Hey Stacy. It's just the three of us right? Now. Hope your week has started off well
welcome everybody. Glad you're here. As you're coming on in to zoom, open up the chat and say hello. I'm about to drop in today's link bundle you'd like to follow along in today's slides. replay link is there also and if you happen not to know about Pathfinder SEO, Click that link. In the next few minutes learn about Pathfinder. Hey, Bonnie Dora Stacey Sue, welcome everybody. Glad you're here. We are about five minutes out. This is going to be a great talk from Lindsay Halsey on a way to look at recurring revenue that maybe you haven't thought about before. Really good stuff. So welcome. Welcome. Hey, Bonnie. Yeah, Sue, it was actually a bit colder than that here in Birmingham this morning. Strangely enough. It's barely Yeah, we're still not above freezing. Crazy. Yeah, Barney. Wow. About that. For those of us down in the south, it is like Sue said, unacceptable. It's unacceptable levels of cold here. Alright folks, good afternoon. Glad you're here. Welcome. Welcome. If you haven't yet gotten over to chat, pop up in the chat. Say hello. Tell us where you're logging in from today. And also grab the slide link that I'm dropping in if you'd like to follow along. We'll be getting started here in about four minutes from now. Yeah, chilly where you are Stacy for sure. Just raining in Northern California. So this is your weather forecast. across across the USA Ah yes, Doug is from the Great White North quite chilly. Up in Canada. Hello, Paul. Paul. See now only only you and I got to see that poll because you're still just chatting with me. But it was worth repeating to everybody. Hey, Class, Welcome.
Yes, Sue you're exactly right. The plugin vulnerability list has some definite recognizable plugins on it this week. Again, welcome everybody. If you're just coming in to zoom up and up the chat and say hello, I were kind of talking about the weather today. For whatever reason we'll be getting started here with Lindsey in about three minutes from now. Welcome, glad you're here. I'm going to drop in the link to all the things the slide link, the replay link if you want to want to go back and review this after or share it with someone that you think will find it interesting those links are there for you in the chat. Yeah, a little chilly in Sweden from Ben. Yeah. Today's checkered question all about the weather apparently. Love it. Hey, Eddie, welcome. Yeah, a little chilly for Cindy. I don't think I'd like to be that far north. Hey, Sarah from Rochester. Welcome. Folks are about two minutes away from getting started. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hi and apparently everybody's checking in with the temperature. So feel free to join us on that. We're going to be talking about the customer's hierarchy of needs and how you can use that to build a recurring revenue engine. Lindsey Halsey is here with us from Pathfinder SEO and this is going to be some great information. We'll have here over the next hour or so. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in our links and one more time here. Paul Oh, Paul, thank you, Paul. Laser they're waiting on you the chat if you'd like to download today's slides I you may do so follow along with Lindsey from Pathfinder. Just about a minute and a half to go
yes, yes, yes. All right. Most folks are quite chilly. It is a chilly day across most of our audience today. Even down here in the normally warm ish south, southeast us it is quite chilly today. Yeah Deborah checking in from Texas with a 36 very cold, cold to us. So you have to understand those of you who are used to snow when the when the world drops below freezing here in the south why everything comes to a stop. We just don't know what to do with ourselves. Less than a minute ago, folks, Welcome welcome. Glad you're all here. Hey, Elizabeth. We are gonna get started momentarily with Lindsey Halsey from Pathfinder SEO when the drop in the link bundle again in the chat if you haven't if you don't know about Pathfinder, click on that link and learn about Pathfinder SEO. We'll chat about it briefly as we get started officially today. But in those links, you'll also find the slides to download and follow along. Oh my minus seven No, thank you. Not for me.
That's funny, Elizabeth. For sure. All right, folks. It is three minutes after I'm going to start the recording officially and we will get underway. Well, good evening. Good morning. Good afternoon, wherever you happen to be around the world today. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and I'm joined once again by my friend Lindsey Halsey from Pathfinder SEO. Lindsay, how are you?
I'm good. I've been having fun following along with the weather here and it's making me feel better looking at the snow falling outside. My house here in Colorado. Yes,
yes. So Lindsey, this is an interesting talk that I heard you give at the recurring revenue retreat last November. And as I shared with our audience, I asked you to come on and share it with us as well because it's just really impactful. How in the world is the customer's hierarchy? Of need connect with recurring revenue?
You're gonna quickly see in a little storytelling as we get started, how sort of we're connecting this idea of trying to build recurring revenue in our agencies, while also meeting our customers needs essentially and and their service goals and things like that. So the tie will slowly come together as as we get going. But really, this is a fun topic whether you offer SEO services and Google ads and email marketing or web design and WordPress care plans, etc. The same concepts will apply throughout and and it's just kind of a nice frame to get the year rolling as we all work on building revenue but also recurring revenue in our agencies.
Absolutely. So we talked about recurring revenue here a lot on solid Academy. It is the foundation of any business like ours. Very, very hard, if not impossible to survive long term in the web development business unless you have a growing stream of recurring revenue. And I'm really excited about this talk because folks, that's going to give you some great insight on how to think about it maybe through a different lens. So Lindsay, you're with Pathfinder, SEO. A lot of folks here are familiar with you and what you do lots of folks here I'm looking at the list, I know are already customers of yours, but just explain briefly what is Pathfinder SEO and what do you do there?
