Curtis Hays (00:00)
Google's constantly going to change, and why do they change? It's because consumer behaviors change. We're living in an age where 65 % of searches don't lead in a click.
Chris Langille (00:10)
All right, we're live. Welcome to episode one. That's right. Episode one of the all new rise and bind podcast from advisor evolved. We've been trying to get this off the ground for quite a while now. And thankfully it's finally here and I couldn't be happier to be joined today with a fellow colleague, friend, mentor, and just a good friend of mine, Mr. Curtis Hayes of Curtis Hayes consulting. Curtis is a guy that, I talk to a lot.
you know, online and off and he is going to bring some, some knowledge to episode one today. So Curtis, man, what's up? Thank you for hopping on with me. I'm pumped that you're here,
Curtis Hays (00:49)
Yeah, honored to join. I've had you on my podcast back last year and really appreciate the invite and coming on today. Excited to dive into some of this stuff with you and help out some businesses, hopefully.
Chris Langille (01:02)
Yeah, man. Yeah. So for those that don't know Curtis, he has a digital marketing agency, just like advisor evolved, not necessarily focused on insurance and financial. He works with some fairly large clients. So he brings a different perspective to things that is, it would be good for my audience to hear, right? Because we, we obviously serve insurance and financial, and these are for the most part, you know, what, what Google would,
view as a small business and you've dealt with some larger entities. like today, really what we are talking about is a topic that comes up quite a bit, right? We both get questions about this, which is search engine optimization. We're actually doing a mini course on our YouTube channel for advisory evolve because it's really one those things where we get that many questions about it that.
we're trying to create content around those questions. So we can point people to that versus, Hey Chris, can you get on a call with me? have this question about XYZ. It's like, before we get on the call, watch this video series because chances are the question is already answered and then some. So SEO is obviously such a hot button topic. There's a lot of, it's a hype machine, right? I mean, for good reason, right? But things have changed.
and are changing quite significantly. And I think a lot of people haven't been paying attention to that. also, and you could probably attest to this, there's a lot of marketing agencies that haven't realized this yet either who are practicing strategies that haven't worked in quite a long time. So today we're going to shed some light on that and Curtis, you know, feel free to jump in.
at any point in time, again, you bring a different perspective in working with some of these larger clients. And I know that just from our conversations, you have sort of shifted a little, and maybe, you you can put a better spin on this, but you've shifted a little bit away from SEO, right? And more to the paid ad strategy. Can you talk maybe a little bit about that and you know, the who, what, when, where, why?
Curtis Hays (03:16)
Yeah, we did. I would say post COVID was where we saw the shift where probably 75 % of my revenue came from SEO projects and retainers and 25 % of it was advertising is now. Well, it pretty much overnight after COVID went the opposite direction. So 75 % turned to advertising, 25 % to SEO. Well, why was that was because
Sales and marketing organizations who had typically spent significant budgets on in-person events or travel or those types of things had pools of money now that they could use and needed to rely more so on digital than they ever had previously. And everybody entered the advertising market. So search got more competitive, social media got more competitive.
In the lead gen space particularly which we do a lot of work LinkedIn changed a lot from an advertising perspective and all this money flooded into the markets. Well, that's increased CPCs. That's you know created much larger demand And then as you've said You know things change and that's something we should always know about SEO and algorithms. It was just What was a December 20th?
of 2024, I think it was December 12th of 2024, there was an algorithm update. Prior to that, there was an algorithm update in November, and there was an algorithm update prior to that in August. So Google's constantly going to change, and why do they change? It's because consumer behaviors change. We're living in an age where 65 % of searches don't lead in a click.
So people are doing search in a search engine.
and they get the answer right inside of search results. And I know we'll probably talk more about that. So we've seen a significant shift in user behavior. We've seen a significant shift in the way that businesses are trying to reach their target audiences. And so we've then had to shift some of the tactics, activities that we're doing, again, to meet those consumers where they're at and how they're consuming and digesting information.
I mean, we could dive into the sort of like psychographics and demographics of this because, you know, the other thing we talk about too is millennials and Gen Z are now becoming your buyer. So you take anyone under the age of say 40 or 45, those are now likely becoming your target audience, especially in the insurance space. These are going to be the new homeowners, the new families, the people who are coming off their parents' insurance.
Chris Langille (05:59)
Mm-hmm.
Curtis Hays (06:04)
and now are shopping on their own and they're looking at options. The way that they shop and the way that they research companies to buy is a lot different than their parents. It's a lot different than me. I grew up with Google. I relied heavily on Google throughout my entire career. That's how I built my career. I go to look up the hours for a restaurant. I go to Google Maps. But you know, my niece who's 30, starting a family,
to look up that same restaurant's information, she goes on Facebook or Instagram. She doesn't go to Google Maps, right? So we have to think about the behaviors of our target audience and then meet them where they're at digitally or offline.
Chris Langille (06:39)
Mm-hmm.
you
100%. I know it's funny. My oldest son turned 16 today actually. I get to see this. Yeah, thanks man. Yeah, he's, can't believe how fast it's happened. But, and then I have a 12 year old son and you know, obviously they're, you know, they have phones and they're on social media all the time with their friends. like they, they like, not that they, know what Google is, but they don't use Google to find and search things like.
Curtis Hays (06:56)
Happy birthday.
Chris Langille (07:14)
Same thing, they're using social media. And I think it's important for people, particularly my audience, Like insurance agencies like to understand that, you know.
going forward in 2025 and beyond, like you have to almost be a content creator as a business owner. Like it's a new reality for a lot of business owners that you need to be doing some type of strategic content creation. We've been telling a lot of people to do video because there's a lot of data and there's a lot of behavior that is showing that video SEO or, you know, video is the way people are researching products. They're not reading
blogs anymore or long-winded product pages. They are searching in YouTube and I know that I'm doing that myself. I mean, I don't remember the last time that I honestly used straight up Google search. Like, and you know, it's also too like, and you can, you can sort of attest to this. Like the buyer journey is not a linear journey. People all the time are like, we got, you know, we got six, seven leads from our website last month.
why didn't we get any this month? And it's like, you know, there's a lot of reasons why lead volume goes up and down, but like people are not just seeing, you know, searching for something in Google, going to the first website they see and filling out a lead form. It's they're bouncing between different platforms. And then there's distractions in between that throw people completely off the buyer journey. Then they come back, you know, two days later.
There's so many distractions online and you know, in our industry, it's a very saturated industry. There are insurance agencies on literally every corner. So if someone does search for insurance agency near me or cost of homeowners insurance in city name, there's a million options that they have to evaluate and sort through. And it's just not as linear of a journey.
as people assume it is. And now with the Google AIO, which is the AI overview, it's becoming even muddier. Can you kind of speak to that? Because I have some thoughts on this, but it's kind of crazy. I mean, it's killing traffic to a lot of websites.
Curtis Hays (09:37)
Yeah, well you you said a lot of great things there. There's a lot to unpack. So let me.
Chris Langille (09:42)
Yeah,
no, yeah, go back to wherever you need to go. So I'm blabbering here.
Curtis Hays (09:45)
Yeah, so there's a couple of
things I do want to address because you did say some good things that I want to highlight that were definitely our pay our agency is paying attention to for for a lot of our customers. The first being. Well, you hit on attention spans so you could go back. I think there was a study back in 2014 where they looked at how.
