#333 - Investing in Organic Growth: Why, When & How with SEO Expert Josh Piepmeier

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Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what is going on? DTC pod. Today we are joined by Josh Piedmyer, who is the founder of Merryweather. And today we're going to be talking everything SEO specifically as it pertains to commerce. So, really excited to dig into this conversation. I know there's a lot of things going on. We've got AI, we've got a changing kind of SEO landscape, we've got brands looking for more affordable growth channels, we've got cacs going up. But let's just get into it. Why don't you give us a little bit of your background, Josh? And then we can jump right into all the different topics that we want to cover as they pertain to SEO.

100%. Thanks for having me on the show, Blaine. Appreciate it. Happy to talk a little bit about my background. So I never actually. The funny thing is, I never actually wanted to get into SEO. I wanted to be more of a direct response copywriter. I actually really liked study Gary Halbert.

I like Eugene Schwartz a lot. A lot of those guys. I wanted to be able to be that person that, you know, you write a sales letter and. Oh, my sales letter, you know, generated $10 million. Right. These guys had were crazy. So. But for a couple of reasons, I had to move and I had to get a new job and I ended up, I ended up getting one in SEO.

And so I sort of fell in love with it. I have that mechanical engineering background too, so I have a degree. And so I sort of brought those two things with me and the SEO, right? Like the direct response marketing. Let's generate some actual revenue here. And then the engineer side of me that was like, look at money in, money out, dollars in, dollars out. I wanted to make it all work out, right. And so I was actually in SEO on the b two b side first, and I transitioned into the e commerce side. And I actually like about e commerce that it is all about the numbers, right? And SaaS and everything like that.

It's like, and blade, you'll know this as well as anyone. Oh, sales qualified lead. Marketing qualified lead. And then you got a bicker over, like, are you actually driving revenue or not? In e commerce, it's like the dollars go up, period. There's obviously conversations about attribution models, but we can talk about that all later. I got into SEO, always have been sort of entrepreneurial, had something on the side, started doing SEO on the side, became a consultant. Now I have my agency, small group of folks, really focused on the revenue side of things, attribution, all that good stuff. Can nerd on that for hours, but happy to get into the value and jump into it.

Yeah. So I think a great place to start is what do ecomm brands need to know about SEO? And maybe we can even start with the basics, right? There's a lot of brands that are starting out that maybe have unique products. They're trying to position them in the market. And maybe we just start with the basics about domain authority and, um, and content that they should go, go after. You know, is this new net, new content that they should be focusing on? When should they be focusing on it in the brand's life cycle? If you're starting out a new brand, like, what's your approach to SEO right out of the gates?

That's really good questions. So, and I think this sort of connects well to probably the number one question that I get asked by other brands is, should I invest in SEO? Should I get started? When. When is the right time? Right? And so let's start with sort of the brand life cycle. Like, when is a great time to invest in SEO? And I think this is changing, but still the playbook that I'm seeing work the best is brands that have nailed at least one other channel and then have, you know, so like net new customer acquisition channel. Sometimes that's influencer. These days I'm getting companies that are seven figures just off of influencers and then they have some email for the, for the recurring revenue afterwards and I, or the retention, I should say. And then they have some CRO maybe doing on the site and then they're like, okay, let's layer an SEO. A lot of brands, it's still the classic meta first.

Right. Scale meta as far as you can. CAC is getting sort of evening out, staying about the same. It's tough, it's going down. Okay, we've sort of maxed out this channel. Where do we go next? SEO is a great sort of second channel to look at, right. I will say that it depends, right. If you're meta first, going into influencers might be a good idea, maybe in some affiliates and then into SEO as sort of that second channel.

But if you've already got a really solid base, then SEO really can help drive the CAC down, actually bring in some more new customers that you maybe wouldn't have otherwise and to supplement your paid efforts. Right. And we can talk about that in depth.

