Nick (00:01): There are many different ways to drive traffic to your website. Depending on where you look online you'll hear a mix of answers on which marketing strategy you should use. You've got SEO or search engine optimization. You have social media and you can even pay for ads to show up and ultimately bring people to your site. There's obviously many nuances and other options out there that contribute to bringing in the traffic. But today we are going to be talking primarily about SEO and pay per click or more commonly known as ads. Anthony Gaenzle is today's guest, and he has quite the experience in getting traffic to his own site. AnthonyGaenzle.com as well as helping others with their traffic, with his group over at Granite Creative Group. Today we're talking about how you can use both SEO and paid ads to drive traffic to your own website and business. So let's hit the music and get right into this interview.

Nick (00:50): This is the Nine-Five Podcast and I'm your host, Nick Nalbach where we get into the minds of entrepreneurs and people just like you. So you can start, build, and grow your own online business.

Nick (01:08): All right. Welcome to the Nine-Five Podcast. It is the podcast and the show where we interview entrepreneurs and business owners to help you better grow your own business. And today with me, I have Anthony Gaenzle. So Anthony, welcome to the Nine-Five Podcast.

Anthony (01:24): Thanks for having me on happy to be here.

Nick (01:27): So, before we kick off and get into the main topic, which is driving traffic to our website,

Nick (01:34): why don't you introduce yourself a little bit and let the listeners know who you are and what it is do.

Anthony (01:38): Great. As you mentioned, Anthony, I'm Anthony Gaenzle. Um, I am, I have a variety of roles, but, um, I'm the head of marketing business development at Granite Creative, which is a marketing agency here in where I reside in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We work with mostly small and medium sized businesses, startups, but we'll also work with larger companies, um, as well. We do it, we do it all. We're kind of full service. I also run a blog at AnthonyGaenzle.com and it's not just me. It's, it's lots of really great, talented marketers from across all kinds of disciplines, SEO content, social media, you know, X, Y, Z fill in the dots there, but it's people from across the world. So it's, you know, it's a variety of perspectives and you get some really good content. There's a new post every day. So, definitely invite people to check that out.

Anthony (02:27): I've been in the marketing field for about 15 years. As I mentioned, the scope of what Granite Creative does is sort of what I do as well. I work sort of focus my energy and the small to medium sized business startups working with entrepreneurs, but I've worked with a lot of really big brands as well. Especially within the, you know, the agency field, I worked with a major global content marketing agency years back, and we work with some really major brands. I'm not gonna mention any, cause I don't know if I get into legal trouble or not, so I really, you know, I really enjoy helping brands, kind of develop and execute their digital strategies and really helping them find ways to grow. So that's kinda my thing in a nutshell.

Nick (03:08): Awesome. Well, we're glad to have you on the show because that is what we are all about trying to grow the business and a big part of that is content marketing. Content and digital marketing, social media. So I'm really excited to kind of dive into this episode, even before we kick off with that. Something that I like to do with all the listeners here on the podcast is I want to know what your super power is and by superpower, I mean, what is it that you do that is like, you are the man.

Anthony (03:38): Yeah. I'd like to say I could walk through walls or shoot webs or something like that. But, um, I would say my superpower is probably connecting people. I think it's it. Relationship building is very powerful and working with others can really, you know, you can really feel good helping them build their blog or their website or their business, but also those relationships can help you build your own own business. So, as long as, as you know, those relationships are reciprocal, um, and you're adding value for them, you can really come become kind of a, kind of a superhero to a lot of people into your own business. If you're focused on building these relationships, that's hugely valuable in the marketing space. So I would say kind of connecting and relationship building, that's mine, my super power. I am working on the walking through walls thing though.

Nick (04:23): Well, if you get it figured out, we're going to have to meet up so that you can kind of teach me as well. So that was good. We'll do another, do another episode on that we'll do a live demo. No, I mean, that's awesome. Connecting connections, building relationships. I mean, it doesn't matter what business you're in or what area of business, like, I mean, relationship building is extremely important, so that's an awesome, super power to have. I'm curious. Do you bring people in, like you connect people with other people or do you just, you think your relationship building skills are that superpower? I guess how, dive into that a little bit.

Anthony (04:56): Yeah, So yeah, it's a variety. I'll connect people to other people or you know, I have, people who, for example, I have a lot of relationships with guest bloggers who contribute to my blog, and they're all trying to build their blogs too. So if I have a piece that comes through that I think would be a great fit for their blog, I'll kind of push people in that direction and help them grow their own, their own blogs and help people. And we kind of have a big network of, website owners who share one another as content and help each other grow. If I'm working with a client who I feel would benefit from a relationship with a complimentary business, I'll make that, that connection. And, not only does that help them grow, but it also helps my relationship with the client. You know, they, they saw the value, if it's something, let's say it's, it's out of the scope of my expertise rather than me trying to Google it and figure it out, which some agencies will do. I'll say, you know, I can't do that, but I have someone really great who can, let's bring them in and that, and then they build that relationship and they pass that along. And it's usually helpful for everybody.

Nick (06:01): That's really cool. What would be a few tips just before we get into the website traffic, what would be a few tips people can start using right now to try to build relationships with people, like new people?

Anthony (06:11): Yeah, well, you know, one of the greatest great platforms is social media. I mean, you, you and I connected on Twitter and, uh, and know I've connected with people in Facebook groups or people on LinkedIn, that there was a really great places to connect. You know, start by just sharing people's content you know, interact with their posts, engage, as you start to see them engage back, then you can reach out and make a, make an introduction, you know, hi, I'm Anthony. Um, thought maybe you'd benefit from this article or, Hey, would you be interested in guest posting on my site? I'd love to share your feedback with, with, uh, with my readers. And, uh, you know, if you, you just keep your eye out, we don't do a lot of this now because of COVID, but, um, events, you know, events are really great for building relationships and I have some, some good, um, relationships that I built with

Anthony (07:01): for example, the people at Content Marketing Institute really love Content Marketing Institute, started going there, I think the second event that they had in 2013, I believe. And since then, I've really been able to build relationships with them. I've been published on their site and that's just, you know, it's, and then I can connect people with, with their people. And then, you know, they they're able to, one of my connections is able to get a post on their site, which is usually valuable for their blog. So it's just kind of being social basically. And no matter what the venue being social and being open to helping others,

Nick (07:33): I was really excited this year. I was going to, I had a whole list of events and networking conferences and stuff that I wanted to go to. And COVID just blew all that away.

