SEO Services: How Much Money Should You Budget OR Invest in SEO Services for 2026?

0:00how much to budget or invest seo services in 2026 how much is it how much would it cost welcome judith how much would it cost to actually have this service done for you it's a question that hey roz glad to see you here

0:30this is a question that i have seen since 2024 come up as a topic of interest and i said you know what let me bring an update for 2026 so you can also get to know about it too welcome lisa hey cheryl good to see you as well ashwarya thank you for being here today we're going to be talking about how much it costs to budget or invest seo services in 2026 for those who are looking for this opportunity i would say right off the bat it's good to invest anywhere between 500 us dollars

1:04a month through 10 000 a month that's the range it can go higher it could go lower depending on who you're working with but you want to budget between 500 to 10 a month anywhere between that range it's a very huge wide extreme range but that is the price what's up rocky how are you happy friday and happy may but i'm not i know i could hear it from your voice

1:35oh no that sucks it's chilling like it's just it's relaxing you don't have to be outside you could be cuddled up bundled up whatever it is you're doing yeah that sounds nice i was thinking about if i was outside but you know yeah definitely it's good if you're inside yeah the weather's been really nice i said you know

2:05what let me just come out here a little bit talk to y'all here thank you for being here trauma good to see you freddo prion oh i do have a question before i fall use it too much um but i was looking at i didn't know they offered all the things they offered so

2:38i think i'm gonna check it out again okay yeah keywords everywhere is a good platform keywords keywords keywords it's always going to be something and i don't know let me ask you this rocky what do you use keywords like let's say you have just a bunch of keywords kind of like saying i have a bunch of cash but you know that this is going to turn into whatever you make it to how do you look at keywords for me um i use it for my copy and how you know um if i want to be found so like with my social media posts my captions my blogs and my newsletters um all the way to my youtube titles so

3:13i've been using them for anything that requires me to write um you know to write and be found okay okay okay i like that freddo what about you how do you use keywords and happy friday happy friday happy friday hey how you doing rocky um in regards to uh keywords um the number one way i use keywords when it comes to seo is i use it on my back end of my websites and i use it

3:45on the copy side of things so if i create a copy i'll usually try to use google trending or google evergreen keywords based on the niche and if it's for paid ads like um like google ads i'll pick seven to ten of the keyword or key phrases that are within my budget but still you know you know are poking as well so that's kind of how i rock with it okay i love how you guys mentioned that that that's very

4:20unique too when i look at keywords and i see the value of keywords i look at them as hashtags and i look at them as urls that's how i see keywords especially the ones that are exactly matching the type of search i'm trying to get then it's just a no-brainer because those keywords are going to be used over time and that's how people are going to be searching for as they type so if they type space type space type and then hit enter then whatever you've typed or you've keyed in is going to be what

4:53people will be finding so i love that you mentioned that too yeah right so if you say urls what are you going to keep using those as websites like how are you how are you doing that for blogs or what yeah so for blogs and for pages literally just for content semantics because if let's say you have digital marketing strategies then you have content marketing strategies and then you have local marketing strategies those are three different keywords or keyword sets i would do domain.com

5:25slash keyword dash keyword dash keyword and that's going to be in a full keyword cycle so i know that if i've done these three

5:40whatever keyword they type in the search box then it's the it's the web page that i've actually created that's going to be pulled up as well hey dr fashion so that's that's how i i would look at it does that matter for the slugs like i think it's called a slug you know i know what i'm saying towards the end like if i did if i had a blog and it was i don't even know how my my blogs are set up but if it was instead of www.digitalmarketingsecrets.com if it was social with rocky

6:11forward slash digital dash marketing dash whatever it works that way as well is that what you're saying read it oh who's going to see it

6:30that's good though that's good

6:33because she knows how lazy she knows how lazy i am or you spoke once and you're still benefiting from what you spoke just think about that if you really think about that like you ain't gotta say that again listen i'm not fighting it that's how my website got got so much so many searches from those couple of blogs i did it's crazy but it's just i'm gonna have to use ai sorry you can use ai everybody's using ai

7:09but also you got to customize it without ai and that's where your expert quotes your tables your faqs your frequently asked questions that's faqs because someone told me they don't know what faqs is i said let me make sure i say it in full so i don't be assuming stuff so frequently asked questions that are on your website or your web page that people can dr fashion is crazy so you gotta know exactly what you're creating online so that people can find you they can connect with you and they can also

7:42learn from you the learning part is the biggest part because if they can learn oh i see this article about this here then i can trust this person to lead me to where i need to go to if somebody gives you directions and tells you where to go to you've trusted that person with your whole heart because you've understood that if you turn left and make a right and make a left again it's because that person told you so if you are getting to that destination and you actually see that you got there you'll be like wow this person didn't scare me this person didn't you know detour me this person

8:16actually gave me what i asked for and i'm here so you appreciate that because you feel like wow somebody else can actually benefit from this too so why i'm saying this is when you create content on your website it's going to give you long-term value because many times when people are budgeting or investing for seo services they're investing for longevity they're investing for long-term goals they're investing for things that they're probably not even aware of especially when you look at the

8:46internet and you're not ranking that alone is going to tell you that you need to start creating content that's going to allow you to rank because if you don't rank on google or any search engine it's going to be like you're posting content and nobody's seeing you and you want people to find you you want people to connect with you it's not just creating content because you have content to show because everyone has content everyone has a phone everyone has a camera so what makes your content different from the other person it's not the angles it could be but at the end of the day

9:20it's how you relate how you say those things how do you message it how do you package it how do you present it that's going to help you long term welcome ithani so when you look at your content in 2026 and you think about budgeting or investing in seo services then you're looking at a range from anywhere from 500 to 10 000 a month usd that is how you should think about it it could range from any of those so if you've ever paid for seo it could be a thousand dollars a month it could be

9:51three thousand it could be five thousand it could be 500 but that's going to be how much it will cost and based on what you pay for is what you're going to get to i talked about budgeting and investing in seo services in 2024 and people in 2026 are still listening to it today so that says something so by 2028 people are still going to be looking for information about 2026 or trying to figure out how much it cost before and what's the difference because seo services are paid in different ways

10:23you can pay for seo services as a one-time fee you can pay for it on a retainer fee which could be monthly it could be quarterly it could be biannually it could be annually you could pay for it hourly by project pro bono there are different options so depending on the agency that you work with that's going to tell you what it is for us we handle it monthly quarterly biannually and annually so we have four different buckets so you can either do it manually annually or you can do it

10:59monthly and if you do it monthly you might be paying more because it's going to cost you more monthly than you if you save and you now have six months in or 12 months in or even three months in because when you look at the number of weeks you have to look at your seo grow it's going to take time some people come in they may say oh yeah i just want to do this for three months and leave we're like no this is not a three months thing this is not a one-stop shop once you're done with these three months what's going to happen after that is going to be on your record because if you create

11:31content and that content is not created consistently and you just depending on the content that was written only in the first three months it's going to be hard for you to scale because it's a website it's your house it's your property if somebody builds for you a website they're not going to create your website and then manage your website and then do all those things just because you they build the website for you first no most people will build the website and leave you to it or let you have your website and continue to have it but if you have a website and the person is actually managing

12:05that page or managing the site entirely they're managing the security they're managing the content maintenance they're managing the moderation there sometimes i've seen it where clients would leave their comments open and then they start getting hacked because they left the comment section open the blogs because anybody can leave anything and then when they put spammy links in the comment section now their account is set and now they're out they're wondering how am i getting flagged for something i didn't do yet your comments was open to everyone so it's a big deal and imagine when you're getting

12:42comments in spammy mode like that and you're getting traffic too just imagine how you have to really understand how to qualify that traffic so when you're budgeting investing in seo services your question is not how much does this cost because it's gonna cost but there's an investment to the cost but your real question should be what am i going to gain after this amount of time i've spent with you investing in seo services for x amount of months that's a question because if you spend one month

13:18don't expect a two-year outcome compared to somebody who has spent a six-month plan and is going to expect a 12 to 24 month outcome so income and outcome two different things inbox outbox two different things inhale exhale two different things so when you invest in seo services you're investing in the time you're spending on your website and if you are spending on your website everything is going to count all the articles that you've published all the pages that you've indexed we talked about indexing

13:51yesterday all the pages that you have to control when it comes to distribution how do you have to make sure that your technical setup is good we've talked about keywords briefly how many keywords do you have in your asset how many keywords do you have total do you know those number of keywords even with podcasting with podcasting there's a number of total keywords you have like i know with diary of a ceo his podcast episodes i only say the full range but it's anywhere from 10 000 plus