Yeah. Um, and I think that's a great way to think about in terms of channels. The one caveat that I'd make to that, and I'd love to dig in, is branded search. Right? I mean, when people are starting out, you know, a lot of times people go and search on Google and sometimes you've got a really niche name. So it's easy to rank number one and people come to Google and they can find your site, but other times you might pick a name that is, you know, really competitive and people aren't going to find you for a couple years. So, so how do you approach it from the get go? Because like, at least the way I think about it, like if I'm launching a new product or a new brand, I'm thinking about SEO in a couple different ways. Like, one is like the bare bones of, you know, if someone searches for my brand, like, how do they find me? And then separately, like, okay, you know, I want to think of SEO as like an actual growth channel that I'm vet investing in, that I'm running a strategy on that's bringing in net new leads. So how do you kind of reconcile the two and how would you think about like, you know, making sure at least you're good for the first section, maybe before you have the bandwidth to take on the second sort of idea.

Great question. Right. And I 100% agree with you. I was talking to a client the other day actually. Um, they have a lot of, I was actually thinking about them when I said influencers. They got a lot of influencers working with them. So a ton of branded search right now for them. They don't have any problems showing up with their, for their brand name.

And we'll get to that in a second. But it was a really interesting problem because I think what a lot of people don't realize is that if somebody searches for your brand, let's say they search for Nike, it's not just the homepage that's going to pop up. There's probably going to be three to five links even below your homepage that are going to pop up. And those can get significant traffic even from brand searches. I think one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that the meta titles on your site are set up. I think if you do nothing else, I know we're getting technical, it's a nerdy, geeky detail, but meta titles specifically, if you set up the meta titles on your site to mention your brand name, that's number one. And don't just do it on your homepage in the beginning, go ahead and put that brand name on the product pages, in the collections pages, etcetera, in the Shopify back end. If you're sort of in a collection or product page, like you're going to edit the content on the page or the copy on the page.

If you just scroll down to the bottom of the page, it'll just say page title or something like that. And it's very easy to edit. Just get your brand's name in there. If it's relevant, get your product in there too. Right? And so I'd say the second thing is think about like what's the second search? Right. So like, let's say you have a very broad name that would be tough to rank for, right? Even your brand name. Well, so like what's, what's the next thing? Right. So my agency is actually a good example of that.

It's Meriwether. Well, Meriwether is a derivative of Meriwether Lewis. Who is Lewis and Clark? It has this historical background. Okay. If people search Merryweather, my brand might not be the first one to come up. If they search Meriwether SEO, it's definitely gonna be the first one to come up. And so that's what I tell people to search. And so if you have this brand's name that is very sort of broad, you got to approach it from both angles.

So tell people to search for, you know, in your Facebook ads, hey, look up, rise coffee. Look up, rise mushroom coffee. Right. Also, then on your, in your meta titles, just optimize your meta titles with your brand name in mind, with your products in mind, and then you should be pretty good to go. Right. Worst case scenario, there's some other things that you can do, but I think those two steps will work for 99% of brands.

Yeah. And I mean, that's a great point. And you can even think about that as it pertains to the domain name. Right? Like in the early, super early stages. Like one example of you just mentioning that that comes to mind is, um, a brand that we're close with. Sundaes, right? The dog food brand. If you Google Sundaes, like, or Sundays, it's like, is it an ice cream sundae? Is it Sunday, the day of the week? Like, there's all these things, but they intentionally, you know, their domain name is literally Sundays for dogs.com. and if you search Sundays and dogs, like, it's showing up all over the place.

So I think that's a good example and I think that's really good context. Now let's talk about kind of like off page stuff that you might do when you're just getting set up, right? So when you're first setting out, if you've got this new domain name that no one's ever heard of before, you don't have any backlinks, you don't have any domain authority, how would you recommend, like, you know, brands? Think about at least getting the first sort of set of, you know, and what's a, what's a fair domain rating to, or to target in like, the early days? Like, what's a great way to get some, some links to your site? And what's, what's, what should your target be? If you're, again, if you're not saying this is my full blown strategy, but I do want to at least show up 100%.

Well. So I think that there's a couple ways. Right? Like day one, you just launched on Shopify, you're just getting started. You're like, let me at least get the foundations in place that I just have everything set up. I think just the standard practice of like, creating a LinkedIn page, creating a Twitter page, a Facebook page, Instagram, etcetera, and then linking back to your site. If you have little descriptions on each of those areas, that describes what your brand does. And they all agree those will send signals that, hey, this is a legitimate entity, this is a legitimate business. We sort of understand what they are, what they do, right? And so that's step one.

