#34 - The Death of Smoke-and-Mirror Agencies: Exposing the Outdated Playbook

There’s a quiet collapse happening in the marketing world. As digital tools advance, the freelancers and agencies still clinging to outdated methods are being exposed—and their clients are paying the price. 

In today’s episode, we dive into the growing problem of “invisible marketing”—services that sound good on paper but deliver nothing in reality. We’ll unpack a real client story involving a $1,200/month “SEO” package that included no SEO at all, and we’ll talk about the local TV station offering social media marketing despite not knowing how to track a single event.

If you’ve ever wondered why your marketing isn’t working—or if you’ve ever felt like you’re being sold smoke instead of strategy—this episode is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

SPEAKER_01: 0:10

Can you see the chickens coming home to roost on this episode of Over the Bull? Guys, it's happening. Uh, and I'm excited about it. I'm gonna be honest with you because I have seen probably for the last 10 to 20 years, businesses that made half-hearted attempts or were kind of in marketing and design build these websites, build these templates and all these things, and frankly, make a lot of money at the expense of the businesses they're building these products for. I mean, this has fallen to entire markets where they're do-it-yourself website builders and design templates and all these things that make people think that marketing and design is just this little a la carte system that you can throw together. And it also allowed for uh freelancers and these agencies to kind of build the smoke and mirrors that that go around it, and it's been very profitable. But those days are changing and changing fast. So let me explain something to you real quick. I've been in this for a long time. And, you know, I remember when I first started uh Integrus Design, one of the big things we needed to do was prove our credibility. And we put an emphasis on certifications and everything ever since, because we want people to know that we're gonna do our best to understand everything going on to help their business. We just feel that's needed, but it was also required back at a certain time. Now, as the market got more saturated and more freelancers came into the field, that tone changed with people that we were consulting with. It went from, are you the most credible to are you even going to do the work? Meaning that there were a lot of agencies and freelancers at the time that would take deposits and frankly never do the job. And uh so that that made it, you know, a whole other game where you know we wanted to show customers we work with and we want to show different things to prove that we would actually do the work. So these these trends would change based upon what was going on in the market. Now you probably have seen similar things in your market. And so what we've done was try to build um a safe haven for these businesses. And it's come to, I mean, this has been for years. Well, they'll come in and they'll believe that the internet doesn't work for them or somehow their business is unique and, you know, that uh somehow it's just not in the cards for their business. Now, of course, this is not true either. I mean, um, you know, of course, everybody wants to run Google Ads, but they think as soon as they run ads, the phone's just gonna magically start ringing, and if they build a website, people are gonna magically start finding it. Now, this is not the fault of you, the owner of a business. This is sales tactics, where through omission, they're not telling you the truth. The reality is the conversion rates on Google Ads out of the gate are really low. Search engine optimization takes a long time. And the other gaining momentum online in general requires an effort, a lot of massaging and changing, and a lot of agility, meaning you can't get rigid with your web design. You got to be able to adjust it according to what's going on. And there are just tons and tons of things that need to happen, and it's a constant effort. It's never done. Now, of course, what this does is if you find someone who's good at what they do, um, the vultures will come at you anyway, and they're going to point out something that's not done the way uh it should be done. And they're probably right. But you know what? It's always a work in progress, but they look for the whole to try to sucker you back in to a system that's going to be ineffective. Now, your challenge is sometimes those freelancers and agencies are not doing their job. And so uh trying to navigate those waters can be really challenging for the owner of a business in the world of tech. So I understand this is where you're at. Now, here's the the really exciting thing for me right now. When I said the chickens are coming home to roost, I mean it because just like I was telling you about those trends, now we have some new trends going on, new things we're reacting to. And it fits right into what we do. And the thing that's in vogue right now is honesty and the cold hard truth, which we've done this since, gosh, we started the business where we just try to sell the cold, hard reality of what you can expect from Google Ads, what you can expect from SEO, what you can expect from web development. And, you know, we have all these analogies where we say, well, a website's kind of like a boat with no sale, and the sale is your marketing effort. So you toss a boat in the middle of the ocean. That's kind of what you got with a website uh initially, until you start building it up and building it out. And so we have these analogies that we use to kind of help bridge