Boost Your SEO: Is Your Agency Holding You Back? [Endless Customers Podcast S.1 Ep. 15]

**Note: This transcript was generated by AI and has not been edited for content.

Vin
0:00:00
Oftentimes we hear about emails that our clients will get or prospects will get that say, Alex, your SEO is messed up and we need to talk soon so we can fix this and get you to rank better.

Alex
0:00:11
Yeah.

Vin
0:00:11
And it makes my skin crawl because it's really just a scare tactic, right? So it's to start a conversation in the hopes to win your business because you're going to pay me to do all the things for you. And usually it results in a client or prospect saying, oh my goodness, Vin, we need to take action right now. And that's not always the case, gang. So let's unpack what that can actually look like and why that tactic may or may not work. Let's do it.

Alex
0:00:35
Let's do it.

Alex
0:00:36
Let's do it.

Alex
0:00:52
And today I am joined by Vin Gaeta, who is our head of web strategy here at IMPACT. Vin, welcome back to the show, bro. What's going on, Alex?

Vin
0:00:59
I'm just living my best life. I'm excited to be talking to you today.

Alex
0:01:02
How's everything with you? It's going great, man. Excited to chat about SEO agencies. Yes, we definitely need to talk about SEO. And I really want to try to get in the mindset because we've been hearing from a lot of business owners and we've been hearing on a lot of sales calls that business owners really are trying to get found. to find better ways, more effective ways to get in front of more of their best customers.

Alex
0:01:20
A lot of the times on these calls, what we've been hearing, we say like, hey, what are you doing to get in front of your customers? What type of strategies are you implementing? The answer is always like, well, we hired an SEO agency, or we're doing a paid promotion, or whatever the answer may be. I feel like there's a misunderstanding, or not a full understanding of what that actually means, and how that translates. And people are spending lots of money and maybe aren't getting the results.

Vin
0:01:44
Anytime I hear someone's working with an SEO agency, my ears immediately perk up, right? Okay. And there's certain things that the business owner needs to consider, right? So I'm not here to say that all SEO agencies are bad.

Alex
0:01:58
No, definitely not. And disclaimer for everybody listening, SEO is important and not all SEO agencies are bad. In fact, a lot of them are great. We're trying to understand and decipher the difference between good and bad and how you as a business owner can quantify that or actually measure that.

Vin
0:02:13
Absolutely. And it is very much just like in any industry, there's going to be folks that lean into certain tactics to keep business recurring. As you look at what your SEO agency is doing for you, it needs to be the things that your team might not be able to do internally. And I'll dig into that a little bit. So oftentimes, when we are exploring with someone and we hear, we're working with an SEO agency and we ask them what that agency is doing.

Vin
0:02:41
Usually, it sounds something like this. And if you're hearing this, start taking some notes. Okay. They're giving us reports monthly on our keyword positioning they're telling us what keywords we should optimize for they're giving us spreadsheets and reports on all of the different s c o data that they are seeing and when i hear that i immediately start to cringe

Alex
0:03:05
what you know i said i was sort of cringe

Vin
0:03:08
those are things that folks are paying top dollar for and there is value in them i'm not saying to not do keyword research or position tracking or look at your actual footprint in the search results. That's super important to your website's health. And so what you said, driving new eyes to our brands, getting folks into our ecosystem so we can help them. Yeah. But those are absolutely fundamental things that anyone inside of a company should be able to do and not outsource. Now, you might be hearing this and you may immediately say, I gotta go fire my SEO agency. Maybe, right?

Vin
0:03:44
So let's pull it back. Areas where SEO agencies can really, really, really help you is the technical pieces, right? If you're going through something like a domain move, you're changing your entire brand from IMPACT to IMPACT-Plus, argument's sake, right? We're not doing that, but you go through that and there are big technical SEO things that need to be considered. There's strategy that needs to be brought

Vin
0:04:09
into that. But if we're talking our normal website maintenance, monitoring, analyzing the success of our content and our footprint on the web, we should not be outsourcing that success and that motion to someone else for so many reasons. There's turnaround times, there's lead times. You're paying someone for a fraction of their time spent on your business to just feed you stuff, right? They're likely not gonna take action. They may be creating, maybe they're creating content for you, which is a whole separate topic, right?

