#36 - The Small Business Mistakes That Come Back to Bite You

Small businesses rarely get taken down by one big decision — it’s the quiet, everyday mistakes that stack up and cost them time, money, momentum, and credibility. In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken breaks down the most common digital and operational decisions that come back to bite small businesses the hardest.

From weak security practices and guessing instead of using data… to cheap hosting, DIY websites, and abusing AI content — we cover the landmines no one warns business owners about.

Ken also explains why running Google Ads to separate websites, ignoring conversion tracking, buying generic “SEO packages,” and using unsupported website themes can derail growth before it even starts. And he highlights one of the most overlooked essentials: your Google Business Profile and your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency — which is absolutely non-negotiable for visibility and trust.

If you want clear, honest insights into the decisions that quietly sabotage small businesses — and how to avoid them — this episode lays it all out without spin, jargon, or fluff.

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What You’ll Learn:
•Why 2-step authentication prevents the most expensive disasters
•How bad data — or no data — leads to wasted marketing spend
•Why conversion tracking is the backbone of all successful campaigns
•The danger of “set it and forget it” marketing
•The truth about buying vague services labeled “SEO”
•Why website themes eventually break and cost you more
•The hidden cost of cheap hosting and DIY website builders
•Why abusing AI creates thin, low-trust content
•The importance of staying involved with your agency
•Why using separate websites for Google Ads destroys trust, tracking, and long-term performance
•Why Google Business Profile NAP accuracy is foundational and non-negotiable for rankings