The attention span of a worker on their computer, let's say they opened up Microsoft Word or Excel and how long they spent in that application before they turned their eyes away and looked at something else. It was about two and a half minutes. We've repeated that study now within the last year and it's down to 45 seconds. So we have these shorter attention spans and then we also have this millennial and Gen Z consumer who
wants authenticity. And if you're a brand who's going to hide behind your logo, you're going to lose with this target market. You have to humanize your business. You have to humanize your brand because people do business with people whom they like, whom they trust, whom they can feel a connection. And frankly, people do business with other people. They don't do business with a logo unless you're Nike. But even you could make a case for somebody like Nike
Chris Langille (10:46)
100%.
Sure.
Curtis Hays (11:07)
I'm buying the shoes because I like Michael Jordan or LeBron James, not because I like the logo, okay? And I can't tell you how many times we built a website and the client says, can we make our logo bigger? And it's like, I think a better idea would be to put a picture of your face there because that's who they're doing business with, you, not the logo. So you've built this case for doing video because...
Chris Langille (11:10)
Right. Yeah, right, right.
Right, right.
Yeah, 100%.
Curtis Hays (11:32)
Now you humanize who you are and the value you bring. gives you this opportunity to educate customers just like you're doing right now, Chris, is you're creating this great video series to educate your target audience and saying, you know, look, you're not going to just do business with advisor involved. You're going to do business with people who care. We're knowledgeable. We're trying to stay up to date. We're trying to educate you and we want, you know, the best for you moving forward. And that's what's going to set.
You people apart and then you tie that to how that target demographic is consuming content if they're not going to Google. And they're they're doing tick tocks and Instagram reels and they're consuming content on YouTube like you mentioned you know there's your opportunity to connect with those people and then so that that leads me into what you were saying about the buyer journey that it's not linear.
We're going to have this problem with attribution and privacy and cookies and all these things. But the reality is, is that person might go and discover your brand along with a couple other brands. But there's things that happen offline that you don't know about. Like me calling up Chris and saying, Hey dude, do you know about this insurance company? Have you used them before? Or do you have any recommendations for me because I'm in the market for new insurance. My rates.
So that interaction that happens offline, you have no idea about, but it's extremely powerful, right? Most of your advisors are probably gonna tell you their best business comes from referrals. So give them a place to refer, give them content that allows me to share with my target audience that if I've got a buddy or a family member who says they're in market and they've got questions that I'm not able to answer.
Chris Langille (13:01)
Yeah.
100%.
Curtis Hays (13:23)
You're a reference, right? I can just point them to your content and say, you know, this agent here is extremely helpful and you might be the one that gets the phone call. But can you track that path to conversion? No, it's actually very difficult. So we're getting back to like old school marketing back in the day where you, know, there's a reason why companies did Super Bowl commercials. You couldn't track and measure it.
Chris Langille (13:24)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
100%.
Curtis Hays (13:51)
At least not from a linear perspective,
Chris Langille (13:55)
Yeah, that's a great point. And it's funny because we've had this conversation with some of our clients, right? Where they'll be like, you know, overly obsessed with SEO, right? And for good reason, right? They spend money on their site. They want people to find it and which is understandable. I I want people to find my website too. Although SEO is not how I personally get clients, but it goes back to the thing where you're like, know, people, consumers don't know about Geico because of their blog articles. Like they don't know about State Farm because of
you know, their TikTok account. You know, these companies obviously have major spending power, right? They can out, out maneuver small business owners and small agencies all day long, which is why like the strategies need to be different. But it's, you know, different, different types of organizations have different budgets and therefore can reach people in different ways. But it's like, yeah, it really is like, you have to be omnipresent to some degree or
you know, at least pick a few channels and really dedicate yourself to those channels because, you know, going back to the whole root of this conversation, which is search engine optimization, right? It's like we tell people all the time, you know, you can't control the quality of lead that comes to you through SEO. You can't control the volume of leads that comes to you through SEO. Don't overly obsess about SEO. Like at the end of the day, you're really in some ways.
hoping or waiting for people to find you, right? And that's not really a great business strategy. know, like I would tell people like whatever you get from your website is like the icing on the cake, right? Like that shouldn't be your primary way of generating new business, right? Like you said, referrals is that that's the number one way that most people get new business. But it is interesting to see like how these changes are impacting
and behavior, you said, user behavior in the buyer journey and like going back to the AI overview, like now, like, you know, to your point, you know, the younger generation, like they don't want to dig through 10 blue organic links on Google search to find their answer. They probably love the AI overlay because it gives you the answer, especially for like informational type of searches. Like if you type insurance agency near me, at least from what I've seen recently,
Curtis Hays (16:12)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Langille (16:18)
the AI overview is not showing up for like a local near me search. mean, not yet anyway, right? Google could change that tomorrow, but for sure, for like informational queries, know, you know, how many ounces are in a pound, like stuff like that. What's the weather today? Google is answering that question right away. So it's feeding into that low attention span mindset. And you know, the reality is to your point, like Gen Z like
Curtis Hays (16:22)
Correct.
Chris Langille (16:48)
that's if you're listening to this podcast episode and you're an insurance agent and you're under 50 years old, sure, you're gonna have some more sort of like mature clients, people that are probably your age and older, but depending on what your growth goals are and maybe if you're trying to sell your agency, there's a lot of value in that Gen Z audience and
SEO might not be the answer for those people.
Curtis Hays (17:20)
Right, right. Yeah, we I mean, and I have specific data on this. I've got a client. We do a lot of lead gen and the home improvement construction space. I've got a client. It's about 55-45. So 55 % of their traffic is over 45. 45 % of the traffic is under, but 66 % of their conversions on the website from that traffic are over 45. So even if the younger people respond to the ad,
and come to the website, they don't convert. Again, thinking about that humanizational experience and non-linear path that most Gen Zs take, they might discover you through that click. Even if they want to convert, they're not likely to convert there. They're likely going to go and do some additional research. They're going to look you up on social media. They're going to ask some friends and those types of things. And then they might pick up the phone and call or they might...
Use chat on your website or something like that. So you know, get this this expectation that they're going to convert through. It's almost like we're X our expectation as marketers is that people are going to skip the funnel and go right to a conversion. You got all this other thing, you know. There's there's really seven touch points at a minimum to a conversion. We're going to skip all those touch points, awareness, consideration, interest and intent, all that to get right to a conversion in one click.
Chris Langille (18:32)
Yeah.
Curtis Hays (18:45)
whether it's an ad or through organic SEO is really a lot to expect and even more to expect in this day and age. So I think you asked me to sort of maybe unpack the search result page, what we would call SERP a little bit. And yeah, a lot is AI generated. But if you do think about that local search, because I get asked this a lot, again, especially when we're dealing with local businesses, is like, okay, my office is located in this area here, but...
You know, we do business, you know, 30 miles the other side of the county. How do we rank over there?
Chris Langille (19:21)
comes up every day, by the way, in my world.
Curtis Hays (19:22)
Every day, right? So
yeah. And you know, the reality is you've got two options. You either pick up your office and you move over there or you open a new office and you put people there, right? Or you can run ads, but you still will have a difficult time with maps and sponsored, right? So Google, you had a Panda and Penguin update, which were years ago.
Chris Langille (19:32)
All right.
where you run ads.
Yeah. Yeah.
