BusinessTok - A Short Form Video Marketing Podcast
BusinessTok is a short form video marketing podcast that highlights real business owners and entrepreneurs that are leveraging short form video on social media to grow their business and generate income! You will learn what goes on behind the scenes and the tactical strategies for how to leverage the fastest-growing social media platform ever to grow your business!
BusinessTok - A Short Form Video Marketing Podcast
Making AI Work for Your SEO Game with Dennis Yu
Today's guest is Dennis Yu, CEO of BitzMetrics!
This podcast is sponsored by: https://www.syllaby.io The ultimate AI tool for video marketing! Find topics, create scripts, create AI videos, edit, and schedule them directly to your social media profiles!
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https://www.facebook.com/dennisyu
https://x.com/dennisyu
https://www.instagram.com/dennis.yu
Connect with your host:
https://www.tiktok.com/@usefulaiwebsites
https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinarmstrong90/
https://twitter.com/SocialtyPro
https://www.facebook.com/Owwstin/
https://www.youtube.com/@socialtypro
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Unlock the secrets of mastering SEO with AI in our latest episode featuring Dennis Yu, CEO of Blitzmetrics. Ever wondered how a former search engine engineer at Yahoo transitioned into a leading digital marketing expert? Dennis takes us on his journey, sharing invaluable insights on how AI is revolutionizing content creation and SEO. Learn how Google integrates AI and why understanding the core experiences behind these advancements is crucial for leveraging new tools effectively.
Technology and AI have a history of shaking up market giants, from Microsoft and Nokia to Google and Facebook. This episode explores these transformative shifts and how AI is set to redefine traditional metrics of dominance. We dive into practical advice for local home service businesses on staying competitive amidst rapid technological changes, emphasizing the critical importance of adaptability and staying informed.
Relationships and visibility are more important than ever for local businesses. Discover how AI and search engines can spotlight quality services and how video content can amplify your reach. From creating authentic, experience-based videos to leveraging short-form content for lead generation, Dennis provides actionable strategies to enhance your Googleability and maintain a robust online presence. Tune in to harness the power of AI and boost your digital marketing efforts!
The fact that TikTok has copied directly. Tiktok executive told me they directly copied Facebook lead ads. Welcome back to Business Talk, a short form video marketing podcast. I'm your host, austin Armstrong, and on this show I interviewed the best content creators and entrepreneurs who have leveraged short form video to actually drive leads and sales. In this podcast, we deep dive into their tactical strategies so that you can get actionable takeaways. You can connect with me across social media at SocialtyPro.
Speaker 1:Today's episode is sponsored by my company, syllabiio. Syllabi is like having an AI-powered video marketing agency in-house From finding trending topics your potential clients are searching for online to generating new video scripts, creating AI videos however you want them, a built-in video editor and even direct publishing to your social media accounts, syllabi has got you covered. You can get started with a seven-day free trial in the show notes. Let's jump into today's episode. Today's guest is Dennis Yu, ceo of Blitzmetrics. Dennis is a guy I've been watching and learning from online for years. This guy is truly a master. He's an SEO master, especially in local business and in the personal branding space. He's an original search engine engineer from over 20 years ago, has spent a billion dollars that's billion with a B across Facebook and Google ads and is on a mission to create a million jobs to help home service businesses show up on Google. He's also a legend on the speaker track and travels all around the world. I am so excited to learn from him with you all today.
Speaker 1:Dennis, thank you so much for joining me. Man Austin Moss, super cool to hang out with you. Yeah, it's going to be a fun conversation. I'm so looking forward to this. I have been following you online for years. As soon as I saw the opportunity to jump into that private group SRS or something like that I don't even remember the name of it, it's just you and a bunch of other people and I bought that thing instantly. I was like lifetime access, 500 bucks, access to Dennis Yu and all of these other incredible people. That's a no-brainer offer for me. So thank you so much for being here today. Man, yeah, you're the boss. You're the guy who's made thousands of videos. I just learned from amazing people and I actually take action on it. I think that's one of the big things. You know people. People procrastinate and they think they need to learn everything endlessly and have everything be perfect before they actually execute. And I think you can learn along the way, but you have to take action to get where you want to go. So, dennis, I like to start all the way at the beginning.
Speaker 1:You've been doing online marketing, digital marketing, seo for decades at this point. How did you get started in that space? What interested you in it? Well, I was a search engine engineer and it was all about categorizing what's on the internet. And I remember one of my bosses at Yahoo who became the CEO at LinkedIn, jeff Weiner. He said that the goal was to categorize the world's information, and we said most of the world's information was not on webpages, was not on social media apps. It was like in your head, it was the stories that grandma had. It were all the stuff in your shoe boxes with photos, and the job was how do we take all that information, in whatever format it was, and put it in a digital, visible sort of way? So when it came to like social media or apps or ai, those are just more tools, right, every year there's another set of tools.