the gap to put things in proper perspective. And this is really important because businesses are all the time lied to through omission. And then you kind of have to diffuse what to expect from the internet to the business owner and then you know, show them that it's real work. It's not going to Canva and choosing a bunch of templates, and it's not going to uh WordPress and buying templates or going to a do-it-yourself website builder and doing those. That's that's not how it works. Those are just attractive means, but without the guidance of a professional, then everything becomes disjointed. It's kind of like um when you were uh, I know when I was a kid, they had these little uh these little balls and it would have different shapes, and you know, you have a circle and you have a square shape and you know it wouldn't go in there. Well, it's it's kind of like that. Um, but I'm excited about this because business owners are waking up. They're realizing it. And I don't know if it's because of the culmination of AI revealing more of it, but you know, when I was telling you that the uh idea of running Google ads to these splash landing pages that have low rank and low authority and not your main page, that these days are coming to an end. These days are coming to an end. And also, what's what's interesting is the last several clients we've been speaking with, um, they're waking up in unique ways. So, for example, uh one of our latest uh people we've consulted with, they came in. And um, here was the thing. When they called, what they alluded to was they're paying money to a uh an agency. We're gonna call them an agency. I think it's just a one-person freelancer, but they have a brand name, so we'll we'll call them that. And uh what they did was they called us up and said, uh, we just think she's taking our money and we don't think she's really doing any work, but we don't know, but we just know we need to get some stuff moving in the right direction. And, you know, one and now I've heard this for several times where I'm like, they're waking up, like they're they're not buying the the narrative. They're they're no longer buying the the big words, you know, where people be like, oh, you need to do, and they use the lofty technical terms we all use. And then the business owner is just like, wow, that sounds really good. I need to get that thing done. And, you know, like for example, right now, everybody's talking about how they got the latest and greatest AI system that's going to just change your world forever and everything's gonna be great. AI is incredible. There are things you can do with AI that will absolutely help your business, but there are things you can do with AI that will absolutely destroy your business. And you got to know which path to take as you navigate through. And guess what? As we're walking through the woods, that path is being carved as we move now. It's not a stable path of years and years, which is what we've seen prior to. Okay, so uh when they came in, they they weren't sure. And so my first question was, Well, what's going on? And they said, uh, well, we're paying a person, we have a website, and they uh have this SEO that they're working on for us, and they said that consumes all of our budget. And I said, Well, what's the definition of SEO? Have they explained that term to you? And they said, Well, it has something to do with keywords, and but you know, she's saying that that takes a lot. And I said, Well, how how much are you spending? And she they go, Well, uh, a thousand to twelve hundred dollars a month. And I'm like, Okay, and she said she's working on keywords and SEO, right? Yes. I said, Okay. So then I started to break down SEO because SEO was one of those terms that that some people will use almost is like this catch-all phrase, this nebulous phrase to make you think that somehow they're doing a lot of magic to get you on the top of the internet. Now, keep in mind when we talk about magic, there's a bad thing about a magician. It's incredible. They promise you they can make things disappear and reappear, but you know what? It's all an illusion. Well, some people use the term like SEO like an illusion. They they want to sell you a principle or a concept and they want to get it in your mind that this new magic thing is going to somehow just transform your business that they do behind the scenes. Um now, they've been paying for this for over a year. Okay, so over a year, this thing called SEO that this other agency was doing, um, you know, is out there. So we have to figure out did they actually do anything? So I started pulling up a bunch of tools that we pay for in real time. I'm just showing them what I see behind the scenes to find out if anything SEO has been done, either SEO meaning their local Google business profile, which some people will use interchangeably with um website optimization or you know, working on the site. And so I wanted to look at it from both lenses because legitimately those terms are used. Like they'll even say local SEO and they'll refer to your Google business. And you know, it there's a lot of different ways to kind of slice this SEO pie, which makes it a very um kind of basic weapon that can be used in um when when you see these kind of things happen. So I ran through all the tools, and lo and behold, very little's done. Very little. Just like the previous one, um, the previous digital agency from the former client two episodes ago, where not only did they do very little, but they actually caused a lot of destruction for that uh client. They actually sent them backwards, where we're almost having to rebuild from scratch due to how bad they actually destroyed their marketing