14:26when it comes to the number of keywords he has under the number of episodes he's published and i believe there are anywhere around less than a thousand episodes so if less than a thousand episodes is giving you more than 10 000 keywords you do the math and you now wonder okay how much do i have to put in so i can actually get it out and then when you're investing in seo services you're thinking about okay these keywords someone's going to think about this tomorrow next week next month how do we position these things out for people we have a client and they're focusing on substance recovery when it comes to

15:00abuse and substances and how can people get off of those things so that they can have timelines so they have timelines on how do i stop smoking how do i stop vaping do i stop doing this they are timelines and now we're creating events on eventbrite to focus on those things to cure those things addiction recovery so we're doing that for clients because we know that if they're going to invest in a free workshop and that means that the people that come in with information they are actually prepared to make those changes then that's where the rehabilitation comes in that's where the science comes in that's where

15:33the commitment comes in that's where the all the details come in the accountability comes in because you're not paying at the door because you're coming to understand you're coming to say okay is this me do i fit in this category or am i good those are the kind of questions people get to ask so whichever industry you're in there's going to be some type of investment when it comes to seo services you're investing in your brand most people pay for ads you pay for social media content management you pay for product shoots you pay for photo shoots you pay for film shoots you pay for

16:10subscriptions you pay for a lot of things but when it comes to paying for seo it's like i don't know about that and in my mind i'm like why but i also get it too because there are companies who have actually burnt people when it comes to seo giving them their heart and soul and saying yeah please take everything and make sure that we're good and all of a sudden you just get smacked in the back because now the person doesn't want to talk to you the person has no access to you the person has changed after a payment was made it's happened to a lot of people we just had a client today we just

16:43onboarded a client today and she was telling me a story about how she worked at about three other companies and she paid for this i'm talking thousands of dollars and she was looking for them because she was not getting what she paid for and then she ended up finding somebody else who was able to help come to find out that what she paid for wasn't what she actually paid for now she has to pay twice to get what she actually paid for so that she was just fed up and she's like that's how i found you and that's how we connected and now we're going to help her get a website she's

17:15been trying to get a website done for years but people have just been taking her money two years three years four years she doesn't know what to do people are going through things so to the point where even somebody else she even said how somebody else had to pay her a refund or she was going to leave a review because i was going to damage her reputation so she rather just pay the money back because she knew she didn't do the work like when you hear this kind of stories you wonder am i supposed to invest in something i'm going to be regretting about or am i going to actually invest in something

17:47i'll be happy about so investment in seo is not just the cost of what you're paying for but the service and the experience and the skill you're paying for people talk about seo services like crazy i just did an audit of a client today and i was in this morning i was it took me about three weeks to send this email because i was like should i send this email should i wait i said no today's the day i that was around april 17th and i sent the email today and the person hasn't responded back but i

18:19can tell because it tells me when the person has opened the video so i'm able to know okay this person opened it so even if they don't say anything i know that they've received the message because they opened it for me i'm not i'm just a messenger i'm just going to tell you this is what i see and that's about it and i felt like even if the person doesn't reply that's not on me that's their problem that's for that's their prerogative right but for me i know that if i'm going to work with you there are things i got to tell you first it's kind of like saying if we're going to be in a relationship if we're going to get married then there's some things we have to put together we have to be in

18:50agreement in things because we can't just be confused or happenstance happy no it's not going to be like that so it's the same thing with seo services you have to ask what am i receiving what am i getting what is the goal am i just going to do this because i'm going to pay for it or am i going to learn about what i'm doing so when i don't pay for it i can still do what i have to do there's a difference so we'd love to hear from you rocky afraid of what are your thoughts on seo services and what have you heard in your industry not going for it yeah you know i do cold calls for uh to offer

19:26seo services and that's a very going from google ads to seo i under i kind of understand most people have a the seven second brain or the the instant gratification brain so the objective for them is i want to make money now and yes seo in certain cases can get you instant gratification however

19:59you know it gets deep because i tell people if you're trying to speed up seo like you do paid ads then you're gonna have to really put out social media a lot of social media videos and add seo to your you know domain to your um to your titles to your description stuff like that because then it'll it'll give you that boost that you will get from a google ad that you know literally is all you know specific so you know when it comes to seo the articulation to people to really explain to them

20:33the importance you know it's a whole different ball game and then this is why for me specifically i got tired of just saying all right i'm gonna do people's websites in in in in a sense of um just working with regular people i only almost work with people with google maps links if they don't have a google maps link i don't waste my time because with a google maps link it's easier to you know show them the the magic that's happening when you're doing seo on a website they don't see the the website got

21:10pinged in this conversation and then these people in this room are talking about it and they they just released the link they're not following the the breadcrumbs they so they don't really see what's going on so it's not as instant now they might get a call and then they might say they know normally in their business they probably got five calls a month now they got 15 but they still won't say oh it's because of you because certain seo depends on how you set it up it can't be instantly tracked

21:42right back unless you you know you have a good setup system so you know it's just the articulation to teach people how important it is because now seo has just upgraded on top of voice seo and ai search so it's it's even it's gotten even more important but most people just don't understand so to speak and we almost have to keep dumbing ourselves down even further to to kind of like just find a perfect language to let them know listen this is crucial so that's my perspective thank you freddo rocky

22:19yeah i just learned um i already knew this already but just in case everybody else didn't know it takes it's too much damn work i'd rather hire somebody out to do seo it's too deep for me um but what i noticed is that businesses i mean i'm sorry businesses because you know i deal around social media social media marketing is now moving from simple things like hashtags to search engine optimization as these social media platforms now are being found on google the biggest thing

22:54in social media right now is that google has an actual um short form video content tab that you can sit in now and so the social media platforms are leaning more towards that so everything and that's why i was so interested in keywords everywhere because even though i'm not blogging if i want to be found now i do have to do that research for search engine optimization and i think it's such an underrated thing um and it's not talked about enough across businesses um like if you want to be found you have to use search engine optimization no one tells us this stuff favor they just say put up a website do that

23:28like my website was dead until you put it on google search console i didn't even know about that i don't even know if you could you know organically be found without putting it on there right i'm looking down at dr fashion using search engine optimized words and seeing what people are searching it's like the core of what you need to be doing so i guess my question to you is why is that such an ignored thing is it because it takes so much work um because it's so expensive to hire somebody to do these things um like why do you think that is great question rocky yeah i believe that the reason why

24:03seo is super underrated is because most people have heard different versions about seo to the point where they're confused and they don't know what they're actually paying for so there's a yes yes and yes i said i need ai now you said i need links or you said i need backlinks now who am i supposed to listen

24:36to so by the time you're done going through to understand who is actually going to help you you you kind of have decision fatigue and now you don't know what to do anymore and now whatever the cost is you're going to pay for it and then it's up to them because you're literally at their mercy now and if they mess it up that's that's on them and they may not have told you because they're things that they probably didn't explain in detail we've saved a lot of companies from i can say hosting

25:07horrors i can say that way because they're companies that literally would be paying clients or paying whoever to host their website on top of the hosting plan that the hosting plan is charging so i mean that's not a an issue you can do what you want i'm not going to knock your hustle but if you know that you want to operate and own your website and if you need to make changes you can't do that then that's a problem we have a client at some point i just said you know what it's out of

25:40my hands now because i can't it's not my business i can't do more than what i'm supposed to do because at some point the client has to now reach out to the person who's hosting their name server to switch up something in the system because we have a record that needs to be added into the database and i can't access it because she doesn't have ownership so you can't i mean sometimes i look at these things and i'm just like wow i wasn't there when that deal was being made i'm just showing up after everything has happened so for me it's about consolidating it trying to configure a way

26:13around it or resolve it entirely so that we don't have to deal with that anymore we had a client that we had to move over 70 domains because they got hacked and they've been hacked for the last three four five years and now they just got revived because we took about three months to fix that problem something that took four years to be revived took three weeks to you know replace so it's kind of like what do you do some people are so confused they don't know what to do they don't know what they're paying for they don't know who they're paying and then when it starts getting so jargon heavy

26:46like you said rocky it becomes like i don't want to do this i don't want to hear this all i wanted to do is just to get the results and get this done and get out the way and check it off the list but most people don't see it that way so i believe if you don't know the right questions to ask you'll be in the wrong position it's like relationships if you have the wrong questions or you don't ask the right questions you're going to be in the wrong relationships and then you realize oh wow i didn't know this was like this because you didn't ask you didn't know you know what i'm bad at that like i'm bad at seo don't do that i'm just kidding i have a great man uh but no yeah

