The Future is Now: Staying Ahead of the Curve in SEO and AI with Amber Goetz

Topics discussed in this episode with time stamps

00:00 – 00:23 “Getting placed in people also ask is actually like kind of a big deal because AI in the AI overview loves questions. It loves FAQ. And if you have a developer that is working on your site or working with you, ask them to add FAQ schema data into those areas of your site because AI is really loving to digest the schema data.” — Amber Goetz

00:24 – 00:42 Welcome to Peppershock Media’s Marketing Expedition Podcast

00:43 – 02:23 About Amber

02:24 – 07:54 Marketing Essentials Moment: Simplicity in Marketing

07:55 – 10:21 Welcome to the show, Amber!

10:22 – 13:10 Client Success Story: The Resort in Arizona

13:11 – 17:00 Tactics for SEO Success

17:01 – 21:35 The Importance of Google Business Profile

21:36 – 24:58 The Value of FAQs on Your Website

24:59 – 25:49 Utilizing FAQ Schema for Better SEO

25:50 – 26:25 Poderific, baby! Whether you’re looking for a podcast studio to rent or need help with the entire production and distribution of your podcast, we gotcha covered.

26:26 – 31:47 Tools for Website Performance Analysis

31:48 – 35:21 Case Study: The RV Resort’s Transformation

35:22 – 39:27 Google Ads Strategies for Success

39:28 – 41:17 The Importance of Long-Term Google Ads Campaigns

41:18 – 45:01 Incorporating Social Media into SEO

45:02 – 46:23 Humanizing Your Brand Through Social Media

46:23 – 47:44 Final Tips—Utilizing AI for Your Website

47:45 – 47:50 Reach out to Amber

47:51 – 48:21 Thank you so much, Amber! Share this podcast, give us a review, and enjoy your marketing journey!

48:22 – 49:08 Join the Marketing Expedition Community today!

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Meet with Rhea Allen

Read the Full Transcript:

Rhea Allen (00:01.204)

Welcome to the Marketing Expedition podcast. I’m your host, Rhea Allen. the president and CEO of Peppershock Media and the founder of the Marketing Expedition community. And today we have Amber on the show. Welcome to the show, Amber.

Amber (00:13.568)

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Rhea Allen (00:16.398)

So I always like to just share a little more than what the bio gives us. Tell us a little bit about you and what got you to where you are today.

Amber (00:25.266)

My gosh, okay, well, you know, like anyone else just lost, just looking for something that clicked, no. I, for years, spent a lot of my time in kind of like, I was going down like the health path into college, didn’t love it, it was just so not resonating with me, but I don’t know how, who knows why I got there, right? Saw this poster in the hallway at school, learn how to build your own e-comm store, and I was like, what’s e-comm? Like, what is that? You know, and just.

Rhea Allen (00:46.008)

Yeah.

Amber (00:54.206)

began curiosity about it and I’ve always been a tech geek at heart, just couldn’t get me off the computer if you tried, even before it was just a green DOS screen, like I was interested. yeah, I jumped into a bunch of classes that were teaching different things on internet marketing and selling online and building an online store. And so I started building sites for friends, for friends’ bands, like just doing these silly websites and I really loved it. And then…

I don’t know, a year or two into that, I started approaching businesses and saying, hey, I can build you a website. And I’ll never forget, I think it was like 2001, 2000, going into this furniture store and just like pitching my services. I’m still like super new at this point and telling what I do. And the guy actually said to me, that internet thing’s a fad. And I remember, like in my mind, I’m like, this guy is so wrong. Like he’s so, so wrong.

Yeah, and here we are today where it’s like, you know, I think having your business online is in some ways more important than having a brick and mortar, which is crazy to say. Yeah, I don’t know. I really thrive on helping people succeed, helping businesses really understand the web development user experience kind of lead gen space. I think it’s really important for anyone that’s doing business online to just have a full perspective of how it all works, because you can weave that throughout all of your processes that you share at your company.

Rhea Allen (02:22.094)

Absolutely. Why don’t you share with us maybe a customer journey from when you started working with them, what was the process, how did it work out, and maybe some success stories of those types of sites that you’ve got to work on with your customers.