program. Well, in this case, it never got off the ground to begin with. They were uh there was no signs of any kind of serious SEO, certainly not 12 to 14 months of it. Um now I did not see a lot of evidence of um artificial intelligence being abused on this particular project, but basically they were forking out twelve hundred dollars a month for nothing, and they knew it. And but they didn't know how to say it. And because they're a small business, they were afraid that if they cut that off, then they're going to cut off all this work that maybe is getting ready to crescendo into this big wave of business, which it's not. It's not. They're they're uh now another thing that was interesting about this was their complaint was that when they call their their freelancer, who may be an agency or may be uh solo, I I don't know, and I I really don't care to be honest with you. But they would also complain that she always seems to be on vacation. And so what I loved about this was this is a blue-collar business in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina that realized they're being sold a bill of goods and they're ready to move on. Okay, I have seen businesses that have drugged these relationships out forever and they didn't realize this. Now I've had many in the last two to three months that are waking up and I am so excited to see it because when you're trying to do a good job and you realize how hard it is to start and run a business, it's painful when you see these people putting everything they have into it and putting a serious effort into their marketing and everything, and then having to come back and then see um that they've gotten nothing for it, that that they've gone backwards or they've been their business has been destroyed, and now they're waking up to it. And I cannot tell you that how exciting it is to see when someone starts to go, Well, what is SEO? And can you tell me if anything was done or not? And then you see them start to move in another direction. Now, I'll tell you where I get excited even more so than that, is we've always been on this road where we sell like the cold hard truth. You know, when someone comes and sits at our our uh in our office, well, we look at their entire marketing plan, we lay everything out, we say, well, we think this is where you're at. And then we say, okay, now here's the reality. This is what you really need to spend, and this is what you're really looking at, and this is the road you're going to have to go down in order to be successful on the internet. And it's not lofty, it's grounded. It's like the brutal truth just kind of hitting you between the eyes. And you know what? Business owners can accept that. Guys like you can get that if you're just told the truth, because then you know what to deal with. And I love it because now we're, you know, it's like, it's like the truth is finally come out. The the agencies and the the freelancers that have lived off all these nebulous terms and telling you they're going to do this or do that, it's coming to an end. Okay, now I'm seeing big media companies also where there's a lot of ignorance with big media companies. Where you can ask some basic 101 questions, and as a as the uh as our company, for example, when we were to talk to them, we can see just based upon their answers, that they really don't know what they're doing. You see, because in their case, they've made a lot of money because what happened was was that you know people have trusted television and things like that forever. And so what they do is because television is now essentially becoming like legacy media, like they're even calling like things like Google and um being legacy um services. Now, Google's not going anywhere, don't get me wrong. They're they're they're you know they're they're going to fight till the end. Um and uh but but the idea is that what these larger media companies have done was they've taken when they were dominant, and their television stations were watched by everybody locally or regionally or whatever, and then what they've done was they knew the writing was on the wall. So then what they did was they said, well, we better get into digital marketing. So now they go out and they build these agreements with these third party groups. Third party just means a vendor. And so then they go get this vendor and then they start selling their services. But what they do is they use the reputation that they had and try to use that to springboard um uh their services to make you think that they're better than they are, and they don't properly run them. Okay, now this is an absolute fact, too. So um, if that's not enough, um, I'm not gonna tell you the name of this company, um, but but it's a it's a well-known place where people typically go to buy uh or look for things like restaurants and things like that. And one of the things that they've done was years ago they approached us and we ran tests and they failed miserably, and it was kind of embarrassing. Um, but they wrote reproached me again, and they were using the same thing where they're trying to lean on certain statistics to make you think that they're bigger and better than they are. Now, what's great about them is they're dead in the water in the southeast. Uh this particular website is bigger, I think, maybe in the northeast and and maybe in the northwest, uh, but in the southeast U.S., they're they're just frankly not used as much unless people are looking for uh, you know, basically a restaurant. Um but but there's that little game too. So let's talk about what's going on here. So a couple things I was just pulling up and and I was just trying to go, okay, what's going on here, and what