Closing More Leads, Losing Google Traffic, and Calling Out SEO’s Biggest Lie

0:01We're starting to see some signs of agency businesses pick up and I'll read this from a text I got from someone on my team. So this is just some stats and data. This is for S &B division where the sales cycles are smaller. So weeks 708 and 715, so this is weeks of July 8th and July 15th, close rates inside two weeks, rates rose by 40 % versus 23 % in late June. So we're continually seeing the close rates from a lead coming in to them willing to sign to continually increase. June increased at 23%. July increased another 40%. On top of the base number from the previous? Not from June, but from the base number on whatever it was before June.

0:54But June picked up over the previous months. Yeah. And then July picked up again over June. They didn't share data from the last two weeks of July. Maybe they don't have it yet. Indicates acceleration began before August bookings, suggesting pipeline quality lifted mid-July. Oh, week 722. I didn't actually read all the text. Oh, there's more here. Week 722, 100 % of the wins came in less than two weeks. Week 729, same 100 % of the wins, came in less than two weeks. So fastest turnaround all year, even in small numbers. They're using text language like small N, capital N. I'm assuming that's numbers.

1:47It's a clear step change versus early June. That's interesting because July, August are usually slower. and it's picking up. There are slow months. The summer months are slowest for enterprise by far. Which is interesting for us because it's been, I would say it's been better than average and then it does feel like it's picking up even though it's August right now. Because right now we're still, even though our main sales head is out on vacation, we still close. I think we close like one or two this week. How'd that work? You took a sales head from a competitor. We won't name the competitor, but how'd that work out?

2:21Really good. So they understand sales better. It's working. Yeah. Yeah. Pitch is tighter. Pitch is tighter and things are moving along. And then it's always in my mind, it's always been like, you know, we get this lead, these leads, this gold. Right. And it's like, but how come we're not closing more? And so I would say that it's been it's been good. And now I'm like, OK, how do we get more? So the sales rep that you took from a competitor, I know this for a fact, they get a lot of their leads from, I believe it's Clutch. Clutch is the site that ranks agencies. I'm pretty sure it's Clutch. I think their SEO is really good.

2:58I'm telling you, they get a lot of leads from Clutch as well. Yeah. The last time we talked to Clutch sales rep, they claimed that they were the largest spender on Clutch. Wow, that company. That company. Wow. I didn't know that. Uh-huh. Yeah. Clutch is expensive. Clutch is great. It's expensive though. Yeah. I like the whole, you know, get emails and webinars. Yeah, I look at it just you do everything and somehow they end up coming in. Yeah. You don't pay for clutch, do you? I don't know if we pay for clutch, but I'm going to guess with no, because they require too long of a contract and we weren't willing to run it that long.

3:31We spend a decent amount on meta. Meta does well for us. For collecting emails or webinars? No, for getting customers. Oh, really? Straight up. Yeah, you do run ads. That's right. I ran that little cursor thing, and it was just straight up retargeting or straight up cold. Yeah, we do cold and we do remarketing, but we spend the majority of the money on cold. That's funny. That actually works. We don't spend a lot, though. It depends. It depends a lot. We only spend, if I had to guess, I think we're spending around$50 ,000 a month. For your size, it's not a lot. It's not a little. Well, we only spend the money for our SMB division.

4:06So it's not a ton of money. it's small. But your SMB is other people's enterprise. No, not really. Okay, what are the minimums per month? I don't know what the minimums are. Okay, so is it okay for V to say? Yeah, you know more than me. So you told me before it was around, call it 15 a month, right? Which is for smaller agencies, that's like a lot, because smaller agencies don't charge a lot. No, that's not our enterprise. I'm saying we don't do the 15. No, I talked about for your SMB division, you're charging 15 a month. No. That's what you told me before. No, I said we skipped the 15s. When you were asking me a comparison, because you're comparing for single grain, I'm saying we don't have that.

4:44You consider that middle market. You don't have. We don't have that. We have some clients. Now, you're talking about average, right? We have some clients that pay more. Average for MPXL. It has to be way lower. Really? If I had a guess, my guess is going to be around like$5 ,000 a month. So I misunderstood then. But what I'm getting at with S &B is we don't have that middle tier. So we have NPD, that's enterprise. we're like we'll work with like the dhl's of the world um and then we have the smb divisions that'll work with smaller budgets yeah and what i'm getting at is we're helping mom and pops for like five grand a month all right i'm averaging it out my numbers could be off but i know it can't be that far off and we do have customers at our smb division that are paying 15 20 30 40 grand a month but that's not the majority if you look at the average it has to be closer than uh five grand when i say i'm guessing i know i'm probably within a 90 percent percentile of my estimate because i've seen the numbers because we get monthly updates right i just don't know every single month but it's pretty steady because we've had our smb division for a while our enterprise though we have a lot of accounts paying us millions and millions and millions of dollars a year so there's a big gap in between so when you're talking about your agency or power digital yeah or a lot of the other agencies that focus on that middle market or like mute six there's another mute six alternative that i forgot the name they're based somewhere in socal they do like d2c uh i think they sold to private equity maybe common thread common thread is another one yeah um they have what i would consider more of that middle market where they're selling their ideal customers paying like 15, 20 grand a month.

6:29We don't have a ton of those. We have lower end. We do have some middle. But if you look at our percentage of revenue, at least in the United States, international, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head. And you can't look at it that way because of the currency exchange. So their version of, like we have clients in LATAM that are paying us 20, 30, 40 grand a month. But that is enterprise in Latin America Or for like in Mexico because of currency exchange, right? So, but yeah, we don't have that middle market like you or Power Digital has. That makes sense. I misunderstood it previously.