Curtis Hays (19:50)
But essentially that leveled the playing field for all local businesses, which Google had to do. And if you're in a highly competitive geographic area where there's lots of agents, there's only so many that could be displayed in a certain mile radius, and you're going to be at least in a near me type search or anything with location intent, you're only going to get those search results that are right close to you.
Chris Langille (20:17)
Local, yeah, five mile radius.
Curtis Hays (20:19)
Yep, and that's just
Chris Langille (20:19)
Yeah.
Curtis Hays (20:20)
that's just the way Google has to has to do it to keep a fair and plain level. You know that's that's the playing field we have to deal with right now.
Chris Langille (20:27)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's tough too. We get this all the time, Chris, you know, why does our website say that we're located in Houston, Texas? Like we write the entire state of Texas. And I'm like, I understand that, but you're not going to rank in the entire state of Texas. I hate to tell you, it's just, it's too competitive. Exactly. So if you, if you take Houston insurance agency off of your H1, you know, title tag of your homepage and you just put Texas insurance agent, you're actually hurting your SEO.
Curtis Hays (20:44)
Right. Because how many agents would be in the state of Texas thousands?
Chris Langille (21:00)
you're hurting your SEO, you could potentially be on page one for Houston Insurance Agency. Now you're on page 10 because you're trying to rank for a much broader keyword. So people that are listening, it's better to go hyper local. Most of your organic traffic is gonna come from a five to 10 mile radius anyway. So if you try to look like this massive agency, that can actually be detrimental from an SEO perspective. Some people,
They don't care. They're like, I don't really care. People have told me that all the time. We don't care about SEO. That's not how we get our clients. Sometimes we don't want clients from Google, like price shoppers and unqualified business, et cetera. But it is something to sort of talk about because it's all location-based. And that's probably a good segue for us to talk about the Google business profile because we see clients and people that...
hire these third party SEO agencies, right? And they'll, you know, they'll hit us up and they'll ask for like a log into the site. And it's like watching the same like train wreck over and over again, right? Like, Hey, is Yoast SEO and you know, we want to install Yoast SEO. And we're like, it's already installed. It's already set up. Like they're doing very low level basic stuff on site when on site is not nearly as important now as it was five years ago.
the Google business profile in many respects is as important, if not more important than a website. And I'm shooting you straight folks because I build websites for a living. you know, that's not, maybe not something I should divulge, but I mean, that's just the reality. I'm not trying to hide from that. Like your website is obviously very critical. It's your own slice of the internet. There's a lot of different things that you can do with your website.
obviously to generate new business, retain existing clients, et cetera. But when we're talking about SEO and we're talking about a local business like an insurance agent, the Google business profile is gonna be one of the very first things people see in a local search. And there's data and Curtis, know, there's data that shows that a lot of traffic is now coming from website traffic is coming from the Google business profile. And it's just Google's way of again, keeping you in their ecosystem.
and people may not know this or wanna believe this, but Google's really not your friend. They don't wanna send traffic to your website if they can keep you on their platform. They make money from ad revenue on their platform. They don't wanna send people to other websites if they can get the answer directly in the search result. So talk about the Google Business Profile for a second if you will.
Curtis Hays (23:48)
Yeah, and again we have to look at people's behaviors, right? So a lot of these searches are going to happen on people's phones. And so if it's happening on the phone, the search result looks quite different. Your screen real estate is different and of course Google knows your mobile and especially if you do something with local intent, which means you used a city name in your search. You used near me in your search. That likely what's going to pop up.
Chris Langille (23:53)
Google Maps.
Curtis Hays (24:18)
Certainly the first thing after some initial ads is going to be Google Maps, which is business. So Google doesn't know if you're looking for directions or a phone number or those types of things. And Maps is what was built in order to provide that helpful information to consumers when they're looking for a business. So if we unpack that, what's going to be helpful to a user in making a decision about
businesses that might be listed there, right? So where they're located specifically, are they in the right category? have you selected the right categories that Google gives you from an optimization perspective? Is the title of your business there everything accurate? And then do you have a valid phone number? Maybe a link to your website, though not likely really clicked. Directions to your business potentially. And then what's probably most important,
is our reviews. And I just did a search here on my computer for car insurance agents near me. And I've got an ad at the top. And then I've got three organic listings. And guess which one's at the top? The one with the most reviews. So I've got 309 reviews from the first one, 144 from the next one, and 62 from the one after that.
Chris Langille (25:33)
Yep. Yep.
Curtis Hays (25:43)
You know, so I might consider location in who I'm going to call and consider first or click on, but I would say maybe most important to me might be the actual reviews. So this is something we've been telling clients and pretty much any industry that deals with consumers is your reviews are super critical, not just in getting them, but also you replying to them. Again, if we go back to authenticity and humanizing your brand.
You not only need to get the reviews, you need to be thanking people and commenting on reviews and responding to bad reviews. But make that process is frictionless and easy as possible to get those use things like text messaging to ask for review after you've booked new business or help somebody through a claim. Just different things that you can do again, is that's going to help.
Chris Langille (26:30)
Mm-hmm.
Curtis Hays (26:39)
not only improve your ranking, but just visibility and attractiveness to a potential consumer.
Chris Langille (26:44)
Yeah, and I want to throw a tip out too for people that are listening. Your Google business profile is managed now through Google Maps on your phone. On desktop, it's business.google.com, but it's going to send you to a search on your result page now. They changed that a couple, about a year or so ago. But on mobile, you access your business settings through Google Maps app. I would recommend anybody here, make sure that you have Google Maps on your phone and treat...
Google Maps almost like it's like another social media account. You can post little updates to your Google business account. You can upload photos. You can upload video, like treat your Google business profile like your most important social media channel. Cause that's really in many ways what it is. It is a social media channel. People don't really realize that because they think Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Twitter.
or X are the social media channels, but the Google business profile, it's your most important social media channel. And I wanna touch on one other thing too, because before we kind of wrap things up, you spoke about what's at the top of Google, right? It's always, almost always, except for the AI overlays, going to be ads. you and we both have done this.
in the last couple of years, which was realizing that for most small businesses, SEO is a multi-year commitment, both in sweat equity and financially, SEO is with no guarantee of results. Unless you're ranking top three organically, you're gonna get no results. And I see that a lot. see people spending a lot of money on SEO and...
Curtis Hays (28:26)
with no guarantee of results.
Chris Langille (28:40)
They're on page three. Again, it's a competitive industry. Insurance is a bloodbath online. It's competitive. And the reality is Google, no matter how hard you fight and claw as a business, Google, they love big brands. They love showing like nerd wallet, bank rate, the zebra, these comparison sites, insurance carriers. You know, if somebody types in an informational search, like how does water backup insurance work?
it's most likely going to be one of those websites that very hard to compete inorganic with those brands. have dedicated SEO teams. have trillions of backlinks. They Google loves big brands, but we shifted to a paid strategy. And why is that? Because paid ads, you know, pay per click and SEO have the same objective. It's to be at the top of Google, right? Both of them cost money.
One of them works way faster and in my opinion, better. The other one takes, could take years and might not ever work. So as a business owner, where would you, where do you think you should invest your marketing dollars into something that might take five to 10 years? Like literally could take that long if you're in a very competitive market or we've turned on ad campaigns for clients and they're in the top three.
you know, within 48 hours and that's not to plug us. That's just the reality. I think a lot of people are afraid of paper click, but you know, and you, we've both had a lot of success with this. mean, can you speak to that for a moment?
