Who Said Custom Client Work isn't Scalable [Jarod Spiewak - CMSEO2018]

Key Takeaways

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys we're gonna get started in a couple minutes go ahead and find your seats get your last beers oh yeah Capel please take your seat just kidding me alright guys let's go ahead and get started so it's Tuesday essentially day two of the Chiang Mai SEO conference this is the second Chiang Mai SEO community event a free event put on for the residents or like I guess the digital nomads here in Chiang Mai we we honor what people are doing in Chiang Mai trying to grow the community here educate especially in the field of SEO so thanks for everyone for coming out supporting the community thanks everyone for signing in online and watching the live stream hello hello in a second I'm gonna be passing it over to Jared Jared I met last year I met him at the conference last year he always came across to me as a smart kid and then I saw him on the lines he'll show interview and we we learned there like first off how likable of a guy is how much of a hard worker he is and also how is so interesting how he scaled very very quickly from 0 to 20 K a month on up work of all places so right off the bat I was just like this kid's clever he's very likeable when I was trying to figure out who would speak at these pre events for this year Jared came right to mind I asked him he said yes and we're very very thankful so Jared you ready to take the stage ready to do this sweet everyone give it up for Jared [Applause] all right so who here works for or owns an agency all right and keep your hands up if you implement custom work for all your clients decent amount hands good so the point of this talk is to go over the systems and processes you need to put into place in order to implement custom work for all of your clients and with the right systems and processes it's not really all that difficult to do either so I don't want to bore you with my background but I do want to share some of the points that are relevant that led up to me being able to get this talk maybe there you go am i blocking it too much once number here all right so I go started an SEO back in 2012 when I was 14 I was gonna be starting college a year afterwards so I had to figure out how to make money online cuz no one wants to hire a 14 year old I found a site called hire writers which if you don't know it's it's a site that turns out a lot of content for cheap my extent of SEO knowledge at the time was put keywords in an article a certain amount of times and you're good to go didn't really care any more about then about that couple years later started a corporate job working real estate in the marketing department [ __ ] sucked so I decided to do a little bit deeper on this SEO stuff that was kind of vague vaguely remembered a little bit about started digging a little bit deeper on Moz search engine land search engine watch the typical sites that you probably read when you get started eventually I got started on up work create a profile was offering my SEO services for about five bucks an hour not too long after that I was hired by an agency so marketing agency was already pretty well established within their niche they had a 10-person SEO team probably about 25 30 people total when I was hired so this was great for me I got to just focus on learning and implementing SEO rather than you know client acquisition account management all that kind of other stuff that kind of comes along with freelancing or owning an agency whenever I had problems along the way I could also lean on the more senior se O's rather than read a bunch of conflicting articles and just take a guess as to what the right answer was so with working for this agency I eventually started taking on more freelance work again mostly to implement some of the some of the stuff that I couldn't implement just because it wasn't my job to do it so start taking on a couple extra clients most these clients were also other agencies so this meant I got a really good understanding of how a lot of different agencies operate internally eventually I was promoted to the lead SEO strategist basically this meant that it was my responsibility to make sure that all clients were getting results seventy-five percent of my time was spent on strategy audits so I it was my job to go into the websites audit them figure out what the issues were how to improve things what the next steps are going to be to get them further results and if the client was off track they just weren't getting the results what do we need to do to change course in order to get them it was the results that they were paying for so in this role I saw I saw a lot of the campaign's that we were building not being particularly effective the way that the the way the campaigns were built was through internal packages so internal packages I just find it as someone comes on with two grand a month we have a spreadsheet two grand a month we do XYZ month one through twelve this was optimal maybe twenty percent of the time so not that things were failing 80 percent of the time but that eighty percent of the time there were glaring issues that if we were to take a different course of action sometimes a much different course of action than the predefined campaigns okay then the predefined campaigns we would have gotten much better results so because of this and a bunch of other reasons that I just couldn't control how the agency worked I eventually decided to part ways with them among other things so between working with all these various agencies as well as clients that I would take on and digging into how their previous SEO companies built their strategies I saw a lot of campaigns that failed where they really shouldn't have the budget was high enough that it was relatively easy and straightforward to go for the results but for whatever reason things were just being held back or things just weren't moving forward but five ten minutes just looking at things it was super obvious to me oh this was clearly missed that was clearly missed they over optimized this and most of the time is because they just didn't dig deep enough right they didn't take the time and