Speaker 1:It was so hard 30 years ago to build web pages. We didn't have wordpress or php or facebook. We didn't have cell phones that could take pictures. Just shows you how old I am. So it's just been a matter of technology making it easier and easier to replicate what it's like to have dinner with somebody. Right, I had Al Casey, who was the CEO of American Airlines, as a mentor and I have all these amazing experiences with him since passed on, but I have no way of being able to show you, austin, what that's like. But with the people I do know here, it's so much easier to be able to bring you along on these experiences. I'm in Seattle today and I would love for you to come to the Pike's Place Market and enjoy some seafood with me. I can kind of almost approximate what that's like, so you can sort of experience it through an iPhone, but I view it as technology's always making it easier and easier to approximate the true experience. But the true experience has never changed. The technology's just catching up to it. So that's my view over the last 30 years. That's such a great and powerful insight because it really is timeless. The core fundamentals are there and no matter how technology changes or new systems that come out, at its underlying, it is that fundamental understanding that will always allow you to succeed and be relevant, always allow you to succeed and be relevant.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about the AI component here for a little bit, because this is sort of the newest area that directly impacts content not just SEO, but content across the board, and Google kind of has a love-hate relationship with AI a little bit. It sort of impacts search, their core business model. What are your thoughts on how AI is impacting discoverability online and impacting SEO in particular? So I had three days of closed door meetings with Google engineers and I signed these NDAs where I'm not supposed to say exactly what we talked about. And also one of my neighbors is the VP in charge of AI at Google, so she has hundreds of engineers and whenever we sit down and have dinner to talk about this sort of thing, she's very opinionated about it.
Speaker 1:So let me just put it this way AI, in Google's viewpoint, is not evil. It's not something they're trying to crush. It's not something you get penalized for just using. It's not like you're not allowed to use it. But here's how Google sees it and they're very clear about it. They say that AI is just another set of tools, just like when Microsoft Word came out or the HP, you know 82 or you know whatever calculator or whatever kinds of tools. The tools are just getting better and better.
Speaker 1:But when you use the tools to try to fool Google or to be lazy or to invent things that aren't real, then you're going to get penalized, like those millions of sites in the last couple of weeks that got nailed on the March core updates and Google has been saying if you were using these tools to be able to showcase things that are real, as in E-E-A-T for those of us that know about SEO, experience, your actual experiences, expertise, authority, trust that you actually have the experience as a Portland pest control company that you actually are, you know, whatever the thing is that you say that you do, is there proof that you actually do it? And Google says if you're using tools to help process that, like you would a trustworthy assistant or a VA, you know. If you use syllabi the right way, if you start with the real ingredients of real experience, then AI is your friend, because you can think of AI as a layer on top of search. Think of it this way because people are like, oh, ai and all this is going to kill Google because the 10 blue links are going away. And now people are late and they want the one answer, which is the generated answer, the synthesis. But it's really this way. Think of it like there's all these filing cabinets, there's all this data that has to be collected to then be put into a search engine and then from there you can analyze those results to give you the one answer. Right? I don't think I've never heard anybody say this. You tell me if you have, but when I think about LLMs, whatever flavor, it's taking all these answers and giving you the one consolidated answer.
Speaker 1:So Google already has that, and it's called SGE search generative experience. And SGE is nothing more than taking the search results, which Google has a world-class expertise. No one is better than them in processing and arguably, as my friend who's VP of this whole thing, says, no one has a better angle on the truth. Right? Because LLMs, just like, generate all kinds of stuff and they hallucinate. But if anybody were to say who's closest at figuring out what's true, what's factually true, what's called canonical, right, I would say it'd be Google, and I would agree. And no one can process better and cheaper than they can.
Speaker 1:So they are intentionally waiting to release this. So people are saying, oh, google's slow and they're caught behind the ball and they're caught asleep. No, they're not. They're waiting. I've seen what they've done and it's absolutely incredible and I think they're just waiting for GPT-5 to come out this summer and then they're trying to preempt Microsoft, basically, which is OpenAI, the people who are funding OpenAI and what they're doing is they're taking the knowledge graph which no one has an advantage over them over the knowledge graph and ingesting all this information about what's going on in the world over the knowledge graph, and ingesting all this information about what's going on in the world, and then they're surfacing what are basically dynamic knowledge panels and those dynamic, those colored boxes. Like, if you search Dennis Yu, you'll see those colored boxes. Those are knowledge panels, right? Every question you have will be answered via these colored boxes, not the 10 blue links. So Google has known about this. We knew that they were ready for this two years ago when they made this announcement about changing E to E-E-A-T for those of us that study what the search engines are doing.
Speaker 1:So I'm not coming at it from the angle of I'm biased towards the search engines because I've been a search engine engineer for a quarter century, but I've seen this progression of people that are abusing tools and, as you know, there's tons of hype and all that. I think you're doing it the right way, you know, with syllabi. But there's a lot of people that want to just auto-generate content, which is called synthetic content, and they're going to get in trouble. So that's why some people have this love-hate thing Like I'm not afraid of the police because I'm not breaking the rules. Right, the criminals are afraid of the police. Google's always had the same set of rules which are very reasonable, which are very clear, helpful content, eaa, ee18, all these different kinds of standards, and folks like you and I actually honor that.