Curtis Hays (30:21)
Yeah, I mean, you can definitely have success there. I would say first step I mentioned earlier is understand your ideal customer profile. And if they are older, I think Google is an opportunity for you to reach them because that's where their behaviors are going to be. If it's a younger demographic, then you look there. Then I think the experience that you provide people once they do come through a click.
Needs to be again more expansive than just one single experience. So if you're looking for people who are likely just shopping for rates, can you compete with, you know, Geico and all the other carriers that are providing a better experience to getting instant quotes and those types of things? Or I can just type in bit of my information and populate everything. Or my assumption would be your agents are
providing a service that those other companies can't provide a more personalized touch. And then I think those are the opportunities that if you're gonna spend the money to bring that traffic to your website, make the most out of that experience. And so how you're messaging on a landing page, where you're showing value, providing that again, humanization,
Chris Langille (31:45)
Put it, yeah. Having a video.
Curtis Hays (31:49)
100 % video, right? Yep.
Chris Langille (31:51)
video on the landing page where you're driving the traffic
back to, we've split tested this, it works, it converts more traffic.
Curtis Hays (31:56)
Yep.
And again, that goes to the humanization, right? So people want to do business with people, not, I mean, I know my insurance agent's name is JP. And you know, I'm not doing business with anybody else from JP. Why? Because I trust JP. So if you can talk to me and I could start to feel trust and I can start to connect with you on a human level, I'm more likely to call. And even if I don't talk to you, the business owner, whoever, I have somebody else on your team.
Chris Langille (32:07)
Yeah
Mm-hmm.
Curtis Hays (32:26)
At least I've gotten to know your culture in a way to see if I'm a fit. The other benefit, Chris, is you might weed out some of those people who are bad leads anyway that wouldn't have connected with you because they realize they're not a good fit.
Chris Langille (32:36)
100%.
Yeah, absolutely. No, it's, it's a lot to like, I mean, I mean, honestly, we're I mean, I've talked to you before, like, we'll probably turn this into a series of podcast episodes, if you're cool with it, because there's just, there's just so much stuff to unpack. And there's, there's a lot of information online. And that really is a little misleading. I mean, it's, it's, we see it in our industry, too. And it's, and it's no slight to them. But you know,
Curtis Hays (32:49)
Yeah
Chris Langille (33:09)
Sometimes you have agencies that, you know, they kind of go the DIY approach and they kind of know enough to be dangerous. And then like they'll tell another agent what they should be doing. And it's like, sometimes it turns into like one of those things where it's like the blind leading the blind. And I don't mean that in a negative way. just mean like until you've done this, like for a living and you've done it for multiple clients and you've been in the trenches and you've seen all the changes in Google.
You know, I, don't know that I would, if I'm a business owner, I don't know that I would tell another business owner like, Hey, yeah, you should be putting blogs on your website. It's not a bad thing to blog by the way, people that are listening, but it just understanding the expectation. Like, you know, it's probably not going to move the dial for quite a while. So do you want to invest time and energy into that? Or do you want to invest time and energy into something else? But, so I think there's a lot to unpack and you know, I guess some of the takeaways.
from at least today's call and feel free to interject here. SEO is very localized, right? So people are listening, start using your Google business profile, treat it like a social media app, post content, post little updates, add upload photos, definitely like Curtis said, your review volume and replying back to those reviews is...
Very critical. Paper click ads, low hanging fruit for sure can work very quickly depending on the client's budget. In some ways is a good replacement for like traditional content based SEO, which as we both kind of agreed like may never work. What else am I missing here?
Curtis Hays (34:58)
Mm-hmm.
Well, I'd say we touched on this without saying it explicitly. SEO is more than Google. So we've got YouTube as the second largest search engine. I mentioned earlier that I have Gen Z people and millennials that I know that they go and do searches and research local businesses within Facebook and Instagram. Like if I were to advise a restaurant here locally,
Chris Langille (35:10)
100%, good point.
Curtis Hays (35:30)
I'd be telling them you should be posting your specials and your hours. There should be some sort of post every single day on your page. How frequently if your insurance agent are you posting? Not that you need to say what your hours are and not that you have a soup today, but there are things that are changing in the industry probably on a regular basis or things happening within the community that you could be a resource for that.
Chris Langille (35:45)
Sure, All right.
Curtis Hays (35:59)
You know, again, the discovery can happen within a social media app. It doesn't necessarily just have to happen on Google. And so know that consumers are using other apps to do searches. They're not just going to Google. Yes, Google has a monopoly on traditional search, but there is search happening across the internet all over the place.
Chris Langille (36:21)
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude. mean, the AI tools are starting to infiltrate and there's a lot of stuff online now about this and Google, if you remember their AI product was called Bard when it first came out and then they changed it to Gemini. And I think they, in some ways like rushed to market because they were trying to compete with some of these new startups. And I know in the beginning, it was very rough.
people were typing in like random questions, like how many rocks should I eat per day? And Google was saying, you know, it's safe to eat one rock per day. Like some of the AI responses were like super weird and just wrong. But so it's by no means like a finished product. And I know that it's going to keep evolving. But yeah, no, it's an interesting conversation. Like I said, there's so many different directions that we could take this, which is why.
Curtis Hays (37:00)
Yeah.
Chris Langille (37:20)
And I'm just going to force you into a series, man. Like you have no choice. We're going to have to do a couple, a couple of other episodes here to unpack this, but I appreciate you, man. jumping on again, couldn't, couldn't ask for a better first guest of the rise and bind podcast. So those of you who are listening, make sure that you head over to the YouTube channel, advisor evolved YouTube channel. we are going to be pushing out content regularly with the help of Curtis and some other awesome.
Curtis Hays (37:25)
Let's do it.
Chris Langille (37:50)
guests and Curtis tell people where they can find you because I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to, keep you a secret, man. Like you're a smart dude and people, have a podcast of your own, which it might be interesting, you know, to other people.
Curtis Hays (37:58)
Yeah
Yeah,
so I spend most of my time if I'm online on LinkedIn. And the reason I spend my time there is that's because where my customers are, my ideal customer profiles are on LinkedIn. And so you can find me on LinkedIn if you look up Curtis Hayes. I have a podcast which you've been a guest on Chris, which is Bullhorns and Bullseyes, where we talk all things marketing and sales. We say it's where precision meets promotion.
And we talk more about not just marketing, but the sales process. And I'd love to get into that with you, Chris, too, is just talking about how important it is once you get that lead, how much it costs to acquire it. And oftentimes, we find companies drop the ball when it comes to actually taking that lead.
Chris Langille (38:52)
Struggle.
Curtis Hays (38:53)
and moving it through the pipeline to actually close it in a new business. So it doesn't necessarily relate to SEO, but if you go through all that work to do SEO or advertising and spend all that money and you're not closing, yeah, you gotta be good at sales and sales and marketing have to talk to each other. So that's what our podcast is all about. That's Bullhorns and Bullseye. So you can find that on Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, Apple, you know.
Chris Langille (39:04)
better be good at sales. Yeah.
Curtis Hays (39:18)
So it was was a pleasure Chris. I'd love to come on again and do this. Let's definitely do a series. And you know all the best to your to your clients as well. I know they're in good hands with advisory of all.
Chris Langille (39:19)
Awesome.
Appreciate you, man. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we'll keep you guys posted, those who are listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and Curtis's. We'll see you next time. This is the Rise and Bind podcast from Advisory Evolve. Peace.