If you have any buddies in the space, right? Like sundaes, you just. Maybe, you know, the guys at sundaes and you just launched a, let's say something, make it a little difficult. You launch a human supplement. Food or like a superfood. Cool. It's a great idea to try and get backlinks from your buddies. Now that's a little bit weird. Like, why would.

Why would a dog food brand link to a supplement brand or a superfood brand? Well, maybe you sort of position it as a conversation between two founders and you put it out on email and it's more of a promotional thing and it's really just an excuse to get some email content and to get that backlink from other people. When we're talking about backlinks, for everybody who's listening off pages really usually means backlinks. And so backlinks is a link from another site to your site that essentially acts as a vote of confidence to tell Google, hey, this site is legit. I think that just getting those basic business pages set up is a good start. Then maybe use your actual real network to generate the next level. And then after that, it's media. If you can get on a podcast, pitch for d two c pod, if you're an operator, get on d two c pod, get that link, things like that. That can really help.

Then establish the business presence and you'll be in a good spot. I'd say, as far as doctor goes, like, what's a good doctor to shoot for? Probably not the most important thing to think about at the beginning, but I have seen, hey, once you get over about a ten doctor, you'll start to see some more impressions. Do you think we should define that, Blaine? Or do you think most people are listening are good?

Well, I think the easy way to define it is basically if you plug in your URL, there's a whole bunch of SEO tools you can use to evaluate it, and it'll give you like a score from like one to 100 of what your domain rating is. So when you say domain rating of ten, that's like a ten on the scale where if you're a brand new site, you're going to be a zero. And if, and I guess like on the high end of the scale, like really reputable sites or popular blogs, like, you know, like official news sources and stuff like that. They'll be as high as like 92, 93, and then like, you know, typical other sort of companies that you might be familiar, familiar with but are more niche like, but are reputable, that have been around, might be around a 50. So I think that's kind of pretty solid context for, um, for DR. And then the next thing that I wanted to talk to, um, talk about is let's talk a little bit about the difference in ecommerce SEO and standard SEO. Like what's the same, what practices are the same? Because a lot of them are very similar, but then a lot are going to be a little bit different. So.

Yeah, how do you think about that?

Right? Yeah, that's a really good question, too. And I think the biggest thing here is how many products you have. And so a lot of DTC brands can almost toe this line, right? If you're a DC brand, you only have one or two products, right? You're probably not going to rank, you're not going to bring a lot of traffic just from two product pages. Okay? Now if you're Amazon or your REI or your dick sporting goods or a target or something, like if they just rank 1% of their product pages across the entire site, they're bringing in a million traffic, right? No big deal. If you're a d, two C brand and you have two product pages, probably not going to bring in a million traffic. So you're going to have to diversify how you bring the traffic in. And so this is where you're getting into more classical content marketing strategies where now you're looking at SaaS brands, you're looking at B, two B brands, and you're saying, how do they generate traffic? How do they generate leads and sales with SEO? And it's a much more content focused play. And so that's when you're starting to publish on your blog and write informational content and answer your users questions.

And you got to be careful in that spot to not bring in traffic. That's not going to convert because if you're just saying, I'm going to write my blog and I'm just going to write whatever informational questions, I'm going to answer all of them. Cool. You're probably not going to convert that. Well, like, if you're answering what are mushrooms? What are functional mushrooms? It's like, okay, somebody who's searching for that doesn't want to buy functional mushrooms right now, right? Somebody who's searching for what are the benefits? What are the best functional mushrooms. How much do they cost? Are there any side effects? That's somebody who's actually considering purchasing the product. Standard SEO is very much focused on content. Ecommerce SEO turns more and more into optimizing collections, pages, shopping pages, creating more of them, optimizing them very, very well so that you can actually rank with those high converting shopping environments.