27:23and i and i just sorry to interrupt you but you're spot on that's what it is it's too confusing and then it's like one of those things with marketing we try to do it by ourselves and we can't because if you don't know what to do or how to do it or what to look for it can be very very hard so yes

27:39yeah that's true and with seo too you also got to know what you're actually getting yourself involved in because some people may say you know oh we do seo and then the conversation ends there but you're supposed to answer what is seo thanks for the coins rocky what is seo what are you using seo for what is the actual goal for seo and if the seo is supposed to do what it's supposed to do then there should be a result and we should be able to see the result organically it's like when

28:10you pay for ads you go and look at the ads report because you want to see what the ads converted to or how did the ads turn into xyz i was talking with pinterest staff we always talk with pinterest every two weeks and we're looking over our client account and we notice some things and we realize oh yeah we need to switch this up switch this up because some things are happening we went up by two percent and the average is point this percent so i said okay we need to do some switching here but that's happening because we're looking at the ads report we're running a pinterest ad and this is to five locations within nevada and california and this is a brick and mortar location

28:46so they sell online they sell on amazon and they have great tools they have great things that they're doing but at the same time we also need to know what is happening on the back end so if i have to go to pinterest to get a report to understand what's going on then that means i need to go and get the report from the paid platform if i'm going to do the same thing for organic welcome then i need to do the same thing for organic so i gotta go to google search console and connect it

29:19google search console is google's internet service provider like everybody that is here listening to this you're probably connected to a mobile network or wi-fi network that's how your website needs to be connected to google's network if you want to be connected to google.com google's network or google's internet service provider is google search console i don't know how simple or how more simple i can get with that but if your website is not connected it's not going to be there how would i know i don't

29:51even have to look at your account from the from the inside i can see from outside i can just go to nslookup.io and i'll put in your domain and it'll tell me the records that you have there if those records are missing then i know you've not connected it it's that simple it's binary code it's either a zero or it's a one it's either a yes or it's a no it's either it's black or it's white sometimes we complicate seo and it shouldn't be complicated so this is really when it comes to understanding okay what are we paying for and why are we paying for this and how long are we paying for this so usually

30:25with seo if you want to really budget or invest give yourself at least a year and a year if that's on the minimum side give yourself at least three to six months to invest and give yourself another three to six months to see the results if you really want to go deep into this give yourself 24 months and then invest for six to twelve months and then give it another six to twelve months to see the results so you decide what you want to do but either way you're going to get those results but it's either going to come sooner or later depending on how you're able to really structure it down

30:58so think about it that way too so that was a really good question rocky

31:05and what i also realized is you know doing google ads for many years i've realized you're not guaranteed a sale run zaxby's giant chicken finger wraps are no snack in fact they're so big they get their own menu get one in your choice of asians and zation buffalo blue and chicken bacon ranch and you know they're coming packed with three crispy hand-breaded famous fingers fresh ingredients and their signature sauce all wrapped to perfection big on size bolder on flavor but that's just how they

31:35do it at zaxby's zaxby's giant wraps they're no snack who's got the sauce zaxby's google ads or tiktok ads or facebook ads you're not guaranteed t to sell anything so you know that's something that some people they just feel like yo i could just create a google search ad or you know a display ad or you know a you know a youtube youtube ad and you know i just get people to sign up not not necessarily so it's all about how you structure your ads and you you may create the best ad in the world

32:12but seo still it still takes part because when they get to the landing page for you to sell whether it's your shopify store whether it's an amazon product could be whatever the case may be when they get there there's a way for you to articulate your you know um your product and service and that's also seo that's copywriting you know that's you know structuring the words in where in a in a way where people are going to actually say you know what i'm going to buy you know or if is it set up with reviews this is

32:48set up in a way where people feel you know they have that you know that their social impact where like okay other people have done it you know it's the jones effect okay it's cool all right i could do it too so all of these things are crucial you know so it's seo is the foundation i feel paid ads is is the secondary but you know and and of course but seo is the foundation without that you're literally just hoping that and it's seriously just hoping and that's what i realized

33:20it's uh it's super crucial uh appreciate you favor

33:27thank you so much freddo that was that was dope you know you got me thinking about a question i want to ask you and rocky too and i'm i'm going somewhere with this question what would you say it doesn't have to be the exact number you can give an average or the exact value it's up to you but what would you say is the least amount of money somebody would invest in per day in running ads for a campaign and then also match that with the highest bid so give me the lowest bid and the highest bid

33:58on a range or exact value it's up to you which which platform it could be a need it's free range oh that's a hard question because it depends on what they want do they want brand awareness like what's the goal behind it because that can be

34:15generation campaign where they are actually going to take action and you can see that the results are happening and actually increasing your conversion lift or even increasing your customer acquisition so for google ads oh sorry go ahead rocky i'll just speak from what i'm from my and i'm about to go to choir practice which i forgot all about but um from my perspective i'll just say from facebook because i've never explored google ads i've done it for a minimum of maybe 20 a day and maximum i've spent

34:50per day per day was probably maybe about 50 a day didn't cost that much but then again like i said it just depends on what it's for is it for a webinar is it for um you know a course it just it's so many different variables but i know it to go very high and if i talk about per lead versus a budget um for something like a webinar or a course you could spend anywhere between one to five dollars per lead to convert them so i don't know what that comes out to be monthly but

35:20but yeah it can be a lot yeah most definitely i would um i would agree on now with google ads you can go with as little as five dollars a day i would only suggest that if you're promoting like in india or africa where the cost per click would normally possibly be lower depends on the keyword um but ideally i tell people 20 25 a day is the base you should start with if you want some type of

35:56you know some type of movement because and then you got to also keep in mind keywords can be very pricey like there's some keywords that can cost up to i've seen keywords cost like real estate keywords are high i'm like five to eight dollars a click depends on on the market um tech keywords are very high because sometimes you could be running an ad and everything is going smooth and all of a sudden you say why am i not getting clicks but then you go you look at the keywords i'm like oh shoot they're

36:29way they way pricier so you have to now you have to switch the keywords so when it comes to paid ads the most the client i've had paid per day was fifteen hundred dollars per day and you know of course the lowest was myself at a dollar a day and that was when i was just you know pushing um different albums in india you know so like meditation albums and stuff like that so ultimately it could be very pricey so when it comes to paid ads and the outcome is not guaranteed and i i'll leave with this

37:04when we go like i tell people when you go shopping you might go to bergdorf goodman sacks fifth avenue macy's bloomingdales and pick up nothing all in the same day and grab nothing but then you go to rainbows and just go crazy so you can't control people you know you know taking out their wallet you know what i mean so paid ads is it's kind of like that you're trying to force people in the building they're gonna walk in but then they're gonna like like what i see but i'm out of here

37:38it's not converting me that conversion is seo that's where you have to really make sure your seo is your foundation and then the paid ads will go like hotcakes and i was gonna say and i want to add to that as well before i head out of here the um we're in a trust recession and i tell people all the time no one is really and i've experienced this with my own ads no one is really buying off the rip just because you're running an ad like that doesn't work as well as it used to so we're spending way more

38:10versus running a cheaper ad for brand awareness sorry my dog's trying to run out the door running a cheaper ad for brand awareness and um getting people to get to know us so i think like what i've been doing is running ads towards things that are going to help me build my expertise and get people to trust me and then converting versus trying to run an ad straight for conversion because those conversion ads they they run up big time they do they do and the fact that you're spending money to make money but

38:46you have to spend more money to make the same amount of money than making more than what you would have spent is crazy because when i look at the amount especially when you look at the conversion rates it's like night and day hey jonathan when you look at the results it's like night and day i'll give you all the stats backlinko did a study right you can google them backlinko with an o like backlink and oh and they did a study this was some time back and the google organic click-through rate

39:17breakdown by position first place you get about 27.6 and that can range up to maybe like 30 percent plus now because that was a study that was done a couple of years ago so imagine you're getting on average 25 to 35 percent on a big range average when it comes to being clicked on because somebody found you organically not that they were paid to click on it or they saw a click that was paid based compare that to a paid ad that you're trying to get the same amount of attention it's not that you're trying

39:52to get more people you want to get the same amount of people but now this amount of people are being spent on more because you have to spend more time and more money on top of that to accumulate that and the average conversion rate for paid ads when it comes to paid search advertising is seven percent more specifically seven point two six percent so imagine you're spending let's say five dollars a day that's 150 a month right and you're converting at seven percent compared to saving that 150 a month