Speaker 1:We actually have real experiences. A lot of our friends, like my buddy, greg Beebe, is a concrete coding company in Waukesha, wisconsin, and he's got crews of people that make shiny concrete floors. He doesn't know a thing about this internet AI thing, but he does a really good job at making shiny concrete floors. You know, making your garage look a certain way with the. You know the shiny concrete floors Like. That's the thing that he does, and AI is to his advantage because his technicians are documenting what they're doing. So clearly there is proof that he does what he says he does in Waukesha, wisconsin. So good, there's so many questions that I want to unpack there.
Speaker 1:So let's start with. Google has had failures in the past. They have had massive, big failures. They've bet on things and they don't always get it right. Even though they have a lot of data, they have all the money in the world, they still can get it wrong sometimes. Do you think that they in the long run, with these updates that they're waiting on GPT-5 to roll out in order for them to release, is going to put them ahead in the AI race and the direction that search is going? And then sort of a follow-up question to that are you seeing people now use more of these AI-powered search engines to get those quick answers, any chat-based LLM or something like perplexity, which is a fast experience? Or do you think people, if you fad, he's trying to say that they're going to be the Google killer because they're the answer engine instead of the search engine? I would go one step further, saying there's actually an action engine, which is I don't want the answer, I want the thing done right. Go ahead and take care of the task. Go ahead and build my website. Go ahead and do these other things. So, whether it's like search or answer or an action, those are all just semantics of people that want stuff done for them. So here's the way I look at it.
Speaker 1:So you remember when Microsoft 35 years ago they came out with the OS and Windows and everyone thought they were so dominant back then that nobody could touch them. Right, and then there was like Yahoo or there was like Amazon or any of these major players that look so big like Google or Facebook, and whenever the next layer came, everyone thought, wow, google's so dominant, no one could touch them Microsoft or Facebook, they're so dominant. But then what we discovered was burr, then Facebook, because that game has already been done. I don't think anyone's going to beat Amazon in shopping, because that game's already been done. What's going on is there's layers that are on top.
Speaker 1:So you remember, back in the late 90s, nokia dominated the cell phone market. Oh yeah, they rocked the whole thing and people were like, yeah, they own like 90 something percent share and no one's going to take, you know, maybe Blackberry or whatever. There were no iPhones back then. Yeah, but then large market share before you look at the current model, current and modern phones were they doing better job, like doing more of what Nokia was doing? No, it's completely different, because today we use phones for things other. We don't even use it for the phone which is making phone calls.
Speaker 1:And with AI it's going to unlock a whole new range of things. So people were thinking, oh, it's just going to kill Google or whatever. They don't realize that when new technology happens, it's going to unlock new things that weren't possible. When you look at the predictions of the future back in the 50s, they thought it would just be more of the same thing. You know ovens and cars. If you ask people before, there were cars that they'd say, oh, the new technology would be horses that would run faster or have six legs or something. No, it's something completely different.
Speaker 1:So in the world of AI, no one seems to want to talk about Jensen's wing. Right? I listen to Jensen. When you want to hear about AI, listen to Jensen's wing. He's the one who makes all the H100s. Right, he's the guy right. And he says what's going to happen in AI is that the cost of processing, when it goes down to basically zero, almost anything can be possible. So it's not that it's a better search. You can have any kind of movie, you can have any kind of experience you can have.
Speaker 1:I had dinner with a billionaire and he said energy is going to be free, therefore, food is going to be free and transportation is going to be free, all these things that lead to UBI. So I'm thinking about that, right, I'm not worried about is perplexity going to kill Google? So back to the original question. I think Google is going to make a lot of stumbles, like you saw the stumble with their woke image video generator. Yeah, exactly yeah, and there's going to be more of that kind of nonsense. But I think at the core I mean I don't know, you never really know I mean I thought Yahoo was going to dominate. We had a chance to buy Google, but we didn't. But you know, whatever. But I think that Google, because of their information processing advantage, because of this model called the Four Horsemen that you probably heard about, google's they own search. It's pretty much indisputable.
Speaker 1:And the next layer, with AI, is going to be something different than search or shopping or hardware or video games or whatever it is. It's going to be something completely different. We don't even know what that is. That's what's so scary. It's really interesting to think about the possibilities. You mentioned hardware. I saw a lot of. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the Rabbit R1. It's just a fascinating AI-powered device and now there's all sorts of wearables that are AI-powered that are coming out, that are changing our world in real time Rather than going to Google search. I have the meta glasses and I can say hey, meta, tell me about this thing. And they're releasing multimodal very soon where you can say what am I looking at, which I have, up to this point, loved reverse image searching in your phone. You take a picture of something and you do a Google image search built in. Our world around us is changing faster than anybody can comprehend, but let's hone it in to the local home service business right now to prepare them for that future.
