Jeremy Weisz 14:03
Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, you can’t create demand. But I like the metaphor, the investment portfolio. That’s a good one. Because I can see how that follows. Yeah, we are investing but also it’s not going to just keep growing like the stock market drop, and then come back up. It’s a long-term investment. What are some of the biggest objections that you or your partner’s get in then how do you recommend handling?
Devon Bate 14:37
I think price in our industry, it’s probably the biggest pushback, hey, I can go to Fiverr and get this for $49. Why do I need to spend X amount of money in a big part for us, it’s customer service that sets that apart? But really, the agency like supporting the agency in building what their value proposition is. So, you know, for us, we’re the service providers, we’re doing the SEO. But what sets them apart versus another agency we work with where we do the SEO, to try and help them add their value to the relationship. And some clients just they’re purely price-driven. And a lot of the times we’ve seen they say, no, thank you. And a year later, they come back and like, I didn’t get anything from it, maybe I’m ready to take this a bit more seriously. But the collaboration and the trying to understand a business’s priorities and objectives versus just I’d like to buy content links, that kind of thing as well. So I’d say yeah, the why are you more expensive is probably the biggest pushback agencies, they’ll get.
Jeremy Weisz 15:51
Are there any other ways that you recommend your partners explain that or go about that of handling the price objection? What else have you seen work?
Devon Bate 16:06
Yeah, I mean, it depends on their offering. So a lot of our agencies handle the, they’re almost more they kind of weasel their way into, like business consulting, marketing consulting, like set them up to really understand the business, whereas some of the low-cost providers, its deliverable, right, it’s I spend this much on, I’ll give you X, Y, and Z, no promises, no commitment, I’m just going to give you the work. So helping them demonstrate to their client that they’re the ones leading the strategy, like getting to know their business, pulling that information out of them, and making sure we’re doing the right things. And if it doesn’t work, we have strategies to pivot and adjust as needed versus what now, where do I go from here. So it’s very much relationship-driven, I would say, at that point, with a lot of our agencies.
Jeremy Weisz 17:18
So make sure that there’s a specific strategy, make sure that you demonstrate the value, and then you’re willing to pivot if that is not working. Right.
Devon Bate 17:34
And really, with our partners and clients on price, and I think, hear this, maybe in real estate, lots of other industries, there’s like the triangle of budget, results, and timeline. And so, if you want to lower budget, and you still expect results in a year, then like, the results aren’t going to be as good, right? Like, each one impacts the other. So it’s, you pay $49 and if you expect results in 10 years, they still might not be very good, because your competitors might outspend you in general, but one needs to give for the other. So that’s what we try and do it as well. So sometimes we’ll get pushback, hey, this was a client might have quoted it was $1,500-month plan. Hey, like, can we do it for $1,000? It’s like, okay, well, this was a 12-month plan, are you prepared to do it over 18 months, same sort of outcome, but it’ll help your cash flow, but you’re basically spending the same amount of money at the end of it. So we know the pieces that we need to do, you said, these are the priorities, you said, that’s going to need this content, these links, your technical SEO may be needs a bit of a cleanup. How aggressive do you want to be in rolling some of this out. So it’s almost more like financing a project over a longer period is also another way to still deliver the same value. But just bring it out a little bit longer?
Jeremy Weisz 19:15
Yeah, it kind of goes back to what you said in the beginning, which is it’s all about setting expectations, because that’s really expectations. It’s really well, if you want to spend this here’s what you should expect to get. What’s another objection that’s a common objection that you see? So price is one, what’s another?