Amber (02:40.974)

my gosh, okay. The first one that pops my mind, that’s the one I’m gonna go with, is a resort out of Arizona that is still my client. They’ve been my client for over 10 years. They had kind of a home-built site that needed some love badly, and when I got my hands on it, it was 2014, and everything was funky about it. The user experience was funky.

Information was outdated and it was just one of those things that was so cumbersome for them to update that no one has time for it. You know if you’re running a resort you don’t have time to make sure that the pricing has been adjusted make sure the menus at the restaurant are the most current like and so it was really fun to jump in and not only address those issues for them and get them solved but show them how we can improve the user experience how we could even back then like automate some of the online processes to take.

heavy lifting off their team who are running around trying to do all the things there on the resort along with answering questions about the website, whatnot. And like I said, we’ve worked together for over 10 years, love them like they’re family, and we continue to just keep revamping. We actually threw up a new version of their site, threw together a new version of their site last spring, which was really fun because…

Rhea Allen (03:58.287)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (04:00.37)

Web is always evolving and I love working with those clients that see that and they understand that and they’re like, yeah, let’s keep making it better. Like let’s keep making the process simpler internally and externally. And I think that’s when clients win is when you remember that what you want might not be what you want, what your ideas are for the website, et cetera, might not always be the best for what your ideal client wants.

just always having your ears open to that feedback is so, crucial. with that client, I mean, we’ve had many successes. We’ve kind of dominate search engine results in that area. And it’s a very highly trafficked area. It’s in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. So they have a season where they’re like, hey, please stop with the traffic because we’re too busy. They’ll literally call and say, hey, can we just back off a little bit? And I’m like,

Rhea Allen (04:51.47)

You

Amber (04:56.746)

not really. Once you’re organic is rankin’ and rollin’, like, you don’t really touch it. You’re just like, well, guess we’re expanding. So.

Rhea Allen (05:00.151)

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (05:05.262)

It’s a problem they have, isn’t it?

Amber (05:06.75)

great problem to have yeah if only everyone had that problem

Rhea Allen (05:10.798)

Tell me a little bit more, just dig into some of the tactics or things that help with their search engine optimization. mean, like you said, everything’s so evolving, and especially now with AI, the results are being served through ChatGPT and all these things. mean, what are you doing to stay current with all the additional things that continue to evolve every day, it seems like?

Amber (05:38.613)

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I mean, for me personally, I read every email Google shares from their web guidelines because they’re changing the algorithm. I mean, sometimes they’re changing it like every couple months where it used to be once every year, every 18 months, they’re changing it up like, here’s August changes. here’s October. And you’re just like.

Rhea Allen (05:58.659)

Yeah!

Amber (05:59.839)

Okay, cool. So for me, that’s like, if you’re of, you know, of technical interest, it’s definitely good to get familiar with the webmaster guidelines. A lot of people are gonna look through there and their eyes are gonna glaze over and they’re gonna be like, cool, that was the most boring thing I’ve ever read. But I would say from like a high level, things you should consistently always be doing is making sure that

the content on your website is very true and unique to you. I know a lot of people use ChatGPT and I think that’s great. I think ChatGPT, AI, I think all those tools there are amazing to help us as long as we’re not letting it replace us. And when I see a website where it’s just so clear the copy has been just 100 % automated through AI, I’m not gonna say I see those brands suffer or anything like that, but it just sort of takes

It takes away your individuality, like who you are as a brand and how you speak to people when they walk through your door, when you pick up that phone. And I will say that since probably like a year ago, stronger branding across the board, meaning everything you say, do, the way you look, the way you respond, your tone and everything across the board, and I’m website, press releases, social media posts, the more those are all very cohesive in tone.

those brands are succeeding far beyond in all searches, which I personally feel is because when AI dropped on the scene in 2023, everybody went crazy generating content and building these websites. And it sort of, I don’t know, like muddied up the waters. We lost a lot of, not that we lost, but they kind of started out ranking a lot of brands that are real and authentic because

Rhea Allen (07:26.542)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amber (07:52.777)

a lot of brands don’t have an SEO person or they don’t have time to update that website every five seconds. So if you got this guy over here that’s, his hobby is just generating website content off of chat GPT, for a minute there, those sites were outranking regular brands. And now it’s kind of turning around and we’re seeing like really strong brands come back around, which I’m so here for. I think it’s very, very cool.

