Dennis Yu: Don't Be an SEO Bro Marketer

Speaker A: Today's guest is a former engineer at Yahoo who understands search engines. Second to none, we talk about all the ways to run an agency.

Speaker B: Wrong.

Speaker A: Hoping to teach you how to be successful and do it right, he founded Blitzmetrics, a digital marketing company that provides training and mentorship for aspiring entrepreneurs across the globe. And on a mission to create a million jobs internationally. Please welcome Dennis Yu. Your biggest wins are often learned from your most painful losses. Could be business, could be family. Being vulnerable can be scary. So let me go first on the business side. I've built a multi million dollar business without spending a dollar on ads. It's been built through relationships. I started my business nearly two decades ago. I learned how to do things right by seeing what others did wrong, including one former employer getting sentenced to 29 and a half years in federal prison in his early 30s. In personal life, I have the textbook perfect marriage. I've been with my wife for nearly 20 years, happily married with three kids. And I learned how to communicate and provide a stable family environment after being raised in a household full of alcoholism and victim mindsets. Learning from others Succeeding is cool, but learning from others mistakes can be your secret weapon. I'm Damon Burton, and this is the Learning from Others podcast where we talk about all the ways business can go wrong so you can do it right the first time. Welcome to the Learning from Others podcast.

Speaker B: Dennis Hu. It's a pleasure. Welcome to the Learning From Other show. How you doing, man?

Speaker C: Good, Damon. And it's awesome hanging out with you again. I wish it was in person. Like we were driving race cars in Vegas.

Speaker B: That was fun. You know, we got a couple stories we could probably hit. Um, you and I have engaged, uh, on mostly, um, Facebook over the years and kind of got a little friendship going on. And, um, yeah, I flew out and I, every time I fly out somewhere, I try and kind of keep track of who's where and um, and meet up with somebody and establish a relationship a little bit better. So I appreciate the opportunity of you being willing to go hang out. And we did, we went and did a limo and race cars and um, I mean, you live in Vegas, but we, we did the tourist a little bit of the touristy thing and thanks

Speaker C: for taking the time. That was such an honor. And you know, you're one of the few SEO people out there. I know this is being recorded. You're one of the few SEO people out there that is legit and drives results. And I am not being compensated to say this, but I've been sharing this and I know people that are watching this and have seen my Facebook posts. They're coming to you.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. It's, um. Well, probably you're legit about that today. You know, not. Not about me, but about the industry. And, um, for. For me, that's been, uh, good and bad to throw rocks at my own industry. Right. Like, it's unfortunate that that's such a valuable sales proposition to distinguish yourself as actually doing your job. But. But it is. So why don't we, why don't we start there? So, um, actually, before we get into it, um, let's. Let's have you talk about yourself. The most enjoyable, uh, comfortable part of a podcast. Um, I. I actually like how you put it on the intake form when. So I asked the guests, you know, what's your elevator pitch that we can use? And Dennis just puts Google. Google me.

Speaker C: We're talking about SEO. And, and you don't have a knowledge panel show up when I Google you. You're a fat weight loss coach.

Speaker B: Fat weight loss coach. Where's. Where's the analogy of a fat weight loss coach? Oh, fat. Okay. Overweight weight loss coach. That's overweight. Got it. Yeah. So Dennis, um, has been in marketing for. How long you been in marketing?

Speaker C: 30 years.

Speaker B: How'd you get in?

Speaker C: And I was one of the original people, one of the first people at Yahoo. So I built the internal analytics at Yahoo. So I'm a search engine engineer. So I'm not an SEO. I am the person who's trying to protect the results from the SEO people trying to trick us.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, have you got jaded over the years knowing, like, how this works and being able to see the manipulation that's going on when it's not done for the right audience and the right users?

