Mastering SEO and PPC

Hey. Hi everyone. Welcome to our show. This is your host Ranmay and we have Brenton Thomas from Twibi agency tonight with us. Welcome Brenton to our show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Great. Brenton is the founder at Twibi Agency and we are gonna talk about SEO and PPC tonight before we move any forward. Brenton, I would request you to introduce yourself and Twibi agency, to our audiences.

Yeah, so I’m the founder of Twibi, so we’ve been around for about two years now. and so we specialise in Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, SEO and email marketing, and that’s founded based on basically me going through corporate and looking for something more fulfilling and love me writing to this agency. And I’ve seen really nice growth over the last couple years and I am excited to be here today.

Superb. Thank you for taking out time for this podcast, Brenton, and talking about SEO. Like you mentioned, SEO is a long-term investment. We all know it’s not an overnight game, right? And it can take time to see significant results. So how do you manage client expectations regarding the timelines for the success of your SEO campaigns, and what strategies or milestones do you set to ensure that there is continuous improvement and you are able to demonstrate progress throughout the process there.

Yeah, SEO’s a very slow game. And, to manage those expectations of clients, really just try to reiterate before we even start, and the last thing I wanna do is, take anyone’s money without that person, understand, like, what’s gonna be involved in this whole process?

So usually in, in the pitch process, I’ll say, if you don’t have six months to wait for SEO to start to affect your bottom line, Let’s not do that. I have other channels that we can manage for you, like Google Ads or Facebook ads, and it’ll get a faster return, but I’ll just reiterate, like in the first month or two, you’ll see impressions right from the content that we put together and fix some of your technical SEO.

And then after maybe another couple months, you start to see a good amount of clicks. And so I’ll let them know that we know that we’re moving in the right direction based on what we see in Google Search Console. But in terms of actual like revenue, you gotta wait six months and repeat that in all the weekly meetings, like over and reiterate over and over.

Great, that’s superb, being so transparent at the very beginning because that kind of sets the expectations and they’re continuously not bothering you about looking at recent results at how we’re gonna achieve that final landmark. If you have set the expectations, really crystal clear at the beginning of the association and talking about SEO link building as an important aspect and has been there as a significant factor for SEO success over these years. And so what kind of strategies do you employ to build those high-quality backlinks for your client’s websites? And then how do you ensure that these backlinks are from genuine alternative sources and align with the website’s overall SEO strategy so that it makes that impact that we all are looking for?

Yeah, so we, so we’ve tried quite a few different link-building strategies. Like Brian Dean has a broken link, has a broken link strategy, right? So you reach out to webmasters and you say, Hey, we have relevant content. Let’s, can you switch that in? That didn’t work very well. We’ve tried buying links. That’s actually a very slow process, and there’s only a limited inventory.

We’ve tried forums, going into forums, and then posting something of value, and then dropping a link in there, but it’s no follow. But the thing that we found worked the best for us was to help a reporter, and there’s two members on my team, and they just, they just dial into it every day. We submit about 20 pitches every single day, Monday through Friday.

And we’re able to generate some pretty good backlinks. They tend to be lower DA, but higher quantity. So we have link velocity as we’re developing our links. We did land a mass, or excuse me, American Express as a backlink, so that’s a very high DA that we’re able to get out of help reporter, so that tends to work best, especially for clients too.

And then we do it for ourselves, and then we also offer that service to clients as well.

Oh, okay. Superb. How is one way out? It’s a tough time taking, like we discussed, but yeah, the results are there for everyone to see if you’re able to crack it. Like you mentioned, getting a link from Amex is a big deal.

Superb. And can you also discuss the process of audience segmentation and targeting in PPC campaigns because you’re so much involved in that. And then what tools and techniques do you utilise to identify and reach the most relevant target audience for your clients?

Yes, that’s when we’re building our audiences, usually it starts with deep conversations with the client. And so the client will let us know, like who they think they want to target, who’s worked historically in the past. And so during our, like one of our weekly presentations during the onboarding, we’ll put together personas. And so then those personas influence all the ad copy, the actual interest based target, and the ad buying platforms and things like that threshold software.

We mostly use the, uh, the tools like inside the actual platforms that tend to work best. So like the keyword planner inside of Google Ads, just the interest builder inside of Facebook ads. That tends to work pretty well.

Absolutely. And then coming to your agency, Brendan, this is a tough market, very competitive in itself. So as an agency owner, how do you bag your clients? What is that process that works for you? I’m not asking you to give every trick up your sleeves in such a competitive industry. What is your approach of attracting, or let’s say retaining the clients and what are your unique value propositions? If, let’s say, we were discussing about bagging a new client and making that first pitch, what works for you that way?