Rhea Allen (08:15.948)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I think you’re right. I think people sort of got a little ambitious with trying to just always end up using JadGBT or some form of AI agent to do things for them. And yeah, sure, it makes it somewhat efficient and it can help. But I think that there’s definitely something to be said about authenticity and using real people with real photos because people want to buy from

real people, right? It seems like I do. mean, and we use AI here too, but it’s there to help. It’s just another tool to help not necessarily replace or augment what you’re doing. want to, yeah, like you said, keep it authentic, keep it real. Yeah, love that.

Amber (08:43.606)

Yes. Yes.

Amber (08:58.922)

Yes, yeah, absolutely. Another thing, because you asked in your question, like, what are some things I’m seeing that’s, you know, working really well right now? And I tell everyone, don’t sleep on your Google Business Profile. It feels to me like the Google Business Profile, it’s always taken a little more importance than your own website ranking per Google’s eyes, it seems. But it is, it’s changing so much and they’re changing.

Rhea Allen (09:07.426)

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (09:20.152)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (09:27.518)

what they’re tracking, the changes that they’re expecting. I just found out last night that Gemini AI is going to be calling Google Business Number profiles just to test out that part of the user experience. Do you answer your phone? Are you helpful? Does your brand align with what it says you do? Which I’m like, man, we all get a ton of bot calls as a business owner. As soon as you put up that Google Business Profile, it’s like everyone’s calling you.

and I’m just thinking this is tricky, but it also makes a whole heck of a lot of sense if they’re really leaning on the AI overview and the Gemini overview to really curate the experience of, hairstyle is near me. Of course it makes sense that they’re gonna make sure, are these people answering their emails? Are they picking up the phone? Do we really wanna keep serving them up in the top three or did five, six, and eight?

answer their phone and provide a better experience. So that’s just something I read in like an SEO newsletter I’m in that people are talking about. So that’s really interesting. But I will say that the brands who are paying attention to their Google business profile, making frequent updates and like really making sure that that content’s always fresh are doing better in a local SEO search results.

Rhea Allen (10:48.558)

Yeah, we post to it just as much as we post through our regular social media profiles and just add it as a part of the social media posts that we create and make. And I think that that’s been really helpful because, why not? It’s another free tool to use that people, think you’re right, often just don’t think of it as another tool that is.

really beneficial and since Google is like the largest search search engine right because I’ll take advantage of that for sure and add photos and those types of things yeah it’s really good.

Amber (11:15.798)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (11:19.604)

Yep. Well, I always say like if Google puts a new field in there, like, do you want to link your social? do you want to update your hours for next month? Like do it, do it, do it, do it. The reason they’re putting that out there for you.

Rhea Allen (11:26.574)

Yeah. I know. Now I need to go look at my, my, our Google, my business and make sure. Yeah, you’re right. I know. Cause, well that and like when we moved new locations, there’s, you know, lots of things out there still that have our old address and, you know, do your best to try to clean them all up and get all the new addresses listed and all the different directories and places.

Amber (11:36.758)

Yes.

Amber (11:43.924)

Rhea Allen (11:54.351)

That’s something also I think people overlook doing or realizing that they need to do. And if you’re sending your customers to the wrong address, oops, that’s going to be.

Amber (12:03.05)

I know. Also too, this has come up, I’m not kidding you, twice this week. So I’m just gonna throw it out there. If someone else set your profile up for you or you signed up with an email address and created that business profile that you no longer use, get in there and make sure that you as the business owner are set as the owner. I have had two clients this week completely lose access to their profiles because…

Rhea Allen (12:09.514)

Okay. Yeah.

Amber (12:27.254)

their original website guy or their friend, someone set it up and then just invited them as a manager and they never did anything about it. And if this is a newer thing, if you haven’t accessed an email in over 18 months, Google’s clearing out those Gmail’s. So then you’re stuck up against, great, how do I get back into my profile?

Rhea Allen (12:43.918)

interesting.

Rhea Allen (12:48.888)

Yeah, and you can’t because it’s already been used and they won’t let you do it again probably. Yeah, you’re right. That’s a good point.

Amber (12:52.18)

Yeah, right. Yeah, so I don’t know. I’m just like, pay attention to your logins, guys. Write down the password you made.