Speaker C: Do you think that weight loss scams will ever go away? Every year there's a new scam, Right. And people fall for it because they're just like, how do you not know that it's a scam? Hey, if I take this one pill, you're going to lose 30 pounds in 12 days. Like, it's a scam. Right. Uh, so the salespeople are always inventing new techniques. And I remember this is like, back in my day, we used to walk uphill both ways. I built websites by hand using Microsoft front page. It was engineers that were building websites, people like us that actually physically knew how to do the thing. It was before the marketing people and all that came in. Back then, you remember, it was called webmastering. Before it became digital marketing and social media and influencer and all these other words that are now really just new words for the same thing. Right? And now I'm going to blame the Internet money bros and the motivational speakers. For now, all of them are AI experts and crypto experts and ChatGPT experts, and they're SEO experts too. So all these people have come in, in the last few years seeing easy money, and now they're going to start selling SEO. I was at Josh Nelson Seven Figure Agency conference, and Josh Nelson's amazing. I love the guy. There are people that come into that program because they think it's easy money. Uh, and in the program Josh teaches you should sell SEO, but he also says you should also deliver SEO too. You should also understand what it is. But some agency owners, the guilty will be unnamed, are selling SEO and they don't even know what it is, but they know that people want it and they need it. So they sell it for $2,000 a month and they're making all this money. This one company that I'm probably going to release a full investigation later today, uh, is making three. Well, they were making last month $320,000 a month off of 150 clients that are paying for SEO and Facebook ads and websites and things like that. And it is a scam. Uh, there's no way to defend it. It's a scam, but it's a sales guy running it. He has no operations, he has no marketing. He's a sales guy. And some of them even white label their stuff out so they have no idea what it is and someone else is doing it. They, the client doesn't know anymore. I mean, you know, they, but they're selling it because they're salespeople. There's too many salespeople in the SEO space. We need more mechanics, not people in the corporate car dealership wearing a tie, slick hair, saying all these things about the car. We need more mechanics that actually have grease on their fingers, like you and me.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I often get asked, what, um, what should I know as I shop SEO? And, and I think that why people are so attracted to, you know, you and your transparency is because it establishes trust when you're willing to go, hey, you know, one example, SEO takes time, but here's why. And then you explain it. Or, hey, not only here are the advantages of SEO, but here are the disadvantages. Because what they're getting pitched to you. You nailed it with the sales bros. And not enough actual people doing the work Is the majority of the time these people that sound smooth are not the people that are actually doing any of the work. So they're going to tell you whatever they think that you want to hear. And so when I get asked, you know, what should I be looking out for and I'd be curious, some of the things that are top of your mind is my first thing is transparency. Like they should be able to communicate. You don't need to know the full granular details of everything that's going on, but you should be able to clearly communicate. Here's the intent behind why we're going to focus on this thing in content. Not just we're going to write stuff how, how are we going to measure progress and how long is this going to take and why? But the majority of the people that are out there are just like, oh yeah, no, we'll get to it, you know, we'll get there, you'll see. And it's just like these vague responses and I think that's become a thing of, of beyond just SEO. But you and I are in that space more. So just marketing in general is these constant sales bros of it's yell louder, talk louder, be flashier and the emotions overtake the sales process and then it doesn't matter. Right before we hit record, I was telling you about somebody that we're working with and they're kill and the data shows they're killing it. But uh, a sales bro got in their ear about hey, you need to be louder and flashier and they're tearing it all down.

Speaker C: Mhm. Yeah. The sales bros are focused on collecting the money. They'll make huge promises. They don't even know whether they can hit those promises because they're not operators. The fact that you were posting screenshots, of course you're masking out like the client name and the keywords and all that, but showing the increase in traffic and sales, not just ranking on more keywords because you could rank on a bunch of garbage keywords and claim victory. We need more people doing what you're doing and actually teaching the techniques. Not that these clients want to learn how to, you know, who wants to learn how to change a transmission? Uh, but at least if you know that that guy who is an actual mechanic is posting videos of him as he's, you know, working on the transmission and got grease on his hands as he's working on the car, there's a lot more trust there. And especially if the mechanic shows what they're doing right. I'd love to, you know, when you go to a car, you know, the dealership and something's wrong with the car, they're going to give you an itemized list of the things that are broken and what. And therefore the toll. And, you know, maybe the dealership will still overcharge you, but at least you know what they're doing, right? If you're buying a new car or not a new car. So, Damon, let's say you're buying a car off of whatever like Facebook Marketplace. And the guy says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always been in the garage the whole time and never been driven. And you see it's got 150,000 miles on. I don't know if that's exactly true. Oh, uh, it's never been in a crash. Really. I don't know. It just looks like some of these parts here don't look like they were the original parts. Are you sure? Oh, yeah. It's brand new. You know, it's.

Speaker B: It.

Speaker C: I don't trust. I, uh, just hate to be cynical. I don't trust what other people have to say. So if you're going to buy a car, Damon, from somebody third party, are you just going to take what that guy says or are you going to have a mechanic check it out real quick?

Speaker B: Yeah. You're doing the equivalent of an audit.

Speaker C: Yeah, so I. You know, audits take two minutes. In two minutes we can spot all kinds of garbage that you and I know, like buying a bunch of fake links or most commonly having done nothing and letting the, uh. Especially in a service based business, letting the GMB and the reviews that are actually done by the client carry the weight. And claiming credit for that. How dare you claim credit for something the client did. Yeah, and dressing it up as. Oh, well, Google's algorithm changes all the time and it takes a while and it's a mystery. And I can't tell you our methods because they're proprietary. Can't give you access to our systems. I hope you understand it's such a big secret, I'd have to kill you.

Speaker B: What proprietary is one of if the not top red flag for me as soon as somebody says that, uh, in a marketing sales discussion, because we're all using the same dozen or two tools, it's just who knows how to use them most efficiently in which combination to deliver on the results, if any, that you have mapped out into SOPs.

Speaker C: Can you imagine if you ask a mechanic? So you're fixing my transmission. What tools are you using?

Speaker B: Oh, it's proprietary.