are some of the common tactics that are being um revealed as uh things that can blow up your company or maybe flags that you can see as as maybe you're starting to wonder, is my guy doing his job, or my my gal doing her job, or you know, how can we know exactly what's going on? Well, there's a lot, but you sometimes you need a an expert to kind of assess what's going on. And so the problem is that even the assessment, uh, remember I told you early on that a lot of times what you'll see is um some people look for holes in the game and then like really emphasize it to get your business pulled away from someone else. But there are legitimately things that you can look for. Now, for me, one of the big things is is there a cohesive product? Do I see progress? Do I see that they're using uh standard templates? Do I see that they have lined things up incorrectly? I kind of look at the holistic picture, but then I do get granular in our meetings too. Uh some people pick on the the grains of sand and then make a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. Uh one thing that they'll do is uh there's still stuff where they're keyword stuffing using uh like low quality backlinks, which by the way is not good and it's getting worse. Um and then they'll do a relevant ghost post or uh guest post um stuff like that, which basically, I know it all sounds super nerdy, but basically in the end, just remember that part of building your credibility up for your business is building your reputation up. And just as though if you were to run for political office and you get an endorsement from someone who's prominent in your area versus someone who is not prominent in your area, or maybe even someone who's a little sketchy, you can imagine one of those is going to carry more weight than the other. Well, your website's the same thing. It's much easier to get low quality votes or backlinks to your website than it is to get good ones. I mean, real SEO is very monotonous, it's fruitless sometimes. Um, there's all kinds of problems that go into it when you try to do it right, which is why so many people try to game the system with things like private blog networks. Uh, if you go to integristdesign.com and locate our press release section, which we're in the middle of doing a major rebuild. So I apologize for any uh navigation issues you may run into. But our first one was talking about private blog networks and how SEO companies are using it to kind of try to game the system and how dangerous these things are. But guys like me can normally pick up on stuff like that and kind of help you navigate. Um, the big one I saw this week, which I just loved, I'm gonna be honest with you. Agencies and freelancers offering vague service. Like you should never buy a service that says we'll do SEO or we'll handle social. Uh, you know, with no metrics, no data, no uh demonstrable value. And the other thing you want to add to that is if anyone, large media buys, uh, local agencies, Google Ads companies, if they're focusing on impressions, clicks, and views as the holy grail of data, uh, you're buying a bill of goods. Um my opinion is that uh you need to run from those companies. I don't care how big or how small they are. You want to make sure that you are tracking what is meaningful to your organization, period. So, you know, a click, yeah, that's a sign. Okay, yeah, that's a sign of how much traffic's coming to your site, but that doesn't put food on the proverbial table. You want to know how many people have made phone calls, how many people filled out forms, why did people leave? Is there a way to capture the large amount of people that are leaving the website and not ever engaging because maybe they're price shopping? Is there a way to use artificial intelligence in a way that speaks to the people that are coming to your site and not making them think that you're just another AI answering service? You know, there's a lot of stuff that goes into that. And this is what people are waking up to. Um, big promises. Oh my gosh. Um there there was also this weird thing that happened yesterday where the um their agency was telling them that if they get a certain uh certification or whatever, that they would pop up on the top of Google or something. And anyway, it was a silly thing that they had come up with. But the point is big promises, okay. When someone promises you or makes you feel as though the journey is going to be easy, um, a lot of times these are um sales pitches, period. They're just simple sales pitches. I mean, when I got through talking with this uh uh this the group yesterday, this new business, I think they're a good candidate to work with us. But the one thing that uh I made clear when I talked to them was that uh I'm not a magician. I'm not gonna turn this thing on and it's not just gonna start working and generating you revenue overnight. That's not how it works. In the world of the internet today, it's hard. It requires adjustments. You've got to understand your customer. You've got to take the technology and give technology time to, for lack of a better word, learn what needs to happen in order to make those uh different parts all work together. And you got to adjustment. Just like a stock car in racing, they're constantly adjusting that car throughout the race. Well, it's the exact same thing with the internet. Now, once you get things moving in the right direction, then it starts to begin to take a snowball effect. But if you get the big promises of, hey, we're super big, we're gonna run you on social and get this and get that, uh, stay away from them. Other thing are no clear KPIs. Um, those are key performance indicators for uh basically what's