Speaker 1:You are one of the pioneers that help people get online, get found the non-tech, savvy person that needs to be found locally, based on the state of the world right now and where most search is happening. What is the biggest opportunity right now that you think most home service business owners are missing out on? If you're a home service business owners are missing out on, if you're a home service business and you're worried about AI and technology and trying to keep up, I can't even keep up. I was the MC at a three-day AI conference in Chicago last week where I got to hang out with all the top people in AI and I feel like there's all these cool technologies and tools so if I can't keep up, I don't think any of you guys can keep up. But here's the one saving grace from having spent all this time with the very top people in AI Not me, just these other people I've learned this one thing this is the common thread, and maybe I mean you probably already know this, but 99% of people don't understand this.
Speaker 1:When the AI is so powerful that it can generate all kinds of content and do all this kind of stuff, the critical scarce resource is relationships and people getting together in person. So if you're a home service business and your technicians are out there on the roof, they're fixing toilets, they're installing pools. They're like Nilsson Silva. I was with him two weeks ago in Miami and he's building the roof. They're fixing toilets, they're installing pools. They're like Nilsson Silva. I was with him two weeks ago in Miami and he's building the pool a million-dollar pool at an $18 million home of a personal injury attorney Not a surprise and he's showing how he's actually doing it and his technicians are showing this sped-up cycle like digging the hole and plant you can see as the pool is being built this crazy, gigantic thing, those real experiences of people that do a good job, where you have quality people that are trained well, that take good care of their customers.
Speaker 1:If that fundamentally is there, then what happens? Well, that's going to result in these signals of great reviews, of people talking about you, of social media mentions. So I think of it as like, if you're an honest person and the lie detector test gets smarter because it's able to look at your breathing and your blinking and your sweating and your words and all these things, I'm not worried about failing the lie detector test, because whoever actually does the best job, ai is going to make that more visible. So the rich get richer. So if you're a home service business, if you're any kind of local service business, the AI is now going to be able to tell whether you actually do a crappy job as a roofer. The AI can tell. Like, if you are Anthony Hill in Indiana and you do tree cutting and tree trimming and landscaping, the AI meaning everything that Google can pick up and everything else that the AI can suck in from data sources can tell you actually do a good tree trimming service in Indiana. Right, 20 years ago, you wouldn't really know so when I was at the search engine. You know what the biggest problem was? Right, 20 years ago, you wouldn't really know so when I was at the search engine. You know what? The biggest problem was?
Speaker 1:Austin, when we were trying to look at local businesses there are millions of them. We couldn't find any information on pure plumbing in Las Vegas, where they fix toilets and broken leaky valves and whatever. It was literally this simple. There was almost no information about them. So, of the very little information we could find, maybe they had a Yelp review, maybe someone built a website, maybe they were in the Yelp pages. We would just try to pull this information and try to figure out is this peer plumbing? Do they have multiple locations? Is this a competitor? Is this a multiple locations? Is this a competitor? Is this a spammer? Creating all this other stuff? It was very hard to distinguish what was real, what wasn't, and then, of what was real, we had to associate this John Smith, is this John Smith? And that's surprisingly hard to do. So now there's so much information being gathered that if you're a home service business or any kind of local service business, it's easier to place you locally.
Speaker 1:You know why the us military doesn't want their soldiers taking pictures or posting on social media. Right, say that again. Why does the us military prohibit soldiers from posting on social media? They don't want copycats. They don't want the enemies to know what they're working on. Yeah, and like a soldier will post, like an Instagram, you know, a reel or a tweet or whatever in that picture includes the geo coordinates of exactly where they are. Yeah, you know the right information. That metadata is there.
Speaker 1:So the fact that cell phones now are information collecting devices makes it easier for anybody that can access that information, whether it's an app or it's the search engine or it's the AI. The AI is nothing more than a secondary consumer of the search engine outputs. It's not like the AI has its own source of data. I don't think people realize that AI, like without search engines, that AI wouldn't be possible, right? Yeah, very true, it's like a search engine within a search engine, like the way to think of it, right? So if you're a local service business, if you're any kind, any kind of business, any kind of product or service, you should welcome the advancements in AI if you do a good job for your customers. If I'll use it to invent all kinds of nonsense and hope that you can trick the search engine or trick whoever and you're never going to you're going to get nailed by trying to do that. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I love that take and I want to dive deeper into I think it's a great pivot into talking about video. You talked about sharing examples of the actual process. We have a great mutual friend, robert Wakefield, who has become just a master of videoing his craft over the last several years and now helping other people other plumbers, other service professionals do that as well. I've been a huge advocate of leveraging video in search for the last decade now, so not as long as your experience. But where do you find that video ties into search in today's world and the opportunity there for home service businesses to be found by leveraging video and documenting their process? So I had a conversation with the head of search quality at Google about this, about video in particular.
Speaker 1:Did you know that YouTube is a separate algorithm from the regular search algorithm, even though it is all combined together as part of universal search? When you do a search and, because of that, things that you do to try to rank in YouTube. Surprisingly, roger Wakefield has more subs than you. I thought you were pretty amazing at about half a million. But what he does is he says you know what. You'll see him say this all the time in videos with me or whatnot. And he'll say I'm just a plumber Technically. That's true, but if you type into YouTube, meet the toilet, right, his videos are all at the top and so what he's done is taken his actual experience and put it into YouTube. It wasn't because of fancy editing, it wasn't because of the AI tools. It wasn't because of fancy editing, it wasn't because of the AI tools. It was because he, literally he's made thousands of videos about plumbing, about every possible topic of plumbing. Just like you have on short form content, you have thousands of videos.