40:26and looking at content that can actually drive in at least 10 per click based on your keywords that you've targeted by url and now you have 10 times what 15 that's 15 articles that's 150 right so now if you think about that same amount of time that you'd have spent to make that 150 you've spent in building links that's going to earn you 150 plus over time because when you split that and you realize okay i'm going to spend ads on digital marketing strategies or digital marketing companies or

40:59digital marketing reports and that's where you're spending your google ads so you know oh this ad costs seven dollars because this click came from this keyword now imagine not paying for that keyword and still getting the click organically but you're converting at 27 compared to seven percent you'd rather want to be at the 27 than the seven percent because the seven percent is like you're scraping for attention when the 27 is a deep blue ocean strategy not to say that paid ads don't work they do because

41:33they are catalysts and you have to think about the learning phase i know with pinterest whenever we run pinterest ads i always mention and i say this beforehand disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer if you want to run a pinterest ad give yourself 14 days ahead of time so if you want to run an ad because you have an event coming up at the end of may or at the end of june and you want to run ads you have to use the 369 method it's if there's going to be three weeks out six weeks out or nine weeks out out of those three

42:03weeks let's say we start off with three weeks you have 14 days those 14 days are already two thirds out of the amount of campaign time you have to spare so you've learned for 14 days but you have seven days to cook it's not going to work that way so if you look at it from that 14 day cycle you have 14 days to let it cook let it simmer let people understand let the algorithm breathe and then after that you now have another 14 days right which gives you 28 days right and then you have

42:35of course an extra two or three days before it becomes a new month now what you've done in those amount of timelines is that you've created an ad that let's say you need 90 days out so you're going to subtract 90 days from 14 days right so what do you get 90 times sorry 90 minus 14 is 76 so if you're looking at that 76 and you're dividing that by let's say 28 if you want to be more specific you have about two months two three months so if you're going to run ads then you have to calculate your

43:1014 days some platforms may be seven some might be 28 right i'm just using pinterest as an example so if you're going to run ads and you're going to convert at seven percent and you have 14 days to spare for learning compared to google search where you don't need all that 14 days if you're google you're google if you're on google that's perfect you start getting clicks the day you actually show up it's like the day you're born you're here you're on this earth you're living so it's active it's not like oh what is it going to happen is it happening has it happened it's happening because it's literally

43:44in front of you so when you have links and you can say send it to your email send it to social media put it on a podcast connect with people run ads on it too because you have a website dot com slash domain dot com slash keyword dash keyword dash keyword now that's the same keyword you'd have been paying for for google to get the same attack i'll say the same type of attention but now you're getting more attention because you're getting more retention because you've built the trust that trust is

44:14built over time and when you have keywords within your arsenal you're going to be great over time because you've created more context for people to find you through the semantic web so if you want to budget or invest in seo services that's 150 dollars that you're spending per day now like you said with fredo if you that's 1500 someone spending per day if you're thinking about that math 1500 by 30 days is 45 000 if they were to spend that in a whole month now if somebody had 45 000 to spend a month which is

44:51there because their companies who spend they spend millions of dollars a month on just ads imagine if you were to take a portion of those ads or the ad budget into organic technical research and development you would be spending less money on ads every month you go closer to the end of the 24 month cycle because you've been able to create something called a market share of voice where you have a higher voice i can say domain authority because more people can find you organically and people like to skip ads

45:25people skip ads on youtube that's why people pay youtube tv to skip ads on youtube people pay spotify premium to skip spotify ads so if you're thinking about watch time building and these guys are already paying it means that they're financially capable to have a higher purchasing power pinterest same thing so people shop on pinterest because you know that people are planners if you take off the peak of pinterest it's interest so your goal is to know what are people interested in and how can you keep them interested because you are interesting you can't be interesting today and not interested tomorrow that's

46:01that's crazy so you have to think about that longevity that's why you make friends with people that you know for years because you know that we have a like we have mutual likes we have mutual things we're not just following each other because we like each other but because we have mutual things that we can learn from each other if i can't learn from you and you can't learn from me what are we doing we have to be able to do things in the way that we can learn from each other i don't want to be the smartest person in the room so that's why these things are happening so when you're thinking about budgeting or investing services for seo purposes in 2026 think anywhere between 500 a month to ten thousand

46:36dollars a month on average it can go up it can go down so there's no fixed price because every business is different it also depends on how much you want to customize that for your business as well jonathan what are your thoughts on this too happy friday thanks for being here hey man i just gotta join and give you claps for that first off appreciate it i was trying to find a point to join in and then i found the point but then you went even farther um you took it a point favor where most people don't

47:06when it comes to justifying seo costs and that's where the math gets kind of tricky against what your current resources are but if you actually want to budget out seo for what you're trying to do that's where you need to go so i don't have to touch upon that anymore you took that as far as you took it previously to that you were there was sort of like a comparison when it came to paid media and paid search versus seo and fred i thought you had some good points i came in on your points and i thought they were cool something that you mentioned that was really cool that i thought to mention uh you you

47:36were describing the attribution window for paid media favor and you were talking about the importance of a warm-up period to paid media followed by what i was going to contribute what's called a warm down period basically when you're running paid media a lot of people run paid media at that moment when they expect the results to be there and what they don't realize is that not only in the way paid media is tracked but also in the way paid media works and how people interact with ads majority of the events you want happen pre during or majority post so there's an attribution window that

48:09has to be tracked and realistically you have to give yourself time pre the campaign and post the campaign for that attribution window to actually add up so that was a very important point that i learned a long time in my career and it helped me out when it came to attribution particularly after ios 14.5 and tracking and all that change because all the events that you used to track on spot were no longer trackable on spot you had to kind of broaden your window to get a better picture of how things were converting um when it comes to what you're talking about if i had to give like a high level overview you

48:41gave a very technical answer and i agree with that 110 percent when and how and how much to justify seo costs um i am a big believer of things that are directional against what you're trying to achieve so if your objective is to achieve traffic on your website and you're trying to achieve purchases if there are directional wins that point towards that and you actually have resources you should definitely start to invest the conversation of how much really starts to get into the math that you gain um really what it comes down to and i would like to have a sort of like a one-on-one room with

49:15you about this favor and we can have like dive into the content deeper on this you mentioned share a voice investing in share a voice versus trying to optimize paid media metrics on a weekly and daily basis is a really interesting conversation because in one aspect you're investing time to get real estate in search and in the other aspect you're bidding against search based on intent and the only part of this conversation that i would contribute is that what you're trying to optimize for plays a major

49:48part what do i mean in that if you have a product that's in season and you understand your price points and your cost and there's an ltv aka lifetime value of course paid media will always be the most actionable item but the point that favor was making is that when you're talking about a long-term approach to not only get your immediate conversions but to also build brand and get traffic building that share of voice online matters more especially in a world where ai overviews are sort of taking over because ai overviews in essence are feeding off a share of voice and when we're talking about share of

50:23voice we're talking about brand and authority and how you actually rank against those topics that you write about and post about so yeah that was that was real good favor i would like to have a conversation uh like a room talking about share of voice particular i don't think you've had that before but it would be cool to have us yeah it would definitely be something to bring in i don't talk about it much uh because these are i would talk about it mostly in the client calls and and really do strategies behind them and because we're talking about seo services i would highlight them but i won't

50:53expand shade on it but definitely when i look at the ai transformation now when you look at someone's website and you realize that there's something missing here because it's not ai ready ai certified or ai optimized people say oh yeah is your website optimized for ai you wonder what they actually mean when you can't see the results or even track data that you can actually look at and say okay we are here now and we're going to be here by this time next week or by this time next month or by this time next quarter it's hard to determine that if you're not tracking and when you think about share of

51:28voice it's a huge deal there was a client that we were working with and we're about to start working with each other again this was back in 22 2022 2023 they've been in business for over 50 60 years they are one of the businesses that built and were contributing to like mall of america for example so they've built huge they are an architectural business and when we started working with them the first thing i did this was back in 2022 the first thing i did was look at the website this was even before ai was happening and popping and i was like you guys we need to get ready for sge

52:02back then it was called search generative experiment and i was like this is going to be happening in the next few years so your website needs to be ready so that even if we come back and leave this and buffer we can always come back and continue where we left off so they said okay what do we have to do so we spent a good couple of months this was about three thousand dollars a month because we're talking about seo services here so this is just consultation i'm not even writing your articles i'm not doing anything it's consultation purely and we're talking for four hours a month recorded with the team and it's it's done on a periodic basis and we did this for about 18 months