Oh, so yeah, so I, I think it’s important to, so first of all, when we reach out, we want to pitch to someone that’s in an industry that we’ve done really well for, right? We’re seeing amazing results for clients in the wine industry. We can get like a 400% return on ad spend off of book reservations, so people can show up to the physical winery and we’re able to optimise towards the right thing in the funnel.

And then there’s, we can get out of learning mode and then, We can generate just tons of books, reservations. So hopefully we’re speaking to a winery and then we can speak to those results and say, we’re doing this for this x, y, z winery, and we can do the same thing for you, same with food and bev.

We just see amazing results about a 350% return on ad spend for a Spirits brand. So hopefully you will talk to a Spirits brand and we can just highlight those results and talk, like really speak to the return on ads that we’re generating for others. That tends to work really well.

Showcasing facts, successful facts of your previous experience in working in that domain. Click set, and then the first way that first meeting or discovery calls when you show them that these things have worked in your industry, and obviously they relate to the numbers there, talking about ads and ad spend, like you mentioned, Google Ads is a popular platform for PPC advertising, right? But it can be really overwhelming for beginners.

People are just starting out. So what advice should you give to businesses or marketers who are just starting out with Google Ads and really want to get the mantra to be successful and they can maximize the campaign effectiveness? What are those tricks? Which would you suggest?

Yeah, I think so. Like the Google reps. So I, I think they’re pretty, they know their stuff, but, I would just take it with a grain of salt. Cause they, they want you to spend as much as possible without any correlation to the result. So I would pick their brains. Right. So if you’re just starting out, they’ll explain a lot of different things to you inside the actual ad account there. There’s some good courses online, but the courses, If you’re not like actually inside the actual dashboard or the ad account, it’s a little hard to like, like conceptualise. I just saw this thing in the course and then now where is it in the actual ad account? And it’s hard to make that correlation sometimes, but it doesn’t hurt to take the courses.

And then what I used to do, this was eight years ago, but I really wanted to just get into digital marketing for the first time. And so I just started reaching out to people on LinkedIn and I met this really nice guy. He lived in Louisiana and he just started teaching me SEO and we got really deep into it.

It was just, we would do four hour phone calls, multiple four hour phone calls, and that was a really good foundation for me to learn SEO so do the same thing with Google ads, and that’s a really good, good way to go about it.

Yeah. That’s superb, that’s superb. One final thing that I wanted to understand from you or listen to your take on it is AI and ChatGPT, Bard.

We are all in that AI storm and content writers are fearing for their jobs. I know that’s not gonna take the job for obvious reasons. Product is a product at the end of the day. A machine can never take a human’s place per se. But in general, what is your take on it? Where are we heading?

Yeah, I think it’s pretty amazing. Yeah, we use it quite a bit. We don’t use it for client work as much. Maybe occasionally emails. Email Isn’t even like our biggest service, but we might use it for some client emails and then we have to then edit it quite a bit to really speak to the business and the nuances of business and add the personality in there.

But we use it quite a bit for ourselves. So we do use to write blog posts, but that’s a big part of what we’re doing. Right. I think we’re pushing out like four new blog posts a week. So that’s 16 blog posts a month off of Chat GPT.

Ah, okay. That’s super nice. And then Brenton before we let you go, I’d like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you are game for it.

Yeah, let’s do it.

Perfect. What is your favourite book?

Oh, oh. Ooh, don’t read books. I read blogs. I read blogs.

Oh, okay. No problem. Your favourite movie?

Shutter Island.

Oh, nice. And are you a morning person or a night person?

Night.

Superb and could really make that out. I don’t know why and how. Yeah. And where do you, where do we find you on Friday evenings post work. I know you work seven days a week. Let’s go on weekends. Where do we find you in the evenings?

At a friends or family’s house. Just playing a board game or just sitting around a table,talking.

Oh, okay. That’s nice. And what was your last Google search?

Ooh

You can check that out. It’s an open book one, so don’t worry.

Yeah. I’ll see. Let me check. Last Google search was, Because Google, DomaG.co. Cuz I, I had bought a, a domain, another domain, so, that’s what it was

Oh, okay. Perfect. The last one, and we are not, not gonna grill you any further. Let’s say if there were a movie made on you, what genre would it be?

Like, who would the person be? The actor.

In general, not really the actor, the movie, what subject would it be on? Oh, that’s a Comedy Rocks, you know, action movie, suspense, thriller, whatever. Yeah.

Oh, that’s a good question. I guess sports, I’ll say a sports movie.

Oh, okay. Nice. That’s nice. That’s nice. Perfect. Then Brenton, really thank you so much for taking our time for this podcast and I’m sure our audiences would have benefited a lot in terms of hearing from you about SEO PPC link building and we’ll try and get hold of you for a more detailed episode sometime down the line.

But yeah, I really appreciate it, man. You are taking our time for this.

Ah yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Yeah. Great. Thank you. Take care.