effort to look at the website figure out what the nuances of each individual client were and it's easy to understand why they did this because every blog post i've read on the topic every art every course i took every book i read said we need to have repeatable processes for a thousand dollars a month we do XY and z for two thousand dollars a month we do a b and c and that makes a lot of sense we're gonna have predictable margins we're gonna know exactly how long task take we're gonna know exactly how many people we have to hire when we're gonna have to hire more people based on you know based on our templatized strategies so let's left me with a question as to whether or not i could figure out a way to plan create and implement custom strategies in a repeatable way without having to resort to internal or external packages external just being you display it on your website it's it's in your sales process so i want to show you guys a little bit proof in the pudding of of using custom strategies i guess so this is a personal injury that'll be an image in the second personal injury client in florida relatively competitive area for a personal injury law they worked with their previous agency for two years with relatively lackluster results so we took them on and we took a customer approach to their campaign so instead of starting off by completely redoing their on site which really needed to be you know completely redone and fixing some of the small technical errors we focused on cleaning up some of the over optimized and quite frankly spammy urls we had to go into the theme files and we recoated how the theme was producing the h1 tag it looks great aesthetically but the issue was just was you couldn't put four or five words in there without it looking horrible because that's how big the font size was so basically recode a part of it to make it easier to implement h1 that was fully optimized later down in the page we also pilote some over optimized pages built PBM links to pages that lacked powerful links and instead of focusing our efforts on their primary location we focus the majority of the campaign to the point that I'll show you on trying to rank them for one of their secondary locations sorry so after two months of working together phone calls were up 170 percent after five months quarter million dollars worth leads and after six months we had quadrupled their monthly cases based on where they were when we took them on just by honestly not doing a whole lot of work sorry if you're watching it wasn't all that difficult so there's a lot of fear that comes a comes across with custom strategies as if in order to create custom strategies we need to relearn SEO from the ground up we need no campaign will be similar to another or you know you're gonna need six-figure SEO s that are all you know super senior and and all stuff like that but no that's true so let's get into a couple of reasons why you want to do custom work before we get into the how so first off you can make more money you can demand a higher budget you're you're not just selling a prebuilt campaign you are taking the time and effort to understand their website their business their goals so on and so forth you're going to you're gonna be doing what no one else is doing you're gonna come off super different during the sales process as well I asked prospects all the time is anybody else talking about custom strategies and they're like no like they said here are options for a thousand month we can do this for two grand a month we can do that or for whatever it is so you're taking the time and effort you can you deserve to get people paid more and people are more likely to want to pay you more when they know that you're actually taking this extra time and effort compared to all the other pitches that they're hearing Nordling can get eight more but you can close a lot more deals so this isn't the only reason why but since we implemented these processes in our agency we've had a hundred percent closed right on retainers this year not an exaggeration like I said not the only reason why so you're able to sell a lot more and a lot easier when you're taking the time and effort like I already said to actually create these custom strategies for clients when they know that you understand their business when you're able to show them why you decided to plan the campaign in a specific way when you're able to show them how you found a certain challenge that's unique to their business that's unique to their local area unique to their niche whatever it may be and you show them how your plan has been formed to overcome these challenges you're showing them exactly what they need to succeed and how you've created a plan based on what they're doing and not just telling them that your plan is going to help them reach their goals like we're all taught to tell them so when they know exactly what you're gonna do how you've planned things around it they're they're gonna be a lot more likely to close if they can afford it there's no reason for them not to sign on you're literally giving them everything they could ever want and no one else is pitching this to them more often than not when you're taking a more targeted approach you're gonna be able to get faster results as well because you're giving the website exactly what it needs you're putting the your time and effort exactly where you need be putting your time and effort into faster results also means a higher ROI if you're getting faster results that means the campaigns gonna be profitable more quickly which means the overall ROI of the campaign is going to be increased typically you're also gonna see ROI have a higher magnitude comparing a successful meeting it's making a positive ROI successful custom strategy campaign compared to a templated one because all your time money and effort has gone into exactly what you need to do you're not worried about you're wasting time effort maybe you didn't need those extra citations and that was 200 bucks over the course of six months that you could have put somewhere else so you're able to put more money into the places that you need to put money into all this also leads to a higher sorry a longer