important. That goes back to the previous statement. You want to be able to gauge what your goals are. You know, if you can't clarify what you're trying to achieve, and we're not trying to shoot for what you're trying to achieve, that's like going on vacation and you know, thinking, you're not knowing if you're going to the beach or going on a ski trip in the mountains. You know, what you pack with you and what you do to get to both those locations is significantly different. You don't take uh snow chains if you're going to the beach. And uh so sometimes people have websites and stuff built without even knowing what they're trying to achieve to begin with. Think these do-it-yourself website builders where you pick that darn template and you put in your stuff. Think about that. That's why those things don't work, but that's why they make a lot of money because they sell illusions. Um, okay, so what it causes, it's causing a lot of harm. Um, cause you to waste your budget, cause you to fail driving real traffic that your competitors are getting. No idea what's going on, no education. You're just spending money and spinning your wheels. And a lot of times you'll wonder if the internet even works. And here's the bad part. Some people, a lot of people, are using what's known as black hat techniques. Remember those PBMs I was telling you, or PBNs, uh, private blog networks. Some strategies can actually get you penalized, and in some cases, possibly even completely blacklisted from Google and other search engines. I mean, you're messing with their product is when you when you try to gain the system. And that's what everybody tries to do. Um, not everyone, but all the unethical ones, where they try to, you know, do things like put all the cities at the bottom of the page, or, you know, just weird stuff where it's not really good for the user. They're just trying to manipulate uh search engines by putting things in certain places. Well, they're getting much, much smarter, and they're really starting to separate the wheat from the chaff. So be careful. Um, I've talked to you a little bit about the uh the client that uh we're bringing on. We're sending them a proposal, a legitimate one. We're gonna be doing videography, photography. Uh we're gonna have to reconstruct the website. Now, a word on reconstructing the website. Let me let me get this out real quick. So one of the common things is when you see something's broken and you go to another company to look for help, there's actually two places that they could take it. One is we got to build your website. Now, they they want to rebuild your website sometimes simply for making money off rebuilding the website. For example, in this case, this client had a very modest website, and this person was telling them like$5,000 to rebuild that website. And I mean, literally, we're talking templates and just throwing in stuff. And uh, so you got to be careful because sometimes you may not need to rebuild your website, or sometimes you do need to rebuild your website. But the what's good for the freelancer or the agency is to just rebuild your website no matter what. And so you need to get clear justifications on why that website needs to be rebuilt or reconditioned. Um let's look here. If I look on, I'm I'm looking through my notes here. Um, you know, the other, yeah, yeah. So here was here was a thing. I'm talking about vague reports. Um, they didn't know to ask for event tracking. Um, they didn't ask, they didn't get any kind of education as far as like what's going on with the traffic and how they can possibly improve that. And so the thing is, is that if an agency cares about your business, they're also going to sit down with you periodically and go, okay, we think this is what's happening. And then you make adjustments, and then you have the painful process awaiting to see what happens, and then you make more adjustments. What shocked me about this customer was in their field, they never saw a keyword report. Now, this person was not running Google Ads for them, which is fine. That's not what they were paying for, although I would have different arguments. But the idea is you run a keyword report and that can enlighten you as to what kind of pages to have on the website, how to frame what is in the URL or the web address. They never had that done. Uh just just a website kind of thrown together half heartedly uh half heartedly. But this company did claim to do SEO, and they didn't go back and adjust those things. Yeah. Just the way it is. Let's see here. Let's talk about why this is happening. I got a couple other notes here. The algorithms definitely are changing and the tools are changing. I mean, I just got through talking to you about um Atlas, which is a new browser put out by OpenABI uh OpenAPI, the folks that uh are behind Chat GPT. And uh it's pretty nice. I mean, there is a war between these companies trying to capture business and be the cutting edge company, and uh we have people that are moving strictly to chat. Uh now, as the search engines are becoming more sophisticated, the user expectations are higher, which means old tactics simply don't work and will now hurt you. It's pretty much that easy. And so um the problem is I mean, there are outdated tactics that are from February of 2025. I'm sitting here in November of 2025. Um, and as I'm sitting here looking at it, and I'm like, their tactics you can't even do then. Uh now they don't they won't hurt you as bad because everything's changing, but it can definitely hurt your positioning. Um I saw a report someone shared with me, and um they sent it over to me, and I'm like, my goodness, this is all outdated. And one thing they caveatted