Vin
0:04:43
But most SEO agencies are set up to report, to analyze, to give you recommendations and a laundry list of action items to go do and then make you go do it.

Alex
0:04:53
That makes sense.

Alex
0:04:54
That makes a lot of sense, but it also is one of those things where the data's great, but what's more important, it sounds like, than anything is what you then do with that data. That's it. And if you're just getting a report that you don't really fully understand and you're not bought into it,

Alex
0:05:07
then you don't know how to take the next step into trying to do the optimization needed or trying to make whatever changes that need to happen in order to optimize that experience for your customers or potential customers.

Vin
0:05:19
That's it. There's so much. SEO can sound and be complicated. You say search engine optimization to the normal business owner of a service business, roofers or painters, and it's this big mystified thing that's like, how do I rank in Google? Well, I need to get an SEO agency because that's what everybody does. You don't need an SEO agency to get good rankings and to track your results and optimize your results. You need someone in your company that understands the ins and outs of what tools can be leveraged to get the right reports.

Vin
0:05:54
And then how do I take action on those reports? Because there's a lot that can change between the time of your SEO agency doing their research, their reporting, and then you actually taking action on it. We're talking weeks, potentially months, depending on what the process is, instead of your team being able to actually go get after it on your website and control your website's destiny.

Alex
0:06:15
Yeah, so there's something really interesting that I'm hearing, right? And I've heard this too, and there was a time where even I felt this way, right? The SEO, we're in the trenches. We know a lot about SEO, because that's what we do, but some business owners don't even know what the acronym stands for. They're like, it's something about optimization and search and I don't know,

Alex
0:06:31
but like there's a real disconnect there and I'm curious as to why that is and then also how do you get business owners and people to understand that like, sure there's a learning curve, but it's really not that complex and with a little legwork or having a specialist on your team, you can really

Vin
0:06:46
make some serious moves and own it versus outsourcing it. Search engine optimization is a very wide term. There is a lot that goes into it. And at the foundation of search engine optimization, for me, how I try to simplify it, it's creating really good content with the right words that your users are likely gonna search for. That's search engine optimization

Vin
0:07:08
at its core foundational level. You peel back the complexity of that, you should be understanding what terms your users may be searching for. That's something an SEO agency likely is feeding you, right? So I'm gonna go to roofing again, residential roofing, residential roofing repair, residential roof fixes. How do I fix my roof? Those are things that a normal person is probably going to type into Google, right? There's also layers deeper than that, longer tail keywords, that an SEO agency is going to charge you to go find them.

Vin
0:07:42
And by find them, they're going to go to a tool like a Semrush or an Ahrefs, both tools that I would recommend anyone listening go check out, and they're going to type it in there, and they're going to get a laundry list of stuff, and it's going to take them all of 15 minutes to get some initial findings, and they're going to charge you an arm and a leg for it. Instead of someone on your team being able to go do that same motion and say, holy smokes, we just wrote three articles and I didn't address this primary keyword that we should be actually ranking for.

Vin
0:08:10
Let me go naturally put that through some content. That's search engine optimization. You're taking what we have, you're getting a little bit more data, and you're optimizing to make sure that your content can rank when someone's looking for it. There's so much more that can go into that. You can look at different signals and search intent.

Vin
0:08:29
But it's all complex things that if simplified with the right tool set, using AI and the robots that we now have as well, you should be able to own the large piece of that in-house and take that outsourced expense and put it into someone that is only focused on you, not five or six different accounts that they're trying to optimize. It's just yours. And that changes, that can be a game changer

Vin
0:08:54
for a lot of businesses.