retention rate as well you're you're gonna be giving them exactly what they want you're gonna be seen as an irreplaceable asset within their business you're they're out of house and house marketing team you understand their business exactly if they just if the client just sees you as a $2,000 a month package then that means you're easily replaceable with any other $2,000 a month package aside from just customizing your approach to SEO as well you should also take this into account when you're customizing how you deal with clients through account management and customer service so when you're talking to them they're gonna if they seem a little jumpy they want you know they're always asking how are things going stuff like that give them updates more regularly than perhaps you give your other clients if they really care about bounce rate for whatever reason explain what that means the difference between metrics and KPIs throw it into your report they're gonna like you a whole lot more they're gonna stay with you a whole lot longer and it shows them that you understand what they care about of course like I already said make sure you set your expectations otherwise bounce rate Goes Down and they fire you for no reason so Jonathan so I did not I told him that I was gonna put him on the spot I did not tell him what I was gonna put him on the spot for so this can go horribly wrong on my end do you like tomatoes okay see so he [ __ ] up so he said that he likes Tomatoes so I'm gonna pretend that he said no so Jonathan and I were together in Chicago for a bootcamp and I notice on two or three occasions when we were eating that he just happened to move the tomatoes to the side of his plate didn't say anything it was it was whatever he I just assumed okay he doesn't really like tomatoes however in the sense of customer services if he was over my house and I was making him a burger I'd like tomatoes apparently he does as well but I would be putting tomatoes on my burger if I didn't think that he'd he likes tomatoes on his burger I wouldn't mentioned it to him I just wouldn't put it on there he's gonna enjoy that burger a little bit more so what I'm trying to say is pay attention to the things that your clients say pay attention the behaviors that they exhibit read between the lines deliver the service that you deliver the experience that they're looking for answer their questions before they ask them so on the on the topic of burgers imagine that you're in a restaurant you get the menu you open it up you find a burger that you want now this burger doesn't have onions on it you happen to like onions server comes over you order that burger you say you want it cooked medium-rare and you want onions put on it the server will write that down take it back to the kitchen now that burger that you just ordered is not on the menu right the burger that you ordered does not have onions on it the cook was not trained on how to make that burger so this is obviously gonna end in disaster right Bobby's not the cook is just gonna simply make the burger put onions on it simple logic so it's not a perfect example but it gives it a little bit of insight as to how custom strategies work we have the ingredients we can put things on we can take things off we can cook it in different ways we can mix and match our side dishes so the way that we implement custom strategies I call this system puzzle piece marketing so a puzzle piece marketing there are two primary processes we need a process for planning the campaign or gathering the correct puzzle pieces and we need a process for creating the campaign or putting the pieces of the puzzle together and we do this through what we call the blueprint creative I know no one else uses that so essentially that's what the blueprint does it sorry keypoint this at the wrong place the blueprint helps us with both these processes so the blueprint itself does exactly what you think it does it helps us create a roadmap or a blueprint of exactly what needs to be done for this website in order to get them the intended result the blueprint is a separate engagement I recommend that you do it as a separate engagement as well - compared to a retainer I'll give you more detail on that on a second we also have our blueprint set up as a product i's service we know exactly what we're gonna do we know exactly how much things cost so on and so forth when it comes to the blueprint itself dynamic pricing how big the website is is based on what we charge use whatever method you want value varies tell you based pricing etc so on the point of productized service this is only going to work if you're relatively niche if you're working with EECOM one day local the next national after that it's one blueprint isn't gonna work because there are so many different things you're looking at when comparing an EECOM site from an on-site technical perspective than you are from a local website which is much smaller doesn't have as many technical issues so if you are in a whole lot of niches are gonna need to pretty much duplicate everything here for each niche so if you have econ you're gonna need an economically to blueprint if you have if you're doing local you're gonna need a local based one even if you do local so that's what we do you might not even be able to go super broad and local but you also don't have to just be the SEO for plumbers so we primarily with contractors and law firms and our blueprint seems to work with every service based type business which is what all of our clients fall under wouldn't work with a car dealership which has a lot of EECOM a spec stew their website or jewellers or things like that so just make sure that your blueprint is set up to work for all clients of a certain niche if it doesn't you're going to need a separate one nope yeah that did too anyways so separate engagement so a lot of the things that go into the blueprint you might think well I could do that for the first month of a retainer don't worry about trying to sell a client on two things but an initial engagement and then a retainer just make it simple just sell on a retainer well you could do that there's there's a lot of issues with jumping right into a retainer if