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: 0:09

The small business mistakes that can come to bite you on this episode of Over the Bull. We're going to continue throughout the rest of the year and talk a little more about things that I'm seeing that are absolutely destroying businesses that were once solid prior to 2025. I can't emphasize enough how much the internet is changing. And now it's more important than ever to stay involved and work with agencies that are actively learning how to live in the new world of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, for those of you just tuning in, is not the thing of tomorrow, it's the thing of yesterday. AI started making huge impacts in 2025. And if you're seeing a downward spiral in your online marketing, it's because you're probably doing one or more of the following and neglecting artificial intelligence. Okay, so let's talk about some common mistakes that I see that may be outside of marketing. One of them is not using multi-factor authentication. So multi-factor authentication would be like using a Google Authenticator app. And basically what that app does is you scan a QR code after you turn on the service, and then when you log in, you use your username, your password, and then the app will generate a random six-digit code, I think it's six digits, that you plug in before you log in, and it will save you. Now, it may seem like some extra steps and a little bit of hassle to set it up, and frankly, it is. But this world is full of bad guys just itching to get a hold of your private information and take advantage of you. They're not just after uh you accepting uh one of the common mistakes is people think that they're just out to get like your transactions on your website. That's not true. Uh bad guys have a whole host of reasons to do the things that they do, and it goes well beyond financial. So just imagine the headache you would have if someone hacked into your business Facebook account, uh, your Instagram account, your bank account, your email, and the list goes on and on and on. So a big thing that you should do regardless of the size of your business is always use multi-factor authentication, bite the bullet, do the work, and it will save you tons of time. And it'll only take one incursion to more than justify it. Guys, we have been trying to get back some of the business pages from Facebook for some people that have come on board with us, and it is extremely difficult to get those pages back sometimes. So use your multi-factor authentication. I personally like the Google Authenticator app, but there's a lot of flavors of ice cream out there. Choose the one you want. The important thing is protect yourself. Okay, number two that I'm seeing a lot of, and I mean a lot, is making decisions without data. So businesses are hiring the so-called digital experts who don't even look at things like keyword count, keyword difficulty, competitor performance, because you can see what your competitors are doing, traffic patterns, existing positioning, search intent, and the list goes on and on. In order to build a successful plan, you can start from scratch and blindly start walking around, or you can look at what your competitors are doing and build a plan based on their success and just do better than they do. It's really that simple to kind of springboard a campaign. Now, of course, success is not easy. So I don't want you to think that it is easy. However, putting all the pieces in place and working from intelligence will serve you far better than just having your website redesigned and choosing something that you think is uh pretty or whatever versus working off analytics. Business is not a hobby. Business is all about, well, selling things, right? So you want to work off intelligence and you don't want to waste a lot of money trying to learn things that have already been learned. Uh, mistake number three. Unfortunately, yes, in December of 2025, we do see it. Businesses are paying people to run ads, and conversions are not being tracked. This means you cannot optimize the machine learning of places like Google and Meta and other places. The other big problem is uh some of these agencies are putting in what we call conversions that are meaningless. For example, conversion should be something that means something to your business. Now, that could be signing up for emails, it could be, you know, uh tracking sales, phone calls, whatever the case may be, uh, but it's not clicking on a page that's random on your website. That just artificially inflates conversions and confuses things. So you need to make sure that you quantify what's important for your business, set those conversions, and everything should be laser focused to meet those conversions, period. Mistake number four, the set it and forget it marketing. SEO, ads content, website, all these things are living systems. When a business never adjusts, your ranks will slide, your ads fatigue, your messaging goes stale, competitors pass on to the next, or competitors will pass you, basically, is what I'm trying to say here. And so you want to be careful about just setting something or trusting your agency to randomly do things. You need to be actively involved, or someone in your company needs to be actively involved in the creation of the content. Look, we're seeing some huge backlashes as people are abusing artificial intelligence, and I will get to that as we move on. The next mistake buying services based on buzzwords, paying for SEO with no deliverables, buying monthly reports with meaningless charts, paying for reputation management that just sends review requests. This is not what you want to spend your money on. Your money is limited, your effort is limited in what you can do, and so you want to focus on things that is that are tangible. Uh, again, we met with a uh a potential client a couple weeks ago, and they were simply buying SEO services. I said, Well, what is that? And they did not know. There are a lot of bait and switch games that happen with the term SEO, and there's a lot of bait and switch that happens in every area of this market in digital marketing. And unfortunately, it's flooded with people that really are well, they shouldn't be doing it. I don't know how else to say it. Um, must the next mistake uh buying website themes, thinking they're custom. Okay, I get it. You pick a pretty theme and you think that that works. Now, if you're in WordPress, here's what's going to happen uh development can stop working on those little cheap themes that are added and look good. Plugins can conflict, uh, the themes are often bloated, and updates can break the design or conflict with other stuff. It's that simple. And the other thing is, is themes just don't work. I mean, I'm surprised that these do-it-yourself website systems are still out there peddling, you start by picking a theme and how successful you can be by starting by picking your design out. Absolutely not the right way to do it. And it's absolutely not the right way to do it to hire somebody that works and dabbles in the do-it-yourself systems. In a professional world, you use professional tools. You don't use tools where the herd goes. Remember, the herd usually is wrong in cases like this. Cheap hosting. Okay, guys, this is a big one on my mind right now. Um, so cheap hosting looks like you're saving um, you know, money every month. So you look at some and it's pretty expensive. You look at others, you see it's cheap. We're talking slow, load times, hacked websites, Google rank penalties, downtime, poor support, and the list goes on and on. Now, I personally checked this uh just to see what that would look like. And I can tell you that when you try cheap hosting, oh my goodness, it is a nightmare. You're sent to forums, you're sent to some AI bot that don't know what they're doing. Now, here's the scary part. A lot of agencies are using cheap hosting and masking it as good hosting. So if you go to the internet and go to Google, type