Anthony (07:47): I attend them, but virtually,

Nick (07:49): Yeah, it's, it's not the same. I did a just last week, Teachable had one of their big summits and I attended that summit. I mean, you don't, I personally, I wasn't able, I mean, obviously you don't have the one on one face to face connection, so it's just through chat. So it's, it's a little bit difficult there, but no, that's, that's awesome.

Anthony (08:10): It's, it's still, you know, events are still good for the obvious, the learning experiences, things like that, but yeah, you lose that personal touch and the billing to connect with people, which is a hugely valuable component of going to those things.

Nick (08:21): That, that was what I was excited about. I was like, get to meet new people that think like me and I kind of in the same path as me, but now it's like, I still like the content, but it's still

Anthony (08:31): Not, not in 2020, maybe 2021.

Nick (08:34): So, all right, let's get into the beef of this episode and that is driving traffic. It's something, everybody wants something everyone's always chasing and it seems to always elude us. So walk me through a little bit of what you do. Um, how do you help other like your clients. How do you help them drive traffic? What are a few different ways that you do that?

Anthony (08:57): Organic traffic to me is, is the best kind of traffic. Um, I do, you know, we do a lot of paid methods, social media advertising, um, Google ads, retargeting, display ads, things like that. Those are great. Um, for specific purposes, driving to landing pages and, you know, collecting leads and so on. They are great, but they also cost money. Organic traffic is obviously everybody's main goal. We really want to show up number one in Google. That's super hard to attain, but it all starts with, with great content. So I, I, you know, we, we always look at the brand who they are, what their meaning is, what value they bring to their clients or, or customers or whatever the case may be. Um, and then for myself as well, we do this and do this for my site, but, um, create amazing content. And that's, that's where it all starts from there.

Anthony (09:47): Once you have the amazing content, then you can use platforms like social media. Your SEO becomes a lot easier with things like link building. You know, that the people getting in linked to you organically because you have really amazing content. So no matter what, whether you're doing paid or organic or whatever you're doing, it all starts with the content. So that's, that's the most important thing is if you're going to really expect to drive traffic to your site, you should have good content. Because if you, even, if you start to drive traffic to your site and your content sucks, people are going to leave. Your stats are going to be super low. And then Google is going to just kind of look at you like now let's, let's put this site over here. We're not going to send people there. So, so those, those are really important.

Anthony (10:28): Um, make sure you fill out if you have a business, especially if you're a local business, make sure all your specific directories are filled out. Things like that. Um, you can be found there's a lot of off page SEO, places that you can be found as well, that can help you drive drive traffic. I get a lot of traffic, for example, from my site through Clutch, which is it's a clutch.co. They highlight marketing agencies, social media consultants, things like that. Um, they, you kind of have a profile on there. They also have a nice blog, but I get a lot of traffic over, over from, from that site because of my profile there. But whatever niche you're in, making sure those directories are filled out can be really useful. But those are just kind of a few, few overview ways of driving some solid traffic.

Nick (11:10): High quality content. I feel like that's one that everyone says is kind of a gimme, but at the same time, that's usually where people lack the most. They just put out massive amounts of content. And it's all about the quantity and quality. When in reality it should be about the quality, not the quantity,

Anthony (11:26): For sure. Yeah. I mean, if you're creating, um, really weak, thin content, um, with, with no substance and it, it really doesn't answer anybody's questions. Um, maybe they'll land on your site once, but they're not going to come back. Versus if you really do your research and find out, you know, dig into who you're, first of all, who is my target audience? What kind of content did they want to see? What answers do they need, but then also what content is out there, that's answering those questions and where are the gaps that, that those parts of the questions that aren't being answered and then create content that expands on the stuff that's already out there and answered those questions. Now, again, there's so much content out there. So creating quality content is, you know, everybody talks about that, but what is really quality content, um, you just really have to focus on, you know, a smaller amount of your content being amazing. All of your content should be great, but if you create a few really kind of cornerstone pieces, those can really drive a lot of the traffic and then you can send people around the rest of your site.

Nick (12:25): Answering questions. That is a, a huge one that I've been trying to focus on. I've fallen off blogging for a while now, especially with the launch of the podcast. It's been hard for me to take it back up, but that is, I mean, I will, when I'm getting ready to do a blog post, I will basically search for questions that people are asking. And that is it. And I, I guess I'd like your take on this. So my initial plan when I started blogging was I was going to try to create these massive blog posts that try to answer a lot of content. There are a lot of answer, a lot of questions people are having in the content, but doing that, I would spend a lot of time trying to write the blog posts. I spent a lot of time doing it. So I kind of was thinking just the opposite. Like what if I would go and research the questions and do a blog post that answers that one question, instead of trying to answer 10 questions in it. Now I have one blog post per question. What are your thoughts on the two different strategies there?

Anthony (13:17): Yeah, so I'm a fan of both long and short form content. I think both of it has value you and you have people who say you have to only have 2,500 word articles on your site or, or nothing's going to happen. Um, and other people are saying no, putting, you know, you answer that question short and succinct is only as much as you need. I think some core questions warrant a 2000 word article. Others might only warrant a 300 word answer and look at like Quora. For example, people go there because they want a nice, short, succinct answer to their question. So on a lot of the blogs that I've run, some of them are, you know, are one or the other short, short, quick hit pieces, or they're only long from, but a lot of them that have seen them as success. I have a nice mix of things.