Yeah. And I think intent is such a good thing to think about, especially if you have limited resources. You're starting to scale up. What content do I create? Well, if you've got a product you want to create, you know, target some traffic that's maybe a little bit further down the, the intent funnel than something that's super top of funnel where they can get the. And then actually this is a great segue into content types. Right. Because we see all this AI popping up. Now you see Google that is answering half the questions for you when you make a Google search in the top snippet.

Right? So would you say that? Because at least, like, I just feel like when I'm making a lot of searches, I see Google like, basically answering that really top of funnel stuff that like, you don't really care who the answer comes from. It's just like, boom, there's the answer. But if you're searching for something like, you need a product or you need the best version of something like, then I think the intent is a little bit different and the results are a little different. So what have you seen as it pertains to AI updates and SEO?

Yeah. So a couple of good points here. The first one is that Google is taking over more of these searches. I'm getting questions about, is this Armageddon? Should we be scared? Is Google going to take all the traffic and we're going to be left with nothing? Is SEO even worth it? I would say that a lot of ecommerce companies are actually winning more now. Yeah. Google's going to take away the top 30% of queries that have a very direct answer. What color is grass? Why is grass green? You don't need a brand to answer that for you. We know the answers even.

What are functional mushrooms? What is functional mushroom coffee? It's like nobody really needs to answer that as a brand. Right. But what are the benefits? Well, there actually might be some conversations about this because especially if it's a new and sort of up and coming space, right. There might be new studies published frequently. We might not have an expert consensus. We might need a person or a brand to have a perspective that can help inform our perspective I think that if you think about in any situation, could I look this up in an encyclopedia or do I need a human's opinion? If it's an encyclopedic sort of thing, probably Google's going to take it. Otherwise, you're probably in a good spot. The last thing I'll add to that is that a lot of ecommerce brands are actually winning right now.

Google likes e commerce brands. They like people who are actually selling products, who are offering the full user experience on their site. And so where six months ago, you would have seen a lot of affiliates ranking for things like best running shoes or best running shoes for women, et cetera, things like that. Now you're starting to see more brands rank for those kinds of terms, and I think that that will continue. So e commerce stores in general, on SEO, LinkedIn, SEO, Twitter, it's actually sort of a meme. They're like, oh, now's a great time to be an SEO for e commerce because ecommerce brands are winning.

We are really excited to announce that DTC pod is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals, and we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests, and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers, and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network@HubSpot.com. podcastnetwork. Awesome. And where do you see this going? Right? Like, you know, Google's starting to, I mean, Google's affecting SEO in so many ways. Obviously, like, SEO basically means what results you're getting in Google, so they can kind of control it. But I think in this wave of AI we've seen, first people were like, oh, what's going to happen to all this AI generated content? It seems now that Google is using AI themselves to provide AI generated content, like we just said.

And also it seems like there's certain sites that are getting dinged if it's really obviously AI, but other sites are really succeeding if the content is AI generated, but really high quality and providing valuable information. So where do we go from here?

Yeah, yeah. And that's a tough question to answer. So I think in terms of using AI to create content, we're still in sort of a risky area. And so we're actually running some tests on that right now, and we're seeing some positive things and we are seeing content that's sort of very obviously AI that we can detect. We're like, oh, I've used this tool before. I've used koala. Koala is a big one. We're seeing a lot of like koala generated articles.

Koala sh. I think it is. And if you read enough of these articles, you'll start to see the patterns. And then as soon as you see one of the articles that's written by Quali, you'll know, okay? And we've seen these articles ranking number one spot for months. But it's just a question of, we don't know at this point how long that's going to last because this is the exact spot that we were in last fall when this AI hype train was really just like powering out of the station, like it was miles beyond the station. And then all of a sudden just this last march or April, AI sites got demolished and a few survived, but you just don't know. So like what is your risk tolerance? Right. And I find that I'm recommending to more people not to use AI because for most brands, the entire purpose of SEO is to reduce the risks, risk, exposure, to increase the stability, to try and say, how do we, you know, whether some of these, these meta updates are like the, the lack of data that we're getting, the pixels are having problems.