the um their uh webinar, which is basically a sales pitch, uh, was that this stuff will be probably outdated in 2026. I told the person that I'm on the board with, I'm like, this was outdated in 2025. It's already outdated. They can't keep their language up uh quick enough. And again, all they're trying to do is just put out feelers, find out who's going to kind of buy the bait and then convert them into customers. That's really what they're they're after. Um data and tracking accountability is another one. Businesses now expect measurable return on investment. Being able to show it is increasingly untenable. So return on investment means is how many meaningful actions did you get? Not how many clicks did you get, how many impressions, how many views did you get? Well, views showing, you know. Now there is a place for those. Those are those are called awareness KPIs. Okay, so awareness means you're building visibility and branding for your business, but that's not where it stops. Okay, it's got to have the complete picture in place. And um, what's great is people are waking up to it. I need to know this, I want to see this, I want to learn. Tell me what we picked up in the last month. These things are happening. Um, and the other thing is saturation and competition. Man, if you're in a blue-collar business, you better buckle up. Because white-collar businesses are being gobbled up by artificial intelligence. And these people are going to need something to do. And so part of what they could do is come down and start taking on blue-collar jobs, which means more saturations for you, electricians and plumbers, and roofers and, you know, people like that. And if you have those kind of businesses, you better be ready because you're about to get hit in 2026 and 2027 if a lot of the uh the data and what what the uh experts are are coming out with with what's going to start to happen. So this means now just doing, or I I don't even like the word, doing social media or doing SEO or having a website and not having a holistic game plan that is constantly being worked on and measured and progressed along with your patients, you're going to fall further and further behind. And as these companies come down, they're going to bring different levels of wisdom. Now, the idea is not to be perfect. The idea is to be the best compared to your competitors, right? So that's always the measurement. Well, if you're doing everything super bad and you've been around for 20 years, they come in and get a year or two under their belt and they do just a little bit better than you do with their marketing, they're going to put a dent in your business. So word to the wise, if you're in a blue-collar field, you really need to start thinking about getting even more serious about your digital marketing. And do not, okay, listen to me really carefully here. If you're in those fields, do not go to a company that only builds plumbing websites or electrician websites or any of that stuff. That's not needed. Okay, you need to find someone who's going to fight for you locally and understand you locally. And then plus, you can get a non-disclosure, non-compete where they're not going to take your data and share it with your competitors who they're probably also serving in your area. So, word to the wise, be careful on that because there's a lot of people who say, Well, we're the uh roofing website experts, and you need to come to us because we know what we're doing. No, that's a sales pitch. Um, impact on local and smaller players. Let me read my note here real quick. Yeah, this goes back to um not being able to uh working with these media buy companies and seeing that they're just running these ads for clicks and views and piggybacking on their previous, their old reputation and just trying to establish that credibility, they're making a lot of money off some people. And the idea is that they should have been let go really early on, knowing that they have run ads and did not raise flags about not tracking important goals or conversions. So conversions, when you hear that word conversions, by the way, just think meaningful actions. Someone picking up the phone, giving you a call, someone filling out a form, somebody requesting something, someone signing up for an email. They didn't do none of that stuff. So let's look at some questions. Um What you could do is you could ask, what specific deliverables do you provide for the fee they're giving you? Um you also want to find out how you're how they're going to learn, how they're going to progress things through. And if they say, well, first we're going to build you a website and then run ads to it or something, or we're going to build you a brand new web page where we can track all the paid ad traffic specifically to. Um, be careful. I mean, there's a lot that they can reveal by just telling you how they're going to kind of set things and forget it. And if they don't give you the plan where they're going to walk with you every step of the journey, to me that's a big flag. Um, what KPIs will you track and report? You know, this is those conversions. You know, have they been doing it? Can they give you a KPI report? Are they padding the numbers where they're plugging in when someone clicks on a button that that's part of your conversions? It could be, but it's not the conversion. Clicking on a button does not add more money in your pocket and help you in your business. Um are you using up-to-date tactics or relying on old tricks? I mean, if you hear them say, you know, give you like a wink wink, this is how we do things, and people, you know, Google doesn't know this, or we have our thing that we do that's super magical when it comes