Anthony (13:58): You know, you answer the questions, right? Um, you develop kind of pillar content, era, kind of a hub content where you have your, your main hub of a specific subject matter. Um, and then you can have all these spokes off of that. That may be shorter articles. You know, you have your bigger article that talks about the subject and then related spokes. Um, that could be shorter articles could be also longer articles. Um, so I think honestly, as long as you have the right question and you have the right answer, if you can answer your question in 10 words, what 10 words, isn't gonna get you any SEO value. But if you can answer the question nice and succinct, you know, people, you know, people like that, if they need a really long tutorial, they like that as well. Then, you know, just as long as if you have both, then you can fulfill both of those needs.

Nick (14:41): Yeah. It was funny. You mentioned pillar content. Cause I heard you say cornerstone articles before, and that was the first thing I thought I was maybe your cornerstone article is your massive piece, your 2,500, 3000 word article, and you have all these smaller, shorter pieces around it, but it's all related to across that same topic and they're all sharing links and yeah, that, that is a great tip.

Anthony (15:03): Yeah. I think that's the, that's the best way to look at it, you know? And then, and then, like I said, if any, you know, if you're writing, I'm trying to write 10, 3000 word pieces, that's going to take you months to put together. And, you know, and, and you know, the amount of content does have having, it has to be quality with the amount of content you have does help. So if you're only able to produce one post a month, that's not really going to add a lot of value, but if you press that one big post plus five other smaller ones that link to it, you know, that's value right there.

Nick (15:30): Continuing on the organic traffic, I do want to get into the paid traffic side of things in a little bit here, but where, if someone hasn't really started thinking about SEO, they just started their blog and they know they want to bring people to it obviously. Um, where would be a good place for people to start when they're just getting into SEO?

Anthony (15:48): Yeah. So an SEO, as you know, is a very complex, deal. It can be a huge undertaking where, you know, companies have massive teams built out to deal with this there's 200 plus ranking factors for Google specifically that they factor in when they're ranking your site. But usually, um, at least the companies I run into, they don't have massive SEO teams. Um, they might have one person or they might be relying on me and my team to take it over. Um, so I think you want to focus on the most important things first, and there's a few things you can focus on off the bat, the quality content we already, um, you know, talked about that in depth, but one of the most important factors is link building. Having a quality link profile to your site is really important. Um, you can do this through outreach.

Anthony (16:34): Um, you can reach out to blogs and, and make an ask for, Hey, I think this, and that's where the big cornerstone content comes in. If you have a really great piece that really answers questions, it really helps when you're doing outreach and trying to grab links from some sites. Um, whether it's you find a broken link on a site and you feel like your article could replace it, or you feel like maybe your article would, would be a great new link to insert, you know, it, it's, it's a really hugely important factor in ranking. So that's one of the ones I think you should think of. I use guest posts. I do a lot of guest posting. Um, I use HARO, Help a Reporter Out, um, which, you know, you get inquiries from, from journalists and then you can answer those inquiries. A lot of times you'll get a link out of it.

Anthony (17:14): You'll get recognition each time if you get picked up. So I think that's really important. And then you look at some technical things like page speed, people overlook that, but if your site takes, I think that, I mean, I don't know the exact numbers, but if you're taking a site takes more than three seconds to load the percentage of people bouncing off your site increases significantly. It's amazing. It's just, people's attention spans are so short. They can't wait three seconds, but it's, it's true. And I'm guilty of that. And that's why I made sure my site know used to load in like eight seconds. And my traffic was super low and I moved to a different hosting. Um, I optimize the images and image types. I don't host video on my site. I hosted on the YouTube and then embedded on my site, things like that.

Anthony (17:58): And it really sped it up. And my, my stats really gone up since then. And then, uh, you know, you want to look at mobile friendliness, obviously that's, that's usually important. And then just generally the user experience, um, is it easy for people to get on your site, find what they need and, and then, uh, you know, can they dig their way around very easily to find additional content. Or are they on your site and they have no idea what they're looking at and they're going to leave. So, you know, those things, you start there focus on those and then you, you build from there. So, you know, once you have all those things in place, you have those rolling. If you have the resources to do it, you can take that to the next level and start looking at all those other ranking factors.

Anthony (18:36): Um, some of them will come into play as you're, as you're building, building it out, your, you know, with the, with the way you create through quality content, that'll take care of a number of those 200. So, you know, so you just have to dig through that. There's a great article on Brian Dean from Backlinko listed out all the, all the 200, I think everyone's at shared that at least once on social media somewhere, but it's, you know, it has all the, all the ranking factors listed out, which is really great. So, you know, start with the ones, the ones I mentioned. Um, and then you can kind of grow from there and expand your efforts to get it all optimized.

Nick (19:08): Yeah. And with a lot of this stuff. Cause I write when I started blogging, that was like, my main focus was the SEO side of things. And I know I spent a lot of time just completely engulfed in SEO. And I think it, it did kind of hurt me. It helped. And it hurt me in a way, because I was starting to bring a little bit of traffic, but I don't think it was necessarily the people that I was actually trying to target. I was, I was just, I would look up keywords that I knew got searched a lot. That's kind of in the realm and we try to bring them there, but it wasn't, it didn't do me any good,

Anthony (19:39): Not quite what they want. So they leave. Yeah, yeah. Right. Exactly. I've been there myself

Nick (19:44): Going off of that. How much time do you think people should actually invest into SEO? Is it something that should be right at the forefront that they're thinking about every single day or would it be better for them to focus on the content and kind of catch the SEO on the backend when you've got time?

Anthony (20:00): Yeah, I think, um, I think it needs to be sort of a, in the middle ground there. I think you, you know, what, what it should be is sort of have your SEO strategy up front, um, you know, and you know, know what things are going to focus on, um, know who you're writing for, focus on the quality content, but then I recommend using, um, I use Moz personally, but I also use, um, SEMrush or SEMrush, I guess people pronounce it differently. Not even sure that the company knows how to pronounce it, but, um, but those are two really valuable tools that can save you a lot of time. So, you know, you can, you can do a lot with those and rather than trying to do a lot of things manually, um, and that, that can save you a lot of time. The, the thing is it has to be a component of your strategy and you have to be dedicated to it.