52:38within the first and of course this is corporate so you're not just dealing with oh get this paid or get this done whatever we had to do took time like there's something that we added to their website that took about six weeks to get done six weeks where other companies they would do it in six minutes so it's protocol it's procedures you have to go through hierarchies you have to go through different things so you understand that not every business is the same and you have to respect that so i looked at them and i said this is what we got to do i did an audit they were less than one percent in share of voice by the time we were done working with them

53:13and building out the interface in month 18 there were less than four percent in share of voice so that may not look like a lot when you hear one to four percent but you look at that point zero point zero one point zero two point zero one point zero two all the way to point zero nine and then point one zero to one point one nine and then to point two zero it's going to take a while to grow and that share of voice is going to expand it and we actually showed the numbers and we said hey this is where you are this is what it looks like and this is why so we added a few components to it

53:45and we understood that there were things that they needed to get done because they had articles they have what don't they have they're in different countries it's a multi it's a multinational company they are literally in every continent in the world but there were some things on their website that was lacking and now i did an audit of their website and i was like there's some new things that you're lacking because then of course seo 2022 is not seo 2026 so i have to come back and do a whole new revamp it's kind of like when you paint someone's wall you paint your wall for your house after three years five years you want to do a repaint or remodeling because you want to renovate your

54:20home right it's not the same paint you had 10 years ago that you're going to have 30 years after so when you start looking at your content it has to grow and there's something called content decay which happens after 24 months so if we've already gone through 18 months times the number of times we've not been available now is a perfect time to come back and start off from where we left off and then continue off from where we started based on the conversation of understanding that we need to improve your share of voice if you're now not ranking on chat gpt on gemini on cloud on perplexity

54:51on manners on grok on meta ai on deep seek these are platforms that you have to show up on anthropic pedal bot these tiktok spider i know them because i keep seeing these bots every day because now i keep talking it's like i talk to bots in a way because i'm doing that configuring for websites clients i'm like this is not happening this happening so i'm just going crazy and nerdy on it but it's very important to look at these things as well jonathan what what are you thinking yeah i was just gonna laugh and say hubspot crawler like they're everywhere it's just it's more bots than people nowadays it's

55:24funny um no you uh uh i was gonna bring a point and then that point kind of made me laugh for a second no you're you're 110 right i think what it comes down to uh uh share a voice so the the the beauty of it is that most people it's very hard to cover all the aspects um you mentioned content and as you were going on content my mind immediately went to the technical side of structured content and getting structured content for the ai overviews to actually take it on and actually put it in a way

55:57that they completely understand it so it's like there's there's the there's the front base inside of just actually making content that's worth reading and worth picking up there's structuring of the content there's the user experience to make sure that you you have a site worth visiting and worth staying on which gets more so into the technical side of seo there's the core web vitals to optimize so really that's why i was curious about that's why i clicked this room to begin with because the conversation of seo budget and i've been curious to get your thoughts on this favor not to take over the topic but really scoping seo it's very hard to scope it when you take all of its

56:32aspects you know we haven't even talked about pr and backlinks and that's a whole strategy in of itself is you're trying to get quality over quantity but it plays a part and share a voice because you're trying to get authority so i guess just like an overview kind of question like when you when you have those type of cons when you have those type of conversations within your consultations do you focus on one specific aspect or are you looking at the whole overview picture of these are the technical things that we have to improve to pass core web vitals this is the content that we

57:05need to write about within this lifespan these are the pr backlinks that we should try and aim for like what how do you respectfully like aim for that constant great question jonathan so this is how i normally do it and everyone does it differently i just found a unique formula that that works and it's been working for years and because i've seen the value and what it brings back to the customer the client even the consumers that actually attribute back to them is amazing what i normally do because seo is crazy it's everywhere right there's so many components of seo there are about 40 types of seo by the way

57:38guys there are 40 types of seo 40 4 0 so you can only imagine what's going on this franchise seo local seo on page seo it keeps going on and on and on so i don't want you to come get confused on what type of seo you need what i normally do and i focus on because every business is unique so i treat every business uniquely different from the other we may apply the same concepts but the fundamentals are definitely the same across the board and what i normally look out for is what are they lacking the

58:09most that's how i start off what are they lacking the most and then i sort it out by priority order either high priority mid medium priority low priority some companies some businesses don't need ai right now because they don't have content on their website to rank so what are you using ai for if you don't have content that people cannot even organically find you on so i look at it from those perspectives that yeah you need this is it urgent is it important is it critical is it essential what are we looking for right now is it technical do we need more stories do we need more cover do we need

58:40more depth do we need more width what do we want out of this so i look at it from what is the most lacking seo factor right now and most times i normally see is visibility most websites do not have visibility they don't have visibility the visibility is lacking because they're looking for attention when they don't even have the connection and that connection is from google search console which is not connected most of the time you may have a wordpress account a wix account a squarespace account

59:13some type of account and these specific things that are missing are going to hurt you because imagine if i don't tell you that you have a canonical tag issue which is a big issue by the way it's just another way of saying that if you have a completely different link if your name is if like my name is favor but if my name was flavor and you're telling you're calling me flavor i'm not going to answer you because my name is not flavor right so it's kind of like saying if you have your website is your website is abc.com but it now says abd.com you're not going to

59:45respond back to that domain because you don't own it it's not your name it's not your name at all so even though the naming convention may be the same the conventional way of how it's saying said and the phonetic way of how it's said needs to match so that also applies to your domain itself so if your domain is not responding and google does not know what your actual domain is then it's going to be hard for google to attribute you or to refer you to any google search engine so why i said that as an example is if you create content and let's say i would say okay we're going

1:00:20to create content for you and we're going to build out your content but your canonical tag is is lacking it's like me trying to tell you oh we're going to drive this car for about 120 miles per hour but you have a flat tire too you're going to look at me crazy because you'd be like what are you about to do are you really sure about that because you'll be looking at me like these guys you must be tripping but if you look at it in the reality you wonder yeah of course that makes sense but at the same time you're like hmm does that make sense so you start doubting yourself and in actual fact

1:00:52it makes sense to not even try that because safety first protection first so when you look at a website and you and people say oh we're just going to write content on your website and then i look at the website and you're hosted on a local host or you don't have any canonical tag references or you're not not even searched indexed then it's going to be hard to even guarantee you that the traffic or the sales or the leads that you're looking for because the infrastructure is broken if there's a bad foundation then we can't scale this is going to be sinking sand so i look at it from the priority

1:01:23standpoint and i know that okay are you a local business okay do you have a brick and mortar location okay how many locations do you have okay which one is lacking out of the three out of the five why is this one lacking more than this one so by the time we answer all those questions and go through that diagnostic process then it's easy for me to now say okay this is what we actually need we need to focus on this we need to focus on that maybe we need to get on a magazine maybe we need to get on wikipedia maybe we need to get on a podcast maybe we need to get you know to as a backlink we

1:01:54need to do something maybe we need to run ads because it's black friday and maybe you need to do something something has to happen but it can't just happen the way it is but majorly every client goes through a technical audit because if we don't fix your technical house then we're just screaming air and it's not going to be fair for anybody because at that point it's a lose lose we want you to win we want to win and we both of us want to see each other win and how do we both win by making sure that we're both okay we're both serving each other so if i'm helping you grow you should

1:02:29be seeing the fruits of the labor by the results that you're getting from your business and that also takes time and usually with seo services you get to see those results within three to six months and then significantly between six to twelve months months and then ultimately between 12 to 24 months after 24 months you're golden it's going to take some time to grow but it's definitely going to grow exponentially if you just give it the time it needs and if the technical setup is also done in a fundamental way and most businesses do not focus on technical seo because they just don't know what to

1:03:05do and that's really where everything is important imagine me giving you a car the interior is nice the sound system is bumping you have gas in your car you have a nice battery but you got four flat tires you're going to have to change those tires before you drive out of the driveway because you got to fix that first because that's most important right now it's not about how how leather seat friendly it is or how musically inclined you are it's going to be focused on can i drive this car now is it safe to

1:03:39drive this car that's a priority to me because my life is important to me so when you look at it from that perspective and you look at your website in that regard then it's good to also ask okay before i make an investment here what am i paying for when i know what i'm paying for then i can now know what i need and then from there you can now take the next steps to now gradually grow through that process because it may take you the first three months to technically set it up then another three months to do the content and another three months to run ads then another three months to maybe

1:04:09do something else and before you know it you have 12 months that you've covered but each every quarter has created more ability for you to understand your audience especially if you did not do this type of practice in the previous year cycle so it's very important to look at it from those two perspectives so that's what i would do jonathan