to marketing, um, those days are gone. It's kind of like uh in the car industry, you know, where you used to be able to play all these games, but now where you can get your um your evaluation and your appraisals and all that, now the price is the price. Now it's just hard work and playing by the rules. So if you hear anybody talk about them knowing some little marketing trick or something like that, um it's basically best practices. The best trick really is to understand what the best practices are and follow best practices. Um be careful if you hear that, because that's going to make you think that maybe they got this secret sauce and no one else knows. No. Uh if they tell you you're gonna be number one on Google in 30 days, I can't believe someone's even saying those things anymore. Um those days are definitely gone. So any kind of like weird sensationalistic promise, run, run, run from those things. Um what good ones look like? Let's flip the script here a little bit. Disciplined uh strategy, uh, definitions of goals, working to goals, those are the big ones. Uh modern SEO and marketing tactics, focusing on user experience, quality content, proper backlinks, remember the good votes, uh tracking meaningful events, uh, optimizing for conversion rather than just rankings. I mean, when someone says they do SEO and all they're trying to do is drive traffic to a website, well, what if your website stinks and no one does anything with it? I mean, how does that work, right? It doesn't. It's got to be adjusted. Uh, transparent reporting is a good one. Uh, continuous improvement. This is probably the biggest. You're not going to start with anybody who's serious and automatically have results. What you're going to have is someone trying to gain the system to get your confidence, and then it may or may not work. And so continuous improvement and hard work is the goal to go by. Will these people actually do the job in a meaningful way and protect my business like it's their own? And how will you do that? Uh, education. We're huge into education here. This is what we're doing right now. This is free to you. Uh, and what we do with our any prospect that comes and sits down at our office or sits in a Zoom with us, we go through and we talk about everything that we see and we give full transparency to it. I don't like hyper focus on one little thing that may be wrong, because if the overall package is good, we need to say that overall package is good. Um here's the thing, you you want to you you want to be aware of this. Um the old school methods are are still being held on to because people believe that they work, because it's like holding on to the yellow pages in the phone book. Um, SEO is not a tactic, it's just a a word. And so someone just selling you SEO in quotes, you need to be very careful about that. And and matter of fact, I think that's the word of the day. If I were to say that anything frustrated me more meeting this client than anything, it was that someone sold them this term called SEO. Uh, what is SEO to them? What does it mean? What can we expect? And why should we do that versus other things? And what's maybe the second or third best thing if you're recommending SEO? Is there something else we should be doing? How long will it take? You know, these kind of questions. Because you start talking about how long it takes, then what you're going to get is uh you might go back to the uh 30-day thing, something like that. Well, we've seen things happen in 30 days. Okay, well, it happened in 30 days with me. Um, you'll you'll start to see the wheels come off the bus when you start to dig just a little bit. And you don't need to know everything from the perspective of the owner of a business in order to ask those questions. And if the language starts to get lofty, say, slow down. Remember, I'm a roofer. I'm not a web guy. I just need to understand this in my words, and I need to get this down in ways I can understand it. Slow people down. We have it done to us all the time. Matter of fact, that's something that we love is say, hey, if we start getting weird with our language, just ask us to stop. Ask us to explain things to you. Um, fraud in digital marketing is on the rise. Oh man, I mean, fraudulent AI phone calls. Oh, you talk about people who are talking about the pros of artificial intelligence. I know your calls are, I know you're getting calls and they're uh those AI clicks and all that junk and all this other stuff. Remember, fraud's on the rise, and freelancers, uh, good old boys, design agencies, big media companies. Uh it may not be fraud in the classical legal sense, but it is fraudulent through omission. In my opinion, it's fraudulent through omission. And you need to uh really guard yourself because I know you work hard for the money that you make and invest. Um I think that's pretty much it. Um so this is kind of where I want to leave it today. What I want to say is if you're in this boat and you're waking up, congratulations. This is incredible. It's nothing to be uh ashamed of or upset about or anything like that. It means you're waking up to a song that the Pied Piper has been playing for years and years and years. This has been going on forever, but because of the way the internet was, it was easy to kind to uh kind of escape that for the agency to where they could still sell these things, which would make you jump from person to person to person to person. Now it's getting separated out. So until next time, thank you so much. This is Ken with Over the Bull.

SPEAKER_00: 43:44

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integrist Design, a full service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.