Speaker C: Wrench tools I'm using. The wrenches I have are very secret. I can understand if you're like Mrs. Field's chocolate chip cookies, but even they put their recipe out there as, like, a campaign to try to. You know, it was like a guerrilla campaign because they planted that thing to try to make it popular. But I flew back from LA yesterday to Vegas, and the pilot greeted me. I always like to just have a quick chat with the pilot if I'm the last one on the plane. And can you imagine asking the pilot, so, um, how did you learn how to fly a 727? And he says, oh, it's a secret. I can't tell you. It's super proprietary. No, there's flight training manuals and all that kind of stuff out there. It's. It's public in. In any field, if you're a doctor, hey, you're a heart surgeon and you're going to do heart surgery on me. What scalpels are you using? Super proprietary. The scalpel. You know, it's the scalpel that I use. As. You know what, you could be a heart surgeon too, if you pay me $10,000 and sign up for my weekend course. I'll teach you how you can be a heart surgeon just in a weekend, because I'm also going to give you access to my proprietary scalpels. Yeah, it's the skill of who's using the scalpel. It's the. Do you remember Mars Blackman and the Air Jordan campaigns? I think you're old enough to remember that.

Speaker B: Uh, I never got into shoes and things. But that's.

Speaker C: No but, but so had Air Jordan, you know, Michael Jordan, the most famous basketball player ever. And they were making fun. It was. The commercials back in the 80s were hilarious. But Mars Blackman, who is Spike Lee, would say, it's the shoes. It's the shoes. So if you got the shoes, then you could jump as high as Michael Jordan and hit your head on the rim. Right?

Speaker B: Y.

Speaker C: So do you think if I switch from Adidas to Nike, that I'd all of a sudden be a better basketball player? Do you think of, like, me doing SEO, if I just switched for my primary tool to, you know, the proprietary Oz or Majestic or Ahrefs or Semrush. Like, do you think that would matter?

Speaker B: No, it's all the same data.

Speaker C: There's no proprietary, like you said.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's.

Speaker C: It's your skill.

Speaker B: The other red flag for me is guarantees and my position on guarantees. Sure, they sound lovely. I get why they're attractive. Uh, attractive to the consumer and attractive to sell. Um, and. And in some forms of marketing, maybe there's guarantees, but in SEO, there's so many abstract variables and wild cards that you should be able to communicate why they are variable in a wild card and also communicate why you can't offer a guarantee on it. What you can do, though, is you can communicate averages and expectations. You know, you can't guarantee you're going to be on page one in 10 months, but you could say on average it's 12 months or whatever, give or take. You can talk about the home runs that took four months, but to me, it's a huge red flag. It's a sales guy. Anytime I hear somebody saying there's a guarantee, as you talked earlier, it's the guy doing the sales and not the person actually doing the fulfillment and the guarantee.

Speaker C: In our space, what you and I are doing, it's competitive SEO. So for us to move from position five to position one, that means we have to get ahead of those other four guys. So we can't guarantee what those other four people are doing.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, we can.

Speaker C: We can guarantee our effort level. We can guarantee higher roi, because we can focus where there's less competition or where there's more bang for the buck by going by changing our strategy. But we can't guarantee, number one on Google for city name, you know, plumbing or whatever it is. Real estate city name.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, let's talk to. Let's talk to the aspiring agency owner and how they can avoid being part of our future discussions and how to approach.

Speaker C: You do not want me writing an article about you in that. I love writing articles about people, and they're either very positive, which is 99% of the time. Like, I love uplifting you, Damon. And then there's the 1% of the people that are outright scamming because, A, they're not delivering, and B, they know it. There's a lot of people that are unintentionally ignorant, and this is the advice that we're giving agency owners right now. You want to take care of your clients. You recognize there's a lot of stuff that you'll never know as much as Damon Burton, but there's certain things you do need to know. You've got to learn the basic tools to see that rankings turn into traffic, that turn into sales, and if you just generate. So there's one personal injury client that they were paying, this guy, his name sounds like a whiskey. His first name is Jason. You can maybe figure out who it Is. And he was charging this personal injury attorney $70,000 a month. And what he did was upload a dictionary to the site on how do you get a commercial truck driving licenses. So they, you know, attorneys, they want truck driving cases because those are million dollar cases versus, like fender bender ones. Right. They really want the truck driving. So this guy was ranking on all these, these truck driving terms, but they're all like, how do, what are the, you know, how long does it take to get a commercial truck, uh, driving license? And what is a cdl? And none of them had the intent of someone who got hit by a truck.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And this guy that was charging $70,000 a month, what he did was he was, he was creating 200 garbagey posts in a glossary every month. I told you about this one. We talked about it.

Speaker B: I remember.