We need to add some more stability here and we're turning to SEO for that. And I'm saying, okay, if stability is your number one priority, do not use AI content. Okay, but there's a lot of, what else? There's a lot we could talk about and still for AI, like chat, GPT and we could talk about the future of those kinds of tools. Claude is getting big now, but does that answer your question?

Yeah, and I mean, I guess kind of the stuff that I've been noticing at least it seems like sites with really high domain ratings that have like taken on initiatives and launched like AI content have actually done pretty well. So it seems like Google is in their updates, at least anecdotally from what I've seen. It seems like they're really prioritizing that, like domain authority and topical authority within AI. But then, you know, that's the caveat there is that you're providing valuable content and then it's not just like random crap AI content. I think that stuff really gets killed. But yeah, anyway, moving on from AI, I'd love to talk a little bit about, we talked a little bit or touched on it briefly about influencer and SEO and how branded search just kind of boosts SEO all around. But how do ads play into that? Is there overlap? Is there correlation from that sort of traffic that you see with a ripple effect in SEO?

100%. 100%. And so this is like one of the big things that we've been looking at and learning more about over the last couple of months. Let's use an example again. Okay? If you look at Google trends and you look at sort of the demand for, say, mushroom coffee, we'll use that example again. The demand for that term has like, skyrocketed over the last two and a half years. Okay? All of the related searches in that entire category have also risen at the same time. So it's a rising tide lifts all boat situation.

Okay? Now, interesting. Why did that happen? What was the trend like? What was happening that caused that skyrocket of interest to happen? Well, surprise, surprise. This is kind of when a lot of these mushroom functional coffee brands started to blow up and when they started to push all their ads on meta, really what happens? And what we're seeing is that meta ads, Facebook ads, create all of this demand. And then SEO is the funnel on the other side, refunding all of that demand. So it's demand generation versus demand capture. And again, we're going back and using more traditionally SaaS terms here because they're super relevant. And so what you're seeing is that if you are a brand that's spending, I talked to brands who are spending $100,000 a month on ads and they're not even looking at SEO. And I'm like, dude, you're generating a ton of demand and you are letting somebody else take advantage of it.

I've actually had clients that come to me and they're like, okay, we're the third or fourth biggest player in our space, but we have another brand that we've done SEO with you. We want to do SEO and make that one of our differentiators. And we literally are just cleaning up all of the demand that is, is left over in this category. And they're still at seven figures, right? And so it's like, literally there's seven figures of demands left over just from people who are running ads and then not doing SEO afterwards because they're generating all of this interest in the category. But if somebody watches your Facebook ad and what kind of Facebook ads are getting popular now? It's like some sort of, like over the top, right? Like brands first, like, oh, it's like jump cuts and all this stuff, that's not enough for a lot of people to buy. So what are they going to do? They're going to go look up benefits. They're going to look at, oh, is this thing actually safe for me? Like I saw it in this Facebook or this TikTok. Is it actually good for me? Is this full of shit? Is it real? And then that's where SEO sort of cleans up.

So you got to have both.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's super interesting. And that goes back to the same thing, influencer and ads. You're generating this demand, you're generating that top of funnel awareness. Maybe someone didn't even know about something. They go to Google, they start to look it up and it's either you're going to be there to clean up that traffic or Google or someone else is. So I think that's a really valid point and more reason to continue to invest in SEO. The next question that I have is about what does it look like in practice? So once a brand has say they've cracked Facebook, they're spending there, they're looking for their next channel. Like, what do you guys actually do with brands? What does a campaign look like? How do you get in there and how do you build an SEO strategy that's going to work?

Great question. So it depends. Right? And so this is the, we're going back to the, the question of, is this more of the d two c model or the classic e commerce model? And so if we're looking at a brand with only a handful of products, maybe, I don't know, 510 products or less, which is actually relatively common, then we're going to say, okay, we're going to optimize the handful of pages that you do have, but we're really going to lean hard into content right out of the gate. We're obviously going to do all this sort of standard stuff. We're going to make sure that the site speed is decent, we're going to make sure that there's no technical huge problems. But I think a lot of SEO agencies way over index on that stuff. They're like, we're going to do technical fixes for the next twelve years and get you up to a 99% site speed and site profile. And it's like, it doesn't matter.