Google's constantly going to change, and why do they change? It's because consumer behaviors change. We're living in an age where 65 % of searches don't lead in a click.
Chris Langille (00:10)
All right, we're live. Welcome to episode one. That's right. Episode one of the all new rise and bind podcast from advisor evolved. We've been trying to get this off the ground for quite a while now. And thankfully it's finally here and I couldn't be happier to be joined today with a fellow colleague, friend, mentor, and just a good friend of mine, Mr. Curtis Hayes of Curtis Hayes consulting. Curtis is a guy that, I talk to a lot.
you know, online and off and he is going to bring some, some knowledge to episode one today. So Curtis, man, what's up? Thank you for hopping on with me. I'm pumped that you're here,
Curtis Hays (00:49)
Yeah, honored to join. I've had you on my podcast back last year and really appreciate the invite and coming on today. Excited to dive into some of this stuff with you and help out some businesses, hopefully.
Chris Langille (01:02)
Yeah, man. Yeah. So for those that don't know Curtis, he has a digital marketing agency, just like advisor evolved, not necessarily focused on insurance and financial. He works with some fairly large clients. So he brings a different perspective to things that is, it would be good for my audience to hear, right? Because we, we obviously serve insurance and financial, and these are for the most part, you know, what, what Google would,
view as a small business and you've dealt with some larger entities. like today, really what we are talking about is a topic that comes up quite a bit, right? We both get questions about this, which is search engine optimization. We're actually doing a mini course on our YouTube channel for advisory evolve because it's really one those things where we get that many questions about it that.
we're trying to create content around those questions. So we can point people to that versus, Hey Chris, can you get on a call with me? have this question about XYZ. It's like, before we get on the call, watch this video series because chances are the question is already answered and then some. So SEO is obviously such a hot button topic. There's a lot of, it's a hype machine, right? I mean, for good reason, right? But things have changed.
and are changing quite significantly. And I think a lot of people haven't been paying attention to that. also, and you could probably attest to this, there's a lot of marketing agencies that haven't realized this yet either who are practicing strategies that haven't worked in quite a long time. So today we're going to shed some light on that and Curtis, you know, feel free to jump in.
at any point in time, again, you bring a different perspective in working with some of these larger clients. And I know that just from our conversations, you have sort of shifted a little, and maybe, you you can put a better spin on this, but you've shifted a little bit away from SEO, right? And more to the paid ad strategy. Can you talk maybe a little bit about that and you know, the who, what, when, where, why?
Curtis Hays (03:16)
Yeah, we did. I would say post COVID was where we saw the shift where probably 75 % of my revenue came from SEO projects and retainers and 25 % of it was advertising is now. Well, it pretty much overnight after COVID went the opposite direction. So 75 % turned to advertising, 25 % to SEO. Well, why was that was because
Sales and marketing organizations who had typically spent significant budgets on in-person events or travel or those types of things had pools of money now that they could use and needed to rely more so on digital than they ever had previously. And everybody entered the advertising market. So search got more competitive, social media got more competitive.
In the lead gen space particularly which we do a lot of work LinkedIn changed a lot from an advertising perspective and all this money flooded into the markets. Well, that's increased CPCs. That's you know created much larger demand And then as you've said You know things change and that's something we should always know about SEO and algorithms. It was just What was a December 20th?
of 2024, I think it was December 12th of 2024, there was an algorithm update. Prior to that, there was an algorithm update in November, and there was an algorithm update prior to that in August. So Google's constantly going to change, and why do they change? It's because consumer behaviors change. We're living in an age where 65 % of searches don't lead in a click.
So people are doing search in a search engine.
and they get the answer right inside of search results. And I know we'll probably talk more about that. So we've seen a significant shift in user behavior. We've seen a significant shift in the way that businesses are trying to reach their target audiences. And so we've then had to shift some of the tactics, activities that we're doing, again, to meet those consumers where they're at and how they're consuming and digesting information.
I mean, we could dive into the sort of like psychographics and demographics of this because, you know, the other thing we talk about too is millennials and Gen Z are now becoming your buyer. So you take anyone under the age of say 40 or 45, those are now likely becoming your target audience, especially in the insurance space. These are going to be the new homeowners, the new families, the people who are coming off their parents' insurance.
Chris Langille (05:59)
Mm-hmm.
Curtis Hays (06:04)
and now are shopping on their own and they're looking at options. The way that they shop and the way that they research companies to buy is a lot different than their parents. It's a lot different than me. I grew up with Google. I relied heavily on Google throughout my entire career. That's how I built my career. I go to look up the hours for a restaurant. I go to Google Maps. But you know, my niece who's 30, starting a family,
to look up that same restaurant's information, she goes on Facebook or Instagram. She doesn't go to Google Maps, right? So we have to think about the behaviors of our target audience and then meet them where they're at digitally or offline.
Chris Langille (06:39)
Mm-hmm.
you
100%. I know it's funny. My oldest son turned 16 today actually. I get to see this. Yeah, thanks man. Yeah, he's, can't believe how fast it's happened. But, and then I have a 12 year old son and you know, obviously they're, you know, they have phones and they're on social media all the time with their friends. like they, they like, not that they, know what Google is, but they don't use Google to find and search things like.
Curtis Hays (06:56)
Happy birthday.
Chris Langille (07:14)
Same thing, they're using social media. And I think it's important for people, particularly my audience, Like insurance agencies like to understand that, you know.
going forward in 2025 and beyond, like you have to almost be a content creator as a business owner. Like it's a new reality for a lot of business owners that you need to be doing some type of strategic content creation. We've been telling a lot of people to do video because there's a lot of data and there's a lot of behavior that is showing that video SEO or, you know, video is the way people are researching products. They're not reading
blogs anymore or long-winded product pages. They are searching in YouTube and I know that I'm doing that myself. I mean, I don't remember the last time that I honestly used straight up Google search. Like, and you know, it's also too like, and you can, you can sort of attest to this. Like the buyer journey is not a linear journey. People all the time are like, we got, you know, we got six, seven leads from our website last month.
why didn't we get any this month? And it's like, you know, there's a lot of reasons why lead volume goes up and down, but like people are not just seeing, you know, searching for something in Google, going to the first website they see and filling out a lead form. It's they're bouncing between different platforms. And then there's distractions in between that throw people completely off the buyer journey. Then they come back, you know, two days later.
There's so many distractions online and you know, in our industry, it's a very saturated industry. There are insurance agencies on literally every corner. So if someone does search for insurance agency near me or cost of homeowners insurance in city name, there's a million options that they have to evaluate and sort through. And it's just not as linear of a journey.
as people assume it is. And now with the Google AIO, which is the AI overview, it's becoming even muddier. Can you kind of speak to that? Because I have some thoughts on this, but it's kind of crazy. I mean, it's killing traffic to a lot of websites.
Curtis Hays (09:37)
Yeah, well you you said a lot of great things there. There's a lot to unpack. So let me.
Chris Langille (09:42)
Yeah,
no, yeah, go back to wherever you need to go. So I'm blabbering here.
Curtis Hays (09:45)
Yeah, so there's a couple of
things I do want to address because you did say some good things that I want to highlight that were definitely our pay our agency is paying attention to for for a lot of our customers. The first being. Well, you hit on attention spans so you could go back. I think there was a study back in 2014 where they looked at how.