Rhea Allen (13:02.021)

I know. Sometimes you end up in password loop hell.

Amber (13:05.264)

I know I finally caved and bought one of those things that helps you keep track of everything and make sure everything’s secure because I’m like I can’t do this anymore. This is not what my brain was meant to do.

Rhea Allen (13:10.67)

Yep.

Yeah, I hear you. We use LastPass and it seems to work pretty good. I just was like, I hope it never gets a knock on wood. never gets infiltrated by the cyber. I know. Never mind. It’s not happening. It reached back. Yeah. I think that, yeah, if a business has not updated their website in a long period of time,

Amber (13:26.73)

Don’t say that. You can’t say that. Don’t put that out there. No, never.

Rhea Allen (13:44.938)

still it’s outdated and it’s not consistent with what they’re doing, it definitely can be a huge turnoff for people to want to do business with them, right? Yeah, so.

Amber (13:53.749)

Yeah. Yeah, it’s, and even like, hate having this conversation is like, you probably got to put some pricing on your site. I have so many clients who are like, I don’t want to my pricing on there. I don’t want to put my pricing on there. And I’m like, okay, well guess what your competitors are. And that’s going to make the difference. And the more information you provide and the more clarity you provide, AI is loving to cite that stuff. Like put in, you know, how much is a, you know,

Rhea Allen (14:03.608)

Mm.

Rhea Allen (14:09.25)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (14:16.707)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (14:20.438)

wellness clinic near me, what can I expect to spend? Whatever the question is, AI is usually always generating and pulling that data from SEO optimized sites. And more often than not, you’ll see information in there that does provide some pricing. I’m not saying it’s accurate, but they’re getting the information from somewhere. So I always tell people, you don’t have to put the price, put a price range. Put starting at, you really want to deliver that information upfront because

Rhea Allen (14:37.25)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (14:50.472)

It’s gonna help you get rid of the tire kickers because you don’t want to work with the guys anyways that Don’t want to pay you right so I got it. We’re gonna rethink it

Rhea Allen (14:57.134)

That’s true. Yeah, they’re scared from just, you know, not able to have that in their budget. Then yeah, moving on to the next. Another thing that I’ve heard about is putting frequently asked questions on your website. It seems like it would be a good move too, right?

Amber (15:05.888)

moving on. Yeah, exactly.

Amber (15:16.67)

It’s absolutely a good move. It’s a very important move. And I tell people, if you can, if you’re a business that has service pages, I would personally put unique FAQs on each of those services. And don’t just pull them out of thin air. Go do some Googling yourself and try to, you know, when you Google and you scroll down and it says people also ask. And it’s curating to you what people are asking. So I always tell people, go do a little deep dive. Don’t use…

Rhea Allen (15:41.486)

Mmm.

Amber (15:45.215)

all of them use the ones that actually make sense and that you can, you when you look at the answer that Google’s providing, they’re pulling that from a site and they’ll even cite the site and they’ll have a link right to where they got that information. Look at that answer and be like, okay, I could do that better and make your response to that question way better. And that’s how you get placed in there. getting placed in people also ask is actually like kind of a big deal because AI in the AI overview,

Rhea Allen (16:05.486)

love that. That’s a great.

Rhea Allen (16:12.823)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (16:14.834)

loves questions. It loves FAQ.

Rhea Allen (16:18.443)

Mm, that’s good. That’s really good. Yeah.

Amber (16:20.436)

Yeah, and if you have a developer that is working on your site or working with you, ask them to add FAQ schema data into those areas of your site because AI is really loving to digest the schema data. And a lot of websites that are DIY or they just kind of threw them together, they don’t have any of that. So you’re behind a little bit. I mean, for people like me, I’m…

pumped that the need for actual coding is coming back because we got way too much clunky junkie out there over the last few years with all of these like DIY pre-built things. So I’m just like, yes, we need this.

Rhea Allen (16:58.286)

Mmm.

Rhea Allen (17:02.094)

Yeah, I always love it when we want to work with a client and they’re like, oh, well, my neighbors, kids, nephew, whatever, somebody, well, he can do it for much cheaper. like, ugh.