I've ranked clients that all of the tools are saying, oh no, screaming bright red, this is terrible, and they're still doing well. Don't spend too much time on that, but at least just get the basics down after that if you're a small catalog, we're leaning into content hard, and I'll talk about the types of content in a second. But on the other side, if you even have just ten products or more, there's a very good chance that your number one opportunity is going to be to create new collections or landing pages for your products. Okay? Because if somebody's searching for hiking boots, somebody's also searching for women's hiking boots and men's hiking boots and men's hiking boots for narrow feet and men's hiking boots that are waterproof. And there's all of these different angles. And so if you can just create new pages that target all of those different keywords, you're essentially increasing the surface area. You're increasing the size, the size of your target that well, sort of Google can shoot at by bringing in the traffic. Right.

And so just by increasing the surface area, not even by, oh, we're going to super optimize these things. Just by getting more volume behind the site, all of a sudden you're bringing in more revenue, especially that non brand revenue, and directed to the product pages, which is super profitable. Right. So even with small product catalogs, where I think most people would say that a ten product catalog or a 15 product catalog is still very, very small, there still are usually a couple of opportunities to do that. Right. And so that's the number one thing.

Well, I think that's really smart in terms of going after the long tail. I think the long tail is super interesting because numerically there's less searches, obviously, than if just someone searched boots versus specific type of hiking boots for women in this color. But if you're making that long tail search, there's probably a lot more intent there. And when you've got a page where like the URL slug of the page lines up exactly with the query, you're going to rank a lot higher. And this is something that like, even I've seen, you don't even have to have crazy domain or topical authority as long as like, you're literally answering exactly what the query is for in the long tail. So I think that in terms of like, you know, especially for people who are, have maybe have smaller collections, I think that's a really sound way to approach it and get started because if you're matching up a query to the page, you're going to do pretty well. So what else, what else do people have to consider to not mess that up? Are there specific tools that you recommend where people can do this themselves at? What level, do they really need to bring on an agency or work with a team like you guys to do it? Is this something you can do in house? Do you see people outsourcing it? What works best?

You got it. One thing I'll say to sort of take us off the beaten path a little bit is that one thing that's really interesting is you've mentioned a couple times in this episode, topical authority versus domain authority. And I want to split those into two separate categories, probably because I'm very specifically passionate about this topical authority. I would consider more of an authoritative presence around content. Right? So if one person has two blog posts on their site about diamond rings and that another site has 500 on their site about diamond rings, okay. I'd say the one with 500 posts, as long as they're all relatively good quality, has more topical authority on the topic of diamonds. Okay. And I think for small brands, this is very important because all of the big brands, Amazon, REI, Macy's, these kinds of brands, they've had too much of a head start for you to really catch up in terms of domain authority unless something crazy happens, right? We're seeing $100 million brands that still are in the mid fifties or sixties in terms of domain rating.

So that topical authority of can we create enough content to be seen as an expert in Google's eyes is really, really important. It's kind of like the difference between a news anchor versus like your neighborhood local coffee geek who's in a coffee shop, right? Like if you need a coffee, who are you going to talk to? You know, a news anchor who has a lot of like, nationwide coverage and nationwide exposure and has maybe interviewed two or three coffee experts or one coffee expert who does this in and out all day, if you can become that mom and pop shop, that's a lot of power. That's very powerful. You can start to outrank some of these bigger, more powerful sites. We've done that again and again. I would say, look, if you're a small brand and you're just getting started, what do you do? I would say publish regularly. Just start thinking about the questions that people answer that are relatively high intent. I actually have a whole list of these questions, like list of blog post ideas that are very high performing.

Happy to give it to anybody who's listening. You can hit me up on LinkedIn or go to trafficlighttracking.com and just enter your email and I'll send you a whole bunch of resources. But I would say publishing consistently, because if you publish consistently and even if it doesn't work that well. Lets say you publish even twice a month for a year and nothings really happening for you. If you hire an SEO consultant or an SEO agency, anything like that, theyre going to very quickly be able to turn that around. Thats going to be a lot of raw material to work with. Then you hand it to the craftsman, you say, hey, what do we do with this? All of a sudden they turn it into a work bar. I'd say you can get started, optimize your product pages, things like that.