The attention span of a worker on their computer, let's say they opened up Microsoft Word or Excel and how long they spent in that application before they turned their eyes away and looked at something else. It was about two and a half minutes. We've repeated that study now within the last year and it's down to 45 seconds. So we have these shorter attention spans and then we also have this millennial and Gen Z consumer who
wants authenticity. And if you're a brand who's going to hide behind your logo, you're going to lose with this target market. You have to humanize your business. You have to humanize your brand because people do business with people whom they like, whom they trust, whom they can feel a connection. And frankly, people do business with other people. They don't do business with a logo unless you're Nike. But even you could make a case for somebody like Nike
Chris Langille (10:46)
100%.
Sure.
Curtis Hays (11:07)
I'm buying the shoes because I like Michael Jordan or LeBron James, not because I like the logo, okay? And I can't tell you how many times we built a website and the client says, can we make our logo bigger? And it's like, I think a better idea would be to put a picture of your face there because that's who they're doing business with, you, not the logo. So you've built this case for doing video because...
Chris Langille (11:10)
Right. Yeah, right, right.
Right, right.
Yeah, 100%.
Curtis Hays (11:32)
Now you humanize who you are and the value you bring. gives you this opportunity to educate customers just like you're doing right now, Chris, is you're creating this great video series to educate your target audience and saying, you know, look, you're not going to just do business with advisor involved. You're going to do business with people who care. We're knowledgeable. We're trying to stay up to date. We're trying to educate you and we want, you know, the best for you moving forward. And that's what's going to set.
You people apart and then you tie that to how that target demographic is consuming content if they're not going to Google. And they're they're doing tick tocks and Instagram reels and they're consuming content on YouTube like you mentioned you know there's your opportunity to connect with those people and then so that that leads me into what you were saying about the buyer journey that it's not linear.
We're going to have this problem with attribution and privacy and cookies and all these things. But the reality is, is that person might go and discover your brand along with a couple other brands. But there's things that happen offline that you don't know about. Like me calling up Chris and saying, Hey dude, do you know about this insurance company? Have you used them before? Or do you have any recommendations for me because I'm in the market for new insurance. My rates.
So that interaction that happens offline, you have no idea about, but it's extremely powerful, right? Most of your advisors are probably gonna tell you their best business comes from referrals. So give them a place to refer, give them content that allows me to share with my target audience that if I've got a buddy or a family member who says they're in market and they've got questions that I'm not able to answer.
Chris Langille (13:01)
Yeah.
100%.
Curtis Hays (13:23)
You're a reference, right? I can just point them to your content and say, you know, this agent here is extremely helpful and you might be the one that gets the phone call. But can you track that path to conversion? No, it's actually very difficult. So we're getting back to like old school marketing back in the day where you, know, there's a reason why companies did Super Bowl commercials. You couldn't track and measure it.
Chris Langille (13:24)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
100%.
Curtis Hays (13:51)
At least not from a linear perspective,
Chris Langille (13:55)
Yeah, that's a great point. And it's funny because we've had this conversation with some of our clients, right? Where they'll be like, you know, overly obsessed with SEO, right? And for good reason, right? They spend money on their site. They want people to find it and which is understandable. I I want people to find my website too. Although SEO is not how I personally get clients, but it goes back to the thing where you're like, know, people, consumers don't know about Geico because of their blog articles. Like they don't know about State Farm because of
you know, their TikTok account. You know, these companies obviously have major spending power, right? They can out, out maneuver small business owners and small agencies all day long, which is why like the strategies need to be different. But it's, you know, different, different types of organizations have different budgets and therefore can reach people in different ways. But it's like, yeah, it really is like, you have to be omnipresent to some degree or
you know, at least pick a few channels and really dedicate yourself to those channels because, you know, going back to the whole root of this conversation, which is search engine optimization, right? It's like we tell people all the time, you know, you can't control the quality of lead that comes to you through SEO. You can't control the volume of leads that comes to you through SEO. Don't overly obsess about SEO. Like at the end of the day, you're really in some ways.
hoping or waiting for people to find you, right? And that's not really a great business strategy. know, like I would tell people like whatever you get from your website is like the icing on the cake, right? Like that shouldn't be your primary way of generating new business, right? Like you said, referrals is that that's the number one way that most people get new business. But it is interesting to see like how these changes are impacting
and behavior, you said, user behavior in the buyer journey and like going back to the AI overview, like now, like, you know, to your point, you know, the younger generation, like they don't want to dig through 10 blue organic links on Google search to find their answer. They probably love the AI overlay because it gives you the answer, especially for like informational type of searches. Like if you type insurance agency near me, at least from what I've seen recently,
Curtis Hays (16:12)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Langille (16:18)
the AI overview is not showing up for like a local near me search. mean, not yet anyway, right? Google could change that tomorrow, but for sure, for like informational queries, know, you know, how many ounces are in a pound, like stuff like that. What's the weather today? Google is answering that question right away. So it's feeding into that low attention span mindset. And you know, the reality is to your point, like Gen Z like
Curtis Hays (16:22)
Correct.
Chris Langille (16:48)
that's if you're listening to this podcast episode and you're an insurance agent and you're under 50 years old, sure, you're gonna have some more sort of like mature clients, people that are probably your age and older, but depending on what your growth goals are and maybe if you're trying to sell your agency, there's a lot of value in that Gen Z audience and
SEO might not be the answer for those people.
Curtis Hays (17:20)
Right, right. Yeah, we I mean, and I have specific data on this. I've got a client. We do a lot of lead gen and the home improvement construction space. I've got a client. It's about 55-45. So 55 % of their traffic is over 45. 45 % of the traffic is under, but 66 % of their conversions on the website from that traffic are over 45. So even if the younger people respond to the ad,
and come to the website, they don't convert. Again, thinking about that humanizational experience and non-linear path that most Gen Zs take, they might discover you through that click. Even if they want to convert, they're not likely to convert there. They're likely going to go and do some additional research. They're going to look you up on social media. They're going to ask some friends and those types of things. And then they might pick up the phone and call or they might...
Use chat on your website or something like that. So you know, get this this expectation that they're going to convert through. It's almost like we're X our expectation as marketers is that people are going to skip the funnel and go right to a conversion. You got all this other thing, you know. There's there's really seven touch points at a minimum to a conversion. We're going to skip all those touch points, awareness, consideration, interest and intent, all that to get right to a conversion in one click.
Chris Langille (18:32)
Yeah.
Curtis Hays (18:45)
whether it's an ad or through organic SEO is really a lot to expect and even more to expect in this day and age. So I think you asked me to sort of maybe unpack the search result page, what we would call SERP a little bit. And yeah, a lot is AI generated. But if you do think about that local search, because I get asked this a lot, again, especially when we're dealing with local businesses, is like, okay, my office is located in this area here, but...
You know, we do business, you know, 30 miles the other side of the county. How do we rank over there?
Chris Langille (19:21)
comes up every day, by the way, in my world.
Curtis Hays (19:22)
Every day, right? So
yeah. And you know, the reality is you've got two options. You either pick up your office and you move over there or you open a new office and you put people there, right? Or you can run ads, but you still will have a difficult time with maps and sponsored, right? So Google, you had a Panda and Penguin update, which were years ago.
Chris Langille (19:32)
All right.
where you run ads.
Yeah. Yeah.