1:04:30you're looking for attention when you don't even have the connection i'm paraphrasing a little bit but that was fire can i borrow that and put that on instagram put me up on a keynote speech and try and seem important um that was great the the uh the thing that i would add to that is uh yes to what you said when it came to priority i know this is a mixed room with with different people in different facets of their careers so if you're if you're in a more of a corporate company that's my

1:05:00background i spent like four and a half years in corporate i've been an inbound marketer for the past seven years if you're in a corporate scenario and you're either consulting or you're working inside you want to take favors methodology but you also want to apply a matrix to that against the resources applied to departments so generally speaking when you're in a corporate scenario which you come to find out is that most departments are either bloated in one side or lacking in another so if if there are content and technical needs but the technical team is kind of bogged down with technical tech debt but the

1:05:35content team is sort of overflowed getting their velocity together kind of quickly so that they can leverage the momentum they have and being a bloated team which inadvertently gets you buy-in with the technical team because once they see structure together on the content side then you can get to the technical side as a strategy that you can use on the other side of that if you're just a small business owner you're just a firefighter every day and there's nothing wrong with that you have to pick the fire that matters the most i would just say picking a theme and sticking with that with that

1:06:05being said it's very hard to tackle everything at once if your theme if your theme for the season is content and on page and all that stuff just focus on content if your theme for next season is you know pr and backlinks and off page focus on that following technical just pick a theme and stick with it and you're better seo is one of those things where it's better to have you want to have breadth but you want to have depth because the winners really have depth i don't know if you agree with that favor i'm sure you probably do but the winners in seo really have depth in one or two and then they leverage the rest

1:06:39to really become like a whole have a holistic type strategy so hope that makes sense favor oh yeah totally it does jonathan there's a retention model that really helps a lot of people to understand where they are coming from where they're going because when people are coming to your websites the first time it's important to know how they return and when you start noticing something called return visitor behavior it tells you that this is the highest quality of engagement that's possible for your

1:07:09website because when someone visits your website for the first time they come back a second time a third time a fourth time a tenth time a fiftieth time and a millionth time and they're coming over and over and over again every day every week and they're actually getting to think about what you're saying then you realize that these visitors will convert at a much higher rate because they've been spending time on your website consistently over time so that familiarity is growing and that growing actually takes place with the organic links that you've been able to put out there how do they

1:07:43keep coming back because if you write one article that's about it but if you write 10 articles and each of them are 10 minutes each now you have 100 minutes over 10 minutes now this 100 minutes someone can spend 100 hours trying to go through these 100 minutes so if you think about this long term you ask yourself what are people coming for why are they staying and if they're staying what are they staying for once you know these answers and you can really understand and see what's going on which you can there are platforms that you can actually scan these things and see them it's going to help you

1:08:16because seo is not just clicks it's not impressions it's not keywords it's not blogs those are important but what seo really is is impact foundation and structure impact foundation and structure if there's no impact if there's no foundation if there's no structure then it's going to be a couple of time bound limits that can you can put on yourself and before you know it it's over with so you don't want to have that for yourself impact is important because that impact is going to go through search

1:08:51engines once you're on google you're on bing you're on yandex you're on dot go you're on brave you're on msn you're on yahoo you're on yandex you're on reddit you're on youtube you're on google search you're on pinterest search you're on linkedin search you're on tick tock search you start showing up in these different bots these different search engines these different search platforms then it's going to be easier for you to run ads when you feel like you need to run ads to make a statement because you're already showing up organically right everybody's excited about the michael movie right the michael

1:09:24jackson movie everyone's watching it i remember when that movie trailer came out around november last year and i was like oh it's about to be crazy and now everybody's going crazy about it right because because of the time it took and because of the amount of time that was spent to grow consistently not just because there's something to see but it takes time right if you knew about this movie that's now out in all cinemas right and you heard about it in

1:09:55november you had december january february march and now we're in march so that's about four months to plan a 12 ticket for a movie or a 50 ticket if you want to buy food and you know drive and all that good stuff now you've built something that is more consistent right so over time you've now said okay i'm going to put this aside for this movie and that's what you're going to put aside because when the movie drops you want to be the first to go and see it that's seo because you learned about something when it matured and it was time to see it or it was time for you to go or the time was right

1:10:30for you to take action it happened organically you were not forced you already knew about it because you planned ahead of time for it organic is planning right you plant a seed you water the seed you grow the seed you enjoy the seed so it's your fruits of your labor that's why it's called fruits of your labor the fruits come from labor you don't get fruits if you don't labor the labor comes from the time that is spent the time the seed and the harvest that timeline is dependent on how

1:11:04structural how foundational and how impactful you want to be so you can write 10 articles today that could save you 10 months of research because now you have 10 months of data you can be able to accumulate over time than spending 10 months worth of ads that you would have gotten the same information on because you have a website now so it's very important to look at these things when it comes to customer engagement there are some things to factor in there are about six things to factor in so just write this down the first one is page depth right that means how many times or how many pages

1:11:38were viewed per session right and you said that to jonathan with page depth and just how people are looking for information if there's page depth how do you know there's page depth page depth means that i come to your article i read your article i can see there's a video there's an infographic there's a table comparison chart there's an faq there's a glossary there's some type of infographic that's telling me more that i need to know there are examples there could be a story there could be

1:12:11expert quotes there could be a podcast there could be a carousel those are different elements that's going to enhance your page depth because you already know that this is a html text page right this is just a block it's just text great but if this text turns into image into audio into video then of course more people want to connect with you so you have your page depth you also have page progression right that means how does it take for someone to move from one page to the next so it took me 30 seconds

1:12:43to be on page one of your site let's say i landed on your contact page and then i now spent 15 minutes on your product page now i've spent 15 minutes plus the 30 seconds or the 60 seconds that i've spent on your site now that progression tells me that okay somebody came to this site they spent 30 seconds now they've moved to another page they've spent 15 minutes somebody else came the next day they spent 30 seconds then the other person spent 10 minutes somebody else comes and spends 15 minutes and then

1:13:14spends 30 seconds eventually all those numbers are going to average down so it's a logical sequence of how many pages that were visited then you think about engagement signals right engagement signals are interactions that happen in between right do they click on something do they scroll to view when they scroll how far down do they scroll do they scroll all the way down and then they scroll all the way up a lot of people scroll all the way down and then scroll all the way up it's like when you buy a book you now look at the back of the book and you're like okay this is all i gotta read okay so

1:13:46psychologically you're preparing yourself to read this mini book this ebook or this encyclopedia it's really up to you because you're looking at what you're about to get yourself involved in based on how much volume you have to cover over a certain period of time so those engagement signals are important and they go beyond interactions they're focused on clicks they're focused on views so that engagement is very important too then there's also click-through patterns right what are they clicking on are they clicking on the home page the about page the contact page the product page

1:14:17then what is also the return visitor behavior that i mentioned earlier right how many times do they visit over time and then those micro engagements that you're tracking is where the details come in now if you want to make sales on your website there are some things that you need to have that if you don't have on your website it will be hard for you to make the sales that you expect to get i'll mention two there are others but i'll mention two number one you have to think about visibility right and visibility when it comes to payment systems right when you go to someone's

1:14:50website and you scroll all the way down to your website does it tell you what type of cards that they accept visa mastercard amex discover paypal cash app venmo whatever it is you're going to see those options there because it's going to tell you what people are going to be paying for is it apple pays it google pays it samsung pay it's going to be showing you there so when you see that you're like oh okay cool like if you go to some places they don't do that like walmart if you go to walmart you can't use tap to pay right because you have to insert your card it's there for a reason they're

1:15:23doing that for a reason right compared to heb where they used to have only swipe but now you can tap to pay at heb grocery store so it's different right so if you're thinking about that that's how people are going to be accustomed a condition to knowing that okay when i go to walmart i need to go with my card because i can't use my virtual card on my phone or my wallet to pay for something because i need my actual card to swipe so you already know what the condition is before you even purchase that product at walmart compared to another place like amazon you can go to amazon fresh or go to

1:15:56whole foods and just swipe away because you have amazon prime so those things are helping you understand how to make purchases so if you go to someone's website that visibility needs to be there let those cards be shown let those logos be seen and then secondly especially if you're an e-commerce brand and if you do e-commerce at all you also have to think about your policies right your return policies your privacy policies your terms and conditions your shipping policies those policies are going to be

1:16:27important because even on a platform like pinterest you can be a verified merchant on pinterest if you don't have your policies authenticated verified and validated you know you won't even be able to be a verified merchant and there are two types of badges you get on pinterest there's a blue badge and there's a red badge right a red badge means you're a verified creator and a blue badge means you're a verified merchant so if you're running ads and you have a store and you're connected to pinterest through