you're trying to create a custom strategy and there's a lot of benefits to also having this as a separate engagement in the first place so first you're able to sell more you're gonna close a lot higher as well so as we all know a foot in the door offer blueprints relatively small ask of a client it's a small turn engagement doesn't take very long to go through and once they give you a little bit of money they're a lot more likely to give you a lot later on it's a lot easier to convince someone to give you a thousand dollars today to work with you for two or three weeks than it is for them to sign on for an agreement that's maybe worth twenty four thousand dollars over the course of six or twelve months you're gonna have more accurate budget requirements as well so you don't want to sign a client on for three grand a month for two months two months later to find out that you actually need five during a month to get the work done that's not going to be a very closing conversation to have you also get a chance to test out the client like I said this is a short-term engagement for us it takes about two three weeks it all depends on how complex your blueprint overall overall is but at the end of two or three weeks and we think the client said dick they're just hard to work with we don't like them there's no point of working with them for the next six to twelve months we already know after two weeks that they're not worth working with it also gives you advantage for getting results as well because now a six month campaign is now seven months long a lot of the things that can go into the blue brands such as keyword research we'll get into this in a second auditing like Google Analytics getting access to the website and all stuff like that things you typically do during the first month then done before you even start month one so you get to start month one of a retainer hitting the ground running focusing just on execution well everyone else are in the first month are worrying about keyword research waiting two weeks for the client get back to them with their website login information figuring out that a past employee actually had in and they don't want to give it to them for whatever reason you know I'll have to worry about that once using once you get started you get started you know that's how you can get see pretty big gains within one or two months because you're just focusing on execution you're not worrying about it and the planning stuff anymore so for the blueprint itself that due to again oh it did three oh well so the goal of the blueprint is to help plan and create the entire campaign by gathering all the information that we need to have a clear understanding of the website the niche and a competitive marketplace I want to read that verbatim because whether you have a much more complex version of a blueprint or a lot less complex version of the blueprint the goal is the the goal is going to remain the same the blueprint like I said split two to two pieces so first is gathering all the puzzle pieces that we need which is going to involve a lot of audits we're gonna be going through our analytics audits or search console audits or on-site audits or technical audits any type of audit you want to do these are gonna be mostly the way that we have it is set up pass/fail checklists super easy to implement mostly you can have a VA do this without a problem we also have supporting documents for lack of a better term so these are things like keyword research content strategy and anchor text analysis they're not going to give you exact tasks that you need to create but keyword research is going to tell you what you're going after anchor text analysis you're going to use that when you're planning your link building campaign content strategy you're gonna use that when you're planning out you know when you're gonna do content what are you actually gonna build out what are you knock what's not a good idea very important as well make sure that with all this you're spending time manually reviewing everything so you don't have to spend dozens and dozens and dozens of hours having so on just look through the website literally someone just eyeballing a website for twenty thirty minutes can reveal so many things that your SOPs are not going to be able to reveal because your SOPs aren't gonna be able to account for every small and tiny nuance that comes across with a website so really quick the first half of the blueprint we're gonna be auditing everything analytics search console on-site technical depending on who you work types of clients who work with depends on what types of audits are gonna be doing these are your pass/fail checklist very clear at the end of the day these are gonna give you exact tasks that you need to do these are the things that are wrong these are the things that are right you're gonna have your supporting documents that are gonna help plan other parts of the campaign the documents that you create to help plan your link building campaign your keyword researcher content strategy so on and so forth you're gonna make sure that someone's spending time as well playing around with the website looking at the link profile and Atrios without a clear look at you B and C they're probably a higher level person they're looking for things that your SOPs aren't gonna catch things that are unique with just this individual client all right so then you're gonna get started on the second part of the blueprint which is going to evolve what I call the master strategy so the master strategy document is a spreadsheet that contains lists of every task and process that we may do for a client so this all the all the possible things that they can fail during during our audits there's a test setup for that we have tasks for you know on site we have tasks for different various link building strategies as well task 4 if we need to create a disavow file this spreadsheet contains every task and every process that we might do while going over the course of a campaign more we definitely don't go through all of these for a single campaign which I'll get into in a second and all these tasks also contain SOPs so with our document it says with your document as