Anthony (20:44): It has to be something you stick with. Um, you know, if you a get, get into, um, get, get a few links, you build a few nice links, you build some pieces of content and then you lay off for a few months. All that value that you started to gain is going to just disappear. So, um, you know, Google wants you to keep on optimizing and keep on producing content or they'll, they'll send you away. And then you also have to be prepared for it to take a long time. I think people, um, you know, I run into this with a lot of clients I'm thinking, okay, I want to rank for these five keywords by next month. I'm like, okay, well, we're not going to be that agency for you, you know, unless we cheat the system and then you're going to rank for them.

Anthony (21:23): But a month later you're going to be off search and shown by Google. So, um, so I, I, you know, for example, if you're creating new site domain age, the age of your domain is actually a factor, um, in search. So you just have to stick with it and realize that it's going to happen over time. Do things like paid at paid advertising and things like that to drive traffic upfront. Um, cause you, obviously, if you're starting a new business, you don't want to wait two years to get your first customer, but you also had to realize that it's going to take time as far as doing the organic part of it. So you have to fill the, fill the void with some other things upfront.

Nick (21:54): Something to add to that, um, we kind of talked about the consistency. If you're consistently putting out posts, you're giving Google more content, you're answering more questions, you're helping more people. Um, something I have noticed I started, I don't think I, I, might've got up to the first page on a couple of keywords that I was trying to get to. I think it fell off at this point now, but I noticed after I got those rankings, it became a lot easier to start getting more rankings. So with the podcasts, something that I do in order to help with the SEO, since I haven't been blogging nearly as much as I post the transcript to all these episodes right on the website. So I have the word content on there that Google can actually analyze. And since I'm doing this weekly, I'm putting out content every single week to the website. And I already had a little bit of a domain authority. I've noticed that I'm starting to rank for a lot more keywords and it's kinda almost like snowballing and rolling. So I think it is important that even if you are focusing on the specific, like H1 titles and page speed and all that stuff, keeping in mind that the consistency is a huge factor in that as well. Yeah,

Anthony (22:59): No, you're, you're, you're a hundred percent. Right. And, and, um, you know, that the fact that, you know, you did people know that you're going to produce something every week and they're going to keep coming back for that. You know, they, they, they like listen to your podcast, they're going to come back for that. Um, you know, if you have the podcast embedded on your site, people are going to not only read part of the transcript, but they'll sit there and listen to the podcast and that hugely boost your, uh, time on site and things like that. So, yeah, so it's really important to be consistent. Um, you know, I'm, I I'm, you know, started my blog humbly. I was posting once every two weeks and then it went to twice a week. And then now I have, um, you know, so many guest posts coming through that.

Anthony (23:36): I have a backlog, that's ridiculous. I'm up till, until midnight after my family goes to sleep, sometimes I typing away, but in the editing pieces off, I have to turn some down now. Um, it's, it's a good problem to have, but now I'm able to post one per day. I didn't want to overload it and post two per day or anything like that. So I just post one per day and it seems like that's been the right formula. So I think you just need to find the right formula for your audience with the podcast. I think one, one a week is really, is really the kind of perfect formula. And I don't know how you could produce one a day with podcasts. It would be a lot of work.

Nick (24:10): There's people who do it. And it blows my mind. Like I think of what goes into this, like the editing of it and all that, like how they can do one a day. I have no freaking clue whether there's some people that will, they say they've done one podcast a day for like two years straight. And it's like, how, where do you have that time?

Anthony (24:29): Exactly. Exactly. You have to be cutting something else out of your life. Like you don't know everything to be able to.

Nick (24:34): Yeah, exactly. That that would be me. I'll spend a whole day just editing a podcast much less, record it and then wake up to do it all again. Like, nope. My next question. Where do you see, I'm sure when you bring in clients, you probably have clients that might think they have a pretty good grasp on SEO or they've been doing it a certain way. Do you see certain people wasting a lot of time on certain SEO efforts where they should be putting it elsewhere?

Anthony (24:58): Yeah. And I mean, I think, um, I think one of the ways that I, that I see people do a lot of, um, kind of the link building thing is really important, but people waste a lot of time with quantity of links over quantity and quality over quantity, quantity over quality. And what happens there is they end up, um, getting a lot of links from sites that are, um, if you use domain authority, for example, I mean, you know, from ranking zero to a hundred, obviously you want to be on the higher end of that when you're getting links. I see a lot of people that have, you know, you look at their link profile and it's a lot of fives and tens and irrelevant sites, and they're just building links just to build links. It's a really time intensive effort. And if you build that really poor quality link profile, it can actually hurt your site. So, you know, I think it's, it's better to spend less time and grab 10, you know, 50 plus domain domain authority sites than it is to grab 110 and five DA sites and spend 20 more hours doing it. So I think people will waste a lot of, a lot of time there doing that.

Nick (26:01): I know I've wasted a lot of time doing that. I've been definitely guilty of that.

Anthony (26:06): I have some bad, I have some bad links from the past on my side site as well. So, you know, everybody does it, we're all guilty.

Nick (26:17): I think there was an article either by Neil Patel or it might've been by Brian Dean again, where he kind of did an experiment like that, testing so many high quality backlinks against even more poor quality back links. And it was pretty interesting how dramatic of a change was you could get like one to two high quality backlinks versus 50 low quality backlinks and the two high quality ones still outperformed the 50 low quality ones.

Anthony (26:41): Yeah. I think, I think, I think, remember that I think it was Neil Patel. I think you're right.

Nick (26:46): I think it was, if, if I can find that I will link to that article in the show notes. Any listeners who want to go check that out they can can go check that out.