Pathfinder is a guided seo software for web designers and digital agencies who want to start and grow their SEO services offering and it includes essentially kind of three primary components. One is process documentation, kind of course based learning so that you can step by step walkthrough what it means to deliver SEO services, then we have a lot of business resources. To help you create the offering and and grow that things like proposal templates, etc. And then we have a community program and SEO coaching. And so we do a lot of group office hours to get SEO questions answered, and, and some workshops to really help you hone your skills.
Yeah, it's very good. So there is a special offer right now in Pathfinder. That is a flash sale actually. We
do we have a flash sale running just for this week. So it ends January 28 for new customers and the coupon code is flash sale, very creative and it'll give you 25% off your first six months. And and yeah, so we've got that running here today. We'd love to see more folks from from this community jump in to Pathfinder, and I see a lot of familiar names and faces in the participant list. So thanks for joining us today. And for those of you that have heard me speak a few times. This will be a little segue away from talking about SEO and the business of SEO and talking more holistically about our agencies and about our agencies. How we can build recurring revenue.
Yeah. So we'll talk more about Lindsay you're gonna be coming back again. This year in July and August for two more SEO courses. We'll talk about that as we're wrapping up today. But you know, offering SEO Services is absolutely a great next step. For those of us that are building websites, managing websites, SEO is a great next step to build recurring revenue. So this should all tie in nicely. So with that, I'm going to disappear and Lindsay let's get started about customers hierarchy of need and recurring revenue. All right,
let's get going. Thanks Nathan for the intro and including me here today. I'm going to start with a bit of a story on failure and and it's a customer story from last year at our agency about last MRR and we always pride ourselves on having really low churn at our agency customers that have been working with us for you know, 10 plus years. And and we're going to talk about what it meant to lose a client and why it happened. And so the client in mentioned was in the IT services space and essentially is kind of similar to our businesses. It provides a service, a technical service, and in this case it has served a really clear geographic industry. So to us, this was a pretty straightforward campaign. We offer Google ads and SEO services. And all we had to do was run campaigns that tied the service they provided to the service area that they served and bring in the right customers. And we did this and we did it for I would say I think it was like seven or eight months. And it always takes a little bit of time to get the onramp going in those first few months when it comes to SEO in particular, and and to really hone in the Google ads campaign for impact. But we thought we really had it there. We knew the who we knew the what and we knew the were about this business. So it was a pretty a pretty ideal client and they had a solid budget. And I know in this room we all kind of know that. Having clients that have a budget that meets their their desires and expectations is always really a pleasure to work with and they were fun to work with. But there aren't customers of ours anymore. And so the question we had to ask ourself was what went wrong? And what went wrong was essentially that we offered them the right service at the wrong time. So they did need more traffic. And that's why they came to us. And they did need the type of traffic we were delivering to their website with our search engine marketing and initiatives. But their website didn't have great user experience and it wasn't very highly converting. And so we were getting visitors into the website, but they weren't turning into leads. And at the end of the day, this meant that the customer wasn't seeing an uptick in their business. And so what they decided to do was basically say, hey, we invested in marketing for the last seven, eight months. We're going to shift gears and now we're going to instead go hire a salesperson, we're going to take this budget we had allocated there our website and marketing and we're going to shift it over and just hire a salesperson and they're going to go out and do cold calls in our community and they're going to drum up interest for our services. And I have to say that this felt like a total failure in internally because the writing was on the wall at the very beginning when we worked with them. We certainly didn't miss the concept that their website needed an update and that usability was a factor. We just simply provided them the service they asked us for and sort of brushed under the rug are concerned about something that maybe should have come first or most definitely should have come first. And so now here we are, and we've got a story essentially about losing MRR, and these things happen and they happen for various reasons. But it's sort of a recurring story and you can think of customers who come to you prospects looking for services and you see some disconnects. An example of a disconnect would be like a WordPress site owner who pays $1,000 a month for SEO but doesn't have a WordPress care plan. To me that screams red flag they're investing in their website and it is a huge part of their business. But they're not investing in making sure it stays up to date and secure and live, which is ultimately going to bring down our SEO results when the site runs into security issues. We see businesses that want cheap hosting, but then their website is mission critical to their revenue. If their site goes down for a day, they would lose a lot of revenue and yet we can't get them on a hosting plan that meets meets that desire. We also see customers who do things like invest in SEO but would have been better with Google ads because they need more immediate results. And so we see these disconnects in our customers and sometimes, you know, there are a lot of different reasons. It can be because they need more education. They need to understand why a word cat press care plan actually comes before SEO or we need to ask them more questions so that we understand what SEO or Google Ads be the best solution for whatever their goal is at the end of the day. And so as we think about this and think about these stories, it really got me thinking how do we avoid the mistakes that our agency made? And where we got a great customer and some strong, recurring revenue, and then we lost that client. Even though the actual traction we were getting them for the service we were offering was pretty strong. And so we see this, essentially situation where a lot of customers are constrained by their marketing budget, and yet we see them invest their limited dollars in the wrong place at the wrong time or sometimes right place wrong time or wrong Place Right Time different scenarios can exist. And so let's talk about basically three strategies today that are going to help us help our clients and offer the right service at the right time in a way that also helps us grow a really sustaining base of our recurring revenue. And the first one is that we need to start by asking the right questions. And when I think about common sales questions, I think about things like can you provide an overview of your company these will be questions I might be asking somebody in a discovery call when I'm trying to get to know them. And and it could be you're selling a new website or selling SEO, but you're trying to get to know their business. You ask things like what products and services do you offer? What sets you apart from your competitors? What are your current marketing strategies in which his most successful? What has worked well in the past for marketing your business, what hasn't worked? How do you track and measure the success of your marketing efforts? Who will be involved and can you provide access to things like WordPress or Google Analytics etc If you listened in on most sales conversations in our industry space, you would hear different versions of these types of questions. And for many years, these are the same questions that I asked because they were the things that helped me put together a proposal etc. And they seemed fitting for for the case. That we were in. But there are a few pitfalls to these questions. And I actually now just ask two questions in these discovery calls. And I asked these two questions because they helped me understand the full context of their business really quickly. The couple of pitfalls you have about these sales questions are one, if your prospect