well as it should it should say Google Analytics audit sorry booth set up Google Analytics based on your Google Analytics audit it's gonna be done by this person or this position so it's gonna be done by Bob or it's gonna be done by a VA this is how much they get paid this is how long it takes to complete this task as well so within our within creating a custom strategy we have not templatized but we have clear understandings and clear SOPs as to all the different pieces that we that can go into an actual strategy so we know how long tasks are going to take we what who does the task we know what they get paid and we know all other tasks that could associated with it so we know what vendors we'd like using how much that costs us we know how long does it take on average to do a disavow file based on you know maybe you have some short function that says okay how many links on average do they have do some quick math and says okay they have 400 links it's gonna take this much time to do a disavow file if we need to do a disavow file for them we also have SOPs for all this like I said so attached to the set up Google Analytics not only do you know who's gonna do it how much time it's gonna take what its gonna cost you that person should also know exactly what they're gonna do know it's a living document as well so when we're going through our this is a document that should be constantly updated by either removing stuff they no longer do maybe two years ago you were building web 2.0 Xand maybe now you no longer do that so you don't need it to be in your master strategy document cuz you're never gonna have to worry about that task again presumably now through your mentor review process through reading through taking courses there's gonna be other tasks that you might come up with that you might have to do so let's even never done it to Saval file before in your life maybe it's a new thing let's say Google never had it disavowed to all of a sudden they come out with it you'll go great hey we might need to do that at some point gets added to the list you don't you don't know who you don't necessarily know who's gonna do it yet depending on the task sometimes you quill sometimes well you're not gonna have that's a piece for that you're not necessarily gonna know how long it's gonna take you're gonna fill all that out the next time that this task is done through an actual campaign so the first time that a client actually needs to have a disavow file done that's when you're gonna you can estimate but that's when you're gonna afterwards figure out like oh I thought I was gonna take an hour it only took 30 minutes or hey we thought and a VA could do this it's actually gonna take a higher-level person while they went through this they create the SOP for us now any other time that we need to do it to file for client client we have that SOP that's a purpose of the SOP in the first place strategist is then going to which I'll get into in a second take everything that we learned from the first part of the blueprint which is gathering all the puzzle pieces figuring out what tasks need to be done and they're gonna start building the strategy and this all sounds a little complicated but 80% of the time when we're creating strategies is just filling in the blank art it says this is setup we don't need to set it up it says this is not set up we do need to set it up content strategy says we're probably going to need 10 blog posts we need to make sure there are ten tasks for creating new blog post only 20% of the time or we're really digging deeper are we really needing to have someone ponder ok we're gonna go on this direction we're gonna go on that direction so when it comes to the 80% it's very much so conditional statements like I already have something set up then you don't need to set up if something's not set up then you do need to set it up the other 20% of the time you're gonna be reviewing the manual review documents and any notes that maybe came up during from an am during conversations so if you're an average target anchor text ratio is let's say 20 to 35% a client is over optimize they're at 75% you know that you need to be to build build links this is the 20% of the time we actually have to dig a little deeper you get to figure out okay how many pill links do we need to build to be able to get within a normal target anger ratio at what velocity do we want to build those links are we going to also build target links at the same time just you know had a higher velocity of the buildings or we're just gonna build build links and tour within the ratio that we need to be and then start building target links again conversely if we are under optimized severely we have a 5% anchor ratio are we gonna build target links only we can also pill a little bit are we going to be super aggressive with our target links at what velocity we're gonna go down so on and so forth so this is where we actually need to sit down and figure out exactly what direction we want to take this is this does require someone that knows what they're doing you're not gonna be able to send this off to a VA who doesn't know much about SEO who just follows SOPs because this requires you know someone that understands all the mechanics of SEO you're also going to be making decisions like what pages should we prioritize right so the client might really care about their their roof repair page sorry the roof replacement page maybe that's you know that's what makes them the most money that's what they care about the most but maybe you decide well going out focusing on roof repair first makes more sense we're gonna get the results fast so they're gonna get a higher ROI faster that's gonna justify them staying on longer which could gonna give us a better chance being able to show up for the roof replacement stuff in the first place like I said you're making inferences on the supporting documents to figure out exactly what you need to do for this campaign in the cases where you can't just have pass/fail checklist so do this do that we're also going to have some some questions that don't necessarily have a right or wrong answer that are just going to come up while you're looking at the site so