Anthony (26:53): It's so it's so true though. And then you have people who buy links too, and that's okay. As long as you really have a trusted partner, that's getting the links for you. If you're, you're just like, you know, here's a thousand dollars, get me X number of links, you know, and you have a marketing website, you're going to get links from like t-shirt companies and a grocery store. Any, any number of places you'll get the links, but they'll hurt your site.

Nick (27:17): This kind of ties into where people are wasting their time, but what do you think the biggest mistakes people make when they start getting into SEO?

Anthony (27:24): So, we already talked about the low quality link profile. I think that's one of them. And I, I mentioned earlier, you know, people create the weak thin content and, and you know, they don't really think about the audience. They don't really think about whether they're answering the right questions or anything like that. They're just creating content to create content, but also you see people, some of the mistakes you see they fail to add alt tags to images, they failed to, to deal with broken links, you know, and redirect them, or they overly redirect everything. They, they don't write meta descriptions. They don't, they don't realize that the meta descriptions that show up in search are something, you can actually change and, you know, decide what that's going to be. So they don't do that. And I think the biggest thing is the failing to plan, you know, with anything in business, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, I think I said that, right, but they can be a real, real killer to any strategy.

Anthony (28:21): If you, if you don't have the execution, if you, for example, you tried to take that list of 200 ranking factors and you just try to go all in on your one person. You try to go in on all, all of them. Um, and you miss out on really focusing on this high value ones. Um, you know, you can really, really fail. So planning and planning and fail is the biggest one. So I think it's the, you know, weak content, it's the, um, low quality link profile. Also with link profile, diversifying your anchor text. If you have a hundred links that are all to content marketing as the keyword in the anchor text that looks like that looks very unnatural to Google. So they, you know, you gotta think about things like that as well, failing to add descriptions. Google can tell what an image is, if you help it. But then with an all tag. They have a harder time they're getting better at it, but they have a harder time if you don't help them with that. So, and then planning to fail. So I think those are kind of four of the biggest things that I see people making, where areas, where I see people make a mistake,

Nick (29:16): Curious on a side note, are you on WordPress or do you, how do you do your website?

Anthony (29:22): I'm on WordPress. And I would say 95% of the clients, I, or my team has ever worked with are and were breasts. Um, we just, we really like WordPress. It's a, it's been hugely valuable and, and we've moved a lot of people off of other platforms that, and they've really been happy with the user experience. When we develop a site, our goal is to kind of be able to hand it off and train the person, to be able to add content and update content. And a lot of times they're not able to, because they're on whatever other CMS system and when you bring them into WordPress it's like a breath of fresh air. They're able to really do, do what they need to do on their own without calling up an agency and paying hourly rates to make it happen. In short answer, WordPress is awesome.

Nick (30:06): Yeah, I agree. That's where my website is hosted on as well. The reason I bring that up is because with a lot of the stuff that you are talking about, like the descriptions, the meta descriptions, the alt tags, all that stuff like WordPress does a pretty good job of showing you how to do that. They don't make it very difficult for you to accomplish that. So when you're building out your post, if you haven't really paid attention, look for like, when you upload an image, for example, there should be an option on the side that says alt text, make sure you put that all text in there. Um, there's a lot of great plugins that I use. One of them is Yoast and then the other one is Rank Math. And those make it very easy to also add your meta descriptions. You can actually adjust the title of your article as it shows up in Google, all that stuff is really going to help. And like I said, WordPress makes it very easy. So make sure you pay attention to those features. Don't just ignore them. Like you said, that could be a huge factor as to why your site's not getting the traffic and you're not ranking

Anthony (31:02): A hundred percent. Yep. I love it. I love it. I love it. Yes, yes. Yoast a great tool. Yeah.

Nick (31:09): I was using Yoast and I switched over a Rank Math. And have you ever used Rank Math?

Anthony (31:13): I have, yeah. Yeah. Just recently, I actually used it. Um, someone reached out to me via email and mentioned that to me. I checked it out and I do like that too.

Nick (31:22): So you have, I know I've used the free options for both of them. I haven't jumped to the paid options for either, but it's, I don't know. It gets the job done.

Anthony (31:32): It has so many great features. I mean, it really does have tons of value for free. I don't, I haven't seen a reason yet to jump to the, um, you know, the people at Yoast probably don't want to hear this, but I haven't, you know, I haven't seen a reason to jump to the paid version yet, but, uh,

Nick (31:45): Next week they're going to strip all the features.

Nick (31:51): Okay. Very cool. So let's kind of step outside of SEO a little bit. We went pretty deep into the organic traffic side of things. I'm really curious about the paid traffic. So I have a little experience with it. I've run Facebook ads and I've tried a little bit of Instagram ads recently, and anybody listening probably knows this from previous episodes, but my website actually got removed or blocked from Facebook and I can't run any kind of ads do any of that kind of stuff. So that's a huge bummer, but I am very interested still in running Google ads. So do you see a difference? I think as I see it, there's a different opportunity to use Google ads versus Facebook ads, but what would you see, like as one being better than the other, or should you be using both of them or what are your thoughts there?

Anthony (32:37): Yeah, I think if the, if you can use both of them, I think using different channels, is good. You can capture different audiences. Um, you know, you're not always going to capture exactly what you want through, search related clicks versus you look at Facebook or even I like, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is great for targeting as well. Facebook and LinkedIn have the ability to target by job titles and by different than factors where Google, you know, you can target by different things, but you're really relying more on, on keywords and your keyword research. And, you know, then, then, you know, if you, if you haven't done your audience research in it, then you may not be targeting the right keywords. And it's really hard to really tell what, especially now with now semantic search of people using their phones.