Alex
0:08:56
It can be a game changer. It sounds like it's a mentality shift to me. And also it sounds like you can be spending a lot of money. Can you give us some examples of how much money people may be spending? And then also trying to paint the picture of like, you're spending all this money, it may or may not be working depending on what you're doing

Alex
0:09:10
with this data. But then if you're a business owner, how much money would it cost to bring somebody in at a decent salary that could own this and do this? What does that look like and why would people want to try to

Vin
0:09:22
consider maybe getting out of the agency piece and looking at a specialist? It's going to range. I've heard people that are spending $500 a month on an SEO company. So I mean, you're ranging between potentially 30,000 upwards of 80,000 depending on what they're doing. Some agencies are gonna bundle in content creation. We're gonna do all the SEO research and we're gonna generate content for you. Insert link to one of our other topics

Vin
0:09:54
that talks about owning your content in-house. But it's tangential. The recipe for success is not outsourcing any of that optimization or your content creation because they're never gonna be the expert. They're gonna find all the stuff that the robots say are good for your users to find. But you as the owner may say,

Vin
0:10:14
I know this term that the normal layman is gonna put in. Maybe it's missed in the tool that they're using. Maybe they just don't have that insight. They never made that recommendation versus having someone that's owning it in-house and that salary range, it's going to range. You can look at someone that's $45,000 all the way up to super technical SEO. If you need a technical SEO person that's optimizing code and different things, that's where having an outsourced resource could be viable if your internal person can't do those

Vin
0:10:43
things. And that's really where the line in the sand needs to be drawn. Is it things that someone creating content should frankly be doing as they're creating really strong content and they just need some additional education, training, and maybe tools? Or do we have some big server issues that need technical optimization? Because that goes into SEO too, right?

Vin
0:11:07
We talk about content, we talk about keywords, but search engine optimization is also speed and page performance and the assets we're loading on a page because Google's not going to serve a page that takes 30 seconds to load. It doesn't matter how great your content is. It could be the exact solution to everyone's question. If it takes 30 seconds to load, they're not going to serve you.

Alex
0:11:29
And I'm not going to sit around and wait 30 seconds for a page to load either.

Vin
0:11:32
Heck no, especially if I'm on the computer in my pocket where everyone is likely searching, I'm going to go to someone else. So the line in the sand is, are we talking about technical SEO things? We have partners that are deep into technical SEO, that are monitoring server changes, that are monitoring deeper Google algorithm changes and testing around that.

Vin
0:11:54
That is a valuable resource. That is something that I would put money towards.

Alex
0:12:00
Yeah, can you talk a little bit more about that? Because there are parts of SEO, exactly to what you're speaking on right now, where it gets very technical. And it's above most people pay grade, and that's why they're specialists. That's what they do. That's their bread and butter. So how do you know, or when do you decipher, you need a

Alex
0:12:16
specialist like that, versus you can just handle it yourself or do it in-house?

Vin
0:12:20
If it's not, the line literally is, we're doing keyword research. We're reporting on our rankings and how we are progressing or declining because things are going to fluctuate up and down. You're going to do experiments. You're not going to always see success. You're going to learn from your mistakes too. Those are kind of the weekly ongoing things that should be happening that should be monitored.

Vin
0:12:40
You're looking at stuff like do we have 404s or pages that are broken and dead-ended? Are we redirecting things? Are we making sure that our titles and our content is optimized to bring users in, right? You may have heard the term, if you're listening, page titles and meta descriptions. If not, dig into that and do a quick Google search. There you go, SEO. So those things are folks that the normal content person,

Vin
0:13:05
the person managing in-house should be able to handle. If we're looking at, like I said earlier, domain changes, where that sends ripple effects for your entire ecosystem. You change one domain, you change a URL that has hundreds of backlinks, that affects your SEO footprint. That's where you need an expert to come in and say, all right guys, you're about to go make a giant change

Vin
0:13:26
that can have big ramifications for your business. If you change your domain, you could potentially cut 30% of your traffic that was already being driven.

Alex
0:13:34
That's huge.

Vin
0:13:35
That could make or break your year.

Alex
0:13:37
Yeah, definitely.

