Ranking Revolution

Doug: This episode is part two of the conversation with Nick LaRoy. We talk about using KPIs or key performance indicators to demonstrate the results you're getting for your clients and generally working with and dealing with clients. I'm not a big client fan myself, but I know it works for a lot of people out there.
If you did miss part one, be sure to check it out. I think. You can listen to it later. You're not going to miss anything, but if you want to hear it in order, you can check out the previous episode. And in part one, we talk about how Nick got his start in SEO and his fractional SEO director offering.

Doug: So let's shift into aligning on KPIs with the client, defining, executing, measuring, communicating, and repeating. And again, this is straight out of the project management. Book of knowledge out there. So I'm pretty sure approaching it in this way aligns you and the client together.
And then it also makes it very clear on the value that you're bringing. So can you talk about how you do this, especially if the client needs some education? So pretty wide open question, but how, how do you start off these kickoff meetings?
Nick: I think what I want to emphasize is this is something that I actually do.
And I know that sounds really silly, but we all know of agencies, freelancers, in house individuals. They just show up and they start throwing stuff against the wall, see what sticks, what's kind of working. And it's a really inefficient way to be able to do any sort of marketing activity. So I had already said earlier when someone reaches out to me to potentially work, I'm doing just as much interviewing of them.
Um, As they are me. And what I mean by that is truly understanding what does success look like for you? And if we sign an engagement and we're kicking off, it's about better understanding that. So when we say about growth and we have resources and we're going to put X amount of dollars, you know, I'm also doing a little bit of math in the back of my head as well, making sure that if you're paying me five or 10 grand, if you're selling 1 widgets.
Like we are not in a situation to succeed. Like I have to help you sell 10, 000 widgets just to break even on my cost. So I'm trying to make sure that I'm doing the math. If you're selling 2, 000 mattresses or a car or, a recurring service. Then it's about 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, you know, transactions that can help you hit breakeven.
And I think that allows us to establish like a, a crawl, walk, run method. And I'm very vocal about that. And I like using the math with my clients to establish that as an expectation. And I think when you go to them and show them how the math works, Like that allows them to kind of poke holes, but also to really get aligned with the process.
And it's just, again, it's this communication. Too many of us, especially in the SEO space, we're not effectively communicating. We're not saying things that should be said because we're afraid that we might get in trouble, we might get fired, you know, or we just don't want the blowback. And I think anytime that we can err on the side of asking more questions and just communicating.
It's only going to benefit your strategy and the results.
Doug: And we'll try to get sort of surgical in these specific areas, but one of the obvious, well, I hope it's obvious when you, when you have to explain what you just described to the client. I mean, it just exposes how bad a client. A founder, a company owner can run a business, right?
Cause this is like cashflow management. This is understanding what you're doing and why and where the money comes from. But it's super common, especially, you know, let's say it's a restaurant or something like that. They could be a great chef and a great restaurant runner. And you know, a lot of. Pieces, but they may not understand some of the core business ideas.
Like I said, like cashflow and then the KPI is like, what are they trying to do each day that actually like moves the needle. And again, super common for people not to understand that. And then even SEOs, right? If you're a skilled SEO, it doesn't mean you understand how to run a business and it can get complicated and people can get distracted from, you know, a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually matter.
So. When you go in, are you sometimes like truly like educating the business owner? Because they, they kind of miss this. I mean, I guess you're working with enterprise people. So like, there's, there's some smart folks in there. So what do you think? Yeah, you'd be, you'd be surprised. Like,
Nick: I think sometimes just doing the math doesn't always math.
If that makes sense. You know, and a lot of times I think people spend money on things that are best practices because they have a budget so they're not always spending efficiently. And they're not prioritizing efficiently. So, it may not be always trying to explain to them, this is why you need to do it, here's the exact return.
It can sometimes be, we have a laundry list of things to do, and one budget, but we're just gonna start top to bottom. And then if you ask, like, what's the rationale for why something is number one or number five? It's kind of like, well, we had an SEO come in and do an audit. And if I see site speed at the very top, and you're going to go spend six figures or seven figures into redeveloping the backend of your site to save half of a fraction of, you know, site speed and the load time.
And your homepage still says home and you don't have an XML site map. And, you know, your, you know, robots files a mess. It's this inefficient use of time. So I would just say sometimes when you get onto the bigger clients, it's just more education on how to prioritize and properly communicate the value of all the things that you have to do.