Anthony (33:24): And, you know, it's not just nearest burger joint. It's, you know, where can I find a burger with pickles and red onions specifically? You know, it's, you know, the key searches are changing and you know, I think if you know, your audience using using, um, Google is great, but then also mixing in really more targeted down to the specific demographics with platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook are really good as well. So I think, and think a mix of it is good. We found with different businesses that varies. Obviously, you know, it depends on your business. It depends where your target audience lives, where you want to target them. Facebook retargeting is great. Uh, you know, someone lands on your website and they're surfing on Facebook later and your post pops up in their feed. You know, that kind of is a reminder, Oh yeah, I did like that brand. I forgot I have something left in my cart. Let me go check that out. And I'm had back there. So there's, there's definitely value to each of them, if they're done right.

Nick (34:21): Something. I just recently heard that really stuck with me, obviously, why I'm bringing it up here. They were talking about the difference between Facebook and Google ads and when you should, and shouldn't use one or the other and something that I thought was interesting. They were talking about Facebook ads. When you are targeting people through Facebook, you are more trying to catch someone's attention. So you figure they're scrolling through their feed. They're doing something else. You're not at the top of their mind. They're not coming to look for your ad. So you really have to do something that stands out, catches their attention and makes them stop scrolling. Whereas Google ads, if you can get around figuring out what keywords you actually need to target, you know, when people are typing in the search, they are looking for exactly what you have to offer. So I think, I think I thought that was really interesting. I never heard that. It's very obvious, but it's something I've never actually heard spoken.

Anthony (35:14): Yeah. I don't think I heard spoken that way either. That's, that's a great way to put it. Um, and, and it makes complete sense. Um, and that's, that's the great thing about Google and, you know, if people landed on your search result, unless you've targeted really misleading keywords, then they're, they're looking for your content. Um, but on Facebook, you're right. There's so much junk in that feed. And that's, I think why I like retargeting because they've been your website just recently. They've, they've seen something they liked there and they were on it for whatever reason, your brands, more likely to stand out in their feed because they just saw it versus being a first view popping up in your feed and they'll, they might just scroll away right through it. Cause it doesn't make that connection. They haven't seen it. I think we have to see something or repeat something two, three times before it really connects. And I think that's where retargeting is beautiful can really help you there. But yeah, so that's a, that's a good way to put it that sums it up. Well,

Nick (36:05): The Facebook ad, the retargeting side of it, I think is awesome. And that's kind of why I'm bummed that I can't utilize that. How do you guys, do you come to, or do a lot of clients come to you that have never run ads? Like they haven't set up Facebook pixels or done any of that stuff and you kind of have to start building their Facebook audience from scratch.

Anthony (36:26): Yeah. So yeah, it's either, you know, it's either that and you have to build it from scratch yet. Start, you know, they didn't just have heard about Facebook ads and they don't know, and the first step, so you have to set everything up for, um, versus they've been running it for a while. They have it set up, but it's not really driving the results that they want. So they want some help with the creative side of it. You know, coming up with a better message, like you said, you really have to create something that stands out in the feed. So coming up with that, you know, putting your advertising agency hat on and coming up with a better graphic or better message or something that stands out in the feed. So it could be any, anything along that spectrum really it's Facebook ads have been around for so long, but I don't think a lot of companies are using them effectively. If you're just jumping on and doing it, you can end up wasting your money. You know, you end up getting a, getting excited, cause you got 500 new followers because of an ad you ran and then you see that 90% of those followers are robots and, or totally off base. And I don't know why they follow me.

Anthony (37:27): It's, it's always fun. No matter what part of the process or what part of the journey you come into

Nick (37:33): When getting into the Facebook ads, obviously knowing who we've mentioned this previously, talking about writing content, but knowing who your audience is and what you're trying to accomplish with that is extremely important in Facebook ads, any kind of ads, really. How do you, when working with clients, do you kind of work with them on identifying what that is? And if you do, what would be some ways people who are interested in getting into ads, how could they, I guess, sit down and try to identify what those exact needs are?

Anthony (38:01): So, so what we'd like to do, and some, some clients think they know their customers really well and they may some, some think they do and they don't. Some will admit we don't really know our con or our audience very well. So one thing we like to do when we work with new clients, as we like to at least offer our services and kind of brand strategy. If it's, it goes from the perspective of the brand itself, building out who we are, what is the value we add? Why would you work with us versus them, the true value in the brand story and develop that. But then also dig into who are the, um, who are the customers. And usually a lot of times a business will think they have one target audience, but nine times out of 10, they have multiple levels of target audience members.

Anthony (38:48): So you want to develop personas for those different target audience members, you know, anything from, you know, demographic related, psych or graphic related lifestyle, things like that. And then you can really incorporate that into your Facebook ads. You incorporate that into your LinkedIn ads. You can incorporate that into anything, the content you create and everything, every part of your marketing. So if it's possible, no matter what part of the marketing you're working on with a client, if it's possible to start there, it's hugely helpful. It's refreshing to go into a client project where they already have that. And it's really well done. But most of the time, it's, it's not, it's something you want to, you kind of work with them and then it makes the advertising targeting and things like that a lot easier.

Nick (39:29): Yeah. And that's something I've struggled with in the past, we kind of have an idea we've built out audience personas, kind of have an idea of who we're trying to target. And then we ended up, ended up flopping and up going nowhere. So it's like at that point, are we off on who our audience is or did it just not a good ad? Was it the words I, how do you, when you start getting, I guess the feedback loop there, how do you, I don't know if it comes back and total flop, you have this big idea built out, like this is who we want to target and they ended up being no good for your brand, I guess, where do you go from there? Cause I feel like you'd basically be starting over from square one. It's like, okay, now where do I go?

Anthony (40:08): I think it's, it's, that's why it's kind of upfront kind of do some, some A/B testing and come up with some variety of different versions of your content, see which one actually resonates with the right audience. Um, and, and then that really gives you a lot of information that can feed future campaigns and you have to be in a, you can't be afraid to fail as well. I mean, nobody's perfect. Even someone that's been doing this for 20 years is gonna step in and make mistakes now. And then, so, um, you know, we see some huge, you know, big time ad executives or big time marketers that they have a huge flop in their campaign. The rest of their career was great, but you're always going to have an opportunity to, to, to fall on your face. So you just have to be willing to learn from it and then apply that to your next ad.