Speaker C: Yeah. And the client, who's wealthy and has made, you know, over a billion dollars, didn't know any better, but he suspected. You know, these guys are not dumb, but they don't know about SEO. They're real smart and they, like, you don't want to try to pull the wool over. Just because they don't know about SEO doesn't mean they're dumb. Okay. They can kind of sniff. Yeah, they're good at the thing that they do and you're good at the thing you do. And I get that. But. So, uh, this guy Jason was claiming, look at all the, look, we're driving. We're ranking on another 2,000 keywords. Yeah. But they're all garbage. And I looked inside the analytics, and there is no more phone calls and no more cases being driven off of this SEO. All of the cases, from a search engine, organic search standpoint, we're coming on people searching for the client's name because this, this client is on TV billboards. He has more billboards in Kentucky than anyone else is all over the place. Right. So they Google his name. And then this SEO guy was claiming credit for this guy's TV ads and billboards. So my number one thing for people that your agency owners and you're, you know, you need to offer, you can't just offer Facebook ads because then you have a 90 day churn. That's just unfortunate. Right? You can't offer social media by itself unless you just want to churn it out. You have to offer SEO. Uh, you have to offer some kind of PPC or whatnot to show that you can drive results. But the key is start with the results first. Don't talk about all the SEO Whatever. Start with, you need more cases, you need more clients, you need more book jobs, you need more phone calls. And that comes from people that come to our website because they search on these certain keywords, and here's the competition on those keywords. So most of these SEO people, they use the SEO tools that you and I know that generate the auto. Generate these reports and put the agency's name on them. Right. Uh, because why wouldn't I want to use these different tools that just send out reports to make it look like there's work being done? But that's not work that's being done. It's just showing rankings that go up and down. And hopefully the numbers are going up every month. And if the business is doing well and they're taking care of their customers, even if you do nothing from an SEO standpoint, those SEO numbers will go up, won't they? So don't rely upon rankings. Rankings are nothing compared to traffic, and traffic is nothing compared to sales. Because even if you drive more traffic, this one personal injury attorney was. Was driving an extra. I forgot the number. But two or three thousand visits a month to their website of people that were looking to become truck drivers.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And then that pollutes our remarketing audiences because we pay to remarket against people who come to the site. Right. Because all of those could be cases. So we're remarketing everywhere because of the pixels. So SEO start. It, uh, sounds fundamental. And it doesn't matter if you do Facebook ads or website building or email. Start with the client's goal and what that's worth and then trace it back to what you do. Like, there's one client they're a, uh, big personal injury from. For some reason, we got a lot of these PIs, and they're spending 1.7 million a month on Google Ads.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And they're also doing SEO. Uh, they're using Ben Fisher for lsa. I love Ben. They're using Steve Wiedemann for SEO. I love Steve. And there's more calls that are coming in. The firm has been growing, but they couldn't figure out where the cases were coming from because there's 10 different systems that have to be tied together. And sometimes in CallRail or RingCentral, we can automatically append where that call came from, but sometimes we have to ask them. And a lot of what we call digital plumbing wasn't in place because multiple LSAs and a different website for PPC versus one for the main firm for different reasons. So we had to tie all all this stuff together and it was only last week. Out of this firm's 15, 20 years, it's only last week that for the first time we're able to see marketing source. So if you're the agency, you've got to be able to show that what you're doing goes all the way down to the bottom line where there's sales. And that means you often have to go into the call rail or into their CRM or whatnot. What percent of the time, Damon, are SEO agencies going all the way down to see that there is a sale that was occurring? Or, uh, do you think that's important? I think it's important, but not, you

Speaker B: know, most people don't almost never. It's, it's mind boggling to me when I get on, uh, a, uh, lead call and they're with an agency already and I ask them for basic stuff. What, what are you currently targeting? What's been done today? And I, for. I'm 17 years into doing this and it still blows my mind like the first time. Every time. When their reply is I don't know what we're targeting, I'm like, okay, well what have they done to date? I don't know what we've done today. They just send me these flashy reports every month that said they did something. It is surprisingly the majority of the time. And I can't wrap. You know, I have such a hard time with this because even though I see it so often, I can't put myself in that position to rationalize that approach. And so it's such a, it's like a twilight Zone to me because I can't, I can't relate to it whatsoever.

Speaker C: Yeah, and there's so many scams. I wrote an article like 15 years ago and I think it was something along the lines of, I mean, we could google it to find it, but you know how to, how to sell SEO. And basically it was a joke because it was revealing the snake level techniques. And I said, you know, the best way to win a client because these guys are also all the sales bros are all about selling, selling, selling. Right? They don't care about delivery. They just want to sell. So I'm like, okay, you want to sell. Here's the easiest way to sell before you go into that sales meeting. Put up a blog post on a site that at least has a little bit of juice. Like, hopefully you have a blog that has some amount of trust and, and optimize it for a long tail keyword. So let's Say that this is. You're, uh, talking to a veterinarian. So then write a blog post that ranks for Boulder, Colorado, golden retriever toenail clipping tips. Right. How difficult do you think that would be? Uh, where Difficulty Zero.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: So write a blog post, make a video about it, rank for it, and then go in there and say, yeah, you know, with SEO, I even came prepared and I know you're a veterinarian. Go ahead and go into Google right now on your computer, on your phone, and search golden retriever toenail clipping tips, Boulder, Colorado. And like, oh, look, we're number one. See?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And then if that doesn't work, because sometimes it doesn't work, you know, sometimes whatever. Sometimes your site has no power, then buy that on Google. Buy that keyword on Google and geotarget. Just a Boulder, Colorado on golden retriever toenail clipping tips. Exact match. Right. And put a dollar a day on that campaign and say, go ahead. And then you could. Ideally they do a search on it and they see your ad and they see that you ranked number one on that. It's fantastic.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Because it's. Especially with local, like you and I know with local, we're not talking about national golden retriever toenail clipping tips. We're saying in Boulder, Colorado, how many other people are writing articles about golden, uh, retriever toenail clipp?