let's say there is a 20-point guide where each point is set up on a different web page those twenty web pages are you going to keep that as all twenty different pages are you going to combine that into one massive guide are you going to create a two-part guide where each part of the guide has ten points in it what you're gonna do is going to depend on you know what's the content quality of those ten individual pages to those ten individual pages or you have good links pointing to them are they currently being used as great as great internal links for other pages are we going to be losing that link juice we're going to be using these for outreach is it going to be more effective to use these for outreach as ten different documents sorry 20 different documents and just outreach with one of them would it make more sense to get looks for one massive document if people are reading these posts or do they want to read twenty different guides in this niche do they want to just sit down on this one page and read ten thousand words of content on a single page do they want to read two parts so these are these are questions that don't necessarily have right or wrong answers that you can come up with off the top of your head this is where you sit down and you figure out based on everything that I know about SEO based on everything I know about this client what makes the most sense to do in this situation so what locations to target as well it's just another example a client might be going after multiple locations well based on the budget based on the level of competition maybe like area say with the law firm example I gave you maybe don't focus on the location that they care about the most maybe you do focus on their city pages because it's gonna get you better results maybe you focus on a completely new city maybe you focus on a smaller service that they do right so if you're working with let's say personal injury attorneys there's like three or four types of cases that they really care about where maybe you do focus on a lesser case because you're gonna be able to get results within a month or two because it's very little competition so you're just like I already said looking at things figure out what you want to do not necessarily right or wrong answers all right so at this point you're gonna have a list of all the things that need to be done during the campaign you have your pass/fail audit checklist tasks you have the tasks that you've created based on what you found when manually manually reviewing the website you're gonna have your tasks based on general idea or a built out content strategy you know what how many pieces you want to make you know what types of content they're gonna be generally know what your link building strategies gonna be you've already figured out based on everything else are you gonna be using PP ends guest post mixer post both how many links are you really gonna need to look at this client where they are you're gonna take this list and the way that we do it is we have a our master strategy is just in a Google sheet so we just duplicate it we delete all the tasks we don't need to do takes like five minutes to really delete all the stuff that we don't need because we have it or organized in a way that just works for us and how we go and everything but then we're just left with a spreadsheet that just has a compilation of all the tasks that we need to do so if we need to create empties of the content there's ten tasks laid out without any order right now as to no we need to create ten pieces of content we need to do the on-site we need to fix these technical issues at this point in time we don't know when we're gonna do it which is what we need to figure out next all right so next we have to figure out when are things gonna get done so we're not always necessarily gonna do things in the same order maybe a client already has pretty decent on site so instead of jumping in and redoing the on site and spending you appending on how big the site is depending on how big the budget is so spending a month or half a month just fixing the on site maybe you leave it as is because the past agency did a decent job sure you want to clean it up but maybe they're really lacking in the links aspect so the first month or two you're focusing on link building and then you're gonna jump into the on site after all right so these are all decisions you're gonna make do you need to jump into building citations right now do you need to do that later are there a lot of citation issues maybe you're gonna jump into a citation cleanup that's gonna be the first thing that you do right so when are you gonna create your content how much content you're gonna create at a time you're gonna create you know if there's ten posts you're gonna do four in the first month four in the second month two in the third month and then use that you know have that all done so you can focus on links you know four four through six so you're just trying to figure out when you do things at this point you're gonna have a spreadsheet ordered month one month two month three month four all the way through six twelve what however long the campaign is and you will have ordered all the tasks you're gonna do based on specific months so so just to go over that again you have all the tasks that you want to do in a spreadsheet you're then just ordering them based on when it makes the most sense to do that you might also be splitting up some tasks so you don't always have to do on-site all in one go depending on the budget depending on how big the site is different things have different priority you know you're not gonna worry about optimizing you know you're not gonna worry about meta descriptions of titles and each one's haven't been touched yet right so maybe you split the on-site into five phases you do want to do phases per month saving that extra budget that you would have put towards the on-site to giving them some extra links because you feel as though that that what that's what needs to be done all right so next are you gonna focus on certain locations or pages first so I kind of talked about this does it make more sense to focus on the roof repair page before the replacement