Vin
0:13:38
If you're going through that, I wouldn't have just a normal SEO agency dealing with that. You want someone that's deeper into the technical piece, looking at what signals are getting sent, what are the strongest backlinks. Again, there's tools that can help you do that so you can gut check this internally. But that's where I would bring in an expert to say,

Vin
0:13:55
all right, we're planning on making some big changes, or we're seeing some really weird things. We've gone through the motions of optimizing our content around articles. We've revamped all of our pages around best practices. We're still not seeing it. Something's wrong. Our pages are still super slow even though we've optimized this stuff. Bring in a technical resource to look under the hood and actually figure out what's going on. It might be code-based. It might be some of the structure of how things were actually set up foundationally that the normal marketer can't edit.

Alex
0:14:30
No, that makes sense. That is, to me, what you're saying is like, you can have somebody on your team and then for these bigger journeys or these bigger shifts where like you're changing your domain or something, something that's a lot more technical that's happening, you could bring in a consultant or you could hire an agency for a certain period

Alex
0:14:46
to make sure that the technical side of it's buttoned up so that you're not losing 30% of your traffic. That's devastating. I'm still thinking about 30% of our traffic. Like that would be...

Vin
0:14:55
It's a lot. And it is something that will happen if you make a domain change. So it's all about mitigating it, right? And that's an extreme example. Most companies listening to this will likely never go through that motion. So what are other things that you might need the technical resource versus in-house resource, right? Let's talk about that.

Vin
0:15:14
Then we can go back into what agencies might be looking at here, too.

Alex
0:15:18
Cool, sounds good.

Vin
0:15:18
So it's, the technical pieces is, I go back to code, I go back to optimizing for the robots a little bit more than the user, right? So your in-house resource should be optimizing for the user, looking at the keywords, the signals, the search intent, what's showing up in search results. Your technical piece is more you want a featured snippet.

Vin
0:15:42
And I say featured snippet or rich search results. Everyone here has searched for a recipe and had a card pop up in their Google or Bing search results that gives you the bulk of the information. It's got a little picture of the pizza that you're trying to make. That's a rich search result, right? That has some code in the background.

Vin
0:16:03
There's generators that you can use, but depending on how your site's set up, it may be more complicated to actually implement. So that's where you may wanna bring in that technical resource. Make sure that all your pages are having that out of the box, right? Especially if you're doing a lot of recipes.

Vin
0:16:19
If you're a product-based company and you are selling, there's product schema, technical term for product code, that you can put in that'll optimize your search results. So it's all about what's showing up in the search results page and how you can better serve that stuff. And Google is changing that game frequently. They're rolling out some new experiences right now only in Europe that they're testing, but that can have big ripple effects for how folks are optimizing their pages in the U.S. long term, right? So it's one of the things that I'm keeping an eye on,

Vin
0:16:51
and we're talking with one of our technical SEO partners around what they're seeing, and how that may need to start translating into some deeper conversations that we have. And one of the things is, they're rolling out product carousels, where in the search experience, you'll have a self-contained module box

Vin
0:17:08
that just has a bunch of products that you can swipe through. It's a different buying experience. The normal SEO optimizer likely won't go into that depth. The person that you have in house, while they may be keeping up to date with those trends, they're not gonna know how to optimize for that. That's where you bring in that technical resource.

Vin
0:17:24
No, and Google is always updating, and they all are,

Alex
0:17:28
and it's hard to keep up with. It is. It really is, and sometimes I feel like I'm getting left behind, and that's why you need to have specialists, and I'm sure people out there feel the same way. That sometimes it almost is overwhelming to the point where like, I can't keep up with this. I'm just going to pay to let somebody handle this.

Alex
0:17:45
And I don't know if that's always true. Like you need to find the balance of you don't need to understand and get into the weeds of all of it. And that's where a specialist can come in. But you also still need to keep up with it and recognize that that's part of the game that you're playing. And it's important because ultimately this is how your potential customers are going to shop or are going to interact with your brand and you need to be in front of it and not trying to play catch up with it.

