Business Podcasts | How to Create a Thriving Business That Is Not Dysfunctional + 10 Core Repeatable Actionable Processes That Will Grow Your Business Today!!! + Search Engine Optimization 101 with the God-Father of SEO Bruce Clay

Audio Transcription

I’m Jerry from Jerry’s Landscape. We do irrigation, tree removal, landscaping. We pretty much do it all. You know, I can landscape the heck out of a property. That’s never really been a problem for me. I’ve got to go. I’ve had a tough time with accounting, with my bookkeeping, but then I came up with this amazing system that has really been a game changer for me. This side of the dash here, this is all the invoices. This side of the dash is going to be expenses. Then I’ve got any miscellaneous receipts or anything like that, that goes in the back seat. Then of course anything tax related. You know, I don’t even know what half that stuff is. But anything from IHRS, that’s going to go right here on the passenger side floorboard. I’ve even got a place for customer complaints. Right out here. I’m kidding actually it’s not really the best to even open the windows at all. Blow everything around. Is it a perfect system? No. I can’t use the defrost in my truck which sucks. You know having passengers that doesn’t always work out so well. But it’s a small price to pay. We’re meticulous. Every transaction matters. Period. Okay? I mean, the system, that’s what I love about it. It’s virtually foolproof. Oh. Whoa, man. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you. And they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zunich. men, eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. on the top, teaching you the systems to get what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s why I’m alive. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi. It’s C and Z up on your radio. And now 3, 2, 1, here we go. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we Yes, yes, and yes! Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we are talking about specifically this concept of how to not drift. Napoleon Hill, the bestselling author of Think and Grow Rich, wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich, and that book absolutely changed my life. And I named my son after the author. The book is called Think and Grow Rich, and in the book he writes here, drifting without Drifting without aim or purpose is the first cause of failure. So I want to ask you this, Jordan, what does that mean to you? You’re a business consultant. You work up here. You help clients grow their companies. When you think about the business owners you work with and you think about this concept of drifting without aim or purpose is the first cause of failure, how does that apply to the listeners out there? Well, the listeners or the business owners? The business owners. The business owners. So, if they don’t have a specific goal, maybe it’s like a revenue goal, maybe it’s like a second crew. A lot of times if they don’t have a specific goal, they don’t know what to work towards. Okay, so let’s do an example. Tomorrow is a Sunday. day and my wife and I we like to attend church at Sheridan Church. And so if we cannot be there physically, then we like to listen to the church. Now the church starts at 9, so tomorrow in particular we have to be out of town. So I have to be on the road at 8.30am and the church service starts at 9 and I want to listen to the church service at nine. So what do I have to do at nine in order to make sure I don’t miss that show? Well, I have to then not listen to something else. And I know it seems obvious, but I think a lot of times people don’t write stuff down. Oh yeah. And so it kind of drifts. And so we’re going to put a lot of meat on the bone here and really focus on the things needed to grow a business. And we’re going to focus on a success story that I’m going to put on today’s show. So if anybody out there, if you wanna hear how this, learning these, how to implement these key revenue producing activities can change your business and change your life, on part two of today’s show, we’re gonna have a testimonial so you can hear from this client that’s actually done it. Okay, so we’re now gonna focus on this particular client. So she’s a young woman, we’ve helped her to grow her business dramatically, and it’s an eyelash extension company. So I’m gonna walk you through all the things that she has to do every week, Jordan, and then we’ll kind of keep track of these things, okay? This is like the top 10 of what she has to do every week. So one, is she has to gather, she has to do this every single week. She has to gather objective Google reviews every single week from her clients. That has to happen every single week. Now, then she has to gather objective video reviews every single week, objective video reviews from her clients. Now, why for a eyelash extension business, in this particular case, it’s called Flutter, you can look it up, folks. We’ve helped this woman to grow her business dramatically. I mean, we’re talking to businesses four times larger now than it was when we first started working with her. We’ve worked with her for years. Why does she have to gather Google reviews from her clients and gather objective video reviews from her clients? Well, one, Google reviews, everyone goes to Google for any business, because one, they want to see it, because that’s where everything is, hours, location, reviews, reviews, reviews. So one is Google reviews. She has to go get those, because that’s what people look at right there. And then video reviews, that’s important because we’re social creatures. You know, we like, we can gauge sincerity if we see somebody. Yeah, we can read it and it sounds good and we’re like, oh, that sounds right. But if we see somebody, one, we can gauge their facial expressions for sincerity. Do they mean it? Yeah. How they mean it. And for this example, this is, they can see the results on the person. So we have, every week she has to gather Google reviews from her clients, objective Google reviews. She has to gather objective video reviews from her clients. Now, every single week, this is a real company called Flutter, which we’ve helped to grow dramatically. You’re going to see the owner of this company here in just a minute is sharing her story with you so you can see that she’s a real person. She has to conduct the group interview. Okay? So conduct the group interview. Conduct the weekly group interview. And someone says, I don’t know what the weekly group interview is. Every week, if you own a business, you need to interview potential candidates for job positions. And, with her business with multiple locations, they apply eyelash extensions, why does she have to do the group interview every week, even when she’s fully staffed? Because you never know, and this goes for any business, you never know what’s going to happen. Your operations manager, your receptionist for over six years, all of a sudden they get an offer they can’t refuse and boom, they’re gone. If you’re not constantly looking for, if you’re not constantly hiring, you’re going to be in a tough spot whenever that happens to you. So in every single week she has to do this. Activity three, she has to conduct the weekly group interview. Now activity number four, she has to weekly, she has to write original HTML content to optimize her website. And the great thing that we do for her is we do the search engine optimization for her. So she doesn’t have to do it. Now for any of our listeners out there, if you want to become top in Google, we’ll teach you how to do that. And on part three of today’s show, I’m going to do an in-depth training on how to optimize a website so you can learn about that. And we also teach that in our in-person, two-day interactive business workshops, which, again, folks, you’re invited to attend. We do them every two months. You can request tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com. But we have to write content every week for her website. Now activity number five, activity number five, this is stuff that we do a lot of this for her, but this is stuff that has to happen. We have to pull and track the weekly stats. We have to pull the weekly statistics now, this is the very important Because when you look at her tracking sheet It’s going to show you how many first-time customers came in where those customers came in how much money we she was spending on ads Where the leads came from how many new job candidates applied? How many Google reviews she has how many video reviews she has how much her weekly sales? Were how much her weekly profit was what her expenses are so every week why every week does she have to pull the weekly? Tracking statistics because you got to know what’s going on in your business You you measure what you treasure if you don’t know one how many sales you got to what your expenses were Then three you won’t even know if you’re making a profit Okay, now again. I’m gonna speak in general terms because I don’t know when our listeners are going to hear today’s show. They could hear this show today, they might hear it years later, I don’t know. But we have conferences we do. We do a conference every two months. Every two months we do a conference. And I’ve been doing it since 2005. It’s every two months. It’s not shocking. Sometimes I might do once a month if we’re really busy for certain times of the year, but it’s always at least six of them a year. And every single day before I leave the office, I ask you how many tickets did we sell? So the last day that you were selling tickets, the last day, how many tickets did you sell that day? Do you remember? 30. 30. But I ask you every single day. I’m like, hey, how many tickets did we sell that day? Every day I ask you this question. And every single morning, we go over our tracking sheet of where the leads came from. And it’s every day. So now activity, this is again, activity number six. We have to have a daily huddle. Every day a huddle. Now what’s a huddle? A huddle is where you make sure that your team is on the right path. So right now, for this particular conference that we have coming up, I think we just hit 3,900 tickets, I think. Yeah, I think we’re over, but… Okay. Yeah. And so we only have a certain number of tickets left. So you do the math and that’s how we know, okay, we only have 370 tickets left, or whatever the number is. For our business conferences, I like to keep them 100 people or less, but for our December conference, I don’t mind making that a little bigger of a conference. And so for the December conference, we’ll typically be at a higher accepted number of people that we’ll sell tickets to. We’ll usually be in the 300 realm or something. But again, why do I, every single week, every single day actually, do a huddle? Every single day. Because you have to make sure that we are on track to hit that goal, to hit that number, to fill it up. And you’ve said things since you’ve worked here, which are things that make sense. You’ve said, hey, I don’t know if you saw this, but this thing isn’t working. We need to fix that on the website. Or hey, by the way, there’s a customer service question. Or there’s a lot of things that you’ll ask me, and that huddle is a great time to do that. Now, activity number seven, I’m just walking you through the 10 things we had to do to grow this particular business. We have to, every week, verify that the online ads are working. We have to verify that the online ads are working. Now why would we have to verify every single week that the online advertisements are working, Jordan? Why can’t we just set it and forget it? Because you have to assume that everything, you have to assume that things don’t work. It’s the same reason you track. You have to like pay attention to things. Now the next thing we have to do is we have to schedule time for weekly staff training? You know, for our haircut chain, Elephant in the Room, or in this particular case, for the eyelash extension business, why do we have to block out time for training every single week? Because you have to train. I don’t know why I’m sounding like a robot. You have to train your people. You have to. You have to. No, but I mean this. This is the stuff behind the stuff. Nobody wants to talk about this stuff, but this is the stuff that grows the company. Yeah. So every single week, every single week we schedule, this is big, we conduct our weekly call slash, I’d say call recording slash sales meeting. Why every single week do we actually have a call recording slash sales meeting every week where we listen to the calls every single week Tuesday at 7 a.m.? For quality control. This is huge because a lot of businesses don’t want to do this so the fact that she does this is and her business has grown. You have to conduct this this meeting this weekly call recording sales meeting to give to listen to the calls so everyone can see you can give feedback on them so everyone who does the calls lives listening so if one person maybe they weren’t the one on the call, but they hear it and they’re like, oh, okay, yeah, that’s, I do that too. I can do that better. Now, activity number 10, we have to schedule a weekly all-staff meeting. It has to, every week we have to have an all-staff meeting. Every week? Yeah. Why do we have to, every single week, have an all-staff meeting? Especially, by the way, if you’re a very small company, you have to do this. If you have like five employees or less, if you have 50 employees or more, you have to do it. Why do you have to have a weekly staff meeting? Because it’s quality control. You’ve got to make sure that your team, one, is doing what they should be doing, and two, that they’re on task. This also is a good way to find out if any of your team needs to be replaced. Okay, so we go over this. Again, on part two of today’s show, I’m going to introduce you to Kandra, and you can hear her success story. I think it is remarkable. I mean, when you think about it, the fact that according to Inc. Magazine, 96% of businesses fail. I think that’s a pretty awesome thing that she’s grown her business dramatically. And if you look at the lady, she’s not a super big person. I mean, physically, she’s not like a overwhelming presence at seven foot two or something. Um, age wise, she’s not in her late forties, late fifties, late sixties, nor was she born yesterday. She’s in her mid-20s. Financially, she took herself out of poverty. She grew her business, even though she was a single mom, that’s when she chose to start growing the company. Inc. Magazine says that 96% of businesses fail, yet she grew her company from 14 employees to 40 employees while being a single mom, while starting the whole thing without a big budget. And so it is possible, but I think everybody thinks that the time will never be just right. So I go back to where we started here. Napoleon Hill says, drifting without aim or purpose is the first cause of failure. And I just believe there’s somebody out there that needs to hear that idea. You’ve got to get up every day and you’ve got to make a plan. So tomorrow is Sunday. I’ll be out of town. Nine o’clock I’ll be turning on the Jackson Lawmire’s sermon. And approximately at 11.30 I’ll be meeting somebody for a meeting that I have to have this Sunday. Then at one o’clock I’ll have another meeting on Sunday. And someone says, I thought you take Sundays off. I do, but I was in New York and so I got back from New York. So my Sunday, now the things I normally do on a Monday has become my Sunday, and so I’ve got to get caught up there. And so I’ve got a very specific day laid out for this Sunday. So I’ll be listening to Jackson’s sermon on Sunday at 9. Then I’ll be having this meeting. Then I’ll have another meeting. I have, I think, four or five meetings all on Sunday. And then today, my daughters, they had their birthday. My twins had their birthday. And so we’re having a big birthday party for them and we got blocked in the schedule. And I just think if you’re out there today, I know this, if you’re out there listening today and you are drifting around and you don’t feel like you’re getting any momentum in your life, it’s because you’re not taking the time needed to schedule and to intentionally design your day. And so I’m walking you through the 10 key revenue producing activities used. uh… key revenue-producing activities used uh… these are two of these are ten you’re not all of them but it’s ten of the key revenue-producing activities used to grow and i last extension business but that’s not all of them but everything that we went over has to be in the calendar so the three tools you need he needed to do less but you just went over the items to your company calendar you’re gonna have to use a calendar to schedule that which matters. You need a to-do list, you need a calendar, and step three, you’ve got to block out time to organize your day. And that’s how it all works. So without any further ado, we’re going to end this section with a boom, and then we’re moving on to part two where you can hear the Kandra Shespansky success story, and then part three we’re going to teach you how to optimize a website. So are you prepared? Oh yeah. Here we go. Three, two, one, boom! What boom? All right shots. We got three people in a very small space here in the studio shot introduces to today’s guest there, sir Okay, so this is Kendra Sapansky and it’s quite a last name folks. Yeah, and we’re hockey So we were going over some of the stats before and she owns an eyelash extension salon What’s the web address where I can go pull it up here. It is, there’s two. Which one are we going to? She has the extensionist, which is T-H-E, and then X, tensionist. Tensionist. Yep. Got it. Okay. That’s right. There we are. Okay, got it. Okay, so, and what are the services that you all provide here? Mainly just eyelash extensions. Eyelash extensions. We do other stuff, but that’s been the main thing for years. And then we started adding things like permanent makeup, brow stuff. And how long have we worked with you? How long have we had the opportunity to work with you? Since 2019. So tell us what kind of growth have you had from 2019 versus now we’re in 2022? So 2019 it was 880. Yeah. Okay. And then what’d you get to this year or 2021, I guess? 2021. It was like nine. Oh, one point four. One point four. One point four. Okay. And when we work with a lot of clients, a lot of clients, if you’re listening today, what we want to do is we want to help you grow your company. And so I want to walk you through the process of how to grow a company because a lot of people watching go. I want to grow my company. It’s kind of a big, vague idea, but I want to dial into the specifics of what we’ve had to do to grow the business and what we’re doing moving forward here. So first off, we started working with you. You’ve always had a product that people love. I mean, is that an accurate statement? People love it, I think. So we’ve had to do is build the online reputation so that people that don’t know about your business who haven’t been in the business, they can hear about it with before that they kind of go online and build an online opinion about your business before they come in. How have you been doing on gathering objective Google reviews? Has that been something you guys have been hammering on there, Kendra? How have you been doing on that? Every stinking week she hits the key performance indicator at each one of her locations. We have nailed that. Like they just do it now. It’s awesome. Okay, so step one for the online reputation. There’s a lot of detail. Have you guys gotten into video reviews yet? Yeah. Oh, they have an ungodly amount of them. It’s ridiculous. They’re on the website. Yeah, if you go to the testimonials page on theextensionist.com, theextensionist918.com. Got it. You’ll find them. Now, when the web, when people go to the website, then you want to create some sort of a no-brainer, some sort of a hot deal, so that way people that don’t know who you are don’t hesitate to do business with you. Now again you guys have, in my opinion, you’re branded as one of the top aka premier brands in Oklahoma right now for what you do. What’s the no-brainer offer that you now offer first-time customers? So we’ve just been doing a discounted classic full set, but Sean and I were just talking about doing a $1 full set and trying that. So $1 for a full set maybe? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I’ve always been afraid to do that, but I think we’re going to. Well, and too, you know, we’ve got the memberships going now too. You didn’t have a membership model. Now we have membership packages we’ve developed that make it make a little more sense to get somebody in for a dollar because just like with Elephant in the Room, Clay, if you can convert the majority of them to a membership, it makes a lot of sense to give away 25 or 40 bucks on the first service. Right. And for people out there that don’t know, you know, Elephant in the Room is a haircut chain that I own and founded. But again, regardless of whether you have a business that’s a eyelash extension business or a haircut business or a dog training company or a home building company, the step one we gotta do is we gotta improve that online reputation. Now, step two, we gotta get those video reviews. Step three, we gotta enhance the website. Step four, we gotta enhance a no-brainer. Come up with a no-brainer that gets people excited and often so hot people will not reject you. And then step five, if we can make a membership model for certain services you can do that, has a membership model helped you with the sustainability of your finances? So far no, just because I feel like we weren’t offering a good enough no-brainer. It’s only been a couple months. Oh so it’s kind of a new thing. Yeah. Now the hiring and process, next thing is you want to create a hiring process. Now one of the things that’s tough about your business or my business or any company out there, it’s finding good people. Now, if you have a system in place to find good people, that is not so challenging. Have you guys started the group interview process? How’s that going? It’s good. Has it helped you? It’s a lot of fun, actually, yeah. Okay. We went from, in 2019, you had 14 employees and now you have 40. Wow, okay, so you went from 40, from 14 employees, okay, from 14 employees to 40 employees. Now, people who work with me, it’s very interesting. I was just talking to a guy literally probably 39 minutes ago, who I’ve worked with for years. And the one thing that he mentioned to me, it’s interesting, he goes, you know, Clay, I’ve worked with you now for almost a decade. And he’s like, my business is now 10 times what it was 10 years ago. And he’s like, it’s just a consistent application of effort. I just go down that boom book, I follow it, and every week we just get 2%. And he’s like, I’ve tried to explain that to people, and they don’t often get that it’s not like a one big idea. All these things are big ideas, but it’s the implementation. Can you talk about what it’s like working with our team and Sean on a weekly basis now since 2019? Well, I feel like talking to him every week, I have someone who can help me with ideas and stay on my ass about things. And like you said, the consistency. So that’s, I feel like, the biggest thing that Sean helps me with. Just the consistency. Right. And the tracking. Because before, I didn’t do any kind of tracking at all. And that’s been probably the biggest thing. Now tracking what it does is it takes the feelings out of things. Now, let me just give you an example. Um, this is a kind of a funny thing. One of these clients I’ve worked with for years, um, talking to him on Monday. And it’s really funny because on the tracking sheet, it shows how many outbound calls did you make? How many appointments did you set? So again, in his particular business, it’s different industry, but it’s how many calls did you make? How many appointments did you set? How many leads did you get? We just try. How many Google reviews did you get? How many dollars a week did you spend on your Facebook ads? And we just track every week. And that tracking allows us to see obvious patterns. So we get to the part where the calls, it shows the number of calls being made. And I know his caller. Like I know the caller, cause I’ve been around the guy. And the owner brought the caller to the meeting. And so I’m going, so you made that many calls? Because I don’t think he did. And he’s like, no, no, I didn’t. So sometimes people even with a tracking sheet, they’ll put in information that’s kind of bogus. Has the tracking sheet, I’m not looking for specific names, but has it allowed you Kendra to to expose bogusness in your business gaps? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Is there any copy and pasting? Really? She does the appointments booked weekly part. Yeah. She tracks a lot of the lead sources. She’s also tracking whether or not the people are in fact getting the reviews to put onto the sheet, which we can go and verify ourselves. But still, this person is supposed to be supplying… We just got this in the last week or two. Because when you delegate a lot of stuff, you’ve got to follow up on it regularly. This person went two weeks or so just copying and pasting the same amount of leads. Wow. So now installing a quality control loop, I’m not sure if we’re there yet in the system, but for the elephant in the room, as an example, it’s a haircut chain. And we have mystery shoppers that we pay to come in and they get a free haircut to come in and get a haircut. And then what we do is we try to get feedback from them. And they have a checklist that’s very simple that they go over. But it’s sights, sounds, smells, experiences, just so that we know. And they text me how it’s going. Well, you know, it’s interesting because when you have mystery shoppers, you pick up on things you wouldn’t pick up on. So like recently, this past week, we found out that there were smudges on one of the windows that had been, you know, not addressed since the last mystery shopper. Or we’ll find out, we have five stores, so we found out that the bathrooms at one of the stores were dirty. Have you guys started putting in the mystery shop where you had it started yet? No, okay, so we’re still kind of, now, where do you, like right now, how many locations do you have open now? Five. Okay, so now as you’re scaling the systems, that’s kind of the next process, the systems and the checklists? Yeah. How are you doing on that process, Kendra? How are you on implementing, building scripts and checklists for everything? We’ve made a lot of scripts within the past couple of months. Okay. Just for every little thing, mainly on the phone. So where do you see the vision going now? Because how many locations? Do you have five? Five. Where do you see the vision going? What’s the plan? Are you looking to license now? Are you looking to franchise? What do you see as the future? I would like to license. License it, okay. Yeah, so no more stores that I open. Yeah, there’s still room. We can fit about 14 more stylists in the space that we have, which will bring in a minimum of a half a million dollars more just with the space that we have. But it’s important to mention that we are maintaining a very healthy 20% profit margin in this business as well. Well, let’s talk about that for a second, because a lot of times people forget that part. You know, you gotta get the accounting done. And I kind of view this as part of the tracking process. But when you start tracking and you start going, well, this is how much money came in and this is how much money went out. And you go, wow. You know, you discover real quick, wow, there’s maybe not enough there. Tracking did you end up having to maybe raise prices or cut any expenses or did that help you kind of seeing where the income in and the expenses were going? I think for me, it was a lot of the just not knowing, like being a business owner and waking up every day and not knowing if you’re going to have enough money for payroll or if you’re going to have enough money to pay the bills. And so doing that just gave me the mental picture, the physical manifestation of how we’re actually doing. And that was not as bad as I thought. Now everybody’s got their own flow, you know. So what I do with my businesses is I know how big I want to get. I’m very happy with where we’re at. So it’s good. And people all the time, they go to Thrive Time Show and they’ll schedule a consultation. I just talked to a guy today and he was like, I don’t understand why you have 160 clients. Why not take on 400? And I just know, because our business is very involved. Like every business owner we work with, it’s like, we have to really get to know you. Where the haircut business, I don’t have that. You know, it’s like, I don’t know most of the customers and we scale it out. But you ultimately, no matter what kind of business you’re in, if you’re in a high touch business like a dentist or a cosmetic surgeon, I mean, Dr. Whitlock, one of my clients, it’s very high touch. We eventually have to get to a place and space where we figure out our ideal schedule, a schedule that works for our family and one that’s kind of, where do you, are you happy currently with your schedule? Have you optimized it? I’m not saying it has to be, check all the boxes that the world approves, but I mean, do you like your schedule now? That was also another thing that I started doing because of Sean was my calendar. And I’ve sucked at it for a long time, but now I- She has every minute of her day blocked out every day. And so you feel good about where you’re headed now? Yeah, I do. I pretty much don’t have to do anything with this business anymore, so I just opened a Daylight Donuts. Really? I’ve been spending time doing that. Last Monday. Bam. Yeah. Awesome. Is it a little crazy? Yeah, just because the person that was supposed to work in open… Yeah, bailed. Bailed. So I’ve been having to do it. Yeah. Now, for entrepreneurs, if you’re out there today and you are… Let me just pull this up real quick here. If you’re out there today and you live in the Northeast Oklahoma, Tulsa area, one, you can visit the business here, TheExtensionist918.com. You can check it out. You can learn more about it. I encourage you to do so. Also, we have workshops that we do. And the workshops, why I like the workshops is that we’re able to work in kind of a shop-like environment on somebody’s businesses, on their business, for a window of time. So people will come to the workshop, we start at seven, we go till three, and they’ll go, I learned more in a day than I’ve learned in years. And we hear that all the time. How would you describe the actual business workshop experience? It’s pretty much everything that’s in coaching just like packed in two days. Got it. And so is that helpful for you? Is that kind of a reinforcement thing for you? Yeah. I sometimes when I’m getting up super early, I’m like, why am I going? I already got a coaching. But every time that I go, it like gets me going again. By the way, I have a question for you. This is not dogging any of our attendees, but we have one guy who attended the past workshop and he is brand new to business. And he asked a ton of questions that I would have asked when I was 20 years old. And to me, it was great to hear it, because I’m like, ha ha, I remember when I had those questions. And it almost reaffirms what you’ve learned. Do you learn stuff from other people that have questions? Yeah. Do you kind of learn stuff from their questions? Yeah. Yeah. So, Sean, people like Kandra are not a dime a dozen. I really do believe we look for diligent doers to help, people that show up, people that knock out the homework, people that are not super high emotional. It doesn’t mean you can’t have emotion, it doesn’t mean you can’t be excited, but people that can just knock it out. What makes Kandra a great client to work with? Just for anybody out there that’s thinking about reaching out to us. She is just very stoic in that if something is going wrong or is just like it doesn’t matter if it’s a small thing or a large thing she comes in very even keel and goes we gotta like fix this thing and it’s just a very unemotional process. She’s also very realistic about timelines. Yeah. She blocks her action items into her calendar which is a big deal. She She actually does that. Yeah. She gets stuff done. And she’s also a client that, you know, she can operate very consistently with this business and build another business and still not be emotional and freaked out. So it’s just, it’s very rare. And that’s what we would look for in a great client. Because you never know in business, like what emotional turmoil is headed your way. It’s more about your mindset towards when things come up. And she’s really mastered that. Now, Kendra, you know, according to Inc Magazine, I’m gonna pull this up for a second. Inc Magazine reports that 96% of businesses fail. And it blows my mind, but I talked to a guy at the last conference and he was like, I love the idea of coaching, but the thing is, and he said, Clay, I’ve tried other coaching programs in the past. And the issue is I’m not gonna meet with somebody every week at the same time. That’s just not, I’m not, and I’m not a guy who uses a to-do list, okay? And I’m not a big calendar guy. And that’s the problem with other coaching programs. And I kind of like your program because I think I go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not us. That would not be a good fit. So if you were out there telling people who would be a good fit to become a client, because we get our clients grow by default, 96% of businesses fail according to Inc. magazine. So by default we know most businesses fail but we don’t want to take on every single client. Who would be a good fit for us and who wouldn’t kind of from an outsider’s perspective? Someone who knows that they have to put in the work to do it because that’s what it takes. I feel like a big reason that that 96% is 96% is because they don’t do anything to grow or take responsibility because it is your responsibility and no one else’s. I love it. And again, I’m not going to get into your personal life but I do want to point out something. Everybody likes to say that I can’t become successful because I have this going on in my life. And I see people that are newly married. They say, I want to grow my business but I just got married just as a kid, just as a kid. I see people that, one of our clients this year, her husband passed away and she had her best year of all time. And I asked her why, and she said, because we worked so hard as a couple to build a business. And when he passed, I recognized that, you know it didn’t help to pout about it. I was just going to focus on growing the business to kind of honor what we had built together. I think of another client that recently they’re growing their business and a weather situation attacked their business in a way that you know, if you live on the coasts, weather can hit you. And their business was ravaged years ago by disastrous hurricane weather. And they went on to have their best year of all time. And I’m talking to the owner and he’s going, man, I, you know, now the challenge for him with his particular business is staffing because more and more people are harder to find to work in his particular industry. But again, we can all make excuses or we can all step up and make it happen. So I encourage everybody out there, if you’re looking to grow your company, you can go to thrivetimeshow.com, thrivetimeshow.com, and you can click on the little consulting button here. Let me see here, you can schedule a free 13 point assessment, let me go there right now. Feeling the flow, working it, going to Thrive Time Show. If I spell it right, it helps, go in here, awesome. And I click here, boom, and you can schedule a free 13 point consultation with myself and I’ll teach you all the systems that I have in place to help you grow your company. Or if you’re looking for eyelash extensions, and I know that I’m not, but if you are, you can go to theextensionist918.com. Kendra, thank you so much for joining us. I really do appreciate you. Thank you. Take care. Now, Sean, a lot of people reach out. They go to Thrivetimeshow.com and they always ask me, they say, Clay, what do you do? And so I’ve tried to explain it in as succinct a way as possible. But first thing we do, you know Sean, a lot of people go to Thrivetimeshow.com or I’ll see people at a tour, I’ll see them at an event, people will reach out to us and they’ll say, what exactly do you guys do? And if I had to explain it to you succinctly, we essentially grow businesses seven times faster than the average business that doesn’t fail. Although Inc. Magazine does show that 96% of businesses fail by default. So I guess one benefit is our clients don’t fail. But the next thing they do is they grow seven times faster. So what we do here is we help you reduce the working hours that you’re working and decrease your costs while increasing your sales and your profitability. And then since 2006, we’ve got a team now that does graphic design, photography, branding, print media, photography, videography, digital marketing, systems creation, public speaking, coaching, booking, workflow mapping, search engine enhancement, PR, marketing. We do a lot of PR, a lot of monetizing. We help people to grow their business, their podcast, their dentistry, their law firm. But what we do is we document those success stories over here at Thrivetimeshow.com if you click on the testimonials and since 2006, I have over 2000 success stories. So if you’re out there today and you want to become the next success story, what you have to do is you go to thrivetimeshow.com and you click right here on growth consulting and you schedule a free 13 point assessment. And that free 13 point assessment, what that does is that schedules you a time to meet with me so that you and I can go over where you’re at versus where you want to be. And then if you want to work with us, I charge $1,700 a month. It’s a flat rate of $1,700 per month to help you grow your company. And again, folks, if you want to learn more about that, we’ve got the in-person workshops, we’ve got the one-on-one coaching. Sean, how long have you worked here as a consultant? How long have you worked here? Doing consulting, it was about 18 months after I came on board, so it’s coming up on five years. Five years. And just think of a few clients off the top of your head that have had massive growth. I mean I think about what Levi Gables. Oh yeah Levi’s he’s working on company number three and four right now. What’s his company called? His original company came to us called GEI-USA.com. GEI-USA.com. That’s a client you’ve worked with that tremendous growth. We just we just did an interview with Kandra. Yep. The attorney James we worked with him. Who else can you think of? Nick Holman, we grew his business by fivefold and we decreased his workload. That’s the cabinet company. Yeah, the cabinet guy. Yeah, so again, if you’re out there, you’re saying, I need to see the success, I need to see the documentation, I need to see the proven plan. All you gotta do right now is go to thrivetimeshow.com, thrivetimeshow.com, and you click on testimonials and bam, you can see what we do. My name’s Clay Clark, I’m the former USSBA Entrepreneur of the Year. I built all the systems, built all the processes, and I’ve been, since 2006, coaching clients. And along the way, I’ve started to discover great people like Clay Stairs or Sean Lohman or Andrew, or different members of our team. And we teach them the processes so that they can help you grow your business for less money than it would cost you to hire one minimum wage employee. If you hired one minimum wage employee out there full-time, it’s gonna cost you about two grand a month after taxes, insurance, et cetera. It turns out we’re less. It turns out. This just in. So schedule that consultation today by going to Thrivetimeshow.com. Click on the business consulting button right there. Click on the red button that says schedule your free 13-point assessment with me and you can schedule that today. Sean, I appreciate you and I want to remind everybody out there, Sean, you smell terrific. Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show. That’s it, arms away. Yeah! We started from the bottom, now we here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we here. We started from the bottom, now we here. Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year. I’m the father of five kids, and I feel like it’s my mission to help you create both time and financial freedom by teaching you the practical skills that will help you to enjoy time freedom. And so on this show, when possible, I try to interview people that really are the world’s best at what they do. We’ve had the world’s best public relations expert of all time. This isn’t an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, Pizza Hut, for Pizza Hut, for Charlton Heston, for Bush’s and the Clintons, the Prince, we mentioned Prince, there’s just so many, I mean he’s huge. Well on today’s show we have the number one expert in the history of the world, ever, in the field of search engine for dummies each year. He writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you as a company get to the top, when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results, as an example, if you train dogs and you came up top in Google when you type in Tulsa dog training, or if you were a pizzeria in Florida and your company whose name was Papa Gallo’s and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top. If you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top it would change your life. If you were teaching basketball lessons and you came up top in search engine results it changed your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today and you were top in search results, it would change your life. That’s why- It’s worth a little bit of money. Well, that’s why for the brands I work with, like Oxifresh, I mean, Oxifresh, let me tell you, these guys are so successful for a lot of reasons. They have great systems, processes, wonderful people, a great vision. They have- Leadership. A very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers. And sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem. But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world, but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers, it’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in and understand what is being said. In our Thrive Time Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the Million Dollar Show. It’s going to change somebody’s life, and I’m excited to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization. Bruce Clay, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the world’s number one search engine expert in the house. Bruce, how are you? I am doing great, thank you. Bruce, your book, Search Engine for Dummies, took me, and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlighter to prove it, and then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it. The last version I read was 760-something pages long. How long did it take you to write Search Engine for Dummies? So Wiley approached us, and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. The Dummies series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that. The difference between a Dummies book and a normal book is that Dummies will not allow you to define, use a term that’s not defined in the book. So we wrote it, we sent it to the editors and they totally tore it apart because we’re used to the jargon of the industry. Right. And they weren’t. So mechanically, the first version of the book took over a year. Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish? Well, we were lucky. We do a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works. So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do was actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard, it was the actual writing. And when I say a year, I’m not talking about part time for 52 weeks, I’m talking about one year of tracked time for us to actually full-time work on that book. You know, Wiley approached you to write the book. I know about you because I’m big in the franchise world. I work with a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors. I work with a lot of business owners. Your name comes up in conversations a lot. And for the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google, in the search engines, and find the book Search Engine for Dummies, and find your website, can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today? Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996. For those of you who remember that far back, I think that’s when Al Gore invented the internet. Thank you, Al. But yeah, January 96 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had, you know, large corporate positions, but I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. My bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I thought, hey, this marketing thing and programming and algorithms is right up my alley. So I started doing it. Then it took off and it just grew. I hired hired a couple people, kept growing, hired a couple more. I’m now located in Southern California in a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world. So it has certainly grown over 22 years. You’re right, I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. And in fact, if you do a Google search for who is the father of SEO, I show up. Hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from somebody. We’re talking about fathers and father related conversations. Perhaps the listeners out there aren’t as familiar with Star Wars as I am. But there was a scene in that movie where Darth Vader was claiming to be Luke’s father. And you just claimed to be the potential father of the search engine industry. So Bruce, if it’s okay, I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you, Bruce. Are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. La la la, Luke. Luke, I am your father. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice my friend. So your credit is being the father of search engines. I know this because I feel like I’m a, I feel like search engine is like nerd meets practical. You know, because you’re helping grow companies. Can you please explain to me, when you say it took off, were you cold calling businesses? Were you emailing businesses? Were you, how did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. I mean you have thousands and thousands. You have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? I mean, were you starting out of an apartment? I mean, how did you start your business? Well, as I said, I started at home, but the way I got my business is I actually optimized my own site. Oh, there we go. So I have actually, in the entire history of the company, not had to go out and do a cold call. I think my reputation is sort of preceding me, but I’m known as the company you go to when nothing else works. People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre, and they finally decide they just have to do it right, and I’m the guy. So I’ve not had to call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form, we touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here. So if you were to go to the form and fill it out, I’d be the guy that said, sorry we can’t help you. Or that looks like an interesting opportunity, let’s take no names. What’s your website for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you? Well my site is of course BruceClay.com. I have several sites but BruceClay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact, the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription fee. The site is just there for people to learn about SEO, they recognize they just don’t want to do it themselves. Okay, okay. So, here we go. Now, you’re hitting on a hot button, and I want to see if you can unpack this for us. I know you can, but my company, my companies have actually hired you to do work for us, your team, because you have a certain level of mastery. Also, I like to freshen up our approach. We help companies with marketing, and I always want to stay, I believe in coaching. I believe in hiring mentors who really know the path, and you are, I mean seriously, you are in a good way. You’re kind of like the Darth Vader of search engine optimization. I mean, you are the Obi-Wan, you’re the Yoda, you know search engine optimization. You are the father of the industry. And so, we’ve hired you, but it wasn’t free, and it wasn’t cheap, but it was effective. Why can the listeners out there not hire a search, why is it not possible to hire a search engine optimization company to help your business for $199 a month? Because every listener gets a call from somebody from some foreign country calling, emailing, saying that they can do your search engine for as little as $99 a month. Why is it just not possible? Well, the the fact is that the industry is changing. Google changes the algorithm approximately five times a day. So it takes time to stay current on technology. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to pay to be current. Well, if you’re not current, I can sell you whatever I want. You can give me a check. Then when I don’t deliver it, you go away and I ended up with a free check. So I think that a great many people take shortcuts. They don’t care if you get in trouble. They don’t care if you get penalized. The flip side of that is, would you work for somebody for a month for $200 and I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA would you get one of them for $200 or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon. It’s the Thrived Time Show on your radio. Stay tuned. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to The Conversation. It is the Thrive Time show on your radio. And on today’s show, we are interviewing Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, the best-selling author of the book Search Engine for Dummies, a guy who’s worked with some of the largest brands in the country. And his company, you can find more about them at bruceclay.com. I have paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars, and I don’t regret it. He is the world’s best for big companies. I will tell you, there are projects, Chuck, that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization. And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients are $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a month clients for him. I mean, he has big accounts. Chuck, why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month? Why does it never work? Because it takes more time than that. Like, it’s a simple math. You can only get a few hours of work for $200 from somebody that knows what they’re doing. And so ultimately, they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up penalizing you for. And so if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you, well, what are you doing? So you’ve got to be where people are, and that’s on the Internet. So Thrive Nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, breaks down how search engine optimization really works. Would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200 for the surgery would really make you suspect. So fundamentally, the problem is that the infrastructure is changing so much that unless you are just taking somebody’s money, you can’t even possibly kind of a rate. It usually takes a few thousand dollars, I’d say, and sometimes many, many thousands of dollars. There’s large companies out there that have 30 to 40 in-house SEOs just working on their own property. Those are the big guys. And, you know, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than $199 a month. If you want it cheap, well, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you. If you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money. What I want to do is, if it’s possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you. And I want to kind of get into some of the details. So that’s all right with you and kind of go through them in a linear fashion. And if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall, I’ve seen so many people with a beautiful website, Bruce, you’ve seen it, too, or it looks great. The site itself, visually, you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it. And then you go to Wikipedia that doesn’t look that beautiful, but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by Google? And what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and by Google? I can certainly address that. Understanding that Google is changing all the time, the technology is changing as well. The process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider. It’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you’re about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about SEO. They don’t understand how to connect things, they don’t understand how to word things, they’re not authors and not writers, they’re people who can build pretty things. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the Ts to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about. It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help a search engine. The search engine basically is blind, deaf, and dumb. It reads your site. There’s three ways they influence ranking. But one of them is it will read your site and it will attempt to determine what you’re about by looking at your content. And by looking at how page A is connected to page B, and the infrastructure and nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about. Now, a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures, and the search engine cannot understand what that is. Now, there’s two other things that fit, and I’ll just go into them briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well, if your content is pretty, you might be able to get some links. And a great many offshore SEO companies, that’s what they focus on, but that is not going to make you an expert. It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called RankBrain, which is the Google algorithm, and it’s based on click-throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked. If you don’t get clicked, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality. And so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best-ranked sites perform the best. So the only way a website can really get to the top is to build something that a search engine can perceive to be authoritative information, quality information, and then the search engine can put you at the top, and then you will get links, and then you will have RankBrain like you, and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time. So all those things have to play together. You can’t just do one and expect it to be there. But pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Oh, we love it. Google loves it. Yeah. Because the prettier your site, the more likely you are to have to buy pay-per-click in order to get your traffic. Right. Now, here’s the thing about it. I hear a lot of people say, this is what people say a lot of times, they’ll say, gosh, you know, but Nike, Nike doesn’t have a lot of content, Bruce. They have a lot of pictures, Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising. And, by the way, people are typing in Nike.com every day. But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name, is probably not going to be there. I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well yeah, and that happens a lot more often than you would think. People have this perception that if you build it, they will come. And therefore, if you build it prettier, more will come. When in fact, if you build it prettier, they won’t come until you buy the ads on Google. So if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines. When we return, it’s our exclusive interview with Bruce Lay. Stay tuned. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, who many consider, who everyone considers to be the father of search engine optimization. Each year, he releases an edition of Search Engine for Dummies, and his firm, which you can find out more about at bruceclay.com is the world’s authority on big budget search engine optimization. Now I’ve hired his firm in the past and if you have a big company I would advise you to check him out as well but I’m telling you you’re definitely going to be spending he talks about during the interview, but $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking six thousand a month, seven thousand. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to him. Right. And they got to re-optimize and rewrite and everything. This is this big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level. And so I try to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts and actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire. And so now without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the Internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers, according to Forbes, and we’ll put a link on the show notes, 88% of consumers read reviews online before buying something. Right? But they’re not going to read a review unless they find you online. And I don’t know the stats in there. Bruce, you probably know the stats more than I do, and I’m not certainly trying to paint you into a corner about knowing the stats, but I don’t even know the percentage. I know the last studies that I looked at from Forbes, I do write for Forbes. I’m a contributing writer for Forbes. I’ve looked at some of the stats. Well over 9 out of 10 people start any product or service, they start their search for any product or service online. Do you have any data that would argue that 9 out of 10 consumers don’t start looking for things online? Or is it higher do you think? I mean, I think I’ve read it shows about 9 out of 10 people start looking for the products and services they’re going to buy with an online search. No, you’re right. The number has consistently been, the lowest number I remember is 84%, but I think it’s consistently over that. I also understand a statistic which is 94% of all people click on only the first page of Google, which means you have to be in the top 10. So yeah, you got to be there if you expect to satisfy anybody’s queries. I think that probably your entire audience finds things or at least finds reviews and certainly how-to’s and things like that online. Digital is the way of the world now. And yeah, you got to be there. Now we talked about you kind of get it that’s high level we got to have a website that Google can crawl that the spiders can index. I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s a stuff called meta content which you write so eloquently about in your book Search Engine for Dummies that only took you a couple years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you that book Bruce I’m not sure if you make any money every time you buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome. Search Engine for Dummies with Bruce Clay. Talk to me about meta data, meta content, things like the title tag and the description and the keywords. I think I’d say the vast majority of our listeners have no idea what a meta title is, a meta description is, what keywords are. They just have no concept of these things. Could you kind of explain it in a way that a simple mind like me might grasp? Most of our listeners, Bruce, are very intelligent people, but if you’re just talking to me, break it down, make it simple for my cranium. So you want it to be at your level. Right, because I am a shallow Hal. Okay. So metadata, actually, metadata is data about data. So in a portion of your webpage, commonly referred to as the head section, the top of the source code, you have a section which has data, these content fields, that describe what your page is supposed to be about. And in that area, there’s typically key tags. One is the title tag, most commonly recognized because when you do a Google search, the link that you get to click on, that is actually the title tag of the page you’re clicking. The second part is a description tag, so it’s called a meta description, and it is the part in the Google search results that commonly show up under the title. And that’s where you would put a call to action. That’s where you would describe why people should click to your site. So those have to be balanced out against the content of your site or there’s a mismatch and Google won’t like you. There’s a keyword tag which is logically used as sort of a just a list of words that should be on the page. Can I ask you a question about that for the listeners out there that might have a question about keywords there? Let’s say I cut hair. I’m a haircut, I’m a hair stylist, and I’m in Boise. Talk to me about keywords. If I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise. I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all. We have hundreds of thousands of people to download this podcast. I want to make sure nobody gets left behind. If I cut hair for women in Boise, what kind of keywords would you be talking about? I would think hair cutting, certainly Boise. These are things that somebody might string together in a query. Like a search. Like a search. Okay. So an interesting statistic is 70% of all searches have not been searched on in the last six months. Yes, repeat it again, please. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody. Please repeat. 70% of all searches have not been searched for in the last six months. What does that mean? If I am in Boise and I need to find a dentist because at 2 a.m. I broke my tooth, you’re not going to just search for dentist. You’re going to search for emergency dental repair, Boise, right now I’m in pain. And, you know, that is a string of keywords that most often are not on any websites. So when you come up with keywords and content and things for your webpage, you need to think about how somebody might actually try to find you and use those words on your webpage. You’re making me cry, this is so good. This is so good. Oh, you’re preaching the good news, yes. I’ll tell you right now, most people, I’ve had cases where people come to me and they don’t understand why they don’t have a better ranking for a particular keyword. And when I do the analysis, they’re not even using the keyword in their content. Google isn’t going to believe you’re about anything if you don’t use your keywords properly on your webpage. Now, in terms of just the amount of content, just content, I think a lot of people don’t grasp this idea. This is a funny thing I did, Bruce. This is back in like 2004, 2005. It was 2003. I owned a company called DJConnection.com. And for the listeners out there, if you go to DJConnection.com, you can see it’s still a company that’s thriving today. I sold it and moved on to open different ventures. But DJConnection.com, one of the things with that company was that I was starting to figure out how search engines work. And this was early stuff. I mean, Yahoo was huge at that point. Yahoo was like a dominant player. Thrive Nation, stay tuned. We come back, we’re going to learn why content matters for your website. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Nation, you are in for a powerful training today. We have Bruce, the truth, Clay on the show. Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. His search engine optimization firm is the number one search engine firm on the planet, his firm represents massive companies that have over a million pages of content that are making billions of dollars. And he’s here to teach you the principles and the fundamentals of search engine optimization so that you can implement these systems and strategies in your own life and business. Bruce Clay. I didn’t realize just how much content mattered, so I decided to write the most amount of high-quality content in the world about the phrase, chocolate fountains, Bruce. I wrote an insane amount of content, because I owned a company called Chocolate Elegance, and we owned chocolate fountains. It’s like the fondue, you know, weddings, that kind of thing, you dip fruit in it. And lo and behold, Bruce, I got chocolate elegance to the top of search engine results as a result of writing something like 80 pages about the origins of chocolate, chocolate fountains, how chocolate fountains work. It was all really well done. It was almost disturbing. Can you talk to me about why the volume of quality content really does matter. Sure, and this should be pretty clear if you understand what you would want when you do a search. There’s a concept called siloing. We invented it 18 years ago. And what siloing does is it says that you should have organized the content on your website in a clear hierarchy. That’s actually one of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. So in a clear hierarchy, what Google is looking for is a bunch of interconnected pages that are on the same theme. So what you did is you created a large group of pages that were clearly different. They had different purposes, but they’re all about the same topic, the same theme. And so what Google does is it looks at your website and sees that you have these connected pages. And therefore, they assume that you are more of an expert than somebody that doesn’t. So if your site is poorly structured, you’re not going to rank as well as somebody that has a properly structured website. The architecture and the way your pages are tied together make a lot of difference. So we’ll go and use that as an example. If I wanted to find a site about chocolate fountains, if there was a site that had one page about them, or another site that has 20 pages about them, that user would prefer the 20 pages. It’s more content, more information, better able to satisfy them. And we all have to believe that Google knows that. So Google is looking at how much content that is quality, it has to be quality, how much quality content is interconnected to build a theme that matches what people are searching for. And if you build that correctly, in a nice hierarchy, connected correctly, then you can perform very well in search. And that’s what you had done. You know, Bruce, I actually was the head of a group called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was the group that threw the wedding shows in Tulsa. We started the Tulsa Wedding Show where brides would go and gather at these banquet halls. You get maybe a thousand brides in one banquet hall at one time at the Renaissance Hotel. They’re all trying to find their wedding vendors. I remember a vendor in particular pulled me aside one time and she says to me, she had a wedding, a bridal store, and she says, how did you find the time to write hundreds of pages of content on DJConnection.com. And I said, well I didn’t find the time to write a hundred pages, or hundreds, I actually wrote thousands. And I did it myself. I usually, Bruce, did it between the hours of 5 a.m. or 4 a.m., usually 4 a.m. to 9 a.m., about five hours a day. I’d write content every day. And Bruce, I’d do it in the bathtub, which I know is a disturbing visual, but I’d sit there in the bathtub and I’m just writing content, just writing about how to throw a bouquet, how to catch the garter, when the first dance was, when the father-to-the-bride dance was, what’s the etiquette behind the toast, why we have a toast, why we do the cutting of the cake, the history of the cutting of the cake, why we have DJs, who the first wedding DJs were, I mean, on and on and on. I mean, all of it, the dollar dance, the waterfall dance, the Soul Train line, the cha-cha slide, the Cupid shuffle, how to do it, the electric slide. I mean, I was like the Wikipedia of DJs, which is why I became the top-ranked company in search engines. Can you explain to me what percentage of your clients say to you, you know, hey, Bruce, can you just write the content for me? And what percentage of them actually are willing to sit down and write the content themselves? Because I believe I have a psychological problem called I enjoy grinding. But I don’t know, I have very few clients I’ve ever worked with who want to write the content. What percentage of your clients prefer to have your team write the content versus the ones that want to write it themselves? Well, we have large projects where they don’t have the team to do it. Under normal circumstances, I would look at you in that particular case and think of you as the subject matter expert. So we would partner with you and we could write the draft, you can finish it, we can editorialize it and make it ready for SEO, and then as a partnership, we publish it. That’s the way most of our writing projects are actually structured because when you’re doing that for a technical business at all, then you’re not going to be the subject matter expert. If you went to somebody, and this is my opinion, but if you went to somebody and said, Hi, I want 200 pages on this topic, you’re going to get 200 pages of absolute garbage. Oh, yeah, total garbage, complete and total garbage. And that really annoys me. You have to spend the time to do the page right, to do the research. The average 1,000-word page is supposed to take about three hours. And it isn’t just writing, it’s editing. And it’s making sure that you have sources and which image do you put on the page? It’s far more complex. What we find with our clients, be it good or especially the small guys, what we find is that they absolutely commit to doing it and then they unconditionally don’t. Okay, repeat that again. That right there, I’m going to put that on a t-shirt. I’m going to put that on a hat. I want to embroider that on my head and get a tattoo on my leg, can you please repeat that? That was powerful. The companies absolutely commit to writing the content because they’re the experts, they want to do that, but then they don’t write it. And it is unfortunate, but that is the case. And we’ve had many projects where we become the company’s writing team. But if it is technical at all, we still need them to read it. So what do you charge to write an article? I mean, if you’re going to write a thousand words for somebody, I mean, you’re going to charge them $6, $12, $0.07. I mean, there’s a lot of companies in India right now, and you’re aware of this, Mr. Bruce. I mean, there are companies in India, companies based in China right now, companies in the Middle East that will say, I will write you an article right now for $9. I mean, what would you charge somebody to write a thousand word page of content? Well, we’re back to the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. I think that one of the problems that you run into internationally is they do not have a shared experience with you as the author. And so they make assumptions about your target persona person. They assume things about what it is that you do for a living and what your product should do and why people should use it. And it hardly ever matches reality in a different country. So we believe that every country has to write their own product content. So in our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think $200 is that is that is like a low average, maybe? That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now, I’m going to go out on a tangent here and give you some additional data. And I know you hate it when I do that. No, it’s good. This is good. This is going to blow someone’s mind. When you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them. proof you did it and we’ll send you free tickets to our next in-person Thrive Time Show two-day, 15-hour workshop and we’ll teach you everything you need to know. Stay tuned. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at Thrivetimeshow.com. Hey Chuck, are you familiar with that thing called the internet? Enter in the net, that’s when you catch fish in a net, right? Chuck, I’ll tell you this man, most people out there are starting to use this thing called Google. Oh, I don’t know if they do. Or they’re on the Facebooks. And I’ve heard that people are going on there to buy products and search for goods and services on that Google. Now, we boys from Oklahoma. And there’s three things I know about search engines, Chuck. One is the word search is the first word. That’s right. The second word is optimization. And the third is I ain’t knowing nothing about it. You want a V8, I know that about engines. Chuck, do you think I should grow out my perm or just kind of let it be? Yeah, you’ll let it grow. Should I put the lightning bolts on the side of my mullet, Chuck? Yeah, yeah, perm mullet with the lightning bolts, Clay. That’s what you want. You know, Chuck, you know, Chuck, you know, Chuck, I don’t know if you’ve thought about this very much, but one thing that we like to say in Oklahoma, Chuck, Chuck, you know what we say? What is that? You know what they say, see you abroad to get that booty, yackal. Lay her down or smack her, yackal. All right, now, Thrive Nation, if that’s about, if you’re saying to yourself, yeah, when it comes to search engine, I’m serious, if you’re sitting there at an office party or an office event gathering a networking event, you’re talking to a buddy of yours who owns a business and he says, well, you know, search engine optimization is key to our success. And you find yourself saying, well, you know what they say, see a broad to get that booty act, lay her down and smack them, yack them. If that’s all you know about search engine, if somebody put a gun to your head and said, teach me how to get to the top of Google, and you immediately said, la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la Thrive nature without any further ado, back to my conversation with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Mr. Bruce Clay. In our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that like a low average, you think, maybe? That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now when you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them. Pages. Bruce, I want you to help me out on this. This is my six year quest. John Kelly knows this, my right hand man. We have been working to be top of the world for the phrase business conferences for about six years. And we’re at the top of page two now. We have a podcast that’s ranked in the top ten on iTunes in the business section. We have thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of downloads, but we’re competing against Tony Robbins. I mean, Tony, for everybody out there who is not aware of Tony Robbins, welcome to the planet Earth, but Tony Robbins, I mean, this guy, Bruce, he has tons of backlinks from news and media agencies. The guy has a team of bloggers writing content every day. And he’s a beautiful man, too, I’m sure. But it’s taken a long time to be… And I know it’s just… So every week, we add content at a rate that exceeds his rate of adding content. And I’ve kind of timed it out, and I believe in probably January of this year, we’re going to beat him finally. But I mean, is that normal, where you go into an industry and you go, wow, this industry, I mean, because Tony Robbins, when we decided to do it, I knew it would take years and years and years. Do you often sit down with a client and explain to them like, hey, to be top of Google for your term, my friend, that’s going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time? And many times that’s the case. And it depends upon what is missing, and I want to make sure everybody understands how it works. It isn’t also whoever dies with the most backlinks wins. It’s who has the best backlinks. And are the backlinks appropriate for that one keyword? And am I spamming the backlinks? Am I buying them? Am I getting backlinks from garbage sites. Those are the kinds of things that matter the most. Many brands, by the time you become a brand, you’re going to get back links to you by your brand name, not particularly what your brand does. That contributes a lot of power to your home page, and then your home page distributes that power to your subpages. So when you think about a Tony Robbins, you’re competing, and a Wikipedia, you’re competing against a brand that over time has acquired a lot of link value. That doesn’t mean that you need to publish more content than them. It just means your content has to be better than them and it has to be more of a solution to that user than them. We have a blog and at one point I felt that we have to publish a lot of blog posts. When I did the analysis, I decided it isn’t how many you publish, it’s how good it is. And so we focus more on, is this blog post solving somebody’s problem? And then, how do I tell that person I have the blog post? That is far more important than just publishing things. You have to kind of advertise that you’ve published it. And you have to advertise to the people that matter. But it isn’t an issue so much of quantity. It is far more an interest in quality that’s going to cause the search engines to perform well with you on your content. Now, having said that, I do believe that if you have too little content, you’re not going to succeed. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much content. We do projects large and small, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the high end and $500 a month at the low end. So it really will vary, but we do them all over the board. Now, Bruce, this is a concept that I would like to see if you can share with the listeners. In your book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, you discuss the amount of content that needs to be on a page in order for Google to count it or for Google to really care about it or to index it or to think it’s not a waste of time. You can’t have two words on every page. And you talked about certain industries and you alluded to it earlier, certain industries you might have to have 1,500 words of content to be relevant and certain industries you might have to have 350 words of content on a page for it to be relevant. Why do you have to have a minimum amount of words on a page for Google to care enough to index it? I know the Google algorithm doesn’t care, but in order for Google to index it, why do you have to have a certain minimum number of words per page? You can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well-performing pages that have fewer than 100 words. They have like 80 words. The issue with words is you need a sufficient quantity compared to your competition to prove to search engine that you are a subject matter expert. In some industries where all your competitors have 400 words, 400 might be a really good number. But if I am competing for an information source against Wikipedia, Google, government.gov’s government pages, university pages that are writing about it, and they all have 2,000 words, my 400 word page isn’t gonna stand a chance. You have to be equal and then better and just being, just showing up to the party is not sufficient. Bruce, whenever I have spoken at big conferences, I’ve spoken for Maytag and Hewlett Packard and O’Reilly’s Auto Parts and UPS, a lot of big companies. And I’ll get an attendee that will come up to me. I’m sure you’ve never run into this, Bruce. But someone will come up to you and say, they’ll say, hey, here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Honestly, I’m willing to pay you guys up front quite a bit, and I just want to know, how do I get to the top of Google in like two weeks? I know you guys all preach that it’s a process, like growing a tree, and that you can’t get to the top of Google immediately because you’ve all kind of agreed to the secret society of preaching a process, but unlike planning a garden, and unlike raising a child, and unlike growing a successful business, I want it to be a microwave thing. And I’m willing to pay you, Bruce, right now, $40,000 up front. Make me top in Google in two weeks. Let’s go. Boom. Why, Bruce, is it not possible? Can you explain to somebody that I’ve run into, people you’ve never run into, but people that I’ve run into at my conferences that want to be top in Google in two weeks, why can you not be top in Google in two weeks? Many reasons. One, we don’t know what’s wrong with your site. We have to open the hood and look under it and see where things are broken. See, if everything was working correctly, then theoretically everybody would be number one. But in fact, most sites are their own worst enemy. Sometimes I could take a site and change their life in a few weeks. I don’t think two is a realistic number, but let’s say four. I can change your life in four weeks, provided the reason you don’t rank is you did something wrong. It’s when you did everything right that it takes longer. I view reviewing websites and fixing websites to be a little bit like a hospital. The very first thing you do is you cart the website into the emergency room and stop the bleeding. You make them so that they’re not their worst enemy anymore. Then you take them into surgery. And that’s when you’re going to do the heavy lifting, deep thinking SEO that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all. And that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. And so if you have no competitors, none, sure, I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. And if you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of 3.5 billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing SEO. Okay, okay. So this leads me into a bigger question. I tell people all the time this, and Bruce, you run a… Can I ask you, I mean, how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people? Because you said you occupy nine floors, am I correct? Nine floors of a building? No, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites, I’m sorry. So 12 suites. How many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have hundreds of people? How many people are working with you? No, no. I want to make sure I say this correctly. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. We’re the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. Jeff, I want to save both time and money, and one way to do it is by having your office and printer supplies shipped directly to you, my man. That’s right, and you can do that with our awesome show sponsor, onyximaging.com. In fact, if you get your office supplies, your printer supplies, and printer service through these guys, they’re going to give you a free printer copier, free of charge. So get a hold of them at onyximaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back. Today we are interviewing the founder, the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay. You want to get to the top of the internet search results? You have something you can sell, a product you can make, or a service you can deliver? Do you feel like you can really deliver to millions of people? Well, maybe. Well, not maybe, but for sure. If you want to reach your ideal and likely buyers, you have to get to the top of search engine results. And who better to teach you and I how to do it than the father of search engine optimization as an industry, the guy who literally has written the book on search engine optimization, the yearly edition of Search Engine for Dummies. My friends, I introduce you to my friend, Bruce Klee. And that’s when you’re gonna do the heavy lifting, deep thinking SEO that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all, and that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. And so if you have no competitors, none, sure, I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. If you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of 3.5 billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing SEO. Okay, okay. So this leads me into a bigger question. I tell people all the time this, and Bruce, you run a… Can I ask you, I mean, how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people? Because you said you occupy nine floors, am I correct? Nine floors of a building? No, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites, I’m sorry. So 12 suites. How many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have hundreds of people? How many people are working with you? No, no. I want to make sure I say this correctly. Sure. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. Got it. We’re the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. And we run into that all the time. Their eyes are bigger than their stomach. They have the ability to write a check, but they’re not willing to do the work to get there. And that is a problem that we run into often. But overall, it’s a tough thing. This is something that I want to get your take on, because you have a big team, people that work with you guys. It’s not about having the most employees necessarily. I’m just saying but you guys have a team of people that really know what they’re doing. I mean you probably have front end coders and back end coders and content writers and search engine experts. I mean you have a whole team there. And I think we have people that have been with us here at the company for over 15 years. And people know what they’re doing. And people want though search engine to be an overnight thing. So someone said to me, Clay Clark, as a business coach, what’s the key to building a great team? I would say every week, never stop interviewing, step one. Step two, never stop advertising that you’re hiring. Let’s go back to step one, never stop interviewing. Step two, never stop advertising. Step number one, interviewing, advertising. And you never stop, and you prune the tree over time. That is how I explain to people how search engine works. You’re never done. It’s like pulling weeds from a garden. Can you explain in your own words why you can never be done optimizing your website? Oh, absolutely. SEO has a tendency to be a loop. And as you know, loops don’t have an end. The search engine changing the algorithm five times a day causes you to have to do different things. A good example is five years ago, nobody was talking about mobile search being as important as it is. And certainly, nobody was talking about voice search. And nobody was talking about how different tags are being invented every year by the search engines to help them. And the word schema wasn’t even heard five years ago. So because the technology is moving ahead quickly, focused on helping the search engines understand what you’re about so that the proper answer can be given, that change alone isn’t going to end. I have another sign I use in my class, which is SEO is done when Google stops changing things and all your competition is dead. So, let me make sure the listeners get that. Search engine optimization. Google, Larry and Sergey started Google. They’re out of their Stanford dorm rooms there. They started Google. They’re using campus computers. They grew it. They moved into the founder of, the lady who’s now the CEO of YouTube’s Garage to grow the company, they kept growing it. They brought on Eric Schmidt to be the CEO and to take the company to the next level. They regret, they pushed back about monetizing the company for a long time, really resisting advertisements and that kind of thing. They wanted to create the most pure and the best search results possible so you’d always find the most relevant search results when using Google. But Google’s the only company out there that you can kind of kill by simply switching to another search engine. I mean, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for on Google, right, and you go to Yahoo or Bing, all of a sudden Google’s not relevant anymore. So Google’s always trying to increase the quality of the search results it produces, which is why it’s always trying to stop scammers and Spammers, so I’d like for you to talk about scammers and Spammers remember back in the day Bruce people could just buy back links From a foreign country and they could be top in Google and then how that doesn’t work anymore You remember that Bruce? Oh, of course. I still run into it a lot of sites have poisoned themselves with those. So let’s start with that one. If you’ve purchased a bunch of backlinks that are absolutely not real, not legit, they’re from pop-up websites in third world countries, and by the way, Google knows, how do you remove or disavow or say, hey, I don’t want those backlinks? How do you remove those backlinks and tell Google, hey, hey, or maybe you’re a, I ran into a client, this was probably three years ago, their competitor bought backlinks and pointed them at them as a way to hurt their rank. How do you disavow or get rid of bad backlinks? Well, the concept of links to you is that some other site doing it to you. I mean, you don’t own that other site, they just choose the link to you. And what you’re referring to as bad links that a competitor pointed at you is referred to as negative SEO. It is clearly their attempt to poison your backlink profile in the eyes of the search engine so the search engine thinks of you as a spammer. What we want to be able to do is to monitor our own backlinks, to determine what is acceptable, and then to get rid of the bad links. However, we don’t own those other sites. And that’s where a special process called Disavow was created. It turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engines. Are you looking for an accountant who is a true expert about tax and accounting, financial planning? Check out hoodcpas.com today. To claim your tickets to the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop for free, all you have to do is to subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes. Leave an objective review and send us confirmation at info at thrive timeshow.com. To claim your star in the National Star Registry, we can’t help you. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we have the father of search engine optimization, Bruce Clay, with us on the program. I want to make sure we kind of reset so we know what we’re talking about. Back links, whenever a site links to your website, if it’s a good website, if it’s not a scam site or an adult website or some site with the virus on it, it actually helps your website. If a site that’s related to you, related to your industry, links to you, then you’ll raise up higher in the search engines. So an example would be if like Forbes, I write for Forbes, if Forbes links to me, that helps my search engine rank Now if you are a nefarious person and you want to do reverse search engine optimization to hurt your competitors This is what you’ll do Is you’ll go out there and you’ll go to a website where you can buy Backlinks so you can buy backlinks. There are sites out there today that will sell you backlinks and you might say well How do I find them if you just type in? buy backlinks, you’re going to find a lot of websites right now that they will, you can pay like 20 cents a backlink or a dollar a backlink and then they’ll link back to you. Well, what happened was years ago with my company DJ Connection, one of our competitors noticed that we were beating them in Google search results. So they paid a nefarious search engine company to put thousands of backlinks back to my website, thus killing my search engine rank. And Bruce Clay realized that a lot of business owners were doing that to each other. They were actually tanking each other’s websites by putting bad links to your website, to your competition’s website. And so he invented a process called disavow, which is where he educated the search engine optimization companies, Google being that kind of thing, about how this practice was hurting small business owners because shady business owners were putting bad links from bad websites to good websites. And so that is what we’re talking about. So now without any further ado, back to our interview with the search engine wizard, the father of search engine optimization, Mr. Bruce Clay. And then to get rid of the bad links. However, we don’t own those other sites. And that’s where a special process called Disavow was created. It turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engines, to Matt Cutts and Bing. being. And so what it was supposed to be is I have somebody linking to me that I don’t want. I don’t control their site. I don’t want it to count against me. So there’s a process in place supported by the search engines where I can actually get rid of the bad links pointing to me. I disavow them. What you’re going to run into is you’re always going to see negative SEO guys out there that are trying to poison your backlink profile. Or you have people who are naive and don’t know anything about your product but they think that you’re a cool site and they steal your site. Or do they somehow scrape Google or something that actually hurts your overall ranking. At one point, I had about 900,000 links to my website, which is a ridiculous number of links, in my opinion. And it was just somebody that wanted to poison me and lower my ranking by getting bad links pointing to me. Did you have a problem with Putin? I mean, did you and Putin get into an argument? Is that what happened? Did he dispute? Did he claim that he was the father of search engines? Is that how that happened? No, that hasn’t happened yet, but you know, you never know. All right. So you had all these people linking to you from Russia that you had no connection with, and so you thought to yourself, I’ve got to find a way to notify the search engines. And you arguably created this strategy called disavowing links. Is that correct? That is correct. Now, I want to ask you this next question here. As far as these are the scamming, the spamming, and you don’t want to poison your website. My partner, Jonathan, and I, the renowned business coach, Eric Chupp, who initially greeted you when we called you today. We see this all of the time, where you’ll see a client, Eric, I’m sure you’ve seen this, where a client will just literally copy the content from another website and paste it on their site. Other people. Other people’s clients. I’m sure none of your clients are doing this, Eric. No, it definitely happens, especially if they decide to delegate something like this to a member of their team that they don’t know that well. Yeah, I’ll get it done. And then you go, look, that’s all good. And so we use Copyscape and SEMrush to check. And it’s obvious, Bruce, when someone copies on your, you know. But an owner of a company will say, hey, you know, John, the front desk guy, Karen, the front desk lady, could you please write the content for my homepage because I’m too busy? And then this person, let’s say the Karen or the Kelly or the Al or the Marvin, whoever it is that works for you, that they’ll copy the content from your direct competitor and just paste it and go, all done, Bruce, I’ve written the content. It’s beautiful. But our team will discover that the content was in fact plagiarized and copied. Why is that absolutely lethal to your search engine ranking? Well, there’s multiple layers of that. The first is, you’re absolutely right, people do that all the time. They still do it to me. The part I really like is when they paste my content on their site, it still contains my phone number. That’s downright ignorant. I periodically get, you mentioned Copyscape and others, I periodically get notifications that other people have my content. Used to be that I was stolen often because I ranked so well. So it is an issue. Now to the search engine, you’re right at the edge. They don’t really have a penalty if you have that duplicate content. They don’t call it a penalty. But what happens is Google views you as not necessarily being the author of the content because they can’t tell who wrote it first. So what they end up doing is lowering the quality of your site in the rankings. That’s not a penalty. There’s duplicate content. We’re just not sure, so we’re not going to guess. The search engine can actually diminish your ranking, but they don’t refer to it as a penalty. We’ve had cases where content was syndicated, where sites actually allowed other sites to use their content through a syndication contract. It turns out that a couple of our clients, being big clients, actually had syndication agreements with even bigger clients. And what would happen is they’d publish the content, they’d put it up on their website, the syndication would take it, it would be published on another website, they’re a bigger authority than you, they got credit for it, and you got hit. So Google has taken a position that even though there’s no penalty for you if you have duplicate content, there’s no penalty. They really think that you may not be the owner, you will see a filter, and your rankings can be impacted pretty much as a quality item. The rule is publish once and make it the best you can make it. Thrive Nation, I encourage you during the break to check out one of our incredible show sponsors. That’s will-con.com. Will-con.com. That’s Williams Contract. And these guys will do a great job building a piece of commercial property for you, adding on to your church, adding on to your building. Check them out today at will-con.com. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show on talk radio 1170. All right, DriveNation. Welcome back to the conversation. On today’s show, we have the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay, on the show. Now, Bruce Clay is explaining to you and I, the listeners, out there why you cannot copy content from another website and why, if you copy content from another website why it will absolutely destroy your search engine ranking. He’s also teaching you how the practical steps you can take to optimize your website and to get your company to the top of the search engine results so that you can get in front of your ideal and likely buyers who are searching for the products and services that they’re looking for online. This just in, your ideal and likely buyers are using the internet to search for the products and services that they are looking for. Chuck, I think a lot of people push back right there. They do, I don’t know, I’m in a different industry, all my business typically comes word of mouth. It’s word of mouth. Why do I need to do search engine optimization, Chuck? Because you cannot rely on word of mouth alone, especially if you’re trying to grow something and you have big goals you’re trying to get to. So you’ve got to get out there, you’ve got to market, you’ve got to be on the top of the search results because it can literally be worth millions of dollars to you. Furthermore, you saying that the reason why you shouldn’t optimize your website is because all your clients currently come from word of mouth would be like me living in the forest spending my entire day hunting for food and then saying to you, I have no need for this new thing you’re talking about called the grocery store because all the food that I eat comes from hunting. So I don’t need, I don’t know what this is, you’re saying it’s two blocks away? So if I walk two blocks, I can go to the grocery store and have all the food I want, nah. Well, I don’t need this thing you’re calling an automobile. I got a horse, I’m good. I track every single thing I kill and all of it comes from hunting. So I don’t need a grocery store. So, screw off. I’m happy. You’re an idiot. And I don’t do search engines either, because 100% of my business comes word of mouth. You see, what happens is, the other people who live in the forest with me, they’re all extras from the movie Robin Hood, the one with Kevin Costner. All of us, we all know word of mouth, I kill more deer than anybody else out there. But if you do go to whatever that grocery store is, I would like to know if they sell beer, because currently it takes me like a half a year to make any. It takes a long time. Like one barrel. It takes me forever. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes me to crush the grapes, to make the wine, let it ferment, the whole thing. I need a drink because hunting is boring. Wait a minute. So you’re saying that there is a grocery store? Yes. Are you saying that my ideal and likely buyers, 80 to 90% of them, are using search engines to find the products and… What? Yes. Do you know what this means? According to Forbes. Do you know what this means? It means that this thing doesn’t work at all. All right, now back to our interview with Bruce Clay, the search engine guru. But if you spin it out to a bunch of other sites or if people on other sites steal your content, that will actually impact your perception as being a quality site for that particular article. Google doesn’t like the same article on multiple sites. They don’t like your content on other sites. One more thing, if what you did is you took the content and you randomly change a few of the words. Ooh, here we go, this is a hot button for me. That is considered spam by Google, not duplicate content. That’s worse. What you’ve done is you’ve actually tried to take the same content and manipulate it to get rankings for substantially the same structured content, and Google believes that that is spam. So if I have an article, whatever the article is about chocolate fountains in Los Angeles, and then somebody took it and put it chocolate fountains in New York, both ends could receive a penalty for that. So again, if you’re out there and you’re scamming and you’re spamming and you’re playing little games, that’s bad. But I think a lot of our listeners are not trying to play games, but someone in your office might be trying to play a game. I mean, you might be the owner of the business, but you hire somebody and they’re going, well, what’s the fastest way to get this done so I can go out and have a burrito? And so we’re talking about scamming and spamming and things you shouldn’t do. One of the things I have seen is people hiring a company in a third world country, typically, to write articles for them. And they use a service called a spinner service. The service, what it’ll do is you’ll send them the links, right, Bruce, to an article that you like, and they’ll promise they’ll send it back, paraphrased, right? I mean, that’s just what they do. But the problem is Google knows what you’re doing. And as you mentioned earlier, that’s a form of spam. Can you talk to me about just categorically why spinners or hiring companies to write articles for you in third world countries is not a move? Well, there’s multiple layers to it. You mentioned Copyscape. Copyscape was originally designed to identify plagiarism because we all know that there’s no plagiarism issue with high schools or college papers, but that’s what they were designed to do. They were designed for an instructor to be able to say, here’s my paper, is it on the web? And if it is, then that’s plagiarism. Well, the search engines own their own index, and you have to believe that they know and have software to detect duplicate content or manipulated content or even re-sequenced content. So, all of that is bad. Your spinners, they did something a little bit different. What they would do is you would be able to hire a company, give them some keywords and a topic and here’s my website and they would write 50 pages for you, and all 50 pages were probably the fastest they could do it because they get paid per page, and they don’t charge a lot. So the faster they can pump out a page, the more they get paid. It isn’t that you actually have to write something that shows up in search. It isn’t that you actually have to have people like it, or even comment on it. It’s just, did you write a page? And when you go into that environment, Google has repeatedly issued warnings and penalties against companies for what is referred to as spinning. Now, what spinning mechanically is, is I will write one article. It’ll be low quality, but to make up for it, I’m going to put it on 25 sites and that’s the spinning part where you you take one piece of content and you put it everywhere and often that’s where they do the minor modification every time they publish it and that is always going to get you in trouble. Google has indicated that if you have content on multiple sites, they consider it duplicate content. No penalty for it, it’s duplicate content. They’re going to ignore it in many cases. They’ve also indicated if that content links to you, they consider that duplicate links and they’re going to ignore them too. So there’s no real value to you to have a piece of garbage content published on other websites that will accept anything and probably aren’t catering to your persona and your target market and the links don’t count that is just poisoning yourself and so Google has indicated that’s a serious problem and nobody does it anymore Unless you’re overseas and that’s all you know how to do to make money. Now Bruce, I want to talk to you now about simplifying the complexity of search engine optimization. You are arguably the father of search engine optimization, you’re the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. You’re the guru, you are the Yoda of search engine optimization. And so I want to read you a notable quotable from Robert Green, the bestselling author of Mastery. And then I want to read you, I want to ask you a question. He says, in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them. Those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and that can never focus enough to learn. My friend, the complexity of search engine optimization for many people, myself included, can be overwhelming, which is why at the Thrive Time Show, our team uses checklists for everything. We have checklists to help us manage the complexity of and the diligence required and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people? Thrive Nation on tomorrow’s show Bruce Clay continues to break down how search engines work. The father of search engine optimization Bruce Clay will be back on tomorrow’s show to break down how search engines and search engine optimization works But before we wrap up today’s show, let me tell you about one of our great show sponsors and Tulsa’s number one Ford Automotive repair shop with over 80 years of combined experience. That’s RC auto specialist job RC auto Specialist comm what’s their phone number? Their phone number is 9 1 8 8 7 2 8 1 1 5 again Again, that’s 918-872-8115. You can check them out at rcautospecialists.com. Thrive Nation, there is no danger. Don’t be a stranger. Go to thrivetimeshow.com today. Podcasts, workshops, one-on-one coaching, it’s all there. I’m telling you, you can change your life simply by going to thrivetimeshow.com and implementing what you learn. Three, two, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show. That’s it. Arms away. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year for the great state of Oklahoma, where we’re broadcasting right here from the center of the universe. And, Chup, on today’s show, we are interviewing the…this is part two of our interview with the center of the search engine optimization universe. So good. The father of the search engine optimization industry, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. Wow! Ladies and gentlemen, we have Bruce Clay on today’s show. And it was weird how you kept calling him dad and father and papa and all those things. It was cool. I liked it. It’s kind of a whole Darth Vader thing. It was a rapport building. I feel like he is my father. This guy really, really does know what he’s talking about as it relates to search engine optimization. Absolutely. And so, as we jump into part two of this interview with Bruce Clay, he’s now breaking down how to simplify search engine. It can be very complicated and very overwhelming, and he explains his processes for simplifying the dark art of search engine optimization. Now Bruce, I want to talk to you now about simplifying the complexity of search engine optimization. You are arguably the father of search engine optimization, the best-selling author of search engine for dummies. You’re the guru. You are the Yoda of search engine optimization. And so I want to read you a notable quotable from Robert Green, the best-selling author of Mastery, and then I want to ask you a question. He says, in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them. Those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and that could never focus enough to learn. My friend, the complexity of search engine optimization for many people, myself included, can be overwhelming, which is why at the Thrive Time Show, our team uses checklists for everything. We have checklists to help us manage the complexity of, and the diligence required, and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people? Well, the entire environment is overwhelming before you even get to search engine optimization usually. You can have your website built on any number of technology platforms. WordPress being an example. You can build it in, it could be e-commerce, it could be informational, it could be I’m just designing it to be a business card versus this is my living. You have the complexity of that environment. Then on top of that, when you get into the complexity of SEO, SEO is so many things. I think I mentioned to you before I teach a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course. I think it’s rated as a top classroom course out there. It’s four and a half days. And I know darn well every time I start people are curious about what you could possibly talk about for four and a half days. And then at the end of it, they want to know if there’s a follow-on course. And it’s because it’s so complex that it has so many moving parts that it’s overwhelming. When we do our projects, going to your checklist item, we have 300 items on our proprietary checklist. We keep them to ourselves, don’t get me wrong, but that’s how we end up getting people in the top three. How many items are on your checklist? How many? Over 300. I want to make sure listeners get this. I wrote a book called Start Here. It’s an Amazon bestseller. And with my partner, Jonathan Kelly, we put together a part of it called the SEO Manifesto. And it is a very simplified version of how to optimize your website for small business owners. And our checklist is not 300 points. And I’ll tell you why it’s not 300 points. Because Bruce, there’s very few organizations or companies like yours that can handle a 300-point checklist. But you guys do. I mean, that’s what you guys do. You’re known for…if you’ve got a website out there…I mean, Bruce, who’s the ideal client for you? What kind of person out there is the perfect fit to be a Bruce Clay search engine optimization client? Well, under normal circumstances, it would be any industry, mid-sized or larger, and mid-sized is a matter of interpretation. If you can afford a few thousand dollars a month to a million, and in fact we’ve had both. Chuck, I just want to make sure that we do a quick time out here to make sure that everybody’s grasping two big things he just explained. One, Bruce Clay, his internal search engine optimization checklist that he uses for his clients has 300 points on it. 300. I have hired his company before. I have invested thousands upon thousands of dollars paying Mr. Bruce Clay and it was well worth it. Now if you want to attend his course, we put a link to it on the show notes, it’s $2,495 to attend the course. And Chuck, do you know why his course does not cost more money? Do you want to speculate as to why he does not charge more for his course? He’s not a hog. Well, I don’t know. Anybody else? Steve, you want to guess? I think that’s part of it, yes. What else? There’s one more reason why he doesn’t charge more. Why he doesn’t charge more? Because nobody can do it! Once he teaches you how to do it, there’s nobody that can do it, which is why he just said point number two. He said that he charges clients thousands of dollars a month, or it’s up to a million dollars a month. Seven figures, yeah. I’m just trying to explain this to you. My company is, let’s say, elephant in the room. You say, Clay, what is it really worth to you to be top in Google? Well, let me just give you an example. When I grew DJConnection.com, no exaggeration, we, many weekends, would do 80 weddings. 