Speaker 1:I have thousands of videos about digital marketing and most of them the ones that get the most traffic are the ones that have no editing at all because they're authentic, real experiences that were taken on the spot Me and Jake Paul at his house hanging out talking about how to be an influencer. That's a real experience that wasn't even shot on fancy equipment. Roger says he's just a plumber, but he has so much actual experience that's been made visible to YouTube, which then spills over, kind of into Google search results and Facebook and TikTok. He's blown up. On TikTok it's just the same thing being packaged differently. So if I'm using a syllabi or a descriptor, whatever, I can have the AI, as like what I would have done with a VA in the Philippines, to do that kind of work for me.
Speaker 1:So, if anything, I'm creating information gain. That's the thing that the search engine folks are talking about from the last couple months. Information gain, which is taking my real experiences and then trying to concentrate it in such a way that it's actually higher quality and more concentrated than the raw instead of synthetic, which is just generate 15 videos about whatever using this AI avatar, using my voice and image. So an example of information gain is so Roger's made thousands of videos Like how do you become a plumber, how do you get a job in the trades, how do you use this leak detection tool to be able to figure out where the leak is, and so he's made all these videos in English. But he's used these AI tools which Daryl Eves has given us access to, which haven't come out, apparently, and now they're translated into Spanish and all these other languages.
Speaker 1:That creates information gain and it's not fake content. It's starting from real content that uses AI to process it into other forms. So Google's not going to frown upon that as like scaled content, which is the thing that's getting nailed right now, or this auto-generated try to fool the search engine. Make a thousand videos about random, you know now, thousands of webpages about whatever. It's not, because it's always starting from the seed of something real, so fascinating there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have heard the rumblings of the dubbing into different languages. That's eventually going to be a native YouTube feature, which I find fascinating. I mean, there's tools like 11 labs and HeyGen now will take your video and not only take your vocal patterns and translate it, but to move your lips and your mouth to the speech pattern in those other languages and to walk and talk, not just like the camera right here, like this, but but as you're moving, as you're in a different environment, actually do that. That's incredible. Like, put me at the beat as we're talking about this and it does that. Yeah, agents walking avatars and the streaming avatars are fantastic. They, they are, and even synthesia's new expressive avatars I don't know if you saw the those.
Speaker 1:They were just uh announced last week. Yeah, it's been one of the the. If you saw the those, they were just uh announced last week. Yeah, it's been one of the the. Yeah, I saw that, but they're too expensive. Synthesia charges too much money. Yeah, it's, it's true. It's it's true.
Speaker 1:They're going after a different market, but we've been two years now. Yeah, yeah, you know what. A year from now, it's going to be a completely different set of players. Oh, absolutely, the. The technology is moving so quick. We're even developing the technology in-house at syllabi as well, but it's just going to be. It's a fascinating world. The lines are blurring between content creation expertise and AI. I don't know where it's going to go. It's fascinating. I definitely agree with you that it'll all come back to in-person experiences, communication, real bonding, expertise. I could go down in an endless rabbit hole on that.
Speaker 1:For a little bit, though, what platforms are you seeing with your clients that are getting the most amount of traction as far as being able to generate leads and sales? Roger's killing it on TikTok. There's a lot of businesses, local businesses, crushing it on TikTok YouTube Shorts, instagram Reels, but from your insights and your perspective, what are the platforms that are generating the most leads specifically for short form video right now. I think it's a combination of YouTube Shorts and just regular Facebook posts, and the reason why is that for service businesses. When you're talking to homeowners or people that are making decisions around their home or around, you know there's pest control, or you got to take Johnny to the orthodontist, or you know when someone is paying for services, you're talking about people who are. You know they have kids, they have families, they have careers and they're not spending as much time on TikTok. Now I have the number one bestselling book on TikTok marketing and it was the number one bestselling book on social media for a little bit, and it's on TikTok.
Speaker 1:So, yes, you can become viral, yes, you can be an influencer, and there's examples of those sorts of folks, but when we're talking about lead gen or an ordinary service business, the bread and butter is going to be simple YouTube videos and just simple posts on Facebook as short form content, like these Instagram reels and Instagram being part of Facebook and the fact that you can boost those posts and turn them into lead ads, and the fact that Facebook optimizes to the lead, not just to like a form or to a click or to a view. The fact that TikTok is copying has copied directly. Tiktok executive told me they directly copied Facebook lead ads. The fact that works just like Facebook is not a coincidence. So these are all service businesses that are showing a little bit of what they actually do, just like our concrete floor got showing you know, here's the floor, the process of building this floor and now it's all beautiful and that generates more leads of other people that want the same thing.