is interviewing multiple agencies, for the same service, they're gonna get asked the same questions by everybody else. And so there is no contrast between your offering and their offering because those calls are going to be really handled in a very similar manner. So that's one pitfall is just lack of contrast in the competitive landscape. The other issue with these questions is that when you ask them, they become really easy segues into giving away our expertise for free. So I asked a question, like what's worked well, and what hasn't worked well, and I listen to the answer, and then I jump in with a solution based mindset. And I start giving away tips and tricks and suggestions and strategy for free in the sales call. So that's the second reason these kind of run into issues. The third is that it takes a lot of time and time is money and in the sales process. You do not have a client yet. And so by sitting down and asking all of these questions when you're on your own dime, essentially when you're on on free time, it really could take a call about an hour. And what I'd really like to do is get my discovery call process down into 30 minute timeframe so that I can spend 30 minutes talking to a prospect, up to 30 minutes creating a proposal and getting it delivered and hopefully close a client in a period of only about an hour. And then when I kick off the engagement, I can sit down and spend more time getting to know their business and asking them some of these additional questions. So that's why these questions sort of can fall apart. But what replaces them is really this idea of getting closer and getting to know our prospects business. And so the two things that I like to ask now are one How have you approached blank in the past? And then what would your business look like if and what they do is basically set us up to understand the two key dynamics we need to understand as we put together a solution for our clients and sell a service. When we ask how have you approached let's say SEO because that's kind of my area of expertise. In the past, you create an open door question that allows your prospect to answer and provide you all sorts of nuggets of information. You're going to hear what they've done in the world of SEO that hasn't worked, which is why they're chatting with you. Maybe they hired an agency who charged them a lot of money but didn't deliver results. Maybe they have been trained to handle SEO in house but they don't have the time or the expertise. Maybe they haven't done anything because they're just getting started. And they've always thought that maybe SEO is too expensive for them or not appropriate in their industry space, but they've heard good things and so they're reaching out. So when I asked this question, I get to know the pain. I also get to know other core dynamics just in the way somebody describes their their solute how they've approached SEO in the past. I get to understand kind of their knowledge level. Based on the language or the industry jargon they may use. I get to know their team a little bit they may reference other people or other agencies. And I can ask follow up questions to get to know more things like if they start talking about a past agency, I might ask them How long have you been working with that company? Because while they may be complaining with a previous SEO agency, maybe I find out they've been working with them for two months and I quickly see that the disconnected that they expected SEO to deliver initial, you know, immediate results. They're only two months in and so education is needed to help them understand how SEO works. So I want to know their pain and then I want to know their destination. And their destination isn't something like I want to rank number one for this keyword, or even necessarily I want to increase my traffic by 10% to my website, the destination if is more imaginative and real world and so if I ask a question like what would your business look like if and I say Google double the traffic to your website or you had a user friendly website, you know, with modern design, etc. So if I talked about what it would look like if they got this thing, then they can tell me what that would mean for them and what that will mean for them could be a very, you know, wide variety of things. It could mean things like oh, if we could increase, you know, our business we we could hire, you know, additional staff and and grow our team or we would be able to open the second location or I'd be able to take a vacation because I could hire an assistant or something like that. And so when we think about this, when we know the pain and we know the destination our job in the sales process is pretty simple. And it is to help them understand the dynamic of how our solution is going to help them move them from a place of pain to the destination or the goal that they're looking for. And so asking these questions, it's going to also help you make sure you match their destination with where you know where they're going. And so had we asked this, these questions and done a good job listening to that IT services customer, we could have started to poke and elicit some pain not just on the SEO side, but also on their website like how did you know how did you work with an agency? How old is your website? You know, what is the history here? To help putting them into a place where we'd be able to say to get to this destination of growing, you know reducing your dependence in their case on salespeople and increasing your presence on Google. We need not just traffic from Google but we also need a great website for them to land on. And so we need these two things not just one thing to get you to this destination. So this is my that's my first tip is ask the right questions. The second is we're going to talk about strategically packaging your services and this really hits home when you start to think about the idea of meeting the service to the customer's hierarchy of needs. So having the right service to offer to the client at the right time. And I think packaging is everything in our businesses. When we have well packaged services. They're easy to price, they're easy to market, they're easy to sell, and they're easy to deliver ultimately, it's a very scalable model. And sometimes we sort of rushed through the packaging piece of the plan and don't put enough thought into packaging. Other times we see people put a lot of thought into packaging and they go with basically a bundled service model. And so in an agency you know, you may sit down and start to do packaging and planning and say okay, I'm going to make a list of the key services that my agency offers and put them in one column like hosting maintenance content updates, accessibility SEO Google ads, and then I'm going to offer a good better best kind of matrix to this. And at different levels, different things are going to be included. And so we think about packaging in this bundled services offering and and when we do that, where if you work with clients in sort of one target market, you may be able to do a pretty good job putting together bundled services that really meet that markets niche so we work with a lot of folks in the travel space. And so we sort of know like what do they need and what would make a good good better best plan where we package up these services and and we can offer them these three tiers of service. And and this is packaging don't get me wrong, but it's not my favorite way to package services. And there are a couple of pitfalls. The first is that it simply doesn't feel good to pay for a service that you don't utilize. And this makes me think back to a time where I had just recently moved and I was getting a new internet plan for my house and I needed cable for the TV and Internet and and I didn't need a landline and yet the cable company was trying to cert sell me a package that included internet cable and the landline and they kept telling me that this was the most cost effective way to get the two things that I wanted, and that they understood that I was saying I didn't need a landline but that I in my head couldn't sort of detach myself from the fact that I didn't actually want a landline and so I didn't want to really want that plan even if the pricing was better than say if it had been unbundled. And and so it doesn't feel good to pay for something you don't need. And so if you're trying to sell a plan and and somebody wants SEO, but not Google ads, and you say okay, that's fine, that puts you still on our better plan here. There's still going to be a little nugget in their mind that makes them feel like Hey, I may be paying for a service and not capitalizing on it and throwing away money. So when you bundle services, it's harder to give people the right service at the right time because everything is packaged together.