page doesn't make more sense to focus all your effort on to a certain location first does it make sense to spend the first three months focusing on location a then months four through six also start to work in location B or maybe the entire campaign just focuses on location a and you know you tell the client like hey I know you care about these four locations but you simply don't have the budget for it based on everything else this is why we need to just focus on this one location at a time so what what takes priority how are you gonna plan things out you know you shouldn't just take a shotgun approach and just you know hope to see that what you're doing is going to get results for all the money pages all the different locations they're going after what's gonna maximize the budget what's gonna get them the results so that after six months they sign on for another six months then they saw him for 12 months so on and so forth now why we're going through this you're also going to notice that whether or not you actually need to edit your SOPs so chances are the way that you have your SOPs for on-site is because that's generally the best way to do it based on your experience within your niche right so most of the time if you if you write your title tags city name keyword - Brandt maybe 99 going nine percent of the time that's how you do it that's fine it makes sense for that to be in your SOP if you just create an on-site a/c cells tell someone to do it like the master strategy is set up it has an SOP on that whoever does that task is going to implement on-site at that point in time using your SOPs but you also need to take into account that it's not gonna be exact every single time right maybe the the clients brand name is just an exact match keyword you don't want to have a Boston Roofing Contractor - Boston Roofing Contractor right so at that point you make a note going back to the example of adding onions to the burger anyone who's doing that task assuming that you're putting the know in a place in your project management system that they're gonna see they're gonna know that if your note says hey don't add the brand name to the title tags on this website at all that that's just what they're gonna do they're not gonna add it there if the schemas are fine if your SOP says you need to remove the local business schema from their website and add it in based on your own template well if the local business schema is determined to be fine you make a note of it hey don't replace that schema it's gonna be super obvious to them okay I just don't need to do that then or if you do need to change up how the title tags are hey don't use this format use this format instead write the SOP should be in a place where probably 80 to 90 percent of the time that's gonna work that's because that's what makes sense for your niche and you're just add even editing them as need be which I'll tell you like 95% of the time we don't have to edit the SOPs it's just situations where like exactly match brand name or goods or whatever it is those are the mostly the two situations that we come up with what's the time okay no I'm going the wrong direction sorry okay now okay so gonna go gonna go through the entire process again with more visuals explaining it again just to make sure that the points were clear so first we need a process to plan the campaign we need to figure out what pieces of the puzzle do we need to do we need to do for this client so the pieces of the puzzle are going to be our tasks and processes we have a task for setting for setting up a hostname filter on analytics we have a process for doing a complete analytic setup if they don't have a Google Analytics account and we do the planning process through the blueprint so the blueprint is a templatized or productized service where we know what tasks we're gonna be creamed we're gonna be doing a lot of auditing we're gonna have supporting documents like our keyword research we're gonna be looking at everything and anything we need in order to completely plan out this campaign for however long it is we also need to make sure that we are also spending time to manually review things as well with human eye there we going there's your SOPs are never gonna be in a place where when you're auditing a website that you're gonna find every possible issue you need to spend even if it's just a little bit of time some time playing around with things clicking on every button seeing exactly you know the small things that are wrong with this website there might be one page on the website that for whatever reason it takes 16 seconds to load or maybe for whatever reason all the images are broken on this one page that you might not have seen through all your normal SOPs and that might you might it might not make sense to have a task check to make sure every page every image is working right that's something that maybe it doesn't come up very often so that wouldn't be in a normal SOP so you need to take time to actually look through things and when things do come up that makes sense to do again so we had a client where they're the lazy developer put it nested the entire body content in an h2 tag so now that wasn't a piece beforehand because perk I've heard about people doing that like before and like nesting everything in h1 before my time and that was working but I've never seen that before so we're like okay great make sure that gets put into our processes to actually look for look for this now on that was the first time we ever seen it with a client easy to check for now we know to look for it so aside from a process to plan out the strategy figure out all the tests that we need to do we also need a process to create the actual strategy we do this through our master strategy a master strategy contains lists of all the tasks and processes that we do over the course of a campaign we're gonna refer this document when we're creating the campaign by looking over it compared to our one of the blueprint which is gathering all the pieces all the tasks and processes that we actually need to implement in order to build a strategy and we're eliminating the tasks that we don't need for my master strategy and then we're left with