Speaker 1:So it goes back to if you can show in short form video and visually show like whatever you do you work on people's teeth, you mow their lawn, you do their roof, you give counseling, like whatever you do if you show yourself in the act visually of doing that thing, then who cares whether it's YouTube or TikTok or Instagram Reels or whatever? Who cares if even your organic sucks and you only have 10 followers? You don't have to have a million followers. I've got a million followers on social media. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Because if you're just trying to service people in your area, if you're a real estate agent in Tallahassee Florida, then you want to show to people in Tallahassee Florida that you're the guy or girl right, and I think people try to. They get so distracted with the whole being an influencer thing that they forget that, whatever the percent is, 95% of businesses are just regular, plain old local service businesses. They're not trying to get to 100,000 followers, they just want to generate more leads for the thing that they do. Let's dive a little deeper in there and I can't agree more with you, especially on the Facebook point. I mean, it's not the newest, freshest, sexiest platform out there, but it's where I get the most business, it's where I'm at the most amount of money, get the most traction across the board. It just works. It just works for buyers. But let's because I love deep diving into funnels and you were kind of alluding to some of this Maybe, if you feel comfortable sharing actionable takeaways for people what is a specific step-by-step funnel that a business owner could leverage short form content to then run paid ads on them for lead gen?
Speaker 1:And then what's the backend funnel? If you can deep dive into that with as much as you'd like to share, it would be impactful. Well, we've got multiple books on it. We've got a book that we've sold 800,000 copies on Number one on Facebook ads, with Perry Marshall, which goes into detail. But I'll just summarize because it's getting easier and easier with tech.
Speaker 1:Did you know that, when it comes to people that have expertise, that are sharing their one tip on how to get, or when's the best time to buy, a house, if you're a mortgage broker, right? Or how often should I cut my lawn? Or how do I pay less in taxes and you're a mortgage broker, right? Or how often should I cut my lawn? Or, like you know how do I pay less in taxes and you're a financial planner? Not in a singing, dancing young adult, whatever I mean, just of a professional who provides a service. Did you know the sweet spot is 22 seconds. Why, I don't know, probably something between 15 seconds, which is like too short, and a minute, which is like you tell a whole story in a minute, but in 22 seconds that's enough time to give one tip.
Speaker 1:And I've interviewed people who have six and a half million followers on TikTok and whatnot, and like I was with Noah Briar and he told me and Perry, I said, so what's the secret? Do you have to be a young adult? Do you have to be charismatic? Do you have to have, like, cool cameras and all that? And he said no, a young adult, you have to be charismatic, you have to have cool cameras and all that. And he said, no, you suffer from rambling old man syndrome because you can't get to the point in 22 seconds. So anyone who's not a young adult and says they don't want to sing and dance or whatever, can you give one of your expertise? Can you give one point in 22 seconds? Just one point. And every time I've tried this, I've been with bestselling authors, I've been with keynote speakers, I've been with all these kinds of people who are famous and well-spoken. And I'll say go ahead and explain.
Speaker 1:I got with the pilot and the guy who runs the Allegiant Pilots Association and I said Alex, why are legion pilots so mad right now? Right. And he initially said well, there's this and there's this and there's that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Quick answer, right. And he said did you know that us pilots are only paid when the door is closed? So when there's a delay, when you're waiting on the ground, we're not being paid either. Like, oh, there it is. There's your 22 seconds and you have another tip and you have another tip. So you take these tips, you put them on whatever the channel is and you boost it on Facebook, you boost it on TikTok, you can boost on Twitter and you can boost to whatever the audience is. And so if you pass back through the conversion API, through Le bridge, through whatever integration that's native to HubSpot, whatever your CRM is, you pass back, which ones become an actual customer, then the algorithm will drive you more of that and it's literally that simple.
Speaker 1:Can you provide a series of tips? Can you show like Tommy Mello does garage doors? He's now got a $300 million a year business. He's in 27 states and he's walking around fixing garage doors where the spring is, you know? And he said did you know that your, the garage door is the smile to your house, like, oh, you're excited about us, kind of clever, yeah, did you know? And so he's walking around the home and you know, like on the bottom of the garage door there's that rubber that's called the bottom rubber and sometimes it's like broken, right, it's like cracked. And he said did you know that, even if there's like half an inch there, that's where the cockroaches and the mice get into your house and that's when they come in and lay eggs and multiply and all that and and? So whenever you come to a new house, if you're a, a real estate agent, come in and look at the bottom rubber and if you see that's that's, you know, broken, then you need to get that fixed right, like, oh, that's a cool tip, okay. And so just tip after tip after tip, because the guy has done thousands of garage doors, fixed them himself, just like Roger has done thousands and thousands of toilets.
Speaker 1:So, in your experience, can you collect a 22-second story literally with your cell phone Not a professional videographer, not a $90,000 red camera literally with your cell phone, can you collect 22-second stories and then put them out there on Facebook, youtube, twitter, tiktok, quora, whatever it is. That's literally. That's the thing. Then you can run lead ads, you can pay money, you pay money to Google and Facebook and TikTok and all that. But if you literally collect these little stories, vertical videos, pay money to the networks, track your conversions by passing it back to the network, pass it back to Google.