The other kind of situation that we run into is accepting that the destination is different for every business. And this is something that Chris lemma really clearly articulated at recurring revenue retreat in his talk, and it really got me to thinking along the lines of this idea that we work with businesses in similar industry. In our case in travel we also work with like a lot of interior designers, and whether they're big travel companies or local businesses in the interior design space, even amongst their peers or their competition. Not every interior designer is trying to get to the same place with their website and their business. For some interior designers of website is simply a brochure. So they needed to have really good visual engagement present themselves nicely and that they're going to use it as a calling card when they have a prospect. Oftentimes a referred lead they want them to be able to go to their website and see say a portfolio of their recent projects. And so that is one destination is I just need a brochure website and so you know I need good design good copy great images, and and a great user friendly website with basic you know, WordPress care plan, and then a little basic maintenance to help me keep the photos up to date and the projects up to date, etc. That's sort of one destination. Another interior design company may, on the other hand, be really relying on their website to generate their leads. They're not getting referred leads from their clients. They need a website that does really well on Google, for instance. And so that website has a different destination. It's all about lead generation. It does need the other you know, components because it will act as a brochure, but it also has to be a big lead generator. And so if I create bundled services, and then make assumptions about my clients that they're all trying to get to the finish line, then that makes assumptions about about a business that may not be true. I think in our industry space, that's also quite true. I know at our agency website, we haven't done a lot of SEO because that's not actually how we get leads, which seems silly since we're an SEO company. But at the end of the day, all of our business for our agency comes from referred sources and so it acts as a brochure and it doesn't need the same amount of muscle or energy, as if we were leveraging our agency's website to be a lead generating machine and thus using our own skills and services with SEO. So bundling up your services kind of runs into some of these issues. And so instead I'm a big fan of the unbundle when it comes to creating a packaging framework. And regardless of what services you offer, you can basically classify them all into three phases. And that is that our projects start with a planning phase, then they move into a building phase and then they have a maintain and grow phase. It's this maintain and grow phase that is your recurring revenue base, because you're planning your build, or most likely one time services, although you could create this flow and still have everything on a monthly retainer, but that whether it's web design or SEO or Google ads or email marketing, there's something around strategy. There's something around getting the heavy lifting done, and then you're ready to kind of maintain and grow whatever it is that you've built. And so if we step back and look at our services in that framework, we can start to come up with kind of what that packaging model looks like. And so when we're looking at web design, we look at the planning phase as being paid discovery. Then we look at there being a phase of designing and building the new website. And then we look at things like hosting and maintenance as being the recurring revenue component of this trajectory. And we can package our services under these three umbrellas for this and keep them somewhat ala carte, essentially, from SEO Services packaging, which also begins with essentially paid discovery, which is the SEO assessment then moves into a setup where we actually build the foundation in the SEO work. And then we move into that monthly management and that's where we grow our MRR. And here's just one last example. And that is within Google ads. We can also have that three phased model where we start with Google Ads strategy, then we do a setup and then we start managing that ad spend on a monthly basis. And so if all of our packaging and pricing can fall under this model, then I can put together essentially a services packaging plan that's going to allow me to deliver the right service at the right price at the right time to customers. It's going to get customers to their destination and then it's also going to grow that monthly recurring revenue or MRR for the years to come. And and it still maintains scalability because it's a little bit plug and play. You can pull in the right service at the right time. And I know in our agency, we use a proposal software called proposal fi and so we have all of the kind of component parts to pull together a kind of a custom plan for our customer. But following all of the building blocks that are fully scalable, fully priced out and ready to rock and roll when it comes to the delivery. Along the way here you may be saying yourself, well this is great, but I can't do all of these services. It's too much you know, you may be a one one person agency or have a small team and you may be saying to yourself, Okay, I am not looking to offer I have a full service offering. And so when I put together my packaging, what do I do when a client needs help with, you know this to get them from their point of pain to their destination, and I don't offer that service. And at our agency we only offer SEO and Google Ads services. So we're super narrow and specific. And the way that we've been able to offer just two services, but still be a close partner and being close with our clients and help them get a full service offering is basically by one creating partnerships. So if you don't offer something being able to refer out that service to somebody who does so that you can solve that piece of the puzzle while you still deliver the service that you offer. Partnerships are great too, because when I was talking about that referred leads, a lot of our best clients come from those partnerships, basically being able to exchange leads and say hey, this client or this prospect came to us but really they need you first. Can you go help them with XY and Z and then we'll be ready with ad services or SEO Services down the road. The other as you can provide white labeled services. So in the context of SEO white label services can come with their challenges because you really have to be in close with the client to impact their results. But Google ads for instance, is the type of service that can be more readily white labeled same with social media. And then lastly, you can say no to a lead when you get to know that pain and destination and you haven't invested a ton of your time because you've just had this quick kind of discovery call. You can then kind of match their pain and goal with your services offering and determine if it's a good fit. And if it's not a good fit, walk away early so that you don't get in the trap of basically providing services to a client where