Speaker B: No one. Yeah. No one.

Speaker C: So with SEO, I think. So to be clear, I know it's easy to rag on these SEO people because it's like 95% of it's scam, unfortunately. But here's the good news. You and I know that ranking for local is way easier because you only have to beat the other people in Orange County, California that do whatever. The thing is, you know, meds, liposuction, Orange county and other cities, Santa Ana, Newport beach, like, that's, that's not competitive. But liposuction, if I, uh, Like how much effort would it be to rank on liposuction if I, you know, needed you to. To do that for some reason versus liposuction. Small city name.

Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, it could, it could be a night and day difference, depending on the location. Yeah. Because you, you also have to take into consideration the indirect competition. And I think this is something that, um, I don't, I don't really hear a lot of other SEOs talk about. I'm sure plenty of them know about it. But, uh, what this goes into, the transparency thing, when you're explaining the realistic expectations to your client, is you not only have to take into consideration the quantity of results that you're fighting against, but the quality of the big players that are in the way too. I mean, there's so many variables in, in which you look at these results that um, you know, I don't know where I'm going with this, but I think it's just at the end of the day it's, you can't outrun your reputation. And so these, these people that say sells over service. Right? And just like you said, where it's just, just sell more is, is the solution that won't last forever. And then, and then what are you going to do?

Speaker C: Yeah, reputation's everything. I think I'd be curious to see if you agree, but I believe that pro level SEO is indistinguishable from pr, reputation management, social media, whatever it is, because it's other people that are credible in that particular topic that are talking about you co creating content like we're doing here. And that's showing up on reputable industry specific websites. Not like random websites that happen to be Dr. 73, but websites that are authoritative and rank on those keywords in that industry. So if you build those relationships, if you have that expertise and you've done a great job, then your reputation's great and your SEO is great. I don't know how, how someone could have great SEO in a competitive area and not have a great reputation. As if me at Google, well, I was at Yahoo, but a lot of my people I trained went to Google. As if we couldn't tell who is legit and what links were real or not. And if that content was generated by ChatGPT or you know, if it didn't have, uh, maybe we can't tell if it was auto generated, but we can certainly tell if it has pieces of experience in there as part of eat.

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, you know, maybe what you and I should do is create, um, an SEO escrow validating company.

Speaker C: No, I do that all day.

Speaker B: Or it's like, you know, we don't want your business, we just want to, you know, we charge a consulting fee to protect you, help vet what your choices are. You know, bring us the three you're considering and we'll tell you the pros and cons of all of them. There we go.

Speaker A: Thanks everybody.

Speaker B: Love to do that.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I've been doing that for 20 plus years. I mean, how many friends have you had coming saying, you know, hey, you know, can you just like look at my SEO real quick? I'm Sort of suspicious. It's like a dude saying, I think my, I think my wife's cheating on me. Do you think, like, if they're, if they're having to ask, I think you know what the answer is.

Speaker B: Right. Every day I had, uh, comes and goes, ah, in higher quantities, uh, on certain days. But it was nearly. I've had three. It's, we hit record at 1pm today and by 1pm I had three just today that asked me that. Yeah.

Speaker C: I've had 35 in the last 10 days.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker C: And it's consistent.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I help most people for free. Like there's this one that hit me up literally just 15 minutes ago. And I'm looking at their text. Hey, Dennis, my name is Chris. I'm a friend of so and so. She gave me your number in regards to an SEO audit. I was hoping to get done on a site I'm working on and then there's some specifics there. I'd love to chat if you're free anytime. Yeah. When we're done, I'll call him back, I'll take a look at the site and in three minutes I'll tell them what's going on.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Because you and I are mechanics. We pop open the hood, we take a look, we hook up the diagnostics. We're like, okay, here's what's actually going on with the car.

Speaker B: Why don't we talk about, you know, you just made the comment that you'll, you'll usually help them for free. Um, as do I. And a lot of times the, the industry will tell you to do otherwise. Right.

Speaker C: It's, it's charging because they're sales oriented. And yes, your time is valuable. And like, I'm not going to get on a whole hour call. I'll just do a, uh, look at a couple quick things. And because I think that, I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I think SEO is, is now verticalized. It's better to. If, if I know a lot about liposuction, I can do, I can do SEO for liposuction. Doctors all over the place. I'll just have a competitive advantage over all the other people, like over people like you and me that are just like, good generally. But we also know certain categories. You've been doing 17 years. You know a number of categories by now. But I think that when people come in and I do a quick audit, like any of us can do this. Looking at the basics, it's easy to do the analysis. Doing the work is Different. I'll pass them to someone that I know. Like, I'll pass them to you or I'll pass them to someone that's really good in that particular industry for real estate agents, for insurance brokers, for E commerce, for like, whatever. Right. And the days when, uh, 25 years ago, you, you could be a generalist, but I feel like you have to be vertically specific if you really want to be world class.