Speaker 1:I've seen this work super, super well. It doesn't matter if you're a chiropractor or a lawn care guy. It's worked super well for people who are not charismatic. For people who are not, I mean, think about how boring repairing someone's air conditioner is. We had these technicians and they're out in the back and they're like wow, it's 100 degrees out in Las Vegas and we're repairing Sarah's. You know, sarah called because her air conditioner broke and we're out here in her backyard and here's her thing and it's old and you know, thank goodness it's still covered by the warranty and we're going to go ahead and repair it and here's what we're going to do. I mean that's and these technicians are thinking this is really boring. Yeah, but if you just literally show what you do in the city, that you do it. Today we're in Henderson, nevada, and we're in the Green Hills area and blah, blah, blah, that's it. Now we've placed it. Now we show what's going on. That's all we got to do. That simple, such good advice.
Speaker 1:I'm going to test that 22-second video theory and see how they perform. For me, I think that's a fascinating specific amount of time for one tip. I'm going to thoroughly test that. So thank you for that. As we wind down here I've seen it go above a minute too, but generally yeah, generally under a minute, because if it goes above a minute, that means you're trying to say too many things. Yeah, I agree. My anecdotal evidence has been a 49 second video that gets at least 38 seconds of view duration. That has been my North Star, for me personally, because when I hit those specific metrics I see my videos take off 70, 80% of the time, and so that's been what I've focused on. But I'm going to test the 22 seconds because I think I can get Go ahead.
Speaker 1:We're trying to get the 22 seconds because I think I can get. Go ahead. We're trying to get the 35% to the end of the video. Now, your standard is way higher because you're a professional video guy and so you have to set the standard for other people. But what we found is that 35% of people to the end of the video, or to like 95%, is really what counts.
Speaker 1:And my buddy, tom Breeze, who's the number one performance guy spending money on you know who he is he tested our dollar a day strategy and he did this for Mr Beast and Alex Hermosi and these other guys. He even let me record the Zoom too, which I thought was just amazing, and he found the same kind of thing. So on YouTube, for example, the videos are longer. They've been trending longer, as you know. So he's trying to get to 35% on seven minutes, and he's just found that when you get to 35% on seven minutes. Those ones just tend to do better.
Speaker 1:And then you look at where you get the spikes, where people are replaying little parks, and then those become the hooks. You can isolate those particular components, but unless you look at the analytics you wouldn't know that. That one little part, three and a half minutes in, where he says and then the one piece of advice she gave me was this now you wouldn't know like that was the thing that people click rewind on right, but the analytics tells you then you can put that as you. Now you can like mix and match and use that one thing as a hook that goes into a tip that then has a call to action and now you have a three-part video hook body. Call to action. Right. Now you start to get fancy. Now you have video editors and other people try to tune for conversion and all that. I find that's not even necessary. If you're playing at the local market, that's like junior varsity. You should be able to dunk on everybody if it's junior varsity. Ecom, you got to be a little more sophisticated. Makes sense. Great, great actionable advice there. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about your Are you Googleable audit service here. So you offer this awesome, incredible audit at areyougogleablecom and, don't worry, that link will be in the show notes of this episode. Can you briefly highlight and talk about that? Yeah, so Roger called me, or he texted me in the middle of the night Roger Wakefield, and he said Dennis, I've got this idea. Are you Googleable? And all these people they're plumbers, they're roofers, they're electricians, they're not showing up on Google and they're paying $5,000 a month to the SEO expert and not really getting anything. And so I just happened to be up and I texted him call me back and he did. And we spoke all night until the sun went up and I said I love this idea of are you Googleable?
Speaker 1:Because you're intentionally not saying SEO, which sounds like it's a scam, but it's very easy, like, are you Googleable? So if I Google, you know, dennis Yu, I Google Austin Armstrong, there is a basketball coach, I think, and there's some other influencer. Yeah, and like you know, so I'd say are you Googleable for your personal brand or your company? Are you? Are your videos showing up? Your reviews? Does your site load fast? Like? There's all these aspects of Google, right? Is there news about you? Are there things about your employees? How's your social media? How are your ads Like? Those are all different components of how Googleable you are, and I would like nothing more than to turn the light on in a dark room where all these I don't want to say these digital marketers are scammers, but all these marketing companies, they just we'll just say they weren't trained very well and they're going out and peddling a terrible service.
Speaker 1:I have a friend who called me two days ago $25 million a year, roofer buying another company for 12 million and just like growing his roofing company and he was going to pay this guy $5,000 a month to do SEO. He's like I'm just a roofer, I don't know anything about SEO, I'm like 60 or whatever it is right. And this guy was selling complete garbage. But with a simple audit, like literally in two minutes, I could determine that there was no SEO that was happening, and on and on and on. I have thousands of agencies that I coach, so I see it from the other side too. And so Roger and I said well, why don't we just create a service and for $200, we will run this whole audit and tell you what's going on. And in fact, if you're an agency like Josh Nelson runs a seven figure coaching group, which is, all these agencies right, arguably the best one. And he said you know what? It'd be really smart for the agencies to get the RU Google report on behalf of their clients, before the client then says you know what, I ran the report and now all these things are broken.