the Fit isn't really there because that ultimately only usually grows your recurring revenue for a very short period of time before one of the two entities decides to move on. And that brings me to my third tip and that is to speak up early and often about concerns so early and often. And the example I gave you would have been during the discovery call with a statement as bold as I hear that you need to you know, get more visibility on Google and I absolutely agree with that. You know, I do have concerns about you know, the user experience once they get to your website, and in the lack of usability etc. Because we don't want just quality traffic. We also want them to become your customers and to fill out your contact form for instance. So when we speak up early and often with concerns, we preserve our recurring revenue because we don't lose clients and and we get the right clients to stay. And so within our agency, we kind of tried to remember what are those times that we need to reach out? And the first is that wrong service and wrong time dynamic that we've talked quite a bit about the other times that are good to reach out or when we're not seeing the expected initial results. So we you know, develop a plan and we take action and we get going and then we see hey, we're two months into your SEO campaign or two months into your Google ads campaign and we're not seeing the volume or the quality of traffic. We were looking for. That's a great time to reach out. You may be tempted to brush something like that under the rug and kind of cross your fingers that Oh, in month three or month four. It's things will pick up but your client builds trust in times of growth and positivity and then also in times where things are down or we don't see the expected initial results. Because what they want more than anything is a is a partnership and they want to be kept in the loop. And so if you're running into a challenge, or a place where you think the client is going to fire you a few months down the line because things aren't accelerating the way they should or the way you predicted. You can basically kind of very, very much build their trust by saying hey, we've gotten in here and we've run into you know, I'm disappointed we're not seeing the initial results, etc.
The next time to reach out is when clients become unresponsive to emails, especially if they were responsive to emails and then they go kind of radio silent or when they're not paying invoices on time. These are kind of the big flags that I just kind of keep it like a little post it note on the side of my desk to remind myself like hey, these flags are the times to reach out. And when I reach out I don't want to assume the why I don't know about you but every time a client goes radio silent, I think the worst I'm like, Oh, they must be looking for other SEO services providers. They haven't approved that blog post that we sent them last month, or hey, they're really busy, and that's why they haven't approved the blog post or whatever it might be. I make assumptions as to why something hasn't happened instead of asking them questions and if I just pick up the phone and I ask a client, hey, you've always, you know been really quick to say pay your invoices and we have to past due invoices. Am I sending them to the right person or whatever, you're gonna get them to open up and say, Oh, they need to go to somewhere else. We're having cashflow issues or things have just been really busy and I'm sorry we haven't gotten you paid, and then come up with a solution. Maybe like automatic drafts and payments. Same goes with like blog posts, if you're sending them content for approval, and they're not giving you the approval. They might be busy. They may not like the copy. They might feel like it still takes them a lot of time to review it. Or maybe they just missed your email and they're not very good at email. So there's a lot of reasons why you want to basically kind of just reach out and ask questions that are open ended to see what they're experiencing. I even see this sometimes when I ask them for feedback on results. I can say we're three or four months into the campaign and I wanted to get your feedback on how things are going on your end. So I'm not coming in and saying oh, I feel a little disappointed that things aren't growing as quickly as I thought they would, or whatever it might be. I'm not planting that seed in their head instead I'm just asking them hey, we're we're at this benchmark. How are things going on your end? And you may hear them say business has never been better. And we're really enjoying working with you and say, wow, that's interesting. I'm not seeing business not being you know, being so up when I look at Google Analytics, but there is a disconnect sometimes between the real world of how business is operating and what we see in terms of lead generation for instance, and analytics. So don't assume ask questions and then the other big one is to change the outreach method if you've been emailing people and not hearing from them, emailing them one more time with like still haven't heard from you do you have time for a call? It's probably not going to like generate the response you need. And so change your outreach methods and just simply pick up the phone because that'll basically kind of spark in the client like, Hey, this is a change and how this agency has been interacting with me and then we can work through whatever the challenges you may be seeing are facing. The other thing I kind of already touched on was this idea of not hiding down results. And so asking questions about their real world business results can be really impactful. And know that especially when it comes to recurring services. What a business is looking for is that you are coming alongside their effort that you are providing strategy and consulting, that you're helping them understand their marketing and their performance. They're not necessarily looking for a results guarantee because there are things outside of your control they can you know in the travel space, demand for travel can go up and down the airline prices last summer were really expensive. So people flew last and some of our clients had a down summer. You know, I can't really control that external factor. All I can control or influence is their visibility on Google. And so that partnership can really come in those times where things aren't all all perfect, because you really get to know each other and they get to see the quality of the partnership that you're providing so this kind of all falls under this idea of building a recurring revenue engine for your agency and it starts by asking the right questions. Then it moves into strategically packaging your services. And then finally speaking up early and often about concerns and if you do these three things against this backdrop of serving clients the right service at the right time, you will naturally watch your recurring revenue grow and your attrition will be super low. So that is the kind of formal presentation here and I'm happy to answer questions. I'm also going to leave you here with my email address. You're welcome to reach out over email as well with any questions you might have in the coming days and weeks. And and thanks so much for being here.