Amber (17:12.01)

Yeah, yeah, that’s what you’re gonna get. You’re gonna get a thing that hits a ceiling and you’re gonna outgrow it and then you’re gonna pay a developer to fix everything and bring it over to a real. So it is an investment and one of my clients, when we first started working together, he was like, why would I do my accounting? This is the same thing. It is an area of business that ain’t my expertise, just like accounting is not and I pay someone else to do that. And I was like, I’m gonna steal that.

Rhea Allen (17:20.728)

Nope. Yeah.

Rhea Allen (17:38.786)

Yeah, that’s good.

Amber (17:40.832)

Great, that’s true. Like, I won’t touch my accounting, no thank you.

Rhea Allen (17:44.719)

Yeah, I don’t want to cut my own hair. don’t want to, yeah. We want to build our own website for sure. So thinking about some of the tools and just tactics that people can take, know, ways that they might be able to incorporate some things to help them with their website. Even if they’re not necessarily the developers or, you know, the web people, like maybe there’s some at least tools that can tell them

Amber (17:52.927)

Yes.

Rhea Allen (18:14.624)

Is my site working well? Is there performance issues? Maybe just like, do you use any kind of tools that help people just determine if their site’s doing okay or if there are areas that need to be fixed, something like

Amber (18:28.63)

Yeah, there’s a few actually. First one I would say is PageSpeed Insights. It’s a free tool provided by Google. You put in your URL and it’ll spit back out the issues that Google sees with your website. It’s gonna be a variety of things. It could say your load time’s too slow. That usually will come down to maybe you’re on a cheap server. A lot of times people grab a cheap hosting package and that comes along with cheap hosting is usually a cheap.

Rhea Allen (18:57.12)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amber (18:58.144)

service. So that’s an easy fix. I you can go find better hosting and then say, please migrate my site. And most all hosts will do that nowadays for you. So that’s a huge, that’s probably like the first most common issue I see with websites that aren’t doing well. Besides that, it’s going to spit back a bunch of other information like, hey, these images are too big, or you’re not providing enough explanation and a link. Like, it’s kind of annoying and cumbersome, but

If you’ve got a bunch of buttons all over your website that just say learn more, Google will have a problem with it and they’ll tell you, they’ll be like, this is too nondescript. Like they want, learn more about services or whatever, book a session for X. They really are asking people to provide a more clear cut path to where they want them to go. So that’ll, PageSpeed Insights, that’ll take you down a rabbit hole and keep you busy for a minute. But it’s also,

Rhea Allen (19:35.81)

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (19:47.502)

That’s good.

Rhea Allen (19:53.103)

At least, mean, need to hire somebody to help them fix all the things, right?

Amber (19:58.903)

Or exactly, or maybe you just hired somebody and then like, here’s your website, run it through there. Because if you just paid somebody and you’re getting this report back that says your website’s a D, they should do something about that. I guarantee all my clients when we launch it out, you’re gonna get an A plus score from Google. Because I’m not charging somebody and then sending them down the road with a lemon of a website, like honestly. Beyond that, there’s another tool that’s

Rhea Allen (20:10.446)

Mm.

Rhea Allen (20:18.222)

Nice.

Rhea Allen (20:23.33)

Mm-hmm. That’s great.

Amber (20:28.886)

I think super invaluable, especially when you’re one of these people who maybe you just threw together your copy, maybe you used AI, but you’re just not super sure that the words on your page are great. I know for myself, I don’t love selling, and so that’s where I lean on chat GPT a lot is I’ll be like, I spin this up so it’s a little more, I wanna close more with this copy. There is a site called Hotjar, and

Rhea Allen (20:40.131)

Hmm.

Rhea Allen (20:43.758)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (20:51.886)

Yeah.

Amber (20:55.464)

You do need to place a snippet of code, but most folks can copy code and paste it somewhere. That’s not, you don’t have to write the code. You don’t have to understand the code. You just need to paste the code. Hotjar will crawl your website. I think it’s like up to a hundred crawls for free and, not crawls recordings. I apologize. And it will record a hundred users journey on your site. So you’re getting this like peek behind the curtain of what someone’s doing when they’re, when they’re scrolling around, you’ll see.

Rhea Allen (21:04.782)

Hmm.