80 weddings. Now, Chuck, let’s just look at this conservatively. Okay, do it. Because we had about 35% of our events that came from the internet. So I’m going to take 80 times.35 and that would be 28. And my profit per show was about $167 in my performance. So that means it was worth $4,676 for me a week to be top in Google. That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. So if you’re out there listening, I would ask, I encourage you to ask yourself this before you get back into the interview. What would it be worth for you to be top in internet search results? What would it be worth for you? What is the value of that? You know, I actually got paid to speak for Maytag University multiple years to the International Community Bankers Association event. We’ll put links, Chip, let’s put links to Maytag University, to where I’m speaking there, so people can verify that it did in fact happen. And let’s also put a link to me speaking in Las Vegas, so people can see that one. They would, Steve, groups will pay me, and have paid me, you know, 20 grand, 15 grand to go speak, and to teach an all-day workshop on how search engines work. Steve, why is it so imperative for all the small business owners, for all the organizations, for all the churches, for anybody out there to be top in Google for the internet search terms that your ideal and likely buyers are looking for. Well if you want to win, then you need to be at the top of Google when people search for what you’re selling. So if you’re not at the top of Google, then you’re probably on page 3 and page 4 or maybe page 20. How would you process this idea, Steve? This is one that, this is something I hear all the time. Not from our listeners. This is from I talked about on yesterday’s show But I really feel like I should talk about it one more time because I think somebody might have missed yesterday’s show and I think Or maybe somebody heard it yesterday, but it didn’t really fully sink in. This is why I hear a lot Well clay I’ll tell you what We get all our business from word of mouth And so we don’t need to know the Internet because we are we get all of our business here chip from from the Internet They’re from the word of mouth, you know, that’s how we always did it. And I know I sound like a redneck for this particular segment, but I’ll tell you this. I’m a surgeon. I’m a Nero surgeon. I’m a Nero surgeon. And one of the things people don’t do is they don’t go on the Internet to find, you know, Nero surgeons. No, they don’t go on the Internet to find, you know, cosmetic surgeons, because what they do is they do Word of Mouth. And that’s just how it’s always been. And I’ve been working with O’Dowd Test as well, because I got the time. I straight out had time on my hands. I became a neurosurgeon, and now I’m also an orthodontist. In fact, I’m kind of a professional, therefore I only operate off of word of mouth. I mean, I entirely, I’ll tell you this, I mean, Chip, I ask all my customers, I say, how do you hear about it? Have I ever had someone say the Internet? No. And that’s why I don’t optimize my website. Because, you see, Chip, if the people were supposed to find me on the internet, then I would definitely invest the money into internet operation. Oh, I am a realist. Because no one ever finds me on the internet. And I pulled an AdWords report, one of them Google things. You added some words to it. And what I found is that nobody had actually found me on the internet, so I’m not going to invest money in my website. I agree with you. Now, Chuck, I’ve got another thing I’m working on. This is a little bit more controversial, but witches, if you burn a witch, you know, because how do you know if she’s a witch? Well, that’s low. Well, she’s made out of wood. Yeah. So what you do is you burn people and you just say and then if they burn then they’re a witch. That’s right. And if they burn kind of slowly then they weren’t a witch. I mean, this is the kind of stupid logic I hear all the time. Seriously, this is the lack of logic. I hear this all the time. I was way into that conversation. I was like, no. You had a client that said they burned witches? Most of them. I am not exaggerating. Woodwitches. I am not exaggerating. I had a neurosurgeon I worked with in Denver, and this is what the guy says. He goes, Clay, none of my clients, we have a lot of patients, and I’ve never had a patient find us on the internet. Because you’re not on the internet! Right! It’s very simple. That’s why they didn’t find you there. No, and then they pull their AdWords report, because they feel like they know, but it’s been about four minutes going on to AdWords on Google, and they’ve done a report and they realize that they’ve got none of their business comes from search engine optimization. So then they say, so therefore I should not invest in search engine optimization. I was trying to think of it like a parallel, but I can’t even think of it. No, and here’s the deal. As a company, we only take on 160 clients, okay? So we can’t possibly work with any more because there’s so much work that goes into search engine optimization. And if you have a $500,000 a year business up to probably a $3 million to $5 million a year business, we’re a great fit for you. But if you have a company like Oxifresh, or a huge brand, and you want to take it to the top of it, if you type in carpet cleaning quotes, Oxifresh is now number one in the world. Yeah. So if you want to be top, and you want to spend some real money to get your real national brand to top in Google, Bruce Clay and his team are absolutely the best. They’re the best. And they’re gonna have a 300 point checklist, but he said this, I want to make sure we’re getting this, he’s gonna charge you thousands of dollars per month up to a million dollars a month. So if you’re out there, you’re saying to yourself, you know what, I want to be top in the Google search engine results. I would highly recommend, without reservation, that you start by getting the book Search Engine for Dummies by Bruce Clay. Get that book. Or if you’re somebody who you learn more, kind of hands-on, you like to interact and ask questions, I would encourage you to book your tickets for our Thrive Time Show in-person two-day workshop. It takes place on the left coast of the Arkansas River here in beautiful Tulsa, Oklahoma, at our 20,000 square foot facility. And if you want to get your tickets for free, all you have to do is subscribe to the Thrive Times show on iTunes and then leave us an objective review. So subscribe to the Thrive Times show on iTunes, leave us an objective review, and then email us your review to info at thrive timeshow.com. So you subscribe on iTunes, leave us an objective review, email us proof you did it to info at thrive times show dot com and We will give you those free tickets so we get back from the break more with our exclusive interview with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of search engine for 3, 2, 1, boom! You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. Thrive Time Show on the microphone, what is this? Top of the iTunes charts in the category of business. Drilling down on business topics like we are a dentist. Providing you with internship like you are an apprentice. And we go so fast that you might get motion sickness. Grab a pen and pad to the lab, let’s get in this. Time to pass some fruit like some Florida oranges. 3, 2, 1, here come the business ninjas. Sonic Boom! Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. We are interviewing Bruce Clay, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, and arguably the father of search engine optimization. Again, his name is Mr. Bruce Clay, the bestselling author of Search Engine for Dummies. And as we hop back into the interview, this is where Bruce is explaining what kind of client would be ideal to work with him or what kind of clients he prefers to work with and what kind of clients he will not work. Search engine optimization is not an event. It is an ongoing process. And so Bruce explains the right kind of people that are the right fit for the search engine optimization process that he does, because his process has been proven to work, and he’s just kind of explained the criteria for who would be an ideal and likely buyer for both he and his organization. If you can afford a few thousand dollars a month to a million, and in fact we’ve had both, then it’s something that we would be able to handle. We don’t really say that we only deal with large companies and get snobbish about it. That isn’t what we do. We pick customers that are able to realize their life is changing if this is able to be done for them. And we get a lot of reward for that. We’ve had clients for 15 years. They’re just totally enamored with the fact that they’re being taken care of. One of the brands I work with, with a coaching relationship, and I’m a partner with the founder of Oxifresh, but you know, we’re top in Google for the phrase carpet cleaning quotes. We have a hundred and thirty seven thousand Google reviews and we have four hundred locations and I can tell you the vast majority of the business comes in from the internet for that company and it’s a game-changing thing but I just make sure I’m understanding what you just said. You’re saying if someone’s willing to spend a few thousand dollars, let’s say someone’s willing to spend like three thousand or two thousand dollars a month on just search engine optimization. Yeah I have people writing six digit checks monthly. Six digit checks monthly. So Thrive Nation you might say what kind of sick freak would do that? I don’t know. I mean there’s a company called blinds.com that is top when you type in blinds and Bruce, I mean these are big companies that make a ton of money as a result of being top in Google. Because back in the day, if you had a question, you used to go, dear God, could you help me think of the answer to this question? If you lived in a field in like Des Moines, you know, Iowa, you’d say, dear God, could you help me? Or you’d ask your mom or your dad. Now people, they go to Google to search for everything. I mean, being top in Google is unbelievably important. Being top in all the search engines is very important. And so, Bruce, I have a list of questions, kind of a rapid fire. I’m going to fire off just a bunch of questions for you. And this will be kind of our lightning round, okay? So here we go. What makes it hard to get to the top of Google search results for one keyword but easy to rank for another? Well, that’s an easy answer. The second part has probably got a lot to do with whether or not you understand what Google is expecting for that keyword, and it may be that your site is more what Google expects already. Whereas for other terms, it may be some work. If I want to rank for a term that is information, but I’m an e-commerce site, that’s going to be more work. So it’s a match between your content and what Google thinks everybody wants, and it’s a different match elsewhere as to whether or not you have competitors that are asleep at the wheel or not. I want to ask you this, Bruce, because this next question to me is one that I see people ask me all the time, personally. And I want to get your take on this, because you are the father of search engine optimization. Everybody wants to be to the top of Google. I mean, I think every business owner wants to be top of Google. I have yet to meet people that say, well, you know, overall, I want to be at the bottom of Google, because I don’t want anybody to find me. I’m trying to bury my secrets, my company on page four. People want to be at the top of Google, but very few people want to invest the work or the finances to get to the top of Google. Can you explain where your money goes? Let’s say that I hire a search engine optimization company. Where does the money go when you’re paying? What kind of stuff are the people doing to optimize a website? If you’re paying your firm $10,000 a month to optimize a website, where does that money go? What is your team doing with their time to optimize a website? In my environment, the team is multi-layer. We actually have a service layer and then an engineering layer. So the service leader are people who are called program managers. And they’re the primary point of contact for the clients. Because when you’re being aggressive in SEO, you’re going to have frequent customer contact. They’re going to send you emails often. You’re going to be doing an awful lot more. When they have a project, then what we do is we build an agile team behind them. The agile team is probably well over 80% of the effort that we put into a project. They are doing deep research. They’re analyzing your site. They’re determining what Google has changed. They’re looking at your competitors. They are evaluating your competition to determine if they have content you don’t have. Maybe that’s why they’re ranking. We look at the speed and performance of your servers. We determine whether or not the search engine spiders are able to get to your pages and spider you because if you can’t get spidered, you’re not in the index. We’re looking at, as I said, 300 items, that takes time. Most people don’t understand. They think that, okay, out on the web there’s some of these quickie little utilities where you put in your URL and it tells you everything that’s wrong with it. If it were that easy because going the final step, it’s like the 80-20 rule. That final 20% takes 80% of your effort. So logically, we have retainer programs and we determine what is an optimal speed based upon what the client has asked for. And we just spend the time where the squeaky wheel is, where there is something that’s going to give them the best bang for their buck and the best traffic and conversion and basically search mileage. And that is the way we spend our time. So the people aren’t just sitting around saying, I want to be top of Google. We want our client to be top of Google. We need them to be top of Google. There’s actually a recipe. There’s a system. There’s a strategy. It’s not just luck. Are you saying it’s not just luck, Mr. Bruce Clay? Oh, it’s absolutely not just luck. When we return, Bruce Clay breaks down how to get to the top of the Internet search results. How do you get to the top of the Google search engine results? The father of the search engine optimization industry breaks it down when we get back. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrive timeshow.com. In a world where not being top in Google is like not wearing pants to work, there is only one father of search engine optimizations. In a world where not being top in Google is like going to work without pants, there is only one father of search engine optimization. And when you host an iTunes Top Ten podcast and you have no discernible talent, and when you get an opportunity to interview the father of search engine optimization, you get strangely nervous and you begin to sweat and cry a lot. Probably opened up too much there, but now Ladies and gentlemen, without any further ado, back to my exclusive, game-changing, premium, platinum edition, and super humble interview with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, the man I call Daddy, Mr. O. That might have come across as weird, but that’s just… He’s the father. He’s the father, and I’m the little boy, but… Ladies and gentlemen, I’m so nervous to interview my dear friend, Mr. Bruce Cliff. So the people aren’t just sitting around saying, I want to be top of Google. We want our client to be top of Google. We need them to be top of Google. There’s actually a recipe. There’s a system. There’s a strategy. It’s not just luck. Are you saying it’s not just luck, Mr. Bruce Kline? Oh, it’s absolutely not just luck. It is definitely a methodology. That’s what we refer to it as. And we have a pretty much a way of analyzing sites, determining what’s wrong, architecting repairs, getting them fixed. And we actually saw that as an audit project that’s just a couple months long where we tear your site apart and tell you all the stuff that needs to be fixed. We do that on our own projects. We do it on our own sites. We rank for a reason and our clients rank for a reason. If we’re actually operating on word of mouth, which we typically do, and people come to us because they’ve heard about what we can do, we can’t afford really to not achieve. So we’re, we’re paying attention all the time. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t sit around also going, we really want this. But it’s one thing to want it, and it’s another thing to do it. And so our teams are focused on results. You, Bruce, in your book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, the 560-page-plus book, I mean, that book is so detailed. But why? I mean, why does it even matter? Well, search engine optimization can change a business owner’s life. Can you explain, and I’m not asking you to divulge a client’s personal information, or if there’s a story you’re at liberty to share, I’d love to hear. But how has search engine optimization absolutely changed the lives of people that have decided to invest in it and to become Top or in the top three of search engine results for certain keywords well as a couple of examples, and I’m talking like many examples in Our case we have gotten sites to rank at the top sometimes in six months, sometimes a year, sometimes longer. And usually what actually happens is they sell the company. So obviously that money is life changing. They get it to the top and somebody wants it. And so they sell it and move on and cost again. I’m not asking for a client that you’ve actually helped that has sold the company, but can you think of some examples of people or organizations you’ve heard of that have sold their company as a result of search engine ops? I know business.com is a famous example, but could you think of it? You’re in this every single day. Right. The… and it really matters a lot. We had one client. They were rather big. They were in the automotive space. They had 1.7 million visitors a month to their website. That’s pretty big. Wow. They brought us in. We did a year and a half restructuring of their entire 12 million page website. Took a while. It was very nice for us. But at the end of it, when they flipped the switch and the site went live, they jumped to 16.4 million uniques a month. That’s a lot of visitors. It is. And 16 million visitors changed their lives. They were originally in a lead gen business where they would get visitors and sell them to auto industries. They switched it entirely to an ad network where people would buy ads on their website and they made so much more money doing that. And then about four months later, they sold it for a fortune. But they were one of the top ranked sites in that automotive space. So that’s an example. A 900% increase in traffic on most websites, that would change anybody’s life. So what do you enjoy doing when you’re not optimizing websites? A lot of our listeners are going, OK, Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the guy who arguably invented the search engine optimization industry. Can you share with the listeners a kind of a look into your personal life and something that most people maybe you know don’t know about you or things you enjoy doing when you’re not changing people’s lives by optimizing their websites? Well yes and no. The one problem with search engine optimization is it’s almost impossible to look at anybody’s website without mentally dissecting it. So it becomes really difficult to spend much time on the internet. I’m recently married. So I spend a lot of time with my amazingly beautiful wife. Congratulations there, Mr. Bruce. Yay! But I’ll tell you, this is something I’m really enjoying. I watch a lot of movies we were kind of into crossword puzzles. Oh wow. And then she has her kids and I have mine, so family’s important. And it’s actually sort of a strange thing. I have become somewhat disconnected. When I get home on Friday nights, I set my computer down, it’s in a backpack, and I don’t take it out until Sunday. Amen. That is different. I never used to do that. So I think there’s multiple layers. You can just really enjoy disconnecting. You don’t have to do a whole lot else. You’re just enjoying it. So what entrepreneurs do you look up to, Bruce Clay? All right, Thrive Nation, when we return, we’re going to go back into the mind of Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of the incredible book, Search Engine for Dummies. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. If you’ve not yet purchased your copy, I encourage you to buy one today. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Bruce Clay actually wrote that book for me, Steve. I think he dedicated Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. For both of us. I think he was dedicated to dummies. I feel like I’m the lead inspiration, the true dummy he wrote the book for. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Dread Nation, welcome back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. During this portion of the interview, I’m asking Bruce about new projects he’s working on and kind of a deeper look into the personal life of the founder of the search engine optimization industry. In my industry there’s certainly some that have really performed well but they have had a specific exit strategy from day one. I enjoy people who have built two successful businesses or one business built twice. One of the things I’m doing, for instance, is I built a successful business. I got in early. Really I consider myself to be one of the founders of a billion dollar multinational digital movement. I feel that way. And having succeeded at that, the next thing I am doing is I’m really developing a lot of software, almost like I’m building a new business within my business. And that software is very, very close to release. It’s going to be great. But it’s sort of a reinvention. And I like that. So when I look at others, I look at people that have succeeded and then reinvented it and succeeded again. And they’ve done it without being rude or angry all the time in the process. They’ve succeeded because they deserve to succeed. And those are the kinds of people I like. I read books all the time and it’s all about what you’re doing. Right now I’m spending a moderate amount of time on business books. So let me ask you this, business books. I want to make sure you have time to get into your new product you’re developing and to cut into the details of that. I also want to ask you, I want to tap into your wisdom. What are a few books that you’ve read? You’re an avid reader. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re the father of search engine optimization. What are a few books you’ve read where you think to yourself, gosh, everybody should read this book? Well, the three that I will recommend. I read Scaling Up. That’s a Vern Harnish book. I think that if you’re looking for a way to be more organized as a business, you should do that. That’s important. Our organization, because we’re an agile team business, I read the book Mastering the Matrix. Mastering the Matrix. Master the Matrix. It’s by Susan Finnerty, I think. Trying to remember. And then one of the best, easiest reading books that I’ve read is the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It is really about team building. So between scaling up, which is organization, daily huddles, KPI management, having the big rock, if you will, then understanding how to manage in a matrix environment, and then team building. Those three books, I think, together are ideal for almost any business of any size. And those are the ones that I would say are probably the best that I’ve read. And then I have this little. Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt you. I did a little Skype delay there, my friend. Back to you. Then I have this other area where I get into actually practicing this stuff. We have a business consultant and I have, I do a lot of consultants. I have a lot of consultants in to help me and mostly because it’s just a lot of work to manage five international offices. So I use help and I think that that is a change for a lot of small businessmen. In a larger environment, you really have to look for your peers that will help you the most. But anyhow, that’s where I’m at. So tell us about this new SEO product you’re developing or what you can tell. I know it’s going to be something you’ve spent a lot of time on. I’m certainly not asking for you to divulge your secrets of this new search engine product. But for anybody who’s ever read your book, Search Engine for Dummies, or who’s familiar with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry, we’re all excited to know about this new product. What do you make it? Well, we have made a product which is an API layer that will work with any content management system. This is the primary concept. For as many people out there that are doing SEOs, there’s 100 people doing content. There’s 100 writers for every one competent SEO. And so what we did is we built a tool that helps people do SEO as writers. One of our first releases for the tool, first flavors if you will, is that it integrates as a plug-in right into WordPress because there’s 56 million blogs. So while you’re writing content for your website, you can see while you’re writing content, you could maybe see whether it’s compliant or not, or whether you’re doing a good job or not, or give you tips along the way. How does that work? Well, there’s a lot of businesses that have plugins and a lot of the plugins just run on your desktop. They’re not really analyzing anything. Ours is software as a service, and therefore, we can actually spider websites, we can spider your competition, we can see that you don’t have enough words based upon your competition and the number of words they have. So we have taken logically a what would be black-and-white television and made it color. We have taken the information available at the fingertips of the and we have given them the power to see it as it is closer to the real internet once it’s published, which is really remarkable. And then we pull in all the analytics data so that you can actually see how well your content is performing on a writer-by-writer basis, blog post-by-blog post, page-by-page basis. And that particular product, I know I’m a little insane here, but we’re offering it at under $25 a month for each domain, which means that every blogger in the world is probably going to use it. And then if you’re really caring that you could publish a blog post and it goes right to the top. This is a mandatory kind of a tool. So I’m just anxious to get it out. It is imminent. Imminent. We’re in final test right now. Bruce, you’re messing with me, Bruce. Bruce, I’m a huge fan of your stuff, man. I’m buying what Bruce Clay is selling. I’m a customer of yours. I’ve used you guys. I’m very happy with the services and the results that you’ve generated. I’m honored to have the father of search engine optimization on today’s podcast. Sir, when can I buy it? Where can I buy it? When can you buy it? Yes, when and where? Come on, give to me. Okay, here’s what we’re doing. It’s $25 a month. Yep. We’re offering a 40% discount pre-sale. Oh! Bruce, where can I get it? Go to my website. Bruceclay.com slash WP slash, sorry, slash SEO slash WP. Bruceclay.com slash SEO slash WP. And it’ll take you to, not only will it take you to a form that you can fill out, it’ll actually show you a seven minute video about what the product can do. Ah, Bruce, Bruce, you’re blowing my mind. I have three final questions for you, then I’m going to let you get back to dominating the world and to doing what it is that you do that has allowed you to become the father of search engine optimization. So these are my final three questions for you. Question number one, how many keywords can you optimize for on one page of a website? Well, that falls into two categories. Unique keywords, you really should operate on one theme, right around one topic. You can have multiple variants. They’re called variants, different ways of saying the same word, like smiling and smiles. So you can have multiple variants and you typically would have several. If you only had one, you look like a spammer. We have some of our pages optimized and ranking in the top 10 for up to 16 keywords. So I’m not sure that the average site will ever have a problem getting ranked for, you know, half a dozen. We typically recommend that more than a half dozen, you’re going to need a bunch of content and a whole lot of structure. We return more with our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry. Claim your tickets to the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop for free. All you have to do is to subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes, leave an objective review and send us confirmation at info at thrive timeshow.com. To claim your star in the National Star Registry, we can’t help you. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. It is the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. Now on today’s show, what we’re doing is we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry. And we’re asking him now why it would be better for a local small business to focus on local search engine optimization keywords as opposed to national keywords. Chup, can you explain on a very basic level for the listeners out there who are maybe not as familiar with what search engine optimization is, what a keyword is all about? We say keywords. What does that mean? And talk to us about local keywords and national keywords. So a keyword is going to be one of the words that people are literally typing into Google to find you or what you do or your product. So like Tulsa mortgages. Tulsa mortgages would be something somebody would type in to find Steve Carrington and total lending. That’s all you’d find. And that’s all. That’s all you’d find, unless you type the word mortgages. And you’re going for it. You’re going to win it, but you’re not quite top in the nation yet. So, you’d want to have people searching for Tulsa mortgages. Well, I’m top in the nation, but people just don’t know it yet. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah. The billboard in the woods. But, same thing with like Luke Owens and the Hub Jam, Broken Arrow, Jim’s, the keyword Jim is going to be a lot harder to win, so you want to optimize for that local version first. So, as an example, if you’re out there trying to be top for the word mortgage right now. The number one website that comes up top in search engines pretty consistently is a mortgage calculator and bank rate and Wikipedia. So you might say to yourself, well, what would I have to do if I wanted to beat bank rate? Well, to beat bank rate right now, you would need 34,300 pages of content. And so if you were going to hire Bruce Clay to do that, on the low end his articles are about $200 a piece. So if you took… Is it $600,000? No, no, no, no. You would need… Seven. No, you would need… Let me pull this up here. Did I catch a niner in there? Well, do it in math on a radio show. It’s not advised, but I’m doing it. So here we go. Oh, yeah. I’m doing the math here. It would cost you $6,860,000. Oh, yeah. To be competitive, but to actually win, you would actually be spending close to $13 million. There you go. So $13 million. Now, if you wanted to beat Steve Currington, and you can’t because we only work with one company in each niche, but if you did want to, right now, let me pull this up real quick here. $1,206. You need $1,206. I don’t know. I’m just guessing how many pages I have right now. Let’s see how close I am. I’m just trying to give an example. You would need right now, you would need 2,300 articles to beat Steve right now. And Chip, I want to put this on the show notes so the listeners get that. Again, if you wanted to beat Bankrate, you would need to invest close to $13 million of search engine content at $200 plus an article to beat bank rate and to beat Steve Currington right now, again, you would need to have, let’s see here, and again, this is if you were to hire Bruce Clay’s team to do it, at $200 an article, you would have, and this is something, Steve, I’m sure you can share this with the team here at Total Living Concepts so they can see kind of what it would cost here. So to beat Steve right now on Google, if you were to hire Bruce Clay, it would be $472,000. That’s what he would charge you. So per article, his team, if they’re writing content for you, they charge about $200. On a previous segment of today’s interview, Bruce Clay explained that his team, if they were going to write articles for you, they would charge you approximately $200 per article on the low end. And so to beat Steve Currington in the Google search engine results, if you were to hire a search engine optimization firm at the going rate of $200 per article minimum, conservatively, you would spend $472,000. That’s not dull hairs. Paying a search engine optimization firm to beat you. And that would just be to beat me in Tulsa. Right. So you can see where search engine optimization can be expensive if you’re not willing to produce your own content internally. And that’s just something to think about. Let it swirl around in your cranium before we get back into this interview with Bruce Clay about why you’d want to focus on local terms versus national terms. Steve, do you have a hot take there? Well, I was going to say, I’d like to point out that I think I paid you a lot less to get to the same place. And so I think that’s one of the benefits of working with Thrive is most search engine companies do charge you a lot of money to get to the top of Google. And I know we didn’t spend $4.72, but we’re there. Because you guys definitely were able to tap into our team’s ability to write content. And you also did a lot of your own podcasts, which we’re able to transcribe, and that produced content for you as well. So Thrive Nation, without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Okay, I have two final questions. Why is it better, I work with a lot of small businesses, why is it better for the average small business, small business owner to go after local search engine optimization as opposed to national search engine optimization? Well, in general, national is competing more against brands, whereas local, the brand typically doesn’t have the bandwidth to penetrate every local market. So there’s a competitive advantage if you are able to be local. A great many businesses are not national. There’s no reason to pretend like you are because you’re not going to want to deliver nationally and so you’re going to want to understand what your service region is and just focus on that. And you can focus on that in a great If you’re a local business right now, you should write this down, Google Home Services. Check it out. It’s a new service. It’s not available everywhere, coming from Google, and it’s an amazing opportunity to get your site premierly presented in Google. So all those things make sense on a local level. If you’re trying to be national, just understand this is going to be a battle. You’re against brands, you’re against everybody everywhere, and that’s just the way it is. I want to explain this to the listeners real quick. I worked with a business years ago, a bakery, and she wanted to be top of the world for the phrase, cakes. Specifically, Bruce, she wanted to be top of the world for the term wedding cakes. I pulled it up and I showed her what the competition looked like, and I said, listen, let’s focus on optimizing for Tulsa wedding cakes. Well, we got her to the top of Google in probably six months working with her and she really, her partner just didn’t want to pay attention and didn’t want to understand how search engines work. And Bruce, they are currently still spending just hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to be top for Google. And they’re almost out of money now for the phrase wedding cakes. They’re not even close, man. They’re like on page four or something, you know. And the thing is, they can’t even service. They got an online order for, you know, from New York or something. They couldn’t even do it. You know what I mean? They couldn’t mail a wedding cake. I mean, can you explain what kind of businesses cannot actually be national and which ones can be? A good example that I commonly use A plumber, of course, can visit your house, but he’s not going to travel to New York to fix anything. Things that are inexpensive, those are more difficult because national is a more expensive proposition, takes longer to rank. So you really have to be careful about the value and return on investment for your product. If it has virtually no delivery problem, then you’re fine. We had a client that sold chocolate, not fountains, just chocolate. And it was great and it was beautiful and they had local contracts at hotels and they were really, really cooking. And they decided they wanted to go national. So one of the first things they did is they sent me a sample and when it got to me it was a box of molten chocolate because it was summer. So it is clear that sometimes you just don’t have a product that should be sold nationally. Now, having said that, I think that it’s always prudent to dominate your area and then expand unless it is clear that you have some form of recognition already nationally. I just want to make sure that nobody just wastes money doing it. I think that local is so much easier and there’s more tools for local. Google prefers local. In my local area, I rank at the top, even though I don’t sell locally, just because I have paid attention to how to do that. I can probably get anybody to rank locally. It’s a little bit longer process to rank nationally. Now, Bruce, my final question for you today is talk to me about the difference between long tail keywords and short tail keywords and why long tail keywords are easier to win than short tail keywords. Okay, there is what you’re calling short tail keywords is commonly also known as a head term. Head term, got it. They’re used interchangeably. A head term is usually a one or two-word phrase that describes simply a topic, right, like chocolate fountain or a specific use for a chocolate fountain, where the number of competitors for those longer term phrases are far fewer. I think that many times people will say, oh, there’s all these searches for this particular term without recognizing that people search, and then they don’t go there. I’m going to give you an example, if I can. The word hammer. I think everybody knows what a hammer is. But here I am in LA, and I do a search for hammer. And the number one result is the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. The number two item is a vitamin, the number three item is a bowling ball, and the number four item is MC Hammer. Not a single one of them are what you were probably looking for. So when there’s ambiguity in there, the ambiguity is far more rampant on what’s called a head term. Because Google doesn’t necessarily know what hammer you’re talking about. Whereas if I said hammer or claw hammer or ball peen hammer or hammer with long handle that weighs over five pounds, those are long tail keywords. They are more specific to the mission of the visitor, they have a higher probability of being closer to the conversion point and you can write about those a lot easier because you know exactly what that product is instead of having to guess as to what I would put for hammer. I think that it’s easier to rank for a long tail. I think it’s faster to get rankings show up in Google for a long tail. I also have many years of experience where if you can rank for many long tail keywords then it’s easier to rank for the head terms. We always are constantly have head terms where we’ll get you ranked for a one-term phrase it’ll take you maybe a year and a half but we can do it. But the way we do it is we focus on the long tail first and then build expertise. And then you can rank for the short term. DriveNation, obviously today we’re talking about how to do more effective marketing and how to generate more customers through search engine optimization. But another way to save both time and money is to have an accountant staying on top of your books. If you’re looking for a proactive accounting firm, I encourage you to check out hoodcpas.com today, one of our great show sponsors, hoodcpas.com. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry. Bruce, you are the arguably the father of search engine optimization. You are factually, for sure, not my opinion, you are the best-selling author of search engine optimization for dummies. You are a man who’s worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet. My friend, I cannot express to you how much we appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to come on to the Thrive Time Show. So my friend, on behalf of the Thrive Nation and everybody out there, all the small business owners and mid-level companies and all the hundreds of thousands of people that download this podcast, thank you for coming on to the show. Well, thank you very much for having me. And Bruce, good luck with your incredible new wife there. We’re excited for you, and if you ever want to be on the show again, especially when the product comes out. I know you’re pre-selling your search engine optimization product right now, but when it comes out, if you want to do an update or tell us how it’s going, please feel free to not be a stranger and you have just been a pleasure to interview as I knew you would be. Well, thank you very much. Hey, take care and have a great day. All right Thrive Nation, that was Bruce Clay. Check out his book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. What I want to do now is I want to spend the rest of the show making sure that every single listener that you leave today’s show knowing how search engine optimization works. And so I wanna give you some tools, I wanna give you a lot of free stuff and help you. So action step number one, Chep, I wanna put this on the show notes, is all the listeners out there, I would encourage you today to go to thrivetimeshow.com and to download the Start Here book we have for free. Go to thrivetimeshow.com, you can download my Amazon bestselling book, Start Here. In that book, I have a thing called the Search Engine Optimization Manifesto. I would encourage you to download, again, the Start Here book for free from thrivetimeshow.com. Download that book. That way, you have a Cliff Notes version of how to optimize a website. But I would recommend that everybody invest the $15, the $20. I’m sure you can find one right now on Amazon.com. We’ll put a link to it on the show notes. Buy search engine optimization for dummies. Buy search engine optimization for dummies and have it on your desk. I mean, keep it there because you’re going to run into search engine charlatans all the time. I mean, how many people, Steve, how often do you get an email from some company, usually based in India or the Middle East or China, that is reaching out to you to say that they can do search engine optimization for as little as $199 a month. Multiple times a day. It happens all the time. Every day. Oh, every single day, multiple times a day. Right. And so I want to make sure all the listeners get this. Once you begin to move up in search engine optimization ranks, you’ll get more emails from companies who are targeting companies that are on the first two pages of Google search engine results. And they’re going to have very compelling arguments. A lot of them use fear to sell. A lot of them will reach out to you and try to scare you. Oh, if Google sees this on your website, whoo, whoo, you could be in trouble. I noticed that you had an error on one of your pages. I’m like, well, I have thousands of pages so it’s not surprising to think that one of them might have an error. So let’s focus on the big four variables that you need to have optimized to get to the top of the search engine results. Variable number one, your website must be a Google canonically compliant website. You might say, what does that mean? We would recommend that you would build your website in WordPress. Why would you want to build your website in WordPress? best out of the box search engine friendly format. It’d be kind of like building a car, let’s say. And let’s say the car… Chep, what kind of vehicle, what kind of truck do you do drive these days? A Ford F-150. King Ranch. Okay, so there you go. So it’s a Ford F-150. A lot of stickers on it too. It looks really great. Thanks. Do you haul a lot of stuff in that vehicle? I mean, do you haul all things from A to B with that thing? Only when I have to. Okay, well if you, let’s say that the chassis of that vehicle, I’m just kind of trying to compare Ford vehicles, but I used to drive a 1989, not so dent resistant Ford Escort, and it’s a hatchback, and that thing, the chassis of that vehicle is not built to carry the weight that an F-150 is. Right. So in the event that we put too much weight into the Ford Escort, it just simply could not handle the weight. And when you build a website, you want to build it on the right foundation. It would be like putting rebar in the concrete on your, let’s say, if you’re building a home, you want to put rebar in the concrete. Chup, you did concrete. That’s right. Why do you put rebar in the concrete? To hold everything together. The concrete has a very strong compression strength, but it doesn’t hold together well if it cracks and the rebar inside it holds it. It’s like the skeleton of the concrete. So you want to build the proper skeleton for your website and that would be using WordPress. You want to start off with a good foundation. Now after you build your site, and by the way if you’re saying I don’t know where are you getting all this information from? Well one, I wrote a book on it. It’s called Start Here and in that book we write the search engine optimization manifesto. But if you don’t believe me, if you don’t want me to cite myself, fine, I’ll give you five books I’d recommend for you. You go do the work. Read these books. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Oh, who’s that? This would be Bruce Clay. Also, The Retargeting Playbook by Adam Burke is a great book. How Google Works by the CEO, written by the CEO of Google itself, Eric Schmidt. And then Get Rich Quick by Mark Ostrofsky, and that’s the only book that I know of that’s endorsed by the co-founder of Apple himself, Mr. Wozniak, and The Honest Seduction. So again, search engine optimization for dummies. We’ll put this all in the show notes. Retargeting Playbook, How Google Works, The Honest Seduction, and Get Rich Click. Those are the books I’d recommend that you read to understand that. But just build your site from the very beginning with the right format, the right chassis, make your website Google canonical compliant. If your site’s built on a different platform, heaven help you. And heaven’s going to need to help you because Google doesn’t like it. And that’s what we do as part of our business coaching program. We can help you fix your website right away. Now the second variable that you want to be very aware of if you want to get to the top of Google search engine results is you have to have the most mobile compliance. The most mobile compliance. When we come back from the break, we’re going to get more into mobile compliance and what that looks like. We’d actually be happy to do a mobile compliance test or a checkup for you. So if you just email us to info at ThriveTimeShow.com. Email us your contact information and your website to info at ThriveTimeShow.com. We’d be happy to do a free diagnostic exam on your website to tell you what you’re doing well and what’s wrong with it. Right? We’ll be happy to do that for you. Also, Chup, we’re giving away a lot of free stuff today. Ah, free stuff. What if you’re listening right now, Chup, and you’re saying to yourself, you know, I want a free printer. I would like a free laser copier. By the way, we have multiple of these copiers in our Thrive Time Show offices. And I want to save both time and money on getting my office and printer supplies. Chup, how can our listeners benefit not only one of our show sponsors but themselves my friend. So it’s also owned business by the name of Onyx Imaging. They’re your one-stop business shop for all your business needs Steve Carrington. You can check them out at OnyxImaging.com but right now if you buy your printer supplies and office supplies and use them for printer service they’re gonna give you a free copier printer at no charge okay. Wait a second, did you just say? Surely you can’t be serious. I am serious and don’t call me Shirley. And copy. And copy? Print your copy for free. All you gotta do is buy it. They price match, they have online ordering. Where can I get this? Same and next day delivery. Go to onyximaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611. 