Devon Bate 19:36
Just isn’t SEO dead? I guess it’d be a pretty common one that I think we’ve heard for about 10 forever. I feel like any big update that comes out, if someone’s website collapses, and they’re just they’ve given up on the whole idea of investing in SEO, and really, the way we position it is that it’s harder to spam, there’s no mass link building from foreign countries that you can dump it your website with your content, buried in whitespace. Like when that disappeared, there was a whole group of people that then didn’t know how to serve it. So it’s more just the strategies are changing. But really, it’s what search engines have always wanted, they’ve just gotten better at doing it. So if you take the strategy of, let’s make you an authority in your space, let’s build out good content, like your point of view, your perspective, let’s get links from other websites. And it’s just harder to do, which means it’s all that more important to work with a reputable agency, or white-label provider, than it is to just buy from wherever and hope for the best.
Jeremy Weisz 20:56
Yeah, the reason this is interesting. So this applies to all industries, whoever’s listening to this, whatever company it is, I’m sure they’re gonna get some variation of this price is blank dead, whatever they’re doing, like, it can be a web developer, like, wait, do I really need this fancy website is in this point, whatever it is. So these objections are pretty universal, you know, and like you said, it’s such a good way of handling, it’s harder to game the system now. So the people who do it are gonna have an advantage, right? And actually invest in it. What’s another, we have price, isn’t SEO data, what’s another common objection that you or your partners get?
Devon Bate 21:49
I don’t know if it’s necessarily an objection, but something some clients push for, is almost like a guarantee of results. That we never advise to do that. And I’ve worked with companies that say that we don’t get you, you know, to X, Y, or Zed by a certain date, you have your money back. And maybe there’s a place for that, that’s certainly not what we advise our agency partners to do. And it’s a balance, but it is marketing, we’re not at someone, I think their argument to me is, when I take my car into the mechanic, I don’t want to pay him and he be like, I might be able to fix your car, like, come back later find out, which is a fair point. But different industry, different expectations there. So I really, at the end of the day, we also shouldn’t be in business, if we aren’t confident in our work. So it is a based on the information we know now, we can expect an outcome by basic, 12 months, 18 months, six months, depending on what their actual budget is, of this. But no, never a guarantee, because you never know what new competitor that comes in with some venture-back funding, and all of a sudden got really aggressive with their SEO strategy. So you can’t predict what other parties are going to do. And that’s SEO, right that if someone else, all of a sudden comes in, then our work given that what we knew at the time might have been enough, but now that there are more people involved, the strategy is changing. So really, it’s the we always start, we tell our clients will just start with a discovery on it. Right? Well show you that we’re capable of, you know, finding things on your website, making some recommendations. Some even recently have started with maybe a three-month project commitment to kind of get over that fear of like, Am I just going to pay for this forever? Like, is this going to be a line item that never goes away? And then when you see results, and you’re happy with it, we can go from there. So yeah, that would probably be…
Jeremy Weisz 24:07
It’s interesting conversation, Devon, because, really what the clients asking is, they just want to diminish the risk, right? So how are ways companies you’ve seen companies do a little bit of a risk reversal, not necessarily guarantee, but a risk reversal? And I see on one hand, companies talking about the value they provide like we just like you said, the strategy is to get you calls or appointments. Then the expectation is okay, like, our goal is to get you calls or appointments, as opposed to selling the features, which is also not a great way of selling, like, oh, we’ll do X number of articles with you X number of links, you can guarantee those things, but then you’re still not talking about the outcome as well. But the person cares about. So how do you navigate the, okay, selling the benefits and the features there?