7:02By the way, I want to go back to something. Talk about getting lucky, right? So, remember I told you I was doing, I started doing these AI dinners a couple weeks ago. And so, that AI dinner has now led to an AI lunch that I'm going to. And that AI lunch has actually, there's a couple of, there's like two or three billionaires there, right? And then you have a bunch of, it's like sponsored by a sovereign fund, that lunch, right? And there's like 10 or 15 people there or whatever. But my point of saying this is if some of you are asking, well, how do you actually get luckier? This is one of those ways.

7:29You host these things. You don't know what's going to happen. My only, I was thinking about it this morning. I was like, I have no expectations when I host these. I was like, yes, I do. I absolutely have an expectation. My expectation is that I end up creating more luck and that good things will happen in the long term. And that just happened every single time, right? So I think with your hosting lunches or dinners, that's how you create more luck. And that's how you become wealthier in the long term. Because, and even this, it's not like I want customers or whatever. but even like I got that the invite yesterday and then actually the person hosting is like oh by the way you should talk to this person over here did an intro it's like oh they actually need marketing help right he just by the way I had no intention hey guys come buy my shit nope didn't do any of that so yeah yeah when I first started my business the overwhelm was real I didn't have the tools to help me scale if only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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10:15A lot of people just don't put themselves out there so they feel that they're not lucky. It's that they're just not trying. Yeah. You're actually an extroverted person. Remember the personality test? I'm actually very introverted, right? I'm introverted. On the first time I said you're extroverted. Or let me rephrase, forget personality. I don't do much stuff that's extroverted where I actually talk to other people or go out. But when you go somewhere, you're very extroverted. You bring a lot of energy. Yes. But my problem is I don't go anyway yeah well like okay so when we go to lunch or novakoff you talk to the waiter like you're very engaging right yeah whereas like if i'm hosting something yes i'm it's very high people think i'm extroverted but compared to you when we go out and eat when we order or whatever like i don't try to talk so yeah but a lot of my conversations are really awkward and my wife tells me you can't ask people these kind of questions it's like they think i'm trying to rob them or something like that i'm like i'm just trying to find out how much you've got No, it's just more so.

11:10It's just like, I'm not trying to be rude, but it's just like, how many people come here through lunch? Which days are busier? How many people for dinner? What do most people order? Because I just want to understand how much the place works. Why can't you ask those questions? Because they're rude. How are those rude? I don't know. That's what I was told. I like asking those questions. I think those are fine. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Anyway. All right. We both have a similar topic in here. Google claims search traffic is in declining. I don't know if you saw their press release or blog post.

11:35Yeah, you go. Go. But Google just put out a vague statement that search is up, more people are using search, and they said they're not necessarily seeing people see a decline in search traffic. They're seeing some people also get gains. They did not give specific numbers, and I bet you they did it on purpose. I think Google's VP of search is lying about how Google is actually doing because they said, oh, total organic click volume from search to websites has been relatively stable year on year. And it's sending slightly more quality clicks than a year ago. I don't know about your traffic. I see the alligator, the open jaw.

12:13I'm just like, what? Like, definitely we're losing clicks. I think we've more so lost clicks and it's stabilized. And I don't think we're losing a ton more right now. We've seen some customers get good wins. We've seen some customers, of course, get losses. We've seen the alligator as well. But we've seen a lot of companies make up the losses in traffic, not necessarily getting more traffic, but getting higher conversions from AI traffic. So we're not seeing AI drive anywhere nearly the volume of organic traditional Google search or Bing search. But we're seeing chat GPT and perplexity driving a very, very, you know, fraction of a percent in traffic.

12:57But the conversions are through the roof and that's making up some of the losses from organic search. And as you and I both know, a lot of the factors are pretty much the same. There's some nuances, but. So look, I just think they have to protect what they need to protect. They always never completely tell the truth for the most part, more often than not. Even when you had the search liaison, all these people. And it's okay, right? You take what they say with a grain of salt and you try to interpret it with your own data. So that's how I look at it. We have a similar topic here. Ours is a little bit, titles are a little bit different, but go with it when you're talking about a female model.

13:36Actually, before you go into that, let's talk about Reddit losing traffic from Google. And then we can get into the female model. Where's that one? Reddit is starting to lose Google traffic. Did I have that one? Oh, there we go. Okay. So this is from Glenn Gabe on X. And so Glenn, by the way, so he's an SEO consultant. And so he said that Reddit CEO said traffic from Google varies from week to week. But overall, it was a headwind in QTube. Headwind meaning that it's kind of going against them, right? Tailwind is when you're getting carried by it. So regarding headwind, quote unquote, check out international visibility trending for Reddit.

14:09I'm seeing that across tools, not great for them. That can change and jump back up, but I'm seeing a drop across several countries outside the US. I wonder if these AI translations are causing problems now that Google has seen that in place over time. Maybe another reason they are pushing forward with becoming a search engine, Germany, France, and Italy are below. So you can see what's happening is you can see it going up and then it kind of just drops and it's slightly rising again. this one was this is Reddit daily updates I don't know what it is but yeah you can see it's not doing well I think they were showcasing Reddit so much in their search results on page one and the quality of the results were not relevant for a lot of keywords but they were just pushing it yeah they had a dollar back at some point it's like whenever Google gives in the past if you're an SEO you know that they're going to take it away at some point that's just how it is well when they're giving that much they were giving a lot Yeah.

15:00The only one that I would say has been pretty steady over the years, they may have seen some ups and downs, is Wikipedia. Yeah. But Wikipedia does not monetize. Yeah. Because I think it's a little bit of a different story with Wikipedia. And it doesn't even matter that Reddit has a deal with Google or whatever. They're going to do what they need to do. Yeah. Well, they're paying them for the data. So then, you know, they can do whatever they want. Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Bye.