918-627-6611. Onyximaging.com. Uh, Chump, you know, hooked on Onyx works for me. And you know what they say, see a broad, they get that booty, yak em. Leg her down, smack em, yak em. OnyxImaging.com. That is not their slogan. That’s not what they say. But check them out. It’s OnyxImaging.com. Once again, it’s OnyxImaging.com. Save both time and money today. Make sure you never miss a broadcast by signing up for the Thrive Time Show podcast. And back to a show that’s cooler than the other side of the pillow. It’s the Thrive Time Business Coach Show. All right, DriveNation, you have started from the bottom of the Google search engine ranks. And you want to get your website to the top of these search engine results. I’d encourage you to get out a pen and a pad and get ready as we enter into the search engine optimization lab. On the first part of today’s show, we had the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of search engine optimization for dummies on the show. And now we’re breaking down what he’s been teaching into very actionable steps for all the listeners out there. So step number one, you’ve got to convert your website to WordPress. You just have to do it. Quit screwing around, not doing it. I don’t care how much money you…Chuck, how often do you hear people say, I just finished building a site, and I’ve spent a ton of money, and I built it on this particular platform, and I don’t want to switch it to WordPress? All the time. But Clay, I just built this awesome triple-sized billboard in the middle of the woods behind your house out here. It’s right, I got to keep it. No one can see it. Yeah, that’s the problem. So it’s unfortunate, and it happens, but that’s just part of doing business. You’ve got to build a search engine compliant website now. Right now. You’ve got to start now. Build it in WordPress. If you want our team to help you. We don’t do just one-off projects. We have 160 clients. That’s all we do. We work with a client and with business coaching. We also tackle their search engine, their web, their graphic design, their print pieces, their videography. We do it all. It’s a turnkey system. We don’t do just standalone websites. Did I tell you about my new hot rod? No. It’s custom. It has no wheels. Nice. It’s beautiful, though. It’s beautiful. It looks great. It just doesn’t have wheels. I just had them on purpose not put wheels on it so nobody can see it. That’s kind of like having a website that can’t be found. It might look nice, but it won’t go anywhere. So now what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to have the most mobile compliance. Now, your site has to work well in mobile because this just in from our home office. Steve, are you aware that most people today are using smartphones? Shut it. Shut it. No, I’ve actually been out to the airport. I went to the park, to the mall, and in all instances I’ve noticed that people are carrying these smartphone devices. Every single person. And they’re on them all the time. What? Even people going out to eat. People walk into a fountain or something because they’re on their phone. I wouldn’t doubt it. They’re using a smartphone. Yes, I do the other day walk into the door. It’s so funny. Bam, right into the… That’s one of my favorite things. Yeah, so I would just say this is people are always using their smartphones and they’re always on Google and they’re always searching for the products and services that they are looking to buy. They’re looking for the answers to the problems they have. And so I just wanted to give you some examples there, Thrive Nation, of people you could check out there. If you type in Tulsa mortgages, you’re going to find Steve Currington. He’s obviously on today’s show, but you’re going to find his website there in the search results. If you type in Tulsa cookies, you’re going to find Barbie cookies. So again, this is a real system that works, and you’re going to generate a ton of business doing it? But I don’t think a lot of people take the time to realize how much of a game-changing thing this could be in your life if you do get to the top of search engine results. And so we had one of our thrivers, we like to have them on the show when possible, stop by the studio and I asked them if they’d be willing to hop on this show and share about how much they’ve grown as a result of implementing the proven systems that we teach. Ladies and gentlemen, this is our interview with Aaron Antus, the marketing director for Oklahoma’s now largest home building business. Hi, I’m Aaron Antus with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them and I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden so I was willing to listen. In my career I’ve sold a little over 800 million dollars in real estate. So honestly I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes and then I met Clay and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15 year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of sales people for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually, in a four-month period of time, has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I’ve found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town, and so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35-year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us and I know if you give them a shot I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800 percent increase in our internet leads going from 10 a month to a hundred and eighty a month that would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show on Talk Radio 1170. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the special edition, the Bruce Clay edition of the Search Engine Optimization Conversation. Bruce Clay is the father of the search engine optimization industry. He was on the earlier part of today’s show. If you’re just tuning in on the radio and you missed the earlier segments, go to thrivetimeshow.com, click on the podcast button and look for this interview with Bruce Clay. Bruce Clay is the father of the search engine optimization industry, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, and we are now, as we wrap up today’s show, we’re breaking down the big four variables, the big action steps that every single listener, and that includes you, you need to take if you want to make the amount of money that you want to make. Okay? And then also to provide more and more proof this is not a charlatan thing we’re providing facts so you know this is not fiction. We’re giving you examples, testimonials, I mean everything is cited. You can find all of this at Thrive Timeshow.com. Click on the podcast button. So we’re talking about variable number one. You’ve got to fix today. You’ve got to convert your website to a Google canonically compliant website. You have to switch your website today over to WordPress. Stop not switching over to WordPress. What the crap is going on? Why would you listen to a show about growing your business and then not take the action steps? I don’t understand it. The other thing that’s crazy to me whenever we get pushed back on this idea is that a lot of people out there are always looking for that automated solution. This is actually it. It normally doesn’t exist, but WordPress, they automatically update. You don’t have to have a custom coder. You don’t have to have somebody just working on your website 24-7. WordPress does a lot of that for you, and that’s kind of the point. So, step number one, switch to a WordPress-based website and use the Yoast plugin. Y-O-A-S-T. Y-O-A-S-T. Use the Yoast plugin for WordPress. Two, make sure your website is mobile compliant. How do I know if my website is mobile compliant? Just email us at info at thrive timeshow dot com. Send us a link to your website and your contact info and my team will run an exhaustive diagnostic test on your website to see what’s going on and we can help you. Now the third, the third variable. Steve, you’ve got to get Google reviews. Oh yeah. Why do you have to get verifiable Google reviews? Why do you have to do that if you want to optimize your website, your local small business? Why do you have to do it? Well, it’s part of the components of what Google looks at when you’re ranking in the local search results. And so if you’re trying to rank locally for any term, the more reviews you have coupled with the canonical compliance of your website, coupled with the content on your website will help you rank. Furthermore, recently, just like in two of our different markets, I got phone calls from people who said they found us and read our reviews. And that’s why they called us. For mortgages? Yeah. I had a realtor call me that said… It was for pet puppies. It was… I mean, total lending concepts. You’re a mortgage company. For those people who aren’t familiar, you have a location in Tulsa, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Alamosa, Columbia, Missouri. What’s the website, Steve? What’s your website? SteveCurrington.com. So they can go there to learn more about you. Our Tulsa listeners out there looking for a mortgage. It’s a real company. And you’ve got real clients as a result of them really finding you in Google, Chuck. Yeah, and the importance of the Google reviews is that the map shows up above the organic listings. Like it’s at the top of the page. And you want to get more reviews in your competition to show up on that map? Can I continue piling on? Please, pile on. According to Forbes, 88% of people read Google reviews before attending your church service. What? Before attending your seminar. What? Before buying something. Before 88% of consumers trust online reviews more than a personal recommendation now. Mind-blowing. Absolutely mind-blowing. So another deep thought is Google wants to make sure that only sites that are relevant come up top. So it’s their way to vet to make sure that you’re not a scammer. Because they’re very hard to get Google reviews. So you need to get Google reviews, objective Google reviews, from your ideal and likely buyer. And last thing, since we’re piling on here, this is like the thing as the business owner you literally have the most control over. You can work with us at the Thrive Time Show to optimize your website and everything, but you and your team can go get Google reviews and it will absolutely move the needle. You know what I want to do? I want to brag on one of our listeners out there, and I want to play a testimonial from Keith, who proudly served our country in the United States military, and who now owns a company called Witness Security. Yeah, can I get a witness? He and his son Tyler have diligently been asking for objective reviews. They’ve been writing content. They’ve reached out to us after a workshop. They asked us to convert their site to WordPress. And they’re now bringing in more deals than they’ve ever brought in before in their entire life. So without any further ado, back to our interview, our testimonial here from Can I Get a Witness? Witness, Witness Security, Keith and Tyler. My name is Keith Schultz and my company is Witness Security here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For the past 18 months that we’ve been working with Clay, you know, our growth was averaging pretty close to 10,000 a month on a regular basis. You know, shortly thereafter we doubled that to close to 20,000 and now we’re close to 40,000 on a regular basis every month. Clay has helped us increase our sales in every aspect when it comes to the calls that come in to our business, helping us to hire people to be able to do that and follow a good script, setting up the appointments and how we do them when we go into the appointment, the sales pitch and how we do it. And then from then on forth, just the SEO and everything he’s done has increased our sales exponentially. Clay has helped us grow our business in the aspects of individuals, how to hire people, how to manage people, how to necessarily organize our business, how to structure the functioning of our business. Though we’ve been in business for close to nine years at that time, Clay has revamped everything we do, you know, to a much more better operational business than what it ever was before. Working with Clay is a little bit different what you’d find in most, you know, Clay pushes you to the point you you get out of your comfort zone and as long as you continue to do what he asked you to do, you will continue to grow, but if you don’t, then you won’t. We heard about Clay Clark on the radio, my son heard it on the radio and had been listening to it for a couple of weeks and said I ought to listen to it. Gave him a call and within a day or so Clay gave me a call and we came in for an interview. He’s helped us in our search engine optimization by helping us with the actual Google ratings when it comes to being placed on the map in multiple locations so that we dominate the industry on the map as well as organically so that when people are searching in a variety of different words we always pop up on multiple locations on the first page. You know, that of which he did, it’s a long process but it works very well and you know Google how their algorithms work it doesn’t change in what he does. So we all were always on top. Clay has restructured everything we did when it comes to selling the security systems. You know, being a local company, we do things quite a bit different. And by doing so and restructuring everything he did in the nine years that I was in business, you know, trying to do it on my own, he came up with a package deal and within less than 10 minutes and revamped everything we do. If you’re looking for coming to Clay Clark for asking him to help you grow your business, I can guarantee it’ll be a success if you follow through with what he says. You know, you have to follow through with what he says in order to make it work. And so you have to come to the table making sure that you’re going to do what he says. Be teachable and you will be successful. But, Chuck, what if I sell pizzas and I live in Florida? Will search engine optimization work for me, too? Absolutely. And so now, without any further ado, yet another testimonial coming in hot from beautiful and sunny Florida. Hi this is Dave and Trisha Rich coming to you from Sallie Beach, Florida. We’ll have a list of a few of the wins we’ve had since we started with Drive 15. We’ve completed group interviews, we’re fully staffed, we’ve received over 100 Google reviews to increase our Google rating, increase their Google ratings, and we now have more money in the bank than we have ever had. Thanks to these Rev coaches. Thank you, good night. Now, Chuck, what happens if I’m a person who makes fresh baked cookies? Will search engine optimization work for me? Freshly baked will work for you. Well, without any further ado, back to a testimonial video from Barbie Cookies. This year’s sales for this week. So this is the same week last year. Do you see the difference? What is that? I can’t really tell. One is… Michael, can you… Can we just… Jason, can you kind of pull this in maybe? Just so you can see it. Just kind of pull it that way. Let’s get the length. It’s more of a… I can’t tell without the length. It’s hard to tell. Look at that. Okay. So that’s last year’s sales. This is last year’s sales. And the total is a mere $4,711.73. Same week this year, 2015. The total is, read it Michael. $11,313.50. Oh, boom! There it is! Awesome! Unbelievable! Thrive Nation, search engine optimization works. But to quote the incredible Maya Angelou, nothing works unless you do. So if you have a functional mind, now is the time to become aggressive and proactive about your search engine optimization. You can begin the conversation by going to Thrivetimeshow.com today and booking your tickets to the next in-person Thrivetimeshow workshop or you can continue hanging out at the bottom of the internet where you go to bury things. Oh. If you kill somebody, hide them at the bottom of page two on the internet search results because nobody, nobody, will find the body. Thrive Nation, that’s my encouraging word. And without any further ado, let’s wrap this show up, my friends. Three, two, one, boom! Boom! The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now, okay. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both 1.3 billion dollar companies. They both have two to three thousand pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually non-existent on Google, to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts, and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, you know, asking our customers for reviews, and now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pessimon company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay. So 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now, our closing rate is about 85%, and that’s largely due to, first of all, our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one-and-done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process. And that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah. So here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months. Or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. It’s incredible. But the reason why we have that success is by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews. That way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists. Everything gets done and it gets done right. It creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really really contributed to our success. But that like is of the diligence and consistency and doing those in that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives. And also, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten the success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut. The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. They implemented those systems, they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut. And if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s gonna take in order to really succeed. So we just wanna give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proven turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you are looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crockrell, head of Disney, with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day-to-day. He does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. Amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go and that’s what I like the most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you and Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. And when we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal. And they were super excited about working with him. And he told me, he’s like, I’m not gonna touch it. I’m gonna turn it down. Because he knew it was gonna harm the common good of people in the long run. And the guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. Anyways, just an amazing man. Anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company, navigating competition and an economy that’s, I remember we got closed down for three months, he helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing and this is our old team and by team I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from four to 14. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past. And they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go We’re just thankful for you thankful for thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that You guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us just thank you Thank you. Thank you tons of thousands The thrive time show today interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems, so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur I always wish that I had this and because there wasn’t anything like this I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny but inside of it it was a hollow nothingness and I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on hot coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey with Tip Top K9 and I’m the founder. I’m Rachel Wimpey and I am a co-founder. So we’ve been running Tip Top for about the last 14 years, franchising for the last three, four years. So someone that would be a good fit for Tip Top loves dogs, they’re high energy, they want to be able to own their own job but they don’t want to worry about, you know, that high failure rate. They want to do that like bowling with bumper lanes. So you give us a call, reach out to us, we’ll call you and then we’ll send you an FDD, look over that, read it, fall asleep to it, it’s very boring, and then we’ll book a discovery day and you come and you can spend a day or two with us, make sure that you actually like it, make sure that you’re treating dogs with something that you want to do. So an FDD is a Franchise Disclosure Document. It’s a federally regulated document that goes into all the nitty gritty details of what the franchise agreement entails. So who would be a good fit to buy a Tip Top K9 would be somebody who loves dogs, who wants to work with dogs all day as their profession. You’ll make a lot of money, you’ll have a lot of fun, it’s very rewarding. And who would not be a good fit is a cat person. So the upfront cost for Tip Top is $43,000. And a lot of people say they’re generating doctor money, but on our disclosure, the numbers are anywhere from over a million dollars a year in dog training, what our Oklahoma City location did last year, to 25, 35 grand a month. To train and get trained by us for Tip Top K9, to run your own Tip Top K9. You would be with us for six weeks here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So we’ve been married for seven years. Eight years. Eight years. So if you’re watching this video, you’re like, hey, maybe I want to be a dog trainer. Hey, that one sounds super amazing. Go to our website, tiptopk9.com, click on the yellow franchising tab, fill out the form, and Rachel and I will give you a call. Our Oklahoma City location last year, they did over a million dollars. He’s been running that shop for three years before he was a youth pastor with zero sales experience, zero dog training experience before he ever met with us. So just call us, come spend a day with us, spend a couple days with us, make sure you like training dogs and own your own business. Well the biggest reason to buy a Tip Top K9 is so you own your own job and you own your own future and you don’t hate your life. You get an enjoyable job that brings a lot of income but is really rewarding. My name is Seth Flint and I had originally heard about Tip Top K9 through my old pastors who I worked for. They trained their great Pyrenees with Ryan and Rachel. I was working at a local church and it was a great experience. I ended up leaving there and working with Ryan and Tip Top K9. The biggest thing that I really really enjoy about being self-employed is that I can create my own schedule. I have the ability to spend spend more time with my family, my wife and my daughter. So my very favorite thing about training dogs with Tip Top K9 is that I get to work with the people. Obviously I love working with dogs but it’s just so rewarding to be able to train a dog that had serious issues whether it’s behavioral or you know whatever and seeing a transformation taking that dog home and mom and dad are literally in tears because of how happy they are with the training. If somebody is interested I’d say don’t hesitate make sure you like dogs make sure that you enjoy working with people because we’re not just dog trainers, we are customer service people that help dogs and and so definitely definitely don’t hesitate just just come in and ask questions ask all the questions you have