Devon Bate 25:08
Yeah, I mean, you definitely, in SEO, you do need both because you know if there is a down month, because, especially busy business owners, they have a website, you’re doing stuff on it. Most of them don’t even read the content like they don’t really know. So if results are down, they need some sort of like, or have you been doing any work? I need proof you’re doing something? Right. That’s always so, we have deliverables that are for a partner that they can share with the client, we try to be as transparent as possible, because there is that, what are you even doing so that like the features, while not necessarily great for the sale, are critical to just show because there are so many, not so many, there are companies out there that sign people up for an SEO program, maybe they optimized a couple page titles in Yoast. And then there’s just a monthly fee, and they’re not really delivering any ongoing value. So that piece is still very important. But from the benefit side, we try to relate it to what their industry is. So using that dentist, as an example, most dentists will know what is the average even annual value of a new patient, maybe it’s $600 for a patient, and how many calls and really, I guess looking at search volume in their market. So if there are 100 people searching a month, and if we can get you to position one, maybe that’s 30% of those 100 people will visit your website, ideally, it’s going to be much better if they’re a business that has an existing website has maybe Google Analytics or some sort of tracking already, so that we can look at you seem to be converting at this percentage, there is this opportunity in search volume, we’re confident we can get you here by 12 months, which means this many more calls, which then means this many more patients and this much more money. And that’s a positive ROI for you. So it can get a little cumbersome because unfortunately, there are a lot of businesses that don’t have that information, especially smaller local businesses, they don’t always have a great way of tracking that. And some of our agencies have actually almost become more operational consultants. As they move further like, okay, you say it’s not working, we see conversions, let’s set up call tracking. Okay, now it’s almost, I’m listening to the phone, you’re actually, you never answer it on time or so-and-so is rude. And then it’s like, we can’t close the business for you. And then they get into offering some of that. So, some of that can happen, certainly along the way as well. We obviously stay out of that site. That’s how the agency sees they can start providing more value working with at least some of the smaller local businesses.
Jeremy Weisz 28:05
Yeah, there’s a lot of pieces. There’s a lot of moving pieces with them. And it’s like, even like you said, let’s say you do exactly what you say. And you get people hitting to the page. And they call and then no one answers the phone. Yeah, right. So like everything that everyone’s worked for, at that point. falls to the wayside. Yeah. So from what you’re saying, it sounds like communication, education of the clients are key, the expectations are key communication, education are key. Because if you’re communicating, like you said, let’s say the dentist gets an implant client, like after month six, that could pay for you for three years. Yeah. But the client sometimes thinking what have you done for me lately? Right. And so the next month, nothing the next month, nothing but if the partner or you educate the client, like this paid for us for three years, then they’re still probably thinking, what have you done for me? Yeah, it helps a little bit on that education and communication standpoint
Devon Bate 29:12
It does and bigger businesses we’ve worked with seemed like I mentioned, we a while ago, sort of Western Canada energy sector, they understood, like, I’ll pay for this for two years, if I get one client out of it, that pays for five more years of this. So some of them certainly do. But it’s more being able to show this actually came from our work, I guess, at the end of the day, that’s the important part, not just I think they just would have called anyway, I thought this was a referral or something like that.
Jeremy Weisz 29:39
That kind of goes into setting expectations communication education. Another one it seems that you just mentioned is choosing the right clients, right, like a client that actually has the right expectations to start with. Talk about that for a second, who’s ideal client for you, or who is not who have you found, they don’t come in with realistic expectations they wanted done yesterday, etc.
Devon Bate 30:09
Yeah, well, I mean, so our clients, if that’s being the agencies that we work with working with niched agencies is certainly the best client for us. Usually it means there’s, there’s intention, there’s, you know, a good sales process that’s consistent. They’re building a reputation in their industry. And you see more of that, adding services to help show the success, I mentioned, like call tracking and dentists, we work with a big partner in the US that, because they do dentists, they always set up the scheduling software, the call tracking software, so they can just get really good at understanding their market. And so we can plug in the SEO piece, and it’s much easier for them to quickly show that success versus trying to build that all from scratch. Yeah, that’s our ideal partner. And so we always recommend for all of our agencies to, if they can, and if they’re open to it to niche into something that makes sense for them, it just it makes it a lot easier, especially in the white label, we can really work on a consistent solution, we can get our cost down, hey, we’ve noticed doing this, it is kind of almost a built for them productize service, most of the time when we do these, it works consistently. And so you can sell it without getting a proposal every time from us. You know what results to expect. And we can just scale together like that.