Anthony (40:52): So you can be doubly successful so that you can make up for the losses. I think you just have to understand that it's not gonna always be perfect. You just have to plan to work in those findings, into the next campaigns to be more successful in the, in the future. It's testing. It really is. It's it's um, you may have the perfect personas developed, like you said, you go in there and the message you think is perfect and then nobody, nobody does anything. So you kind of, you can ask your, the good thing is if you have people that are, are, um, using your products or working with your brand, you can ask them, you know, why, what are your thoughts on this? And, you know, does this resonate with you? Does that, you know. What, why, why doesn't it resonate with you? And then you can do kind of that stuff up front, and then you can make those tweaks on the back end to avoid some, some of the flops

Nick (41:39): You think for anybody starting out the money is obviously the big red flag for probably anybody that's looking to get started. Do you need to have a big budget in order to start running ads on any of the platforms, Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn?

Anthony (41:54): No, I think, I think he, you know, you want to avoid trying to dump a huge budget upfront. I think you want to test the waters and test with a smaller budget and start to see those results. And then you can justify adding a bigger budget in there. So, uh, you know, I've seen companies that were dumping. Um, for example, um, one company I worked with was dumping four or $500,000 a year into Google ads. And they were seeing, um, you know, they were seeing results, but the cost per conversion was pretty high and they, you know, they were spending a ton more money than they should. Um, when we reworked some of the messaging, we actually cut down that spend probably to, I think is, you know, $125k a year or something like that. So significant cuts and the, it costs per conversion went down, but they were seeing about the same conversion. So, you know, I'm not saying spend $125,000 either. But you know, you can, you can test. If you have a small budget, you can test $200 there, test $200 there and, and see what's working and resonating. And then when you find out what's working that, that if that $200 turns into $2,000 worth of business, then you can increase that to $500. And if it keeps showing those results, you can keep increasing it

Nick (43:02): Kind of keep increasing the ratio.

Anthony (43:04): If you do the organic thing and you're doing, you're doing the SEO, you're doing the great content and you're doing those things together and that can really keep your spend down as well. That's why content marketing and SEO are so great as tactics.

Nick (43:16): What would you say? I know one of the biggest things I would freak out about because there's money into the ads. You can, you put the ad out there and you watch it and you're not seeing any hits on it. And you're sitting there like, okay, well, it's not going. Maybe I should cancel this. Like it's spending money, but nothing's happening. How, how long do you think you should let an ad run? And obviously it probably varies by platform, but how long do you think you should let that ad run and kind of mature before realizing like, okay, no, we got to cut this.

Anthony (43:44): I mean, I think you don't want to go too long. I think, you know, it's putting, it would be hard to put a specific amount of time on it. Um, you know, especially if you're spending a ton of money, if you're spending that $300,000, you don't want to let it go too long, but you definitely want to give it time.

Nick (43:58): For someone that's just starting out testing. They're kind of trying to feel out, find their audience. And they're trying to basically set themselves up to be able to retarget and remarket, and maybe they even want to do some split testing, maybe different pictures and images and titles, stuff like that. Would you say a couple of days or a couple of weeks or

Anthony (44:18): Yeah, you hit, if you hit the week mark and you're really not seeing anything, it's probably time to adjust. You know, the first couple of days, I think, you know, it they'll take, it could take some time to ramp up, but once you get to that week, Mark, and you're not really seeing anything, you're probably going to start just randomly seeing, seeing progress. And a lot of times, you know, ads will, you need to change your ads eventually because they'll take off and then they'll over time, they'll start, you know, the platform will stop serving them up as much because other people are starting to come into that market and things like that. So, you know, you don't want to run it too long, too long, either. Even if you are seeing results, you kind of want to switch it up and you want to keep your campaigns fresh. So, you know, if you're, if you're not seeing any results in that first week, take a look at it and kind of revisit what, what you, um, what you're saying and who you're targeting and things like that

Nick (45:05): You mentioned it a little bit earlier, too, obviously both of the Facebook ads, or I guess not Facebook ads. I keep saying Facebook ads, but ads in general, the paid traffic. I mean, really, it needs to be working in conjunction with SEO. Like you had mentioned before with a company that's just starting out. I think you might've mentioned earlier in the episode actually already, would you focus more on ads to try to get some of that traffic coming into your site while you're building up the SEO? Or would you pump more resources into the SEO to start?

Anthony (45:35): Yeah, I think, you know, as your trying to get your brand out there, I think it's, it's always good to put some, some ad spend in there and get some people familiar with your brand. And, and, and that's, that's a good way to really, to get that re that recognition and awareness, you know, cause like I said, like we talked about SEO and content marketing are wonderful once they start rolling, but if you don't have six months to start ramping up business, that's, that's not going to be your best approach. So while you should be doing that, you should be doing it on the side. Now the opposite is true. If you have the budget and you have the time, I highly recommend really creating a high quality content strategy and SEO strategy and executing that and spending six months really getting that in order.

Anthony (46:19): And then, then put some spend into it and drive traffic to your site because now you have all this really great content there that people can interact with, engage with. So the only danger of I'm trying to drive traffic upfront when you don't really have anything, is they land on your site and your site only has info about your services and things like that. If it really catches their eye up front. Great. But if it doesn't, they don't have anything else to click to and click through and learn more about. So it's, you know, it really depends on kind of your state as a, as a business and whether you need to have that traffic upfront or if you can afford not to. Then I think that the best way is to, to not do it upfront until you really have a army of content, if you will.

Nick (46:57): Right. That is a good point. I mean, we talked about high quality content being important for SEO, but really it's just as important for the paid traffic because you're going to pay to get those visitors on your site now. And if your website is garbage or your content's garbage, you just paid to basically bring someone in and send them away. And they're like, nah. So yeah, I mean, I think regardless of that is like the moral of this episode. You want to drive traffic, it's all going to come down to great high quality content.