Vin
0:18:07
Yeah, it's big because if you're not laser focused on what good can look like for your company, you're not going to know where you're getting oversold from an agency, right? So it's about what are we comfortable bringing in-house and it goes to the technical. Anytime someone starts talking about code or schema, I usually say, your SEO agency may be able to do some of that for you. But that's where they should be starting, not where it should be being brought in.

Vin
0:18:38
What can we keep internal and where do we need to pay an expert to come in and support? The specialist mentality. The Google changes can be big. I don't expect the normal in-house SEO person that even may be staying up to date with these things to know how to solve all those problems. There's time, research, testing that goes into that. It's where a technical person lives. It's where you spend the time in looking at the trends. The normal SEO agency is going to keep you to those easily repeatable tasks, the reporting, the giving you a deck every month with,

Vin
0:19:06
Here's your trends up and down and some new search terms that you're now ranking for based on the most recent articles, and they are likely charging you a premium for a nominal amount of time on your account. Instead of having someone full time looking at the health of your website, what's going up, what's going down, and leaning into different trends that you internally are seeing. If you start getting a bunch of folks ask, I'm going to go

Vin
0:19:30
back to roofing. If you start getting a bunch of folks asking about metal roofs and you have historically done all asphalt shingles, you probably need to start re-optimizing your content strategy and your keywords around metal roofs. Maybe it's a fluke, maybe it's not. But think about the turnaround time if you then

Vin
0:19:53
bring that to an SEO agency. They have to go redo their strategy. They have to go do all this stuff. There's a delay there. Versus giving it to the person that's at the desk next to you and say, we just had 17 calls about metal roofs instead of asphalt shingles. Go do your research, go tell our content manager or maybe they are the content manager, go write those articles, get that stuff onto our website and into our footprint.

Alex
0:20:18
That's a great point and that's something that happens not just with SEO but I hear that with web design companies too where if you're the company and you need to update, you need to change, you see a shift in the market, you learn something new, you then have to call them or email them and you have to wait and there's a ticket and it takes exponentially more time. So there is value in having someone on your team that in real time you can be like, hey, this is what's up,

Alex
0:20:40
this is what we need to do to pivot. And you can make changes faster to just meet people where they are.

Vin
0:20:46
That's it. And speed is of the essence for everything that we all do. And it's how fast can we do it. And the three-day turnaround time, the week turnaround time for giving it to an agency to go report on could be business loss. Those are opportunities that you're not getting at a search that your competitor might be getting,

Vin
0:21:05
because they were able to do it faster than you.

6
0:21:07
Right.

Alex
0:21:08
That's a really good point. So I know that you coach, and you train, and you implement a lot of this with companies and clients that we work with. You have a ton of experience in this. You're like a wizard to me, honestly. It's way above my pay grade. But the question for me is, do you have an example or a

Alex
0:21:24
company that does this really well, or something that maybe a story you could share with us about a company that's crushing it with SEO. And maybe when you first started interacting with them, they were hiring an agency and spending way too much money. Do you have a story maybe you could share with the gang.

Vin
0:21:38
I go back to, and they're one of our case studies on our site, RoofCrafters, and I don't actually know if the team over there had an SEO agency when they started working with us.

Alex
0:21:48
RoofCrafters is great, by the way, and Dave, who's the CEO there, is an incredible guy, an incredible leader, and everyone listening and watching, if you get a chance, you should go check out RoofCrafters down in Tampa, Florida, is that right?