Jeremy Weisz 31:53
I’m curious, Devon, if there’s cases where that makes sense, right, specializing niching. And this is a constant conversation, I’m sure. I’ve heard a lot of agencies have internally. But then sometimes they’re fearful like, well, we’re neglecting this other business, right? If we fully go all in on, if you’re listening to the audio, you can see we are looking at the video, we are looking at seobrothers.co and the industry’s like, you know what, cardiology, right, like 30% of their clients are cardiology, whatever. And the 70% is not they’re worried, I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times, they’re worried well, are we going to neglect this, have you found cases where you’re working through this process, because I’m sure with your onboarding, and we’ll talk about your client onboarding a little bit, that you almost have to do a discovery on where to focus, have you done discoveries, where agency actually kind of discovered through your discovery with them that they should be niching into a specific industry?
Devon Bate 33:03
A little bit, especially in the early years. And more so if they’ve also got other services. So a big type of partner we work with, they generally do, say paid ads in-house, and then outsource the SEO. And so, any industry that maybe we’ve seen come through where it’s very complementary, there was one that was in the HVAC space where, paid ads are excellent for all of the emergency keywords. And then then we were really good for the researching big major furnace purchase that kind of thing in tandem. So, it comes down a little bit to what they offer, but we can see it when we used to look at our top 10 partners by revenue, nine out of 10 of them were niched, and it was a no-brainer that they were just able to build processes and scale accordingly. And you definitely get the, that scares me and the early stages, maybe there is more trying and like don’t You don’t have to decide necessarily right away until you find what you’re really good at. But yeah, we get that pushback a lot.
Jeremy Weisz 34:20
No, but there’s a lot of articles so if this happens to be in your specific space, you can check out their industries page, you can see that, I guess they eat their own dog food because they have a different article for each of these niches. Right. So if you are a med spa if you are here’s to create a perfect franchise SEO solution. We have cosmetic surgeons we have on and on and on auto repair shops. Talk about the client experience. I know that something you’ve focused on throughout the years and even now, what have you found is the best, walk through your onboarding client experience.
Devon Bate 35:03
Yeah, I mean, we’re always looking for the best, always looking to get better, right. And it’s changed a lot over the years, I would say, just the client experience in general, is what has set us apart and helped us see our success. Because especially in the white label, and I’m going to mention this earlier, there can be a lot of resellers where, you know, an agency just goes, and I need 10 pieces of content, and I need five links. And it’s kind of just self-managed that way. Whereas we really do try to be a partner for the agencies that we work with. And we also want to make sure we aren’t wasting each other’s time before we come in, and offer a lot of our complimentary support on top if it’s not going to actually work out. So to start things off, we do a demo with our sales team. Good fit, do we like each other? Do culture adapt to things align, this is what we do, this is how you would work with us, here’s our portal, that kind of thing. If they want to move on to the next stage, usually they’ve come to us because there is a current need. So they might submit a discovery audit, we’d walk them through what it would be like for them to onboard their first campaign, I guess, in that process as well. So they can get a sense of that flow, emails, delivery documents, what are things look like with something a little bit more relevant than just samples. And from there, we look at signing a master service agreement, so we look to work together for a year. Obviously, they can terminate if the relationship doesn’t work out. But we like that soft commitment, because sometimes it can be like a really like you guys have, I’ll see you when I have a paying client. So it’s just another way to get that engagement from them. And from there, we do a big meet-the-team call. So Director of Client Experience, who’s going to be your project manager, who’s going to be your account manager, get familiar with some of the faces, we are fully remote, it’s going to be a zoom or Google meet calm, we’ll then introduce each other really just more relationship building before we get into to client work. After that, we’re in the process of developing like a new client or a new partner package. So it comes with all of the things that they’ve probably been demoed already. But obviously, you quickly forget what you’ve seen in a presentation, so nicely packaging, anything that’s relevant to them, hey, when you onboard a client, make sure you get Google Analytics, if it’s local Google business, and some of that housekeeping as well. And that’s really the onboarding partner. And then obviously, there’s the additional layer of onboarding their campaigns as they come in, as well.