Speaker 1:So you know, austin, like, how Carfax works. You can see, like was the thing in a wreck and was the engine replaced, and so why don't we have that for digital marketing? Why don't we have a clear standard? If you're a local service business, if you're a, you know, you're a real estate agent, you're a dentist, you have a license, right. You're a plumber, you have a license. You fly a plane. You're a surgeon, you have to get licensed. In digital marketing, there's no such thing. So, austin, I could just declare myself as an expert, right. And how would you know? There's no city inspector that's going to come around. Now we have an inspector, it's rugooglebullcom, and I love it. I've done dozens of these audits. It's so much fun, it's so good. If you want to give it away for free, I would even. You know, you can choose, like you know, 10 people. We'll give it away for free because we're not doing it for the money. All that money goes into employing young adults that we have that are in our program and then VAs that are in the Philippines and other places.
Speaker 1:You heard him everybody. Go, click that link in the description reach out, and you might just get some time with Dennis. I was uh, some some searches on my name because we had talked about this on a on a previous webinar. I have a unfortunately very competitive name. There's a large uh influencer and the um, the florida gators defensive coach, uh, football is austin armstrong. But when you search for austin arm or Austin Armstrong AI, I dominate. Yeah, but how many people are going to search that? So we need to get you four citations.
Speaker 1:Now the influencer, austin Armstrong, is going to be a little tougher because I want to say there's like 150 searches per month or whatever on him. But if you have more searches per month than he does, then you will demonstrate to Google that you. Let's see if I got the number. I'm sorry, no, it's 3,500 searches per month on his name and they want to know his age. They want to know this. I guess the wife, his TikTok, influence their birthday height, all this other stuff on this other guy. And then there's the football coach yeah, but you can beat these guys because you have enough of an audience. I think you can beat the 3,500 a month if you structure your data better, because I think you're killing it on social media because you do the short form video.
Speaker 1:But I think, from an SEO standpoint, there's a lot more things that you could do. Yeah, I'm probably going to have another conversation with you on that. I'll help you for free. Just tell everyone about it, like what you're doing with SocialTee Pro right, and even though Instagram doesn't pass link juice, instagram carries a really strong signal, absolutely. I've always been a you have these all my great content. You're just and you're not using schema correctly. And then you're also Forbes Council. I wouldn't do Forbes Council because people know that Forbes Agency Council. It ranks though your TikTok course, your course on Teachable. I think you need to get your web properties up in par with where your social is Very true. I'm going to work on that with you. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Part part two we'll we'll deep dive. I want to be respectful of your time to ask. This was so incredible. I could chat with you for the entire day and ask selfless questions. But if anybody wants to work with you, get ahold of you. Anybody wants to work with you, get a hold of you, leverage your knowledge. What's the best way that they can get a hold of you? Well, you can go to areyougoogleablecom and get an audit.
Speaker 1:Or, because we practice what we preach, literally Google my name, dennis you, and you'll see a knowledge panel show up. And we get knowledge panels for people who are not famous. People say, oh, you got to be famous. No, you don't. Like my buddy here, danny Liebrandt was brand new in digital marketing. He's got a knowledge panel right. So you got to be Google-able and there's a step-by-step process. Literally, do a search for knowledge panel, dennis Yu, and you'll see our step-by-step process. Our whole thing is put it out there, all the knowledge. Just put it out there for free Charge for services. All of that will be in the show notes. I can't thank you enough.
Speaker 1:This is one of those episodes that I'm going to have to listen to over again to just really fine tune and take those golden nuggets and take action on them. Dennis, any final words for the business owner out there yeah, meet people in person to create real content on video, long form, co-created content like this, because those experiences that are in person and real can be chopped up by the AI. Whatever, we don't know what the best AI tools are going to be Right, maybe syllabi in a year from now, but when you build those experiences and have those in the bank, at least it can be used later. So I'm creating content now for tools that I know don't yet exist, and that's why, like for your SEO and all this kind of stuff, I'll fly out wherever you are and spend time with you just to show that we practice what we preach and we know where your SEO is. Now we know that you're an absolute boss, in short form, and the AI tools. I would love to see the same thing happen on the Google side, and I want to practice what we preach and meet you in person, do this for you and show everybody. We're going to make it happen.
Speaker 1:Let's turn. I don't want any of your money, I just want to do it. Let's do it, man, let's do it. Heck. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna line it up. We're gonna line it up, we're gonna do it. I appreciate you, brother. Thank you everybody again for listening to another episode of business talk. I hope you took as much away from this episode as I did. If you learned something new today, leave us a five-star review on wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps us reach and inspire more business owners, more people, to create this episode. If you found this episode inspiring, consider leaving us a five-star review on iTunes or your favorite podcast listening platform. I know that's a lot to ask of you, but it really does help the podcast reach more people. Do you have any feedback about the show or a guest you'd like to recommend? Email me at podcast at socialtprocom. Until next time.
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