Anthony (47:30): Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it's really the cornerstone of any, um, any marketing effort these days. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's content that adds value for people and makes that connection and that quality content and the relationships, whether they're relationships with other marketers or the relationships with your customers, that content is really a big part of that.

Nick (47:48): We actually, on episode eight, we talked with Ryan Biddulph and he talked about that. He's very big into the blogging space.

Anthony (47:55): Yeah, I know Ryan. Yeah. He was one of the connections I made and we connected on Twitter as well. And he has a great Blogging From Paradise

Nick (48:03): Blogging From Paradise. Yeah. He, we had him on back on episode eight and he talked about that. Cause he's, he's built up quite a, like, I don't know how you want to call it. He's built up a lot of backlinks and he's got a lot of people coming to his site and he's getting a lot of traffic to his site and that's all come down from building those genuine relationships. So that was when you said your super power was building relationships and connecting with people. That was one of the first things I thought of it's like, that is huge.

Anthony (48:29): Yup. He's, he's very good at that. I mean, he's, he's um, you know, he's got connections to, I mean it, you know, you've talked with him just recently. I mean, it seems like anyone out there, um, it's in the blogging space as, as connected with Ryan at some point. So he's, he's a very good example of, of building those relationships. You know, if I'm, if I'm Robin of connecting he's Batman, you know.

Nick (48:54): No, he is a very awesome dude. If you haven't talked with him or find him on Twitter yet I'll link to that. It's just at Ryan Biddulph, but I'll link to his content too, in the episode where we actually interviewed Ryan. So anyone listening, definitely go check him out. He's a good dude.

Anthony (49:09): Yep. I agree.

Nick (49:10): So we're kind of coming to the end of our episode here. We're already approaching an hour rather quickly, which seemed to go by super fast.

Anthony (49:19): Great conversation. Really enjoyed it.

Nick (49:20): Oh exactly. I love it. What would be some final words that you'd like to leave the listeners with? Maybe it's a tip or a trick or maybe you got a hack or something like that. What would you like to leave all the listeners with before we head out?

Anthony (49:33): Yeah, so, you know, mean we, we, I think I killed the, um, the concept of, um, you know, really drove home the concept of relationships and quality content. But beyond that, um, you really have to be passionate about what you're doing. You really have to enjoy it and you really have to be all in if you're not all in, then get all out because you're, you're, you're, you're not going to ever see that that value or you're gonna be miserable if you're putting in the work and you don't like it, you're going to be miserable. Um, if you don't like it, a lot of times, you're not going to want to put in the work and driving a successful website and building business through website takes tons of time and effort and you really have to be ready to do that. It's usually rewarding when you start to see those results, roll in, don't get discouraged those first few months and even year, um, when you're not seeing those results, because that can happen very easily.

Anthony (50:20): And you think, you know, it's just never going to happen for me. Um, but if you just stick it out, I've seen it happen with so many businesses, you know, just kind of toiling along here. And then all of a sudden it just starts to pick up. And that's when, when things get fun. So just stay confident and, and, and keep going. Unless you have a really horrible idea and your content is terrible. It's not going to work for you no matter how passionate you are, but in most cases you're good. If you're passionate and you dedicate yourself.

Nick (50:50): Awesome. Passion, consistency, and persistence.

Anthony (50:53): Yup. Yup. Yup.

Nick (50:54): All right. Now, lastly, where can people find you, maybe they want to get in touch with you for your services. They want some help kinda building traffic to their own website or their business and social media. I mean, where, where do you want people to go and find you?

Anthony (51:10): Yeah. So you can find, first of all, Granite Creative for marketing services www.granitecreativegroup.com. Um, granite as in the stone surface, um, you know, the countertops and things like that. Um, and then, uh, www.anthonygaenzle.com is my own blog. Um, you know, and lots of great, um, talented individuals contribute to it. So, so that's, you know, a good place to get advice. Um, if you're looking for, uh, for other ways to grow your business and then you can find me, um, if you, if you get to that link, you can find my links to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, they're all at the top of my site. So you can, you can find me there as well. And then otherwise you might find me in walking around Lancaster.

Nick (51:55): Perfect. I'm going to have to go make a visit, see if I can find him walking around.

Anthony (52:00): Okay. It'd be hard to tell him, cause I'll have a mask on, but, uh, look for the look for the red hair.

Nick (52:08): Well, awesome. Everyone listening as always the links to all of Anthony's, uh, the Granite Creative Group, Anthony Gaenzle social media, all that. Stuff's going to be on the show notes to this episode. So if you need help with the spelling or anything like that, or can't find it, just go to the show notes and we will get you in front of Anthony. So Anthony, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. I had an excellent time, like you said, great conversation.

Anthony (52:35): Same here.

New Speaker (52:36): It just flew with it, man. Yeah, man. Thanks for coming.

Anthony (52:38): I appreciate it.

Nick (52:40): That is it for the interview with Anthony, Gaenzle all methods discussed in this episode can help bring more visitors to your website or business, but as we've really drove home

Nick (52:48): This episode, without something of value to give your visitors, all that traffic really won't do much for you. So you need to focus on understanding who your audience truly is, and then follow that up with really high quality content to help bring your audience in. And that's ultimately going to benefit or help your audience. If you focus on the value, you really can't go wrong. If you want to check out any of the links discussed in this episode, there were a lot of them this episode, or maybe you just want to get in touch with Anthony. All of those links can be found in the show notes. The show notes for this episode can be found at ninefivepodcast.com/episode15.

Nick (53:24): And don't forget five is all spelled out. That's N I N E F I V E podcast.com forward slash episode 15. One five. If this podcast has helped you in any way, please head over to iTunes or wherever you listen to the podcast and leave a rating and review. And lastly, don't forget to share the podcast with someone, you know, who might be interested in starting or growing their own online business. I'd love to be able to help more people. And a part of that comes from all you amazing people helping to spread the word. So that's it for today. Thanks for tuning in. I will catch you guys next week.