1:16:58shopify through wix through any other platform that you choose then those are the guidelines you'd have to go through to get that blue check mark and then for you to keep the check mark you have to also be in sales and attribute your content because you want to do that consistently for example go to target if you go to target's pinterest you're going to see they have a blue check mark right just go to google and type in pinterest target or target pinterest account however you want to write it and you're going to see that blue check mark i'm talking about so the reason why i'm giving you guys these things is so that you know that if someone's going to invest in seo services then the

1:17:32technical setup of the website has to attribute to this type of sales because you just don't want a site that's pretty it's great but you want to be pretty on the outside and pretty on the inside so you have to have it in both sides you can't just be one-sided right you have to keep on a balance there has to be an equilibrium so for that to work two people have to come together the producer and the consumer have to come together and make an agreement that this is a product this is a price this is a process when those things are understood from both parties then you don't have to worry about anything

1:18:04because you've you've been able to clear the foundation and create clarity through the process so they don't feel like man is this person trying to charge me here imagine you're trying to pay for something and then before you check out they say oh you got shipping oh you got this or you got service fee before you know it you budgeted twenty dollars now you're about to pay forty dollars for a product that you had a budget on twenty for so if you think about those things long term it will help you to also know that when it comes to seo services and understanding how much to budget or invest it requires what are the people that are going to build your service for going to have

1:18:40what does that website look like what does it entail what does it do and what does it do for you does it make more money for you does it create more leads does it build more awareness if i'm featured in a magazine today what article what website am i going to link back to like for me a company reached out to me msn reached out to me and i'm going to be in one of the articles that they're going to be you know creating a publication on that's a backlink that has come to me i didn't i didn't see that coming and now i'm grateful for that so i thank god for that opportunity right so these are

1:19:12the things that happen because people are organically finding you on social media on search engines or search bots and then they send you an email because you're accessible and you actually respond back to them and it's an actual business there are a lot of people you're doing business with that you've never probably talked to or even seen in real life but you've made transactions with them online because they've seen the trust that you've built across the different search engines that they refer or find you from so if you really look at these things long term it will really help you a long deal as well freddo what are your thoughts about this when you look

1:19:46at investments and just budgets in general when it comes to seo um you know i would really when it comes down to money first i'm gonna be honest with you i at this point i usually go for people who understand seo i don't really go for people where i have to convince them because people who understand it just understand it they're gonna just pay it it's it's more stress on the seo specialist to try to convert people and you know to under in

1:20:23understanding i understand that the importance of it because you don't want to just bypass people and a lot of people don't know why they failed in business and they could have just been you know a few keywords you know that could have changed the magnitude of where their business went so i completely understand the perspective um but most people that understand it understand it and they pay without thinking twice so it you know for me it's more like i don't really deal with the that anymore because i usually say okay let me just deal with the people that just fully understand it

1:20:55because it's it's going to cost money and in some cases people pay more for seo than they do paid ads depends on you know the results that they're getting and you know it's one thing i tell people like you were saying earlier favor you need about seven to twenty touches like people have to see you multiple times in different places if they don't know you to trust you you know so you need about seven to twenty touches on average usually they say sixteen but it goes up you know what the you know what the

1:21:30more people get screwed over the more people they might not even have gotten screwed over they just heard a story of what someone said and then they said oh my friend said oh your friend all right so now i gotta you know break down the whole understanding of your friend and who did your friend use so i don't we got time for that so i understand that perspective another thing people don't understand when it comes to paid ads paid ads don't doesn't necessarily help your seo depends on the paid ads

1:22:03that's being used right google ads it helps you for instant gratification but unless someone bookmarks your website it doesn't help your seo it doesn't stay once it once you stop paying it stops running and that's it but seo goes forever so even if the person that was creating your seo it um you no longer do business with the work they've done stays forever and it's evergreen they call it evergreen so those things are you know super crucial um another thing i've realized with seo the keywords that you want to

1:22:39use for google ads might cost beyond your budget right so let's say it's six dollars a keyword and you only have twenty dollars a day you can't do it you might have to pick a 35 cent keyword but it's not as you know it's not the keyword that you would like but it's a keyword that you could afford right when it comes to seo you can use any keyword in the world the most expensive keywords done right it's good so you might not use all of them in one website you might say okay my my home page i use

1:23:1620 keywords um my my blog page my first blog page i use another 20 and you can keep adding keywords different blogs within your website until you have all the keywords now when someone types in certain keywords guess who's gonna pop up you know so it's so crucial as um favor and jonathan were just talking i was um taking videos from my that i posted on youtube and adding it to pinterest and you know

1:23:48now i'm i'm adding another seo you know footprint and you know in the in the you know in on the internet so to speak so super crucial that and one thing that a lot of people don't do that i do every time i add my domain name to my to my titles right to the body you know so if i'm if i'm creating something i'll put the lotto.life you know um uh what you call it pick three picks for friday may 1st you know

1:24:25whatever the case may be and you know and then i'll but i'll make sure i put my domain name within the title whether it's tick tock whether it's youtube whether it's you know pinterest whatever the case may be why because when you do a google search and you type in some of those keywords that people are interested in you may just pop up and if you pop up forget about it like i got one of this keyword it's called w4 sandwich if you type in w4 sandwich right now on google i don't care where you

1:24:56are in the world my ebook is going to pop up on the first page because of seo i never ran an ad to that in my life but i'm the number one in the world when it comes to w4 sandwich for my ebook that costs five thousand dollars so when you type in w4 sandwich you can do it right now that's my receipt you're going to go up you're going to see a five thousand dollar w4 sandwich ebook you're going to know it's mine so that's seo that's the that's the power of seo years later i don't even think about

1:25:27that book but it it pops up it did pop up for me too so high key you're definitely on spot with that and even looking at the positioning and the site you're using because it's on gumroad it was a very good task because a lot of let me say this way a lot of businesses don't rank with gumroad you don't see a lot of gumroad results on the results page so that's a big one so appreciate you for mentioning

1:25:59that fredo it's a big deal when you look at these type of things and you wonder okay someone may not type in w4 sandwich because they don't know what that is but if the person knows what it is and you've been able to semantically connect it back to that title then yes somebody's going to definitely see it too and then that's where the branding and the non-branding comes in because someone's going to know the brand or someone may not know the brand but understand the brand because of the non-brand term that you gave it so those semantics super important you can't neglect that at all so yeah

1:26:33definitely that's a big dent and a big win for you so thank you for mentioning something in the w4 sandwich is an actual very popular process i didn't make it up i just own that keyword you know what i mean so it's literally if you go online right now you can go on youtube type in w4 sandwich process millions of videos but i just you know kind of have the seo power when it comes to google and i see that too from your meta description tag i'm actually looking at it right now so let me see

1:27:10let me see let me see yeah so you're the only one this is me looking at this for the first time you're the only one who had the w4 sandwich within the first let's do this math real quick within the first 50 characters with spaces so that's a good thing because the word process and i can see even with my ai web guide it also tells me with w4 sandwich and what it is and there are

1:27:43other people also you know talking about even investors that are talking about there's a whole pdf on scribed about it so i do see that as well and i also see a response from three years ago on youtube so you showing up there too is a big deal because when someone sees that and they see the price and they now go do their research they'll come back and they'll be like who owns this page and then they'll be like okay let me get to know more about what the person does and then they get to see more about what you do because like you have another one called get sales fast so that's me diving deeper

1:28:18somebody else would do the same thing too so before you know what you're like oh i know what this semantically means now maybe i didn't know what it was but now have an understanding so it creates that excitement that surprise element and also that curiosity which is also good for business you know in a way as well i think another aspect i think another aspect that makes it rank well too not only so technically it's a colloquially term to something else which is different it's like affinity search traffic but also the testimonials on the landing page itself it's just a good

1:28:52transactional landing page optimized for that keyword so it's like like to favor's points pretty impressive that you got a gum rub page to rank for that um and then you know there's there's a lot of different ways you can build around that kind of strategy so to favor's point that's not something that is a huge top of funnel driver but if you have top of funnel traffic coming from another place and you ask people to search that that's the easy legion uh excuse me not legion that's an easy sales

1:29:23mechanism to get people to convert through seo um the other thing that i thought was interesting as well too and this is coming from my own personal experience when it comes to content fatigue i think a lot of people can take advantage of miniature product seo a lot of my background is in product uh and content layering on top of the product so an example i'll give you an example if you search mock draft simulator uh this was the pretty much the biggest product that we built at pff it was it's the nfl mock draft simulator but when it was launched at the time back in 2019 2018 if