Vin
0:21:59
They're in that southeast area, and I say that because Zack who heads up all of the charge on web world and content and optimization he took some of the stuff that we we coached him on and he went deeper into Local SEO for them and started really laser focusing on some of the terms for there in Atlanta there in Florida Georgia Florida and one other state that I'm blanking on right now But he went deeper on his own and started creating deeper localized pages, deeper localized content. So if you're searching in Florida and you get to a RoofCrafters search result,

Vin
0:22:35
you're going to be met with a super localized term based on the SEO research he was able to do, not outsourcing it to an agency to say, give me all the localized stuff I need to do. He optimized the core of the website for the end user. They got a ton of good traffic and organic results and then they needed to bring it into a more local audience to help laser focus their results he was able to do it all on his own I shut her to think what that would have looked like for them if they were paying someone to report on that and do the research and They couldn't go use a tool. I'm pretty sure Zach is still using semrush

Vin
0:23:08
To go get after it in that way, right? it's using the tools of the trade to be able to go faster and not rely on someone else to make those updates for you. So he can go to the website, he can build out whatever pages he needs, he can go retool all of the keywords and the content as needed without waiting. Right. Zach's a very smart guy and he also, he's part of the company, so he's part of the lifeblood of the company. He knows the terminology, he knows what works and what doesn't, so he's already got that awareness that an outside agency may not have.

Vin
0:23:41
So that's also a leg up too from what I'm hearing is having that experience and being like boots on the ground is a lot better than having an agency from halfway around the world telling you like, well, these are the keywords that AI just spit out for us. So that's really something fascinating

Alex
0:23:56
that I think businesses need to consider and think about.

Vin
0:23:58
You can talk to the salespeople. They have unique reps for each location. If you go to a localized page, you're gonna see a specific person that for that geo region will come out to you and talk to you. So if you go to Clearwater, Florida, you're gonna see Terry on that page.

Vin
0:24:13
This is totally incorrect. Terry's gonna be on that page in a video and Terry likely fed Zach some specific things around Clearwater and what the humidity does to the roof down there and all the nuances that you need. And he got it right from the source.

Alex
0:24:28
Right, but then for an end user, they're searching for a term that they thought they needed, they're met exactly where they are, they get the information they need, and then they're talking to a specialist that then is the same person that comes out in real life, not just digitally. I mean, that experience is about as high level

Alex
0:24:44
or concierge as I think you can make it. And is way more effective from a sales standpoint too, because I feel like that salesperson or Terry, when they go out to talk to that customer, it's teed up. Like you're basically just ready to help and give them what they need, versus like trying to continue the pitch and continue to sell them.

Vin
0:25:01
And it boils down to Zach had the ability to do the research himself, to look at what keywords they should be ranking for, to look at the search intent behind those keywords. So when I've said search intent a few times, there's a lot of, there's four different areas of search intent, one being transactional. I'm looking to make a purchase, one being cost.

Vin
0:25:21
I'm looking to vet what the cost actually is. And tools like SEMrush, A-Refs will actually give you what that search intent is so you can look at top to bottom of the funnel, where am I hitting my content marks? That's something that many companies will pay an agency to do it and take action right away. And we're talking like a couple hundred bucks a month for the right tools versus potentially thousands of dollars a month for someone to do it for you.

Alex
0:25:51
Totally, can we talk a little bit about that? That's a great segue. You've mentioned a few tools like Semrush or Semrush. What are some tools that people can use? And I don't want to get crazy into the weeds on this, but just at a high level, a few tools that can really help your SEO, and if you're just starting to dabble

Alex
0:26:06
and enter into this game, what can really be a game changer?

Vin
0:26:10
The two that I have used continuously in my career, SEMrush, Semrush, whatever way you want to go, or Ahrefs, so A-H-R-E-F-S dot com. Both phenomenal tools.

Alex
0:26:20
And we're not sponsored by any of these people to say this.

5
0:26:22
This is real.

Alex
0:26:23
Sure, this is what you're using in real life.

Vin
0:26:25
Yeah, I primarily use Semrush. Ahrefs is a phenomenal tool as well. They both have some nuances into their functionality, but at the end of the day, they give you the insights you need to take action, right? So those are two ones that I would lean into. They both have wonderful knowledge bases and education pieces to help train you.

Vin
0:26:42
It's also something that my team does a lot of, is train people on the best practices to get out of those tools, so you're not spending an ungodly amount of time, you're spending the right amount of time to get the right results and take action. Aside from that, and this is going to be, some folks may say, duh, here.