Get some content on them, get some content in your blog. And then if you're still not getting results, then go ahead and reach out to somebody. Okay. And I'm happy to talk about tools and whatever. We can talk about that stuff for hours.

Sweet. And Josh, kind of the last question I had before we wrap up here was, I'd love for you to share just some sort of examples, tangibly, for either clients that you've worked with or seen brands that have really gotten to focus on SEO. What does the outcome look like for them? What have you seen?

Yeah, 100%. It does depend on the industry. Two of my favorite examples, I'll do two short stories here. One was a CBD company. Obviously, CBD brands are very reliant on SEO. Some of them have cracked the Facebook meta industry. They know how to advertise while maintaining compliance, but it's tough. We were talking to this CBD brand and they'd been doing SEO for three years and they were stuck.

They were doing a lot of wholesale deals. They had to do white label deals. They owned the factory, so they had a great product and everything like this and they just couldn't scale. And so they said, we really want to stop with all of these white label deals, relying on these to keep our staff in business. It was this family run business had the whole family that they were sort of keeping employed with this company. And so with SEO, they'd been working on it for so long that I came in and within six months we were able to quadruple the number of customers that they were getting every month. Right. So they were at like 400 customers a month.

We got them up to 1200 new customers a month across the entire business just with SEO, because they had done the groundwork. And so I think one of the most rewarding things about that story for me was that it was this family run business. They were reliant on this thing that was sort of a pain in the butt. The wholesale side of the business, the white labeling, things like that, and we were able to transform the entire business through SEO. Right. And so I don't think that every business is going to have that same effect. Right. If you're doing 100 million from Facebook ads and then you turn on SEO, it's not like you're going to get to 200 million, right? But for some small and medium sized brands, that's 100% viable.

The second brand was a little bit of a different story. They had really, they had figured out Facebook, they had done a lot of influencers, they had some affiliate plays, things like that. They had a lot of stuff working. But then their Facebook ad account got banned for a couple of reasons. Then during that time, SEO was just starting to work, and then it exploded two months after their Facebook ad account was banned. During that time, SEO saved them. Not an exaggeration. They would have been at whatever they could extract from their email list for those few months if SEO wasn't bringing new customers in.

That was really rewarding because it was the safety net. That's what everybody talks about, hey, where's the safety net? How does SEO provide some stability for you? And that's exactly what we were able to do. I think those are two examples of what it can do for you. It can literally add hundreds of customers a month, but it also can act as the safety net of something else in your business goes wrong. It's that insurance policy. As much as people like to hate on Google's algorithm, it's still a little bit more stable than some of the other brands or the other channels sometimes.

I mean, just anecdotally, and this isn't necessarily an e comm, but more in the SaaS space. For my company, Castmagic, we recently just. We were seeing CAC go way up on meta, so we were just like, you know what? It's not like the payback period is too long. Let's just fully cut it. And we just, like, literally fully cut everything. We took an ad budget from, like, 50 grand a month to, like, zero and, you know, through. Because we've been, like, investing in SEO. Like, it hasn't obviously fully made up for anything, but, like, we're able to, you know, at least outrun, churn for a while while we recalibrate and, like, go after other more profitable acquisition methods.

So I think it's healthy, like, all about it, so love it. This has been super fun, Josh. For anyone who's listening that wants to connect, reach out to you, find those resources or whatever, where do we find you on LinkedIn? Twitter? Why don't you shout out your socials if you've got them?

Yeah, so that's Josh Pete Meyer on LinkedIn. Hopefully we can include that in the show notes because Pete Meyer's a nightmare spell. Otherwise, I think the easiest way to remember is trafficlighttracking.com. dot. That's where I have a whole series of resources. You can find some attribution stuff. It'll help you figure out if you're actually making money from SEO. The resources on there again, trafficlighttracking.com, probably a little bit easier to remember.

Go there and then I will send you an email with all of the resources that I have available.

Sweet. Thanks so much for coming on, Josh. It was a blast.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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