Speaker B: It's. It's literally minutes. Yeah. I mean, uh, why not?

Speaker C: Why put the barrier up? Yeah, literally, you're right. Two minutes. I can, I can audit someone to. And I've done this like we did one last week for the city, um, of San Francisco and the Small Business Development center, which is this nationwide thing, part of the sba. And people were signing up. We had a whole bunch of people on Zoom. And I just did audit after audit after audit. People love doing it. We've been doing it now for 18 months because they started it up in the middle of COVID and we've been doing it every month. It's great. Yeah. Free audits. Why not? Not selling anything. But people say, oh, can you recommend someone to, you know, my website's on wix. Okay, Go to upwork and use the job postings that we have on converting. And. And here's the job posting. This is my website. It's on Wix. I want to move to WordPress. Here's another guy's website. Don't copy it exactly, but can you make it like that and host it on WP engine? And I wanted to meet this other criteria. We have website, we have criteria. You can literally Google it. Like website audit checklist, blitz metrics. You'll see. And it also has to fit this criteria. How much? $300. Okay, cool. This guy's 95% and has 200 ratings. And his earnings, uh, are $200,000. Like he's in Pakistan. Okay, fine, sure. $300. Let's do it. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, and so we teach people how to hire VAs and how to hire people in Upwork and Fiverr.

Speaker B: But the data that you get is infinitely. It's worth more than that. I mean, you're buying so much wisdom and such a compressed amount of time to make a long term decision.

Speaker C: It's a Fortune 500 company. I'll say, okay, it's a power hour. Go to blitzmetrics.com powerhour and we have an onboarding process. Because they don't want just three minutes of my time. I'll give anybody three minutes of my time because it's too rude to say no and I'm important or whatever. I'll just give you three minutes of my time. Fine. Right. I'll pre record it so it doesn't require being live.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker C: But uh, if it's a, well, yeah, it's a well known company, then I'm like, yeah, it's 1500. Nothing for you.

Speaker B: Huh.

Speaker C: So we'll do that. And we had one two weeks ago and they bought that. They said, yeah, you know, we really are struggling. Can you help us? The SEO agency is playing games and like, Yep, I already know what they're saying. And now we have a large contract. Yeah, the 1500 led to, it was basically like a paid sales call. If you're an agency, know that when you do, when you do it the right way, you, you provide value whether it's free or charged or you know, you will drive more real clients because they trust you.

Speaker B: Yep. And from my perspective, I've uh, talked about how there's only three types of content consumers. So the, and this is why you should give away your content for free or give your time as, as availability permits. So consumer number one is the person that takes your advice and runs. Okay, well, they were never a client anyway, so you didn't lose them, but now you increased your reputation and your reach. And then content consumer number two is somebody that may not need what you offer now but knows somebody that does or they come back later. Or three is they buy. So from my perspective, you have no losing reason to not just give away all the answers for free, because I want the person that values time more than money. So if, if they can implement it, I'm happy they made progress with it. Otherwise, you know, we, we, we establish trust, we establish credibility. And then when it makes sense, it, it uh, just eliminates the sales walls.

Speaker C: They would have been a horrible client to begin with. So we call those free tarts, right? Yeah, you're a diy. You're going to try to do it yourself, save every penny. You know, you go and get your own groceries. I have the freaking ghost groceries delivered to me from Costco. I'm not going to be a driver of uh, like I, you know, so those people, you give away your information for free because you don't want those kinds of clients to come to you because they're just going to complain. They're nightmare clients. They're gonna, they're cheap, you know, you. Oh, but I can get that for way less. From the Philippines. Yeah, you go do that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, I think you and I could talk indefinitely, um, about a variety of things, especially this, in this, this topic of the industry. Um, now, now as we get kind of closer to wrapping up, let's, let's kind of take the opposite approach. Um, so we've kind of, we've kind of beat up on our own industry a little bit. M. Let's, let's kind of help the aspiring agency, um, owners with some, um, some wins. Right? So we've said don't do these things, which I guess imply the opposite of do these other things. But um, you know, how did you start to build up your reputation? How did you start to get your foot in the door? How did you start to earn the trust of people? So we can kind of maybe end a couple little tips there on the high note.