in where is this website hosted, and simply type in your web address and you'll find out where it's hosted, and you can do some research to find out exactly what's going on under the hood. Unfortunately, people disregard the value of hosting and they treat like it's a one-size fits-all. Absolutely not the case. Do-it-yourself websites. This is still a big problem, and it's going to continue to be a big problem. There's a lot of bucks to go into it to feed a bunch of information that, frankly, simply is not true. So, do-it-yourself website builders will cost you triple or more later, through their bad structure, wrong keywords, no optimizations, incorrect tracking, wrong messaging, picking templates, putting in a bunch of content, realizing that you need to move on at some point, and then having to pay someone to move all your content. This is the reality of do-it-yourself website builders. You're not cheating the system, you're not gaming the system, and just because you're following the herd and the commercials making it feel like that they can do it, they can't. I will say that I do like a lot from Shopify in certain instances, though. Uh that that's literally probably the only one. Um, oh man, abuse of AI content is the next one. So we're circling back around. Okay, artificial intelligence is changing everything. Uh go back and check out our uh podcast on uh Atlas, the new browser from ChatGPT. It's pretty outstanding. It's changing everything, guys. But here's the thing: you can use a tool in the right way or a wrong way. You can use a hammer to punch in a nail, or you can use a hammer to uh break a window. One's good, one's bad. A lot of digital agencies are using it to break a lot of windows. So here's what happens. They use it for fluff content, repeat phrasing, no real EEAT trust signals. Okay, it's important that content is human created. I can tell you that we've been running tests, and I can tell you that I've drumped uh jumped a domain authority by around 23 points simply by using the hard work method and involving clients. So that's part of the strategy, and that's long term. So don't think that just because you got some blog articles tossed up on your website that Google's going to look at that and think that somehow that's as good as human-written content. You need to be involved, guys. You cannot let your agency simply run wild and post things on your website. It's the way of the world. Uh, by the way, it also duplicates ideas, and Google can spot this. Um, there's just it's it's it's not worth trying to cheat the system. Okay, it just simply is not. Now, AI can be crazy beneficial. It can help you analyze content, it can help you come up with some messaging ideas. You can create virtual boards of uh different personas and use them to help guide your business in different ways. There's tons of things you can do with AI, but when you do it in the wrong way, it's going to hurt your business. And I'm telling you, we're seeing more and more businesses coming to our office, and they are suffering because their digital agency is shortcutting it, running everything through AI. And you can see the old Wiley Coyote cartoon where the TNT is exploding something. That's exactly what's going on with these guys. Okay, um, not staying involved with your agencies. Uh, man, all right, let's circle back around on this one. Uh, your problems are your decisions there'll be decisions that drift, the messaging will go off brand, uh, your priority shift will happen without your knowing it. Uh, so you got to give feedback and opportunities get missed. I shared with you a situation a couple months ago where we're working with a uh a client and we targeted something through our coaching session. It took about um, I don't know, eight to ten weeks for it to fully evolve, and it's his most successful paid ad campaign. If he would have not been coming in and us having discussions, he would have never experienced that success. So now we're going to track the trends and see if it continues, or maybe it was temporary. You see, you have to be involved in this. So the takeaway here is it's your business. Um, you do not want to have this thing on autopilot. You need to co-pilot the business. You're paying agencies for their expertise. So ask the questions and get the results. And understand that it's going to be real work, it's going to take real time, and that now your credibility is the currency of the internet. I've been using that phrase now for several weeks, but it's absolutely true. Your business and how Google sees it as authoritative, how Chat GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, all these things, your authoritativeness and what makes you unique in creating real content and building it on the right system is absolutely non-negotiable these days. Okay, the last one uh that I want to throw at you here is this idea of local optimization. So, local optimization commonly is your Google business profile. That is more important than it's ever been. And it's going to remain more important than it's ever been. Now, what you want to do across all these things is you want to track with different phone numbers. You want to understand exactly where the traffic's coming from and all that. But more importantly, you need to use a tool that will optimize your Google business profile. There are some tools out there. We have our own uh tool that does it. There are some others out there. You just need to look at them and do a lot of homework and make sure that you're not overpaying for it, and also make sure that the tool is going to do its job. In the past, you could kind of skirt along with this. Now, I would argue that those days were gone around 2022, 2023. But you can buy a tool, and what it will do is it will basically broadcast your business information consistently across the internet. And so if you're at 123 Main Street, it makes sure that everything's spelled consistently, make sure your phone numbers are set up right. Yes, I said that your phone numbers are set up right. They have to be consistent, but there are ways to use tracking numbers in addition to that. So just a quick little tidbit there you need to talk to your agency about. And so basically, what that does is increase what we call our nap score or NAP score. And increasing your nap score will help your overall picture. So as you're thinking about your business, oh, and here's one more thing, too. I have seen some agencies sneak this in. They call that SEO. And I personally think that's a little bit of a bait and switch. It feels like what they're trying to do is no longer offer website optimization, and they sell local SEO as uh Google Business Optimization. In our world, at our agency, we consider those two completely different things. We have different tools to do all of them. Uh your social signaling also matters, by the way, too. So, guys, um, oh, by the way, uh sorry I took off last week. Um we had uh we took off for Thanksgiving. We get together with the uh the family and uh we do a bunch of stuff. And so uh Friday we did skip it and I didn't give you any preemptive warning to that. So um happy holidays to you guys, and I hope you're having a blessed holiday, and I hope that you uh take time as owners of businesses, you know, it's real important to kind of regroup. You know how taxing running a business is from you know everything, not just marketing, but you know, just managing day-to-day operations or renewing your trademarks or things like that. It's just a lot of work, right? So anyway, I think that uh taking time uh to really look at the fruits of your labor and enjoy your family is absolutely critical these days. Okay, guys, I know it's a little bit short, it's kind of a micro podcast, but I wanted to get something out to you. Uh again, thank you so much for tuning in to Over the Bull. Until next time, the best of luck to you, your business, your successes, your family, and your health.

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