And on the other end, it's more of like, you don't have a ton of budget. So how do we make sure that we're prioritizing so we can get the best bang for your buck? It's, it's the exact same issue, just at different scales.
Doug: Do you have templates and systems set up pretty well so that you can just roll in and say, Hey, here's, here's what we're working through today.
And as long as you have the key stakeholders around, you're able to work through and get, you know, the right information for KPIs and who you need to interface with. How does that work?
Nick: Yeah. So I will say that is one of the typical fallbacks of people like myself that are solo consultants. Do I have processes and documents in here?
So not everything is always getting the template out and building it out, but I do build variations of it. That's pretty specific to my clients. Again, one of the benefits of me working with a handful versus trying to get a team of 10, 20, 30 plus SEOs to replicate what I'm doing. So I am not exceptionally efficient that way, but I do think that way and create these type of documents.
It's when I'm going in to make sure that we are covering various topics and getting this information.
Doug: Is there, is there a reason why you couldn't just have like a general template or is it more customized depending on whoever you're dealing with?
Nick: Oh, no, I'm going to be 100 percent honest. I'm lazy. It was the part that I hated the most in agencies is building playbooks that I felt like expired and was no longer relevant three weeks after you wrote them.
Okay. And you always had to go back and revise them. I absolutely should. Like I will, I should be doing it. I don't always, that is part of like, one of the things that as a luxury, it's like, I hated doing that. I don't, I have my own way to do it. It's not as efficient as it could be, but it works. So, but the answer, just to be clear for everyone that's listening to this, build a playbook, build templates.
It really does help you. I will say. Not relevant to this specific topic, but I do have a very well created template that I repeat or I'm sorry, I go back and visit all the time for my technical audits because when you do have a hundred things that you need to look at, it's really easy to forget a couple steps and I go through kind of mine and it's like, Oh shoot, I forgot about that or the rabbit hole allows me to go to a next level.
You know, whereas I would say a lot of these are so baked into my mind when it comes to onboarding, KPIs, communication, that I can do a little bit of thinking this out and documenting it on a document, you know, and then just jotting things down. Okay.
Doug: Let's talk.
Nick: Oh, slap my own hand. We all can be better.
Doug: Yeah. Well, as a lazy person as well, um, making a template is like the ultimate lazy thing, cause you don't have to do it again, but you do have to have the discipline to do it the first time and then iterate and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, you know, it's working for you. So keep doing it. That's why
Nick: I like to admit though, it's like, you know what, even some people that have, that find success, we don't always do things easy.
And I love the mantra of work smart, not hard. Sometimes I choose the hard way. Just ask my wife.
Doug: Well, let's, let's move on as we're wrapping up here to how you actually measure and then communicate the results. So obviously key, right? Like if you can't get those metrics, if you can communicate properly, then you're really demonstrating the value you're bringing to the company.
Hence the long contracts, the long retainers, and you know, more introductions and referrals. So how are you measuring, uh, just in general?
Nick: If there's one thing that everybody listening to this should get from this conversation is this one point, always talk about the money always like there's not any situation where you should deviate from it because the best way to make sure that people are going to retain you is when they see clear as day they are making money for the investment that they are making in you.
And now we can get into secondary KPIs, you know, your email signups, your traffic, your rankings, you know, certain actions being taken on the site. Those are all important, especially at the very beginning when you're not making the money. But again, so many SEOs make this mistake where it's like they think that, you know, page views and clicks and email signups the KPI.
And the reality is I can't speak for you, but like my electrical company doesn't let me pay them in clicks. So it's like, talk about the money. So what I mean by that is on some sites, it's really easy. You know, if you have an e commerce site, we go to the organic channel, we measure, you know, what are some initiatives that we've done?
How did those pages net out into a certain amount of dollars? And then you call out that, you know, our costs were X minus Y, you know, and that was kind of the incremental value. That is the easiest solution. Now we get into some of the smaller or less quantifiable KPIs. Lead generation. This is where communication with your client is just incredibly, incredibly important.
Because we may not be able to say every lead is worth the same amount of money. Okay. However, what you can do up front is agree with your clients on how we're going to measure that type of conversion and what type of dollar value are we going to put on it in average. If you're an electrician and your average house call is 300, some could be 1, 500, some can be 25 to, you know, flip a, you know, a switch, we're going to call it 200.