Speaker C: So I believe that, you know, when I was a, a young adult and I didn't even speak English, you know, until I was seven, I always felt that I wasn't good enough and I felt that all these other people were so much bigger and better than me. And I remember going to pubcon and Kevin Lee of uh, did it was speaking and this guy started analytics company. He's well known in the world of SEO. And I thought, wow, this guy's like uh, a God. I would love to be able to do SEO and all this. But I don't think I'm like him. He's so well spoken and just everything about him. I just worshiped this guy. Now I was an engineer at Yahoo and I was a great engineer, but I didn't know how to communicate and I didn't know if I could make promises to the client because, you know, I wanted to make money as an agency because on my way, you know, as I was about, about to leave Yahoo, but I didn't, you know, I knew I'd work really hard and I knew I was honest and ethical. But I, I, I didn't want to go out there and just start making promises because there's a chance I couldn't deliver. So you know, I would tend to not say anything or tend to not put myself out there because I thought all these other people are out there, just aggressive, fast talking salespeople. And I didn't want to be like that because I heard so much of the gar what we talked about. And then I realized, you know, there are clients. If you find the right clients that they will, it's like night and day. So when we had Quiznos as a client, uh, they were A fantastic client. They weren't the nightmare where they're. Every day they're, like, checking their rankings and asking what's going on. And they paid us a lot of money. And I find that if you're an aspiring SEO and you're growing, it's, yes, obviously, learn from people like Damon and keep improving and work hard and have great operations and all that stuff. But I think client selection is the most important part. When you have the right client and you're transparent with them and you have a relationship with them, and you, You. You go out to dinner with them, maybe if you could meet them, right? It's just so much better. And, uh, it results in retention, and you feel good about what you're doing. And then you have them on your podcast as you start to have results, and they love to talk about you. Like, we did this for the Golden State warriors, the basketball team. And I loved working with the Golden State Warriors. They treated us so well. I got to meet Steph Curry and hang out in the locker room and go to the playoff games. They paid us a lot of money. And here's the, uh, thing that may seem too far away for most younger SEO people. I put them on stage. I was given the opportunity to speak to being a keynote speaker at one of the largest conferences in Europe. The last year's keynote was Richard Branson, and they wanted me to be keynote, and I said, no, no, instead of me being the keynote, I want to put the head of marketing from the Golden State warriors, the very popular basketball team, as the keynote, and I'll introduce them. Right. And that worked wonders. There was a case study that was done by Facebook on us. So your reputation carries everything. The relationships that you have, interviewing your clients, interviewing other people that are competitors. You know, maybe Damon or I are competitors. Not really, because there's plenty out there for all of us. So by having the abundance mindset, that enables us to be able to share what we've learned and elevate other people. Like, wow, Damon just wrote this great article. I'm going to share it, and I don't if he generates more clients because of that. That is fantastic. It doesn't have to come to me. Most of my posts that I put out there on Facebook are elevating other people and how awesome they are. I think that's hard to do if you're small and you're not making money. You're like, oh, I want every dollar that comes my way because I need every penny to pay rent and whatnot. I get It. But if you change your mindset, this is the last I'll say about this whole like motivational speaker walk on Coles Tony Robbins kind of thing. But I found if, and I wish I knew this 20 years ago, that if I spent more effort honoring and elevating other people in the industry, that will drive me more of the right kind of clients that I want. Even without me talking about my expertise or what I know or how good I am. Um, I closed five clients last week on SEO pieces because I was elevating. You can go back to my Facebook and figure out what it was, but by elevating other people that are well known in the industry. I interviewed yesterday on my podcast, one of the top content marketing experts and she's a big deal at LinkedIn that's driving my reputation up. People buy based on your reputation. It's all based on your perceived authority. That's why clients buy. If you're a sales minded person, the perceived authority gives you the opportunity to get the right client. And then like you said, Damon M. Those three categories, when you do the audit, figure out which one they are. And if they're great, then you have to deliver. But as long as you can deliver, then you're great. Right? And so I approached from the standpoint of I learned how to deliver first as a search engine engineer. So I feel like, Damon, I'm credible to talk about SEO because I'm one of the few people that actually worked at the search engine. And you know, like, I have a good opinion about this thing. I have some credibility here. And so now it's easy for me to audit. It's, I've done this enough times. I've learned from, from other people. So I would hang out in, in like London or in Singapore with Rand Fishkin and his mom Jillian, who's the one who's really running the show. And you know, we're putting together SEO presentations, we're hanging out with the conference organizers. And I realized these are these people that I thought were gods, were humans too. Kevin Lee, who I told you was the guy I worshiped before he, he invited me on his podcast twice. And I said, I said to him on the podcast, I can't believe you can even Google it. And see, this is what I said. I can't believe I'm on, I'm hanging out with you, Kevin. I mean, this is a guy like when you were done speaking on stage and then all the people would come up to you, uh, and I'd never get a chance to talk to you. Like, oh, one day I'd love to talk to Kevin Lee. And here, here you are reaching out to me to be on your podcast. What the heck is going on here? He said, no, no, no, Dennis, I'm just honored to be spending time with you. And then he said all these great things about me, and I said, this is being recorded, isn't it? But maybe if you're doing SEO and you feel like you don't know as much as Damon or whatnot, sometimes you have to step back and look at how much you know. So when you interview someone or someone else interviews you, you realize, like, oh, wow, I actually have come a long way. I've actually learned a lot. And that puts you in a position of gratitude, and you honor your clients and you're not worried about poaching. You're not worried about other people that do SEO. I help other people that do SEO for a living. Um, you do that too, Damon, does that hurt your business at all in any way?

Speaker B: Not at all.