a list of all the tasks that we do actually need to complete so we have all these tasks we know that we need to create ten pieces of content we know that we need to do the on-site we know that there is these 15 technical issues that we need to fix we know that we need to bring in a developer to move a plugin that they're using off the site but it might break something so we know all this stuff we need to do we know now we need to know when we're gonna do it which is the next step which is actually building the puzzle so we know everything that we need to do we then need to plan out okay sequentially how are we gonna do this what takes priority what makes the most sense to do a month one month two month three so on and so forth and that's mostly the process right there we're just planning out the campaign auditing it finding the issues taking all those issues and then building the strategy around those specific issues in a relatively precise duay to create an unreasoning a process size system to create a custom strategy with with these strategies start with these systems and processes creating custom work is not all that complicated once you have everything set up it does take time to of course get all this together doesn't take us a whole lot of time to put this together it's not that difficult to do and we get you know like I said beforehand much better results much faster results clients are a lot happier closing a lot more as well in my opinion this ways all the possible negatives may be the painful month or two that it takes to get all this all this organized to play tests to make sure nothing's broken in your processes that's it if we would give it up for the oldest 21 year old on the planet Jared good job brother does anyone have any questions just put up your hand okay um do you ever find it difficult to sell the blueprints I know like a lot of clients might like be interested and worked on rather than what's kind of theory in a blueprint I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on that and great talk so we have had one instance where there was there was a prospect who was very against the idea of planning things out their analogy was well if I want to get my roof fixed I'm gonna have an have someone come out and inspect it they're not gonna charge me for that they're just going to check things out and then they're gonna get the work done the issue is that if they just want work done then they're not they're just looking to hire someone to do work they're not they're not really hiring someone to understand their business they're not honor hiring someone to do anything other than tasks they're essentially trying to hire an employee who's gonna do work that they don't understand how to do so it's a matter of you know that's probably a bad client I would try to you know explain it to them that's what I always do it'd be like hey you know like your thing about it like this well here's why you should do it they can't get through the header they just don't agree with it that's not a client I want to work with in the first place same thing as if someone came in and they're like hey I want you to do all this work for me for 200 bucks that's just not how we do things hey a great presentation love it very much I was wondering how many people are in your team and what kind of do you have like developers technical SEO is what's going to split between the people and what kind of tasks do you give to what kind of people sure so I'm really big on automation so I love Dagon diving into Google sheets with functions and writing custom scripts through JavaScript or Google scrubs or stuff like that so most of what we use to have the A's for pretty much there's very few PS I just have one VA who just if I need something I just don't want to do myself as straightforward she does that right now I've still been doing the on-site part of things mostly just the plane not to implementing it by figuring out what stuff should be sent it over to VA to implement that just because I found it very difficult right now to hire someone for on-site for the more technical stuff I have a developer so he's he's on call there's not usually a huge need for him because if it's something I can do in like 30 seconds or some of the VA can do in 30 seconds just send it off to them but I do have a developer for the more like digging into the theme files stuff like that on-call designer for when that's needed don't need much design work but we're adding images to the website especially for blog posts if a client wants to if the client really cares about their brand then that's when you know so I know we'll have a lot more work to done creating custom images for them link building so there's there we use a mix of vendors and also a little bit of stuff done in-house we've moved a lot to vendors eventually back in-house once we fix the processes for that but linking for pill linking outreach for guest posts that sort of thing I think that's the majority of the time I heard it might be forgetting someone I'm sorry if I am if that's good enough Jared first of all I love Tomatoes hate them on my burgers so you got unlucky ever since deploying these kind of SOPs and these kind of systems have you found that the overall cost of campaigns has gone down because you're able to use lower level staff to do a bigger amount of the campaign while your expert so probably yourself and maybe one or two other people are doing less work so I'll say short answer yes but it makes that a little bit difficult to definitively say it's just because for the other automations I built in it's obviously made a lot less work and made things a little bit more streamlined so the the blueprint itself when we when that first came out I was operating that with like a 40 50 percent operating origin built out built out automations and some of those automations allowed for tasks that I would normally have an SEO do automate part of it bring it down to a VA level things like that so we were able to build that out to a seventy-five percent profit margin and then from there I felt that it needed more stuff so I added more stuff which lower the profit margin of course but we were able to get more done