Curtis Hays (19:50)
But essentially that leveled the playing field for all local businesses, which Google had to do. And if you're in a highly competitive geographic area where there's lots of agents, there's only so many that could be displayed in a certain mile radius, and you're going to be at least in a near me type search or anything with location intent, you're only going to get those search results that are right close to you.
Chris Langille (20:17)
Local, yeah, five mile radius.
Curtis Hays (20:19)
Yep, and that's just
Chris Langille (20:19)
Yeah.
Curtis Hays (20:20)
that's just the way Google has to has to do it to keep a fair and plain level. You know that's that's the playing field we have to deal with right now.
Chris Langille (20:27)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's tough too. We get this all the time, Chris, you know, why does our website say that we're located in Houston, Texas? Like we write the entire state of Texas. And I'm like, I understand that, but you're not going to rank in the entire state of Texas. I hate to tell you, it's just, it's too competitive. Exactly. So if you, if you take Houston insurance agency off of your H1, you know, title tag of your homepage and you just put Texas insurance agent, you're actually hurting your SEO.
Curtis Hays (20:44)
Right. Because how many agents would be in the state of Texas thousands?
Chris Langille (21:00)
you're hurting your SEO, you could potentially be on page one for Houston Insurance Agency. Now you're on page 10 because you're trying to rank for a much broader keyword. So people that are listening, it's better to go hyper local. Most of your organic traffic is gonna come from a five to 10 mile radius anyway. So if you try to look like this massive agency, that can actually be detrimental from an SEO perspective. Some people,
They don't care. They're like, I don't really care. People have told me that all the time. We don't care about SEO. That's not how we get our clients. Sometimes we don't want clients from Google, like price shoppers and unqualified business, et cetera. But it is something to sort of talk about because it's all location-based. And that's probably a good segue for us to talk about the Google business profile because we see clients and people that...
hire these third party SEO agencies, right? And they'll, you know, they'll hit us up and they'll ask for like a log into the site. And it's like watching the same like train wreck over and over again, right? Like, Hey, is Yoast SEO and you know, we want to install Yoast SEO. And we're like, it's already installed. It's already set up. Like they're doing very low level basic stuff on site when on site is not nearly as important now as it was five years ago.
the Google business profile in many respects is as important, if not more important than a website. And I'm shooting you straight folks because I build websites for a living. you know, that's not, maybe not something I should divulge, but I mean, that's just the reality. I'm not trying to hide from that. Like your website is obviously very critical. It's your own slice of the internet. There's a lot of different things that you can do with your website.
obviously to generate new business, retain existing clients, et cetera. But when we're talking about SEO and we're talking about a local business like an insurance agent, the Google business profile is gonna be one of the very first things people see in a local search. And there's data and Curtis, know, there's data that shows that a lot of traffic is now coming from website traffic is coming from the Google business profile. And it's just Google's way of again, keeping you in their ecosystem.
and people may not know this or wanna believe this, but Google's really not your friend. They don't wanna send traffic to your website if they can keep you on their platform. They make money from ad revenue on their platform. They don't wanna send people to other websites if they can get the answer directly in the search result. So talk about the Google Business Profile for a second if you will.
Curtis Hays (23:48)
Yeah, and again we have to look at people's behaviors, right? So a lot of these searches are going to happen on people's phones. And so if it's happening on the phone, the search result looks quite different. Your screen real estate is different and of course Google knows your mobile and especially if you do something with local intent, which means you used a city name in your search. You used near me in your search. That likely what's going to pop up.
Chris Langille (23:53)
Google Maps.
Curtis Hays (24:18)
Certainly the first thing after some initial ads is going to be Google Maps, which is business. So Google doesn't know if you're looking for directions or a phone number or those types of things. And Maps is what was built in order to provide that helpful information to consumers when they're looking for a business. So if we unpack that, what's going to be helpful to a user in making a decision about
businesses that might be listed there, right? So where they're located specifically, are they in the right category? have you selected the right categories that Google gives you from an optimization perspective? Is the title of your business there everything accurate? And then do you have a valid phone number? Maybe a link to your website, though not likely really clicked. Directions to your business potentially. And then what's probably most important,
is our reviews. And I just did a search here on my computer for car insurance agents near me. And I've got an ad at the top. And then I've got three organic listings. And guess which one's at the top? The one with the most reviews. So I've got 309 reviews from the first one, 144 from the next one, and 62 from the one after that.
Chris Langille (25:33)
Yep. Yep.
Curtis Hays (25:43)
You know, so I might consider location in who I'm going to call and consider first or click on, but I would say maybe most important to me might be the actual reviews. So this is something we've been telling clients and pretty much any industry that deals with consumers is your reviews are super critical, not just in getting them, but also you replying to them. Again, if we go back to authenticity and humanizing your brand.
You not only need to get the reviews, you need to be thanking people and commenting on reviews and responding to bad reviews. But make that process is frictionless and easy as possible to get those use things like text messaging to ask for review after you've booked new business or help somebody through a claim. Just different things that you can do again, is that's going to help.
Chris Langille (26:30)
Mm-hmm.
Curtis Hays (26:39)
not only improve your ranking, but just visibility and attractiveness to a potential consumer.
Chris Langille (26:44)
Yeah, and I want to throw a tip out too for people that are listening. Your Google business profile is managed now through Google Maps on your phone. On desktop, it's business.google.com, but it's going to send you to a search on your result page now. They changed that a couple, about a year or so ago. But on mobile, you access your business settings through Google Maps app. I would recommend anybody here, make sure that you have Google Maps on your phone and treat...
Google Maps almost like it's like another social media account. You can post little updates to your Google business account. You can upload photos. You can upload video, like treat your Google business profile like your most important social media channel. Cause that's really in many ways what it is. It is a social media channel. People don't really realize that because they think Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Twitter.
or X are the social media channels, but the Google business profile, it's your most important social media channel. And I wanna touch on one other thing too, because before we kind of wrap things up, you spoke about what's at the top of Google, right? It's always, almost always, except for the AI overlays, going to be ads. you and we both have done this.
in the last couple of years, which was realizing that for most small businesses, SEO is a multi-year commitment, both in sweat equity and financially, SEO is with no guarantee of results. Unless you're ranking top three organically, you're gonna get no results. And I see that a lot. see people spending a lot of money on SEO and...
Curtis Hays (28:26)
with no guarantee of results.
Chris Langille (28:40)
They're on page three. Again, it's a competitive industry. Insurance is a bloodbath online. It's competitive. And the reality is Google, no matter how hard you fight and claw as a business, Google, they love big brands. They love showing like nerd wallet, bank rate, the zebra, these comparison sites, insurance carriers. You know, if somebody types in an informational search, like how does water backup insurance work?
it's most likely going to be one of those websites that very hard to compete inorganic with those brands. have dedicated SEO teams. have trillions of backlinks. They Google loves big brands, but we shifted to a paid strategy. And why is that? Because paid ads, you know, pay per click and SEO have the same objective. It's to be at the top of Google, right? Both of them cost money.
One of them works way faster and in my opinion, better. The other one takes, could take years and might not ever work. So as a business owner, where would you, where do you think you should invest your marketing dollars into something that might take five to 10 years? Like literally could take that long if you're in a very competitive market or we've turned on ad campaigns for clients and they're in the top three.
you know, within 48 hours and that's not to plug us. That's just the reality. I think a lot of people are afraid of paper click, but you know, and you, we've both had a lot of success with this. mean, can you speak to that for a moment?