Very good. Thanks, Lindsay. It's a really interesting approach. To thinking about creating and packaging services. And let me just invite everybody. There's a question there in the q&a. But if you have a question you haven't asked yet, please pop up in the zoom q&a and ask that question. Now. Before we get to that question, hopefully some others, Lindsey, we talked at the very beginning here a little bit about Pathfinder, SEO and how you work with agencies to help them provide SEO Services. speak just a little bit more about that and how an agency owner like many of the folks are in the audience might add SEO services to their offerings to increase their monthly revenue.
Awesome. So at Pathfinder, if you're just getting started adding SEO services to your offering, then within our software, you'd want to start within sort of the business resources and training side of things because we're going to walk you through how to package price market and sell SEO Services. Basically that business development work that has to come before you get your first SEO client. And we have worksheets and templates and recordings to basically accelerate that process for you, so that you don't have to learn on the job, which is how most of us have have, you know, built out different services offerings. In the past. So that's kind of step one, and then we move you in towards building your SEO skill set. And so we all come with a different comfort level with the actual delivery of the service. And if SEO is still something that maybe you don't feel like an expert in, we will basically kind of help walk you through via our checklists, the process of delivering the service so it breaks everything down into a step by step lesson that you can follow or that you could have a junior team member follow if you have have a group and and then once you've we've kind of practice your SEO skill set and you've built out your your services delivery, you're going to start landing your first real clients, and that's where the fun comes in. You're adding more campaigns and and you've got everything up and running. And so once you get into that phase with the game, you'll be relying on the Pathfinder tool set to help you deliver this service. So we have white label SEO reports that are super simple, and a lot of lessons on how to deliver monthly SEO services and what's included there so that you can keep essentially delivering value to your clients all along the way. There are group Office Hours coaching sessions and workshops, something offered almost every day so that every time you have a question or you just want to learn from others, you're able to you're able to just jump right into one of those sessions and and kind of get unstuck or get that confidence boost you need to realize that for most people in this room, you're probably already offering SEO services and just not getting paid for them. Because SEO is real world marketing. It's very much you know, helping clients with great user experience and great design with great content and the icing on the cake or kind of sometimes the new skill set is what do we do in the world of helping them with Link Building and Google Maps and things like that?
Yeah, very good. So take a look there at Pathfinder SEO folks, there is a flash sale going on right now that you'll see the banner across the top of the screen. And if you're watching this on a replay, you can email Lindsey right there at her email address and she had made the deal may not be as good as the flash sale but she'll she'll hook you up with something she
said yeah, absolutely. And and thanks for everyone with all their their thumbs up and plus ones. We so we so appreciate that. And for us, the best part of the best part of Pathfinder is that we basically get to work with our friends in the agency space. So we are agency owners as well and and we're all learning and growing together and and that's always been the best part of Pathfinder. Yeah,
absolutely. So one more thing before we get to the q&a, and that is Lindsay once again you'll be with us for two SEO courses later this year, both in July and August. These are not on our schedule yet, but there'll be the last week of July and the last week of August. As usual here on solid Academy. It's the last Tuesday Wednesday of each month. We do a four hour course over two days on a topic that's very relevant to those of us that are building and managing sites for clients and that it's a little different approach this year than we've done in the past. For a few years. We've done kind of an SEO basics course the first month, and then a more advanced SEO. In this this time we're actually going to assume some basic SEO knowledge and if you don't have that you can go back and rewatch one of the basic courses from that years past. Those things are pretty much the same. But we're going to be focusing in on SEO advanced in the business of SEO. I tell us a little bit about that. That's upcoming here.
So I'm really excited about this year's training. And as you mentioned, we're going to move away from the basics and we'll still have basically two different sessions. The first one is going to be what we're calling advanced SEO, but really isn't any like advanced tricks like you might your mind your mind might not go towards something like oh, we're gonna learn how to customize schema on a WooCommerce site or do whatever, you know, kind of techie more advanced SEO skill. But what we're actually going to do is go back to the beginning and really look at strategy. How do you invest your time and your energy, whether it's on your website or your clients website for impact, and you do that by being really strategic and focused. And so the advanced course is going to be a lot of of strategic thinking and planning and, and there's going to be everything you need to to kind of raise the bar or the level of the SEO service that you're providing away from just basic I know how to do keyword research and I know XML sitemaps but raise it up a notch in terms of the strategy strategic thought and planning, which generally speaking also improves the the the ultimate results for your clients. So that'll be a really fun today's session. And then the following month we're going to move into the business side of things. So we're gonna talk about packaging, pricing, marketing and selling SEO services all have worksheets for you for every step along the way, but this will be a little bit of a hey, we all know sometimes and Nathan you always say this the best like we need to work on our business, not just in our business. And that second session is going to be all about working on our business actually doing the work to get the business planning in place so that we can sell SEO services to our clients.