Jeremy Weisz 38:07
Talk about that for a second. So you’ve kind of walked them through educated them. And now you need that. They’re like, yeah, let’s go. Let’s do it. Devon, what happens next?
Devon Bate 38:19
Yeah, it depends on what they’re coming to us with, some have a book of business that they want to bring over, because they’re not happy with their last provider, that’s usually more of a custom, like, hey, this was my budget, this is what we’re doing, how can we make this fit? And that’s kind of a separate conversation to onboard an existing book. But, you know, if they were coming fresh, or just slowly bringing on new clients, we always ask them to submit a discovery, or discovery and proposal depending on how early in the sales stage they are in, and that involves, we look at their business priorities, if they have a sense of that already. If it’s more of a cold discovery, then we’ll just look at some of the keywords that they already rank for, what positions they’re in, who are they up against in terms of competition? What is their technical structure look like? How would we approach this campaign? And then we typically would provide a couple of options. So, if you’re a wellness clinic, you’ve got lots of different services, you’ve got Cairo, you’ve got massage, you’ve got physiotherapy, right, if you want to focus on say, all five of your core services, that means, we at least need five to 10 pieces of content per month, we need that many more links, it’s going to be this budget to get you these results in, say, a year, or if you don’t want to spend that much, maybe you just want to focus on one or two of your most profitable. So let’s say let’s focus on Cairo and massage. So it’s going to be less content, fewer links, that will be a smaller budget to get those services there. So it’s trying to give a few different options for pricing, but still being about delivering that value. It’s just, how much do they have, I guess on their website? How many things do they do, as well?
Jeremy Weisz 40:13
That’s helpful. Yeah, Devon, and again, I’m on the SEOBrothers.co site. And I’m on the packages page. So you can check out what they have going on here. But I’m curious on pricing, how do you in this is current and time we’re looking at this could change, they could raise their prices? So if you watched this five years from now, you know, don’t ask Devon, oh, why can you give me that old pricing, but talk about pricing, and how you came up with pricing, because you’ve taken account, okay, I’m white label. So my clients have to go and sell this. So you have to strike a balance there.
Devon Bate 40:59
We do, in the White Label Space, you’re at a slight disadvantage of not really being able to price at value, right value-based pricing, when someone else then has to mark it up is much harder to do. So we do a lot more cost-based pricing, which is unfortunate, but it’s the reality of the industry. And we actually just overhauled our pricing structure a little bit to make our managed campaign, more of a managed campaign. And so what I mean by that is the way our ongoing campaigns work, unless you’re a, we’ve got to partner with 90 locations, and it’s a scalable, very specific, like I mentioned before, we build custom solutions, if you’re an agency that’s hyper niched, and you want to grow that way, for smaller to medium size agencies are managed campaign, it’s really a $500 pay to play fee base fee. With $100 of, we almost say it like SEO spend. So for instance, the $500, that gets you your reporting, that gives you your monthly agency analytics, crawl Search Console, check, a base amount of link building, project management, time, account management time, that kind of thing. So just to run the campaign, and then it scales up. But it starts with $100. And this is sort of how we base our recommendation. So if we feel you have lots of services, you voiced, you want to be aggressive, then we price, it’s basically a fixed, I’ll just use an example maybe say $50 per piece of content. So if we feel you need four pieces of content, then that’s going to be an extra $200 of budget, that your SEO strategist will manage over time. So the way we look at it is it’s not necessarily a fixed scope, it’s, say, a range of two to six pieces of content, and maybe two to eight links. But based on a quarterly basis, what we feel is the next, in your best interest, the next best thing for your website, this quarter, maybe we need more content early on, and fewer links, while we build out more of a site structure for you. And then as we progress into future quarters, maybe that mix changes a little bit as well, obviously, Google business and local plays into that. But it’s kind of like a $500 for a strategist to manage your SEO spend. And that scales up based on how many pieces or components we call them of SEO, we think your website needs and that discovery process. And then self-managed is basically you don’t get the strategist overseeing it. These are four, they’re usually agencies with in-house SEO already, that are more of the like, pretty low competition that could just use some link building some technical cleanup, I know what I’m doing, you get your reports, but you don’t get the why isn’t this performing what’s happening here, you kind of have to know what you’re ordering that we package as a campaign instead of necessarily, ala carte content links, that kind of thing. But if they say why isn’t this performing? You don’t have enough budget, let’s move to a managed campaign. And we can leave the strategy there.