Curtis Hays (30:21)
Yeah, I mean, you can definitely have success there. I would say first step I mentioned earlier is understand your ideal customer profile. And if they are older, I think Google is an opportunity for you to reach them because that's where their behaviors are going to be. If it's a younger demographic, then you look there. Then I think the experience that you provide people once they do come through a click.
Needs to be again more expansive than just one single experience. So if you're looking for people who are likely just shopping for rates, can you compete with, you know, Geico and all the other carriers that are providing a better experience to getting instant quotes and those types of things? Or I can just type in bit of my information and populate everything. Or my assumption would be your agents are
providing a service that those other companies can't provide a more personalized touch. And then I think those are the opportunities that if you're gonna spend the money to bring that traffic to your website, make the most out of that experience. And so how you're messaging on a landing page, where you're showing value, providing that again, humanization,
Chris Langille (31:45)
Put it, yeah. Having a video.
Curtis Hays (31:49)
100 % video, right? Yep.
Chris Langille (31:51)
video on the landing page where you're driving the traffic
back to, we've split tested this, it works, it converts more traffic.
Curtis Hays (31:56)
Yep.
And again, that goes to the humanization, right? So people want to do business with people, not, I mean, I know my insurance agent's name is JP. And you know, I'm not doing business with anybody else from JP. Why? Because I trust JP. So if you can talk to me and I could start to feel trust and I can start to connect with you on a human level, I'm more likely to call. And even if I don't talk to you, the business owner, whoever, I have somebody else on your team.
Chris Langille (32:07)
Yeah
Mm-hmm.
Curtis Hays (32:26)
At least I've gotten to know your culture in a way to see if I'm a fit. The other benefit, Chris, is you might weed out some of those people who are bad leads anyway that wouldn't have connected with you because they realize they're not a good fit.
Chris Langille (32:36)
100%.
Yeah, absolutely. No, it's, it's a lot to like, I mean, I mean, honestly, we're I mean, I've talked to you before, like, we'll probably turn this into a series of podcast episodes, if you're cool with it, because there's just, there's just so much stuff to unpack. And there's, there's a lot of information online. And that really is a little misleading. I mean, it's, it's, we see it in our industry, too. And it's, and it's no slight to them. But you know,
Curtis Hays (32:49)
Yeah
Chris Langille (33:09)
Sometimes you have agencies that, you know, they kind of go the DIY approach and they kind of know enough to be dangerous. And then like they'll tell another agent what they should be doing. And it's like, sometimes it turns into like one of those things where it's like the blind leading the blind. And I don't mean that in a negative way. just mean like until you've done this, like for a living and you've done it for multiple clients and you've been in the trenches and you've seen all the changes in Google.
You know, I, don't know that I would, if I'm a business owner, I don't know that I would tell another business owner like, Hey, yeah, you should be putting blogs on your website. It's not a bad thing to blog by the way, people that are listening, but it just understanding the expectation. Like, you know, it's probably not going to move the dial for quite a while. So do you want to invest time and energy into that? Or do you want to invest time and energy into something else? But, so I think there's a lot to unpack and you know, I guess some of the takeaways.
from at least today's call and feel free to interject here. SEO is very localized, right? So people are listening, start using your Google business profile, treat it like a social media app, post content, post little updates, add upload photos, definitely like Curtis said, your review volume and replying back to those reviews is...
Very critical. Paper click ads, low hanging fruit for sure can work very quickly depending on the client's budget. In some ways is a good replacement for like traditional content based SEO, which as we both kind of agreed like may never work. What else am I missing here?
Curtis Hays (34:58)
Mm-hmm.
Well, I'd say we touched on this without saying it explicitly. SEO is more than Google. So we've got YouTube as the second largest search engine. I mentioned earlier that I have Gen Z people and millennials that I know that they go and do searches and research local businesses within Facebook and Instagram. Like if I were to advise a restaurant here locally,
Chris Langille (35:10)
100%, good point.
Curtis Hays (35:30)
I'd be telling them you should be posting your specials and your hours. There should be some sort of post every single day on your page. How frequently if your insurance agent are you posting? Not that you need to say what your hours are and not that you have a soup today, but there are things that are changing in the industry probably on a regular basis or things happening within the community that you could be a resource for that.
Chris Langille (35:45)
Sure, All right.
Curtis Hays (35:59)
You know, again, the discovery can happen within a social media app. It doesn't necessarily just have to happen on Google. And so know that consumers are using other apps to do searches. They're not just going to Google. Yes, Google has a monopoly on traditional search, but there is search happening across the internet all over the place.
Chris Langille (36:21)
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude. mean, the AI tools are starting to infiltrate and there's a lot of stuff online now about this and Google, if you remember their AI product was called Bard when it first came out and then they changed it to Gemini. And I think they, in some ways like rushed to market because they were trying to compete with some of these new startups. And I know in the beginning, it was very rough.
people were typing in like random questions, like how many rocks should I eat per day? And Google was saying, you know, it's safe to eat one rock per day. Like some of the AI responses were like super weird and just wrong. But so it's by no means like a finished product. And I know that it's going to keep evolving. But yeah, no, it's an interesting conversation. Like I said, there's so many different directions that we could take this, which is why.
Curtis Hays (37:00)
Yeah.
Chris Langille (37:20)
And I'm just going to force you into a series, man. Like you have no choice. We're going to have to do a couple, a couple of other episodes here to unpack this, but I appreciate you, man. jumping on again, couldn't, couldn't ask for a better first guest of the rise and bind podcast. So those of you who are listening, make sure that you head over to the YouTube channel, advisor evolved YouTube channel. we are going to be pushing out content regularly with the help of Curtis and some other awesome.
Curtis Hays (37:25)
Let's do it.
Chris Langille (37:50)
guests and Curtis tell people where they can find you because I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to, keep you a secret, man. Like you're a smart dude and people, have a podcast of your own, which it might be interesting, you know, to other people.
Curtis Hays (37:58)
Yeah
Yeah,
so I spend most of my time if I'm online on LinkedIn. And the reason I spend my time there is that's because where my customers are, my ideal customer profiles are on LinkedIn. And so you can find me on LinkedIn if you look up Curtis Hayes. I have a podcast which you've been a guest on Chris, which is Bullhorns and Bullseyes, where we talk all things marketing and sales. We say it's where precision meets promotion.
And we talk more about not just marketing, but the sales process. And I'd love to get into that with you, Chris, too, is just talking about how important it is once you get that lead, how much it costs to acquire it. And oftentimes, we find companies drop the ball when it comes to actually taking that lead.
Chris Langille (38:52)
Struggle.
Curtis Hays (38:53)
and moving it through the pipeline to actually close it in a new business. So it doesn't necessarily relate to SEO, but if you go through all that work to do SEO or advertising and spend all that money and you're not closing, yeah, you gotta be good at sales and sales and marketing have to talk to each other. So that's what our podcast is all about. That's Bullhorns and Bullseye. So you can find that on Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, Apple, you know.
Chris Langille (39:04)
better be good at sales. Yeah.
Curtis Hays (39:18)
So it was was a pleasure Chris. I'd love to come on again and do this. Let's definitely do a series. And you know all the best to your to your clients as well. I know they're in good hands with advisory of all.
Chris Langille (39:19)
Awesome.
Appreciate you, man. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we'll keep you guys posted, those who are listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and Curtis's. We'll see you next time. This is the Rise and Bind podcast from Advisory Evolve. Peace.