Rhea Allen (21:24.34)

It’s kind of like a heat map or something, right? I’ve seen something like that where it’s like the more places that people click on, it like looks like a heat map to me. that kind of, yeah, like the infrared, know, where you’re, yeah.

Amber (21:25.993)

It’s so cool.

Amber (21:33.623)

Yes, yeah, there’s, you can see like, you can see like maybe they’re clicking on something that’s not a button and you’re like, do I need to put a button there? did 67 people click that spot? You know, and it’s super, and I do it all the time when I launch a site with a client, I’m always like, hey, can we run a heat map for a while? Like just, wanna, I don’t know, I don’t, I’m never gonna be like, I know exactly how to build this site. Instead, I would, instead I’d rather be told, you’re wrong, you know, change it.

Rhea Allen (21:46.178)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (21:56.687)

Yeah, yeah.

Rhea Allen (22:01.39)

Yeah, well, that’s, that’s really good advice to see how people are actually navigating and how they’re, you know, maneuvering your site or if they bounce quickly because of whatever reason. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah. Yeah.

Amber (22:02.218)

and then the client wins with more conversions.

Amber (22:07.498)

Yeah.

Amber (22:14.282)

Yeah. Another, one more tool that I’d like to share and a few sites do this, but I find Moz to be the easiest. You want to know what your domain authority is, especially if you are someone that’s trying really hard to increase the visibility in search. If you have a low DR domain rating, domain authority, they’re, always called different things, but it’s the same thing. It’s basically what your.com is ranked. What is it ranked at?

Rhea Allen (22:42.614)

Hmm.

Amber (22:43.804)

Knowing what your domain authority is really helps you see where you could have some setbacks. You could have a site that’s been live for 10 years, but if you have a super low domain authority, you’re like 10 or under, that’s your biggest problem. You want to get your domain rating up to at least 30, and then you’ll start attracting better backlinks. You will have people reaching out to you going, I want a link from your website. I’ll give you a link from mine. And that’s part of backlinking.

Rhea Allen (23:01.774)

Mmm.

Amber (23:12.512)

We’re all out here trying to support each other.

Rhea Allen (23:12.557)

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I love all these tools. It’s fun to learn what people are using in each area of expertise that you have. That’s awesome. Let’s dig into another case study, another client that you’ve helped and maybe kind of where they were before and then what you did and where they are now.

Amber (23:26.303)

Yeah.

Amber (23:37.751)

Okay, there’s one here actually near me, near Zion. They are an RV resort and when they brought me in for a meeting about a year and a half ago, they were like, we are at 13 % capacity. We’re not booking, no one’s finding us. We’re not coming up on search, help, what can you do? And so obviously did a crawl of their site and saw that many, many areas of the site were missing very foundational SEO. I’m talking.

missing titles, no H1s, no heading structure whatsoever, no meta descriptions. They had pages that were not even being indexed. And so digging deeper, me, I’m like, who built this? Did they hate you? Why did they do such a bad job? And it turns out part of their software package when they purchased…

Rhea Allen (24:19.854)

I set you up for failure!

Amber (24:32.288)

there through the booking for people who come online to book was, we’re gonna build a website for you. And you know, when you’re an investor and you’re building this resort and you’ve got these big dreams, you’re not like worrying that your software company you’re paying a gajillion dollars is maybe gonna build you a shoddy website. You’re just like, cool, that’s great. Someone’s gonna do the website, you know? And it looked fine, it was pretty.

Rhea Allen (24:34.52)

then, is it?

Mmm.

Rhea Allen (24:53.998)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (24:56.566)

but it wasn’t doing anything. There was no conversions coming in. It was all happening from word of mouth and flags on the road, which, know, so it’s missing its purpose. And they were like, we need to do something like today. So I was like, all right, here’s what we gotta do. We’re gonna rebuild your website because foundationally, they missed a million very important steps. So start the new build of the website. At the same time, launched a pretty aggressive Google ad campaign. And you know, there’s,

Rhea Allen (24:56.686)

Mmm.

Rhea Allen (25:03.47)

Thanks

Rhea Allen (25:18.924)

Yeah.