Jeremy Weisz 44:26
Thanks for walking through that. And then I’m sure you get all over the place. But do you have a recommendation? How much should your clients sell things for? Right? Like, yeah, I’m thinking I can kind of compare it to retail, right? If someone’s in a grocery store, I don’t know the actual metrics. But let’s say they’re selling to the grocery store for $3 and the grocery store is gonna sell it for six. They want 100% markup or whatever it is. So what do you recommend as far as pricing goes for your clients?
Devon Bate 45:00
We generally recommend 100% markup, there are certain industries that maybe you can’t get away with that there are some industries where the value is just outrageous, and they’re five times as much. But it also depends on the value that they are showing up with as well. So like I mentioned that the dental example, if the call tracking and patient booking, and all of that kind of gets bundled into it, it’s probably going to actually get marked up a fair bit more, because it all seems even more valuable. But we always shoot for, like 50% like, is the cost. And so the, you know, the early days, and I see a picture of Jeff and Matt there from RocketBarn, like that was it, it was you go out, and like every quote I’m going to give you is 50% cost of retail pricing. So that has carried forward. That is what we try to encourage our agency partners to sell for.
Jeremy Weisz 46:04
Talk about RocketBarn.
Devon Bate 46:07
Yeah, great company. It’s actually, Matt recently bought oh, Jeff. So it’s just Matt now, but they found us on I was living in Waterloo, Ontario, in Canada about six years ago, we ranked for a Waterloo SEO term. So our own organic helped us get found by these two, they’ve gone through a lot of iterations themselves, they always knew that they were going to be in the sort of niche dealer network space. So some of the initial projects we worked with, were basically Co-Op funded HVAC. So American Standards got a marketing budget. So, local reps can run marketing campaigns at 20%, the actual cost, the rest is Co-Op funded. And so that was kind of how we got in with them. And really, it was the service layered on top and we didn’t have too many clients at the time. So I had more time, you know, I had no children yet I was out there hustling with these guys in the early days to try and help them sell. And we just started growing the book of business with them. So, this is really where the client experience side that I see paid off for us in the early days. And now they specialize in franchise SEO. So we support building out those scalable solutions that they can sell time and time again.
Jeremy Weisz 47:34
Devon, first of all, thank you. I have one last question. Before I ask it, I want to point people check out SEOBrothers.co to learn more and more episodes of the podcast. Last question is just mentors in your agency journey, and it could be specific mentors or it could be distant mentors, maybe a book or other resources that you like.
Devon Bate 48:00
Yeah, I mean, two come to mind, obviously, my brother Adam, he’s got seven years on me. He mentored me through all of the technical like the actual SEO side of things. My background, I studied finance dabbled in real estate. So, the industry knowledge really came from him. I guess to take it back to maybe a book. I haven’t really recently read as many business such agency books. Built to Sell is a great one. But Jocko Willink, like Extreme Ownership and Leadership Strategy and Tactics more on like the leadership and personal development side. I’ve reread those many times as we’ve grown a team, it was one thing to go out, be friendly build relationships with clients, sell SEO deliver work, but all of a sudden you start growing and a team gets building, that skill was never really practiced. And so I turned to those two were, yeah, really great books that I’ve listened to a few times over.
Jeremy Weisz 48:18
Awesome, everyone, check out more episodes of the podcast SEOBrothers.co. Devon, thanks so much.
Devon Bate 49:13
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