Speaker C: It helps your business. So we have a lot of clients do that we do SEO for, and still I'm talking about Damon, and I'm sending people to Damon, and it doesn't hurt me at all.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it only helps. And when Dennis says he. 90 of his posts are about lifting other people up, he. He's very literal. It's probably 90 or. Or plus. And it's just, you know, it's not necessarily content creation, but documentation of.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: What you're doing and the engagements and the people that you're connecting with. Um, and. And I actually just made a post on LinkedIn this morning about, um, on the same topic. There's somebody who I've been mentoring, and I send them business. Right. Because then it helps the. The person that I connected them with to finally get somebody that can support them morally and ethically. And then it helps a young, aspiring entrepreneur to build their business up, and then they're going to reciprocate the other way when. When it's a client that's a little bit out of their league. But it's a. It's amazing to watch for. For me, the. The part that I find most fascinating, obviously, yeah, sales, ah, is great. Um, growing is great. But the wild card is. Is always what I find the most fascinating and rewarding. Where you get a relationship that you didn't expect or an opportunity to. To meet or do a thing. You know, just like you said, you. You got to go, um, in the locker room, meet Steph Curry. Just like those things that you, you didn't have on your to do list. But then when it happened, it was such an amazing thing. That's what I find the most rewarding about serving and helping others and, and just being moral and transparent.

Speaker C: Yeah, serendipity. And you build these relationships over time and they start to unlock other things. And in finance, this is called a, uh, real option. So by having the Golden State warriors as a client, we then were able to work with the NFL and the NBA and all these other sports teams came calling and I never would have realized, I guess in hindsight it's like, well, yeah, obviously you're promoting how awesome the Golden State warriors are. Facebook wrote a case study. Mark Zuckerberg mentions you on stage. You know, and how we got a 39 hour, every dollar got $39 back of what we invested. Of course that would have happened. But you never, in the moment, you're not thinking about that. So really, when you, when you have great relationships, that for you young SEO people, focus on the relationships, focus, make sure your communication is great. The SEO people have a reputation for being geeks that don't communicate, be personable. You sent me some cookies, Damon. Wow, that was so awesome. That was serendipitous. I enjoyed that. And that, that's just building relationship. Uh, checking in on people, clicking like on their posts and delivering great work leads to so much more. The referrals that you get from your existing clients are worth more than any marketing you could ever do. You do a good job of that. You never need to do marketing.

Speaker B: Uh, I, I'm 17 years in, and this is the first year I've considered spending a dollar on advertising. So the entirety of this multimillion dollar business has built purely, uh, on reputation

Speaker C: and results because you've earned it. You have the perceived authority, and you have the actual authority.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Dennis, um, I appreciate, uh, I just love talking to you. You got a good vibe. Um, it's good to be in company with somebody else who's transparent and straightforward. Um, I did not pay Dennis to say kind things about me, but I greatly appreciate them.

Speaker C: Are you giving me a commission at all? No, it's because I believe in you and you've, you've taken the effort and I've taken the effort to build the relationship over years. And people can tell.

Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. And then once you get in, as you just started talking about with Golden State warriors and then other professional sports teams, when you get in with somebody, you know, I'm not going to refer anybody to somebody that I won't put my name behind. And I'm sure you feel the same way. Right. And so when you get in and you establish these relationships with people at high level, they. They have a. A circle of trust. Right. That you get exposed to once you establish your authority and your ability to deliver. So, I mean, there's so many different to kind of wrap this up on the. The thing of, you know, you can't outrun your reputation, and you can't outsell your reputation. You can probably get pretty far in the beginning by focusing on sales and not reputation. Uh, but eventually you hit that amplifier of reputation where it begins to go tenfold times tenfold times tenfold that you couldn't spend. I mean, you couldn't have bought your way into a relationship with the Golden State Warriors.

Speaker C: No, because they get three calls a day from people that are offering SEO and PPC and all kinds of magic promises.

Speaker B: Yeah, funny. Uh, I got to work with the Utah, uh, Jazz on their retail division, team store. Same thing came from a relationship.

Speaker C: Yeah. If you're. If you're a player in the game, you want to be here long term, focus on relationships. If you just want to make some quick money now, focus on sales. But you'll. You'll be run out, and then whatever the next new thing is, you'll do that in a year or two. But if you want to be like Damon relationships all day. I know, like, people say that all day, but I. I promise you, that's the thing. It's not sales calls. It's not the cold email magic blasting using AI. It's not it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Dennis, you blitzmetrics. Uh, how can people get a hold of you, learn more about you?

Speaker C: They can Google me and they can see a full knowledge panel and whatever your favorite channel is. And I respond to everybody. It's not a va, it's me. It might take me a few days, but I, uh, you know, LinkedIn's probably the best way to reach me from a business standpoint.

Speaker B: Well, Dennis U. Blitzmetrics. Google them. Dennis. Last name Yu. It's been a pleasure. Looking forward to meeting up again and doing our thing, wherever that is, next time.

Speaker C: Awesome, Damon. Appreciate you.

Speaker A: Damon Burton here.

Speaker B: And thank you so much for listening

Speaker A: to the Learning from Others podcast. I sincerely hope that today's guest helped you learn something. Since 2007, I've generated millions of dollars for businesses like yours, ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize but without paying for ads. Download your free copy of my new SEO book, Outrank, if you visit www.freeseobook.com today.