Yeah, very good. So that's coming up by advanced SEO was August 30, or pardon me July 30, and 31st with the business of SEO coming up on August 27 and 28th. Those courses are available for solid Academy members and membership is free if you have any of the solid suite packages. Alright folks, let's turn our way over here to the q&a. Lots of great questions here. First of all, from an anonymous attendee, how do you guide a client to the right ROI when they want to do both SEO and organic SEO and Google ads?
Finding ROI return on investment for clients can be the is probably the biggest challenge to offering SEO and Google Ads services. And the challenge can come from a couple of scenarios. The first scenario is that our customers don't always know their business as well as they need to. And so you know, we'll have in a sales call or just early kickoff call with somebody will say something like, Okay, I managed IT services company, what's the value of a contact form on your website and we think like, hey, they're savvy business people, and they literally can't tell us if it's $10 100 or 1000. You know, and so you work with businesses that sometimes don't know their own business well enough to even be able to calculate the return on the services you're providing. And so we start by unearthing basic data and we can do that with Google Analytics things like how many you know, clicks on the phone call button on your website, are you getting each month? How many forms are you getting, etc, we can track that and analytics. And then we can work with clients to start to box that in and get a sense of what is the value of a lead to their business. And so it might take us several months to determine the actual return on investment from the service we're providing. And then we can start to look at it through the lens. Is this valuable to you? And what is you know, where should we be investing more and where should we be investing less? With Google ads? Things are a little more immediate, because it's sort of value has to stand up pretty quickly because the minute you turn off the ads, the visibility on Google goes away. And so the pressure is on with Google ads and ROI a little bit more than it is with SEO. Because with SEO, we know that the value of the blog post I wrote for you this month is actually not going to be realized until like It's like realized over the period of the next five years. And so how much time and energy do you want to put into trying to monetize what that value is and what that return is? And how much do you want me just writing the next really good blog post and building that engine and so with SEO, it can be a bit more challenging. And then I'll kind of preface over the top of all of this, I think, in an era where there are so many touchpoints of how we acquire new customers. pinpointing the success of an individual marketing channel and putting $1 value on the return is so hard and when I think about our marketing at Pathfinder, we go to conferences and events. So we have like travel expenses and sponsorship. We run Google ads, we invest in SEO, we blog. We invest in email marketing, we create partnerships. When we look at our new customers. We can almost never pinpoint Oh, that was a Google ads lead or that that will Good thing we wrote that blog post because it's all of those things together that are leading to better results. And in the move that we're the world we're heading into with Google in particular, have potentially more what they call zero click Results. People are just getting their results on Google and they're not even clicking always to the website, it becomes even harder to get that attribution. And so yes, we care about return on investment. We want to work with our clients to understand their numbers. But we also have to accept some levels of imperfection because we're not going to have a precise like, hey, if we you know, we've seen clients, they turn off their ads, and then they're like, but now we're not getting leads out of organic, social or whatever you're like, Well, I think it was all working together in a way you didn't understand. Yeah,
it's a great answer. So moving into this, this next era that you just started to describe which, you know, sometimes Google is just giving us the results, more and more on seeing barred results at the top of my Google search, rather than what I'm expecting to see, you know, just the regular SERPs. Craig is asking some people claim that AI is going to destroy SEO or completely change it. What do you think? So
this is the time of year where literally if you go back in the archives of blogs, you will see is SEO gonna die in 2014? Is SEO gonna die in 2015? How about 2016 2019 This has been a question across all of Google's history and ASIO that everybody has been asking is like, when is it going to die? And like every year, I basically say it's not going to die. It's going to evolve and change. And when I really look at that even, you know, it makes you feel like oh, well then that means everything I learned last year I have to throw out but that's not really the case. A lot of times everything just kind of builds and where you start to invest your time and your energy just shifts a little bit. And you start to see more value out of some actions and less value out of other actions. And so I don't think SEO is going to die. Just like I don't think websites are going to become obsolete. And what I think is that this is a great opportunity time to help your clients navigate this generative AI experience. And what does it mean for their business to make predictions and to help them move through into this world and maintain what really matters to them? Which is sales revenue, whatever it is that their website does, and it's a great time to create that partnership. So I do have on our website, a webinar, I think it's next week, SEO in 2024. And we are going to dive much more heavily into this kind of brief answer is No I don't think SEO is gonna die. And so if you're interested, this will be a great session to take a deeper dive and unpack kind of what what we're seeing change and and how we're adapting our strategies accordingly. Very
good. I just dropped that link in the chat. For anyone that would like to take a look at the upcoming training videos there on Pathfinder. Let's see. I know. I know you have a hard stop at the top of the hour, Lindsey. So let's let's move into rapid fire q&a Here. Paul is asking, should you have a packages page on your agency website? Or should you keep that to yourself?
That's like the big debatable question should you put your pricing etc. Ultimately at our agency, we decided to not go with our packages on our website. We literally go this is our our plan this is our build. And this is our monthly it's really high level. And it does not have checklists and boxes and all sorts of complexity. Because ultimately we always speak with clients first. And then I have for our agency like a SEO Services deck. It's a PDF and that PDF is the thing that has some pricing and the packaging and more detail and what I walk them through sometimes in that discovery call and and so personally, I keep the packaging a little private so our competition doesn't see it. But then also I don't know how much our clients or prospects could even understand it. It may overwhelm them more than impressed them. So that's our opinion, but we've seen people you know, do a nice job doing their packaging on their sites too.