Vin
0:26:58
Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, so you can actually see what the search results are getting from your website. So having those set up and actively monitoring them. Those are free. Every person listening to this should have access to their Google Search Console account. I'm going to give you one layer deeper. You should have a verified owner-level access to your Google Search account.

Vin
0:27:23
Many agencies do not do that, and you don't actually have the keys to your castle there. So that's something that we help folks do as well, is get access into these tools so they just have them. No kidding. See, I just learned something there. So can we talk quickly about what you just said with you don't own the keys to your kingdom. So they think they're in control. Maybe the agency they hired, they got a handle on it, but in reality, they're almost locked out

Alex
0:27:48
of their own kingdom is what you're saying.

Vin
0:27:49
We've worked with a few companies over the last six months that knew they had Google Analytics, knew they had Google Search Console. All the things that can give us metrics and insight into not only SEO, but our web footprint and how healthy or successful our site is, they didn't have login access, let alone actual owner access.

Vin
0:28:10
While it has not happened, it could happen where someone's like, we're not going to give you access, go set up a brand new account. You can get some of the data to flow across, but that's time lost. Anyone that you're working with, if they're setting up accounts for you,

Vin
0:28:24
you should be making sure that you have access, that you've actually logged in, that you are set as an admin or an owner because you should have those things. You should have control. And there are agencies and companies that do not set it up in such a way. And it's, I don't want to say that it's a malicious intent, but I always liken it to you're kind of getting shackled to someone. You're going to have to go back to them at a certain point and ask for access. And that's usually a way for them to say, well, have you thought about this? Let's upsell you in this way.

Alex
0:28:53
Sure. Keep the, keep the control.

Vin
0:28:54
Right. And it's, it's not good for anyone.

Alex
0:28:57
Yeah. And I don't think I've ever met a business owner that was okay with surrendering control of anything. It's the complete opposite. They want to know every facet of what's going on because it's important to them as their baby. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So we've covered a lot of ground today. What's one thing for business owners or for leaders or for SEO people that they can take back to their organizations and they can do as a next step like right away?

Vin
0:29:16
If you're working with an SEO agency right now and I'm not saying this in a way that's assuming that you're getting less than what you should be getting. Look at the actual deliverables. Look at the strategy that they're just handing you reports and saying, this is what we found, you may want to have a conversation. If they're actively supporting you, if they're looking at areas where, hey, have you optimized this piece? If they're driving some of that, more value.

Vin
0:29:52
I'm always going to recommend that you shine the spotlight back on yourself. How much of this are we allowing to be outsourced versus do we have someone that could get trained up to be doing this faster, more efficiently, and getting the results quicker for our team.

Alex
0:30:08
But it starts with looking at

Vin
0:30:09
what you're actually paying for, because some contracts have some interesting things in there and you may not be getting stuff that's actually driving value. If you're only getting health reports, and that's something that a lot of companies will do, they'll give you a health report. Here's your trends, here's your errors, here's your stuff.

Vin
0:30:26
Here's what you need to go fix. You're paying someone to generate a report that comes out of a tool that you can generate in maybe 20 minutes to go take action on. Stop spending that money and spend it internally and get more out of it.

Alex
0:30:40
Or you may think that your SEO company is working great, but how much money are you leaving on the table? How much more money or more leads could you attract just by optimizing and starting to own this and understand it a little bit more.

Alex
0:30:51
Wow.

Alex
0:30:51
That's big. Really great insights, Vin. Thank you so much for your time and for being on the show. For anyone who may have questions or follow-ups for our listeners, for our viewers out there, how can they get in touch with you?

Vin
0:31:01
Just reach out to me. You can hit up coach at impactplus.com. We monitor that and I will get back in touch with you as soon as I can.

Alex
0:31:07
Vin, thanks again. And for everybody out there listening and watching, this is Endless Customers. I'm Alex Winter. I'm Alex Winter. We'll see you on the next episode.

Transcribed with Cockatoo