Now your goal is to make sure that You know, you're mapping, make sure your math is mapping. And when you're talking to your clients, you need to always communicate those KPIs, how often are they being triggered? What is the value being driven by that? And how do you ensure that that value is always higher than their expenses?
And it sounds really silly, like, and really simple, but I don't think we as SEOs do a good enough job of this. I think we talk too much about rankings. We talk too much about clicks. and GSC impressions. It's like, stop it. Like start every conversation with you made X amount of dollars. Cause I guarantee every single time that will drive the direction of the conversation.
I love it.
Doug: So simple, very smart. How often do you have, uh, meetings or, you know, various communication, communicate these metrics?
Nick: Yeah. So I would say that is a bit unique to every client. And that's part of the conversation is understanding. Who is the audience? You know, I have point of contacts where I'm direct.
I'm working pretty directly with like the CMO. I also have other clients that I have a point of contact who then sits in internal meetings and levels up our findings. So it's more about preparing for that individual to go in. And again, it's just communication. So sometimes it's every week I chat with people.
You know, I would say every other week is pretty common. And then I always make sure that at least once a month, whoever is the person who's in charge of signing my checks, I'm talking to them one way or another, so that I can directly tell them here is the amount of revenue that we made here is my expected costs.
Do you have any questions? Do you have concerns? So that way it's not a guessing game.
Doug: Perfect. Well, as we're wrapping up here, before I let you mention where people could find you and all that stuff and talk about the newsletter and the job board just a bit. Is there anything else about KPIs or communication or, you know, just working directly with a client that you want to highlight here?
Nick: I think the big thing that I just want to communicate and for those that follow me on social media. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I talk about this all the time, but of all the skills that you can invest in, invest in your communication. It's a lot easier to figure out how to format an XML sitemap, you know, how to identify the pixel length of your title tags.
Like those are all tactics that we can learn on the internet. You can go to YouTube, you can take a course, but communicating to people, being able to look somebody in the eye and confidently articulate what you're trying to do. What the value is and how you're going to achieve it is a skill that most SEOs cannot do.
And if you can master this, it's the quickest way to bring yourself up into the upper echelon of SEO service providers.
Doug: Awesome advice. So talk about SEO for lunch. Who, who's the right person for that? And then your job board, SEO jobs. com.
Nick: Yeah. So SEO for lunch is for busy people that don't have the time to read everything that gets published in this industry.
If you sign up SEO for, I'm sorry, SEO for lunch. com, you'll get an email every Tuesday and it covers everything that matters. So you're not going to get a hundred thousand links to everything that's been published. I read all of that. And basically what I'm doing is I'm taking a week's worth of reading and I'm Three updates that might come from a search engine specifically, a handful of jobs that are available for people looking for new opportunities.
And then just some really interesting articles that people are writing about that haven't been written about a hundred times before. So again, as the name kind of says, the whole idea is we have a lunch break, spend one of them on every Tuesday going through this email and learn what matters and save yourself the time from having to read.
Everything else that in my opinion doesn't matter. And then my other, um, hobby site at this point, and you know, it's growing to be much more than a hobby site is seojobs. com. So if you're in a position like I was where, uh, you were made redundant or you're just simply looking for a new opportunity, SEO jobs is kind of the antithesis of what is Indeed and LinkedIn.
You're not going to have a zillion jobs to choose from, but all of them are real jobs with real opportunities. And a really good way just to get in contact with those hiring managers. So there's a email for that as well. That goes out every single Monday that sends you a list of new jobs that are actively looking to hire.
Doug: Perfect. Well, thanks Nick. We will link up to that stuff so people could find it really easily and really appreciate it. Hopefully we'll catch up again soon.
Nick: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on your show.
Doug: Thanks for checking out this episode and thanks to Nick for sharing his story. If you liked it, be sure to check out some of the other episodes. I have interviews with people that have been running agencies for many years. Transcribed That have been doing SEO for decades. And some folks that have just been doing it for a few years, or they're actually pretty fresh running their agency.
So there's a wide range out there. By the way, Nick also has a newsletter called SEO for lunch and a job board called SEO jobs. You can connect with them over on LinkedIn. We have that link as well. And if you dig the show, make sure you're subscribed. Please leave a review. It really does help out. We don't have too many reviews out there right now.
I haven't made a big push. So if you leave one, I'll certainly be able to see it. And I thank you for doing that.