Yeah, that's a great answer. Question from Paul prefaced by, this is a terrible question. But I'm going to ask anyway, what is the lowest price SEO package that an agency could charge? And what would it look like?
Good question. So our lowest price package is SEO maintenance for local businesses, and it's priced at $425 a month and I bet if you looked in our accounting, you'd find a few legacy clients that we didn't even get up to that amount. And I look at that as providing two to three ish hours of service a month, they get a monthly report, and they mostly get local SEO services. So we keep an eye on their Google Maps listing. And we do just small little tweaks to kind of try to keep their presence strong and we provide them with eyes and ears on the ground. We don't you know, write new blog posts, we don't do heavy lifting. But that for us is is the lowest price point. And that can go further for clients if they're willing to put in some elbow grease. So that local business client is going to do copywriting and they're going to like we tell them the strategy and they're actually going to blog and we're going to meet once a quarter and make sure we've got a plan. They could get results better than plant people on our biggest plans, because they're coming alongside the effort. So you have to kind of determine with a client like what their desired results are, how competitive their industry spaces, but then also how much will they participate and if they're budget minded and they're willing to participate, they could get a ton out of your service.
Yeah, very good. Let's see how so let's say you are a web agency. You got clients on a monthly website care plan. How would you, let's say their client's budget is too low for SEO, how would you decline them that service while not losing them on the care plan?
Yeah, so if their monthly services is too low for SEO than they should still need to they have to understand that the value that the care plan provides and the necessity that you know, it is like you shouldn't even have a website without a care plan. They need to be educated in that regard. And you can let them know that while their budget may not allow them to invest in SEO right now. Maybe as part of your care plan, you meet with them once a quarter and you kind of do strategy and maybe on those calls. You are an SEO expert, you can give them some SEO nuggets of things they can be doing so maybe you can give them you know, a little bit of extra value essentially saying hey, you're not on an SEO plan. But, you know, we'll we'll in these calls, talk a little bit about SEO, etc. So I think a big part of it is just making sure they understand the hierarchy of needs, and that the biggest thing is that their site is safe, secure, live, etc.
Yeah. Ben would like to know, do you think it's always bad to have a good better best option column typical pricing strategy? Or is it is it always bad to have that setup? So
no, and I think I've probably glossed over this one too quickly. Because this to me, the good better best is a great framework, because it gives people choice. And so within our monthly SEO Services plans, that's exactly how we have it structured is three different levels of service. And and there's good better best what we try to avoid is bundling, unlike services, so keeping hosting separate from SEO. And so in this context, it's the bundling of the service that makes the good, better, best plan and in our experience, run into some roadblocks. But within your monthly services offering or within you know, your setup, you may have choices for different levels, but it's for like services. So, you know, it's me saying okay, our monthly SEO good plan includes reporting, a phone call once a quarter and ongoing SEO maintenance. And then our better plan also includes us writing a blog post for you. When we have that kind of frame where everything's in one service line, then I think the good better best plan works if that makes sense.
Yeah, that yeah, that that's good. Let's see question from Jean Jean has a client that's focused on marketing by Facebook ads. His website is new, but designed by an old redundant meaning. Yes, difficult current website, trying to encourage the client to hire a copywriter to rewrite the content because it's sparse. You have something I can take to him about this but the content is important when PPC ads are used.
So yeah, content is a rising tide that lifts all boats. I don't have a resource to just like toss it in the chat. But it's a rising tide that lifts all boats. It's not just about SEO, and that Facebook and Google their algorithms also and their ad platforms also care about the quality of the content on the website. So look up things like quality score, and Google ads, etc. To look for some resources online that will help support up this idea. You've got to have good copy as like the basics before you start spending money on any kind of ads. Yeah,
very good. Yeah. So a lot of conversation about AI today, and let me just mention that we did just add our premium course for February for our members. And that's going to be Maddie Asman coming back to talk with us about website content. And she'll be spending a lot of time on AI not only the ethics of AI copywriting but also how to utilize it you know, for good and not for evil. So a lot of good information coming up on that in our course next month here on solid Academy. There's one final question lingering about when this flash sale ends and that looks like right there on the screen is January the 20th 25% off for six months. Pretty good deal. Awesome. Lindsay, give us give us your last thoughts as we're starting to wrap up here.
The last thought is that it's all about recurring revenue. And when we look at agencies that that are growing and scaling and having strong profit margins, a lot of it comes from being able to sleep better at night knowing that payroll and everything is covered by that recurring revenue. And so if as agency owners we all know one number about our business, I think it should be what percent of your income is recurring revenue. And it's not so much that there's a certain number you have to get to but that you kind of have to decide within your agency what that percentage target is, and and work to grow it.
Yeah, very good. Well, thanks again, Lindsey. As always, for your wisdom on all these things, really good thoughts today. Thank you all for being with us as well. Tomorrow is office hours for solid Academy Premium members and our newsletter. At WordPress news roundup is coming up on Tuesday. free for everybody. So thanks again for spending an hour with us to unpack this great concept. Thank you again, Lindsey. And we'll see y'all next time here on solid Academy where we go further together.