1:29:56i'm not mistaken um there weren't a lot of solutions around that were as good um and it has a ton of traffic it's like six-figure search traffic when you look on simrush um and the the beauty of that is really the domain itself doesn't drive a lot of traffic it has a lot of news feed content pff.com uh but the lifespan of that news feed is not is not really the best we started working on evergreen content in the end before the company got acquired but we never really put together a full-blown strategy but what i'm saying is that with ai nowadays and the tools that are available you have the ability

1:30:30to create because conversation was about retention and then we talked about other things and really to nail seo you need retention so with that being said in in your universe of building seo and building content you also want to think about miniature products it doesn't have to be full-blown products and apps but it can be downloadable pieces of content or just miniature jobs to be done that are tied to your space that would make somebody want to either come back or share it to create that virality and nowadays you have the ability to create those things quite quite quickly and quite

1:31:02cheaply with ai so you tie a bit of ai with seo now you're talking about product seo and then you got some retention welcome back rocky and you know you mix content in that you can find a bit of a strategy so content seo is great it's just content seo without intention doesn't really drive results content seo with intention drive results but it's hard to quantify the content that you put out with intention so you're better off focus focusing on quality and creating these mechanisms of retention instead of

1:31:33just putting out a bunch of content that's thin that doesn't rank anywhere exactly you know when you mentioned that you got me thinking about even when fredo was talking about the w4 sandwich the reason why somebody would purchase the product easily on gumroad is because they are they associated with gumroad if they pay on stripe they associate with sprite if they pay with paypal they associate with paypal if they pay wire transfer they do that like i just got an email from partner stack that's a i'll call an affiliation program platform and it says that i have money

1:32:05waiting for me to cash out and withdraw because that happens every month from affiliate programs that i get so i can see the same thing when it comes to platforms that people use and where it translates to third party wise when you're now cashing out on systems that are paying you on a monthly basis because you're producing content that is evergreen so it changes everything completely even with clubhouse for example if you go to google right now and you type in what is clubhouse karma if you do that what is clubhouse karma you're going to see my article on google right after clubhouse or before clubhouse

1:32:41whichever one comes first but you're going to see it there and i wrote that article april 5th 2026 today is may 1st 2026 so you ask yourself how do you show up on google first place when there are people who have been there for years it's because that content i've been talking about on clubhouse was this is not the first time i've talked about clubhouse when i joined clubhouse in 2020 i wrote an article about it in 2020 which is still ranking on google so if i talk about something new about the same topic or subtopics about the same context then google is like we talked about this before last

1:33:15it's like me coming to you let's say i talked to you about something rocky two years ago and then i bring it up again two years later you're like yeah we talked about that but we didn't really finish on that topic but we discussed it so it's kind of like the same thing with google you discuss with google and say here's a copy of what i talked about and then i'll come back again and talk about the same thing in a different way and that puts me at a higher search score because now i have a higher trust signal so the more that keeps happening the more results you get and the more traffic you even build and i love that you put the link jonathan to michael jackson's google trends results because

1:33:47everybody knows michael jackson right but why is it that the traffic is still going up because of organic traffic so even though the music is still on his movie is now going back to his music which is still organic search people are going to go to apple music and type in michael jackson or type in on whatever platform they're going to use even though they knew about it before seo has just validated it and revalidated the sentence so it's a big deal when you think about branding and non-branding can you talk about that as well jonathan yeah 100 the only reason i was going to cut you off and chime in is because you you were talking i wasn't trying to cut you off when you were mentioning it but you

1:34:20were talking about the michael jackson movie it was cool seo sits on this island sometimes and it's not fun because it's just about it's a bunch of these people talking this language that nobody understands and you were incorporating seo into a holistic strategy when it comes to marketing and you were mentioning the michael movie and how they were seeding the michael movie for marketing through seo with the trailers and everything that built up and if you look at the google trend link i think the first trailer was released like february 2026 if i'm not mistaken if you look at the trend obviously

1:34:53it spikes at the very end but you can see the little spikes when the trailer releases version one version two version three were released so you that was a very um that was a very uh cool point the branded to non-branded thing um and fredo was talking about this earlier because uh so that's something that's that's that's it's sort of like a known term but it's not branded to him uh branded is easiest to to to rank for but it doesn't typically have a lot of traffic that's just things that are

1:35:24associated with you so i'm willing to guess if you search jonathan solid marketing i'm gonna pop up somewhere i'm just a guess that's just branded seo um that's very good real estate to optimize for for yourself uh to your point and question favorite um things that when you talk about like non-branded things that's kind of like where really a lot of more traffic is and it's not the easiest to rank for those kind of things but you can create a strategy to where because the conversation initially was

1:35:54about visibility you focus on optimizing your branded self and then you build a holistic strategy to optimize for non-branded things and then in between that you're looking to find retention so you know really just to go back to the point of this conversation when it comes to seo and budgeting for seo we're trying to find retention we're trying to increase visibility and we're trying to create content that has intent that gives us authority and when you do that over and over again in perpetuity

1:36:27whatever you want to call it directionally you're going to get results there's a lot of different things that can give you favorable results or unfavorable results but at least it gives you a platform to actually build upon so i think the hardest part about this is you know and it's kind of been the thing that we talked about the past couple weeks over information overload and you know going back to favors point just to wrap up this part you know how do you look at all this you know whatever you can tackle and what is a priority start there so if if you are good at content start

1:36:57with optimizing that if you're weak on content but you're good on technical and you know you have technical needs start with that but make a priority list of things that you know to tackle and theme it out it's very hard to tackle this stuff kind of like day by day i'm going to do a little bit i'm going to work on a little pr and backlinks and then i'm going to do a little content and i'm going to work it doesn't work like that make a season for technical make a season for press release make a season for content and then if you have the time and resources if you're blessed enough for that blend it up if you can but just you know be practical and prioritize to get the results that you're

1:37:29looking for and be thoughtful don't just put out stuff just to put out stuff put out stuff that actually drives intent towards what you're looking for you can't lose with that kind of strategy

1:37:40definitely 100 not thank you so much for that and that's how you would

1:37:48i'm going to block you just donathan you trying to scrap right now i'll never

1:38:05hey man uh i'll text you my number in the back i don't think you even have my number i'll text you my number in the back channel next time you're on stage next time you're on stage uh hey i don't even have notifications turned on i really just pop in and out sometimes but i've been following us for a long time favor and i whenever i hear him talk i'm like man this dude is smart as hell and he don't never come and talk and i invite him up my hand gets tired from trying to invite him up on stage

1:38:33not your hand getting tired that's crazy

1:38:36we love you johnson and thank you for always being here man always a pleasure and this is why we love clubhouse it's an og space and anyone that comes here whether it's your first day first year whatever time you've been here you always appreciate and you're always welcome and thank you faith for putting my link in the chat that was sweet of you appreciate you that was really really thoughtful i really appreciate that and you know when you look at content today in 2026 your goal is to build authority build trust and when you build these things out you would have to pay for ads we have a client

1:39:11that we've still been together for years this is probably three years in now and the first time we spoke he wanted to run ads because he does airbnb photography and he lives in texas and he needed to run ads so that he can get clients so he can take photos of their airbnb you know i would say hosting properties so the listings that are on airbnb of course you can upload any photo you want but he

1:39:42does professional photos so that you can actually get the leads and the sales that you want because presentation is everything so he was looking for ways to run ads on google on on meta he was just trying to figure it out and he's 20 years in in this business so he's not a rookie he's a he's top top notch and he's really good he does wedding photography he does airbnb photography he does product photography but he said airbnb he wants to focus on that specifically so around 2025 that was just what last year i said okay you know what let's let's pull back the strings let's see what we can

1:40:17do with this time we have and give ourselves some timeline to make sure that people can find you in texas that are looking for airbnb photography so you don't have to keep running ads to get the same attention if you go to google right now when 2026 if you go to google right now and type in texas airbnb photography you're going to see a name that says david pizzat photography you're gonna see him there and he's literally next to airbnb in the first listings of google so ever since we optimized his

1:40:49website because he has photos on photos on photos and he does great and we're able to even turn that page into a money page what does that mean when somebody clicks on that page now there's a form that you can fill either there's gonna be a pop-up that you're gonna get which you join the community or you actually fill in the form or fill out the form so that you can now inquire for a quote or inquire for any type of service you need with him so he's never run ads again after we installed all