Amber (25:26.294)

tons of ways to go about campaigns, but we wanted to just drill down super niche to the people we knew who were looking for their exact service. And we did that by setting up a competitor campaign. So anytime someone searched up a competitor, their ad would pop up right at the top. Because in my mind, I’m like, that’s the fastest way to steal business. And that was like, OK, that’s going to get the phone ringing in like 48 hours. And then from there, it’s just been

Rhea Allen (25:41.944)

Hmm. Cool.

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (25:53.176)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (25:54.837)

building great rapport online with other local affiliated businesses to do like really strong back linking and cross linking and keeping on top of our SEO, you know, working on whenever there’s an opportunity to, like I said, increase that domain authority. Press releases is a fabulous way of getting some very nice websites to link to you when you’re new. So that’s a good trick. Yeah, within…

I want to say six months, we had got them up to 60 % capacity and now today they are hanging around like 80%. So it’s their, the end of this year will be their second year in business. And we just met earlier this week and they’re like, all right, so next year we’re going to be, we’re going to hit a hundred percent. I’m like, yes, let’s go. So yeah, it’s just been fun to watch them grow and just to even drive by and be like, look at all those spots taken up. That’s exciting.

Rhea Allen (26:36.75)

Yeah!

Rhea Allen (26:44.686)

Yeah, that’s really cool. So let’s talk a little bit more about Google Ads because, my goodness, there’s just so many things to think about when, I mean, you said competitor ads, I love that. I mean, it’s tricky, but also very highly effective. That’s right. I love it. But yeah, I think a lot of people or lot of businesses

Amber (26:49.291)

Yeah.

Amber (27:01.408)

Thank you. Hey, all is fair in business and war.

you

Rhea Allen (27:15.042)

they might dabble, right, in Google ads. And they might say, this has happened. Well, I tried it, it didn’t work. And so to that, I’m like, well, how long did you try it? Did you let it learn? Did you spend enough money? I mean, when clients come to you and say, hey, I want a Google ad campaign, what are some of the things that you would cover or just educate them on and, you know,

why it’s important to do it over a long period of time rather than just a short tiny little, you know, stent and just thinking through like what’s effective? What do you think?

Amber (27:54.649)

my gosh. So I think it’s, first of all, it’s very industry based, very industry based. If you’re in a super competitive industry, like for example, lawyers, insanely competitive, they have no choice but to spend a nice chunk of money. And depending on the size of the area they live in, they’re gonna spend more. Like a lawyer out here is not gonna spend probably 50 % of what a lawyer in like Los Angeles would spend. it’s really like,

Rhea Allen (28:05.454)

Mm.

Rhea Allen (28:21.87)

Right. Or especially for like the ambulance chaser lawyers. That’s all that are. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, me neither. I don’t want to. I wouldn’t want to.

Amber (28:26.006)

Yeah, well that’s like a whole other that’s a whole other thing. Yeah, that’s Yeah that I’m like whoo, that’s seems really stressful. I don’t run any of those No, but I do I do work with I work with a criminal attorney out here who We do his ads in such a cool way where we’re really drilling down by the case type and It’s tremendous how well his ads are performing now like

Rhea Allen (28:50.136)

Hmm.

Amber (28:54.224)

we’re not getting phone calls for things he doesn’t do, we’re getting like legit phone calls for things he does. So that’s kind of great. But then there’s, know, on the flip side of things, there is, I have a client out of British Columbia and they do wildlife tours. They do like, they take boats out filled with people from Germany and Switzerland and all over the country. So that is like a whole, that’s just like a whole strategy, like trying to, and we dive deep into their booking list and be like, okay,

Rhea Allen (28:54.605)

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (29:09.134)

Hmm.

Rhea Allen (29:16.899)

Yeah.

Amber (29:23.766)

seems like more people from Germany are more interested in bears and people from here are more interested in seeing whales. Like it’s very, very different. And a lot of the audience dialing in, you gotta be open to like starting out a little looser. You know, might think like, no, I wanna target 25 to 45, but you might learn later on, like you really wanna target 35 to 65. Like you just, you gotta be willing to know that.

the more your ads run and you’re right, you definitely don’t wanna just turn them on, turn them off. It takes Google Ads two weeks to even like really start working at all, like really start showing and even collecting data. So for two weeks, you’re not even gonna really know at all how they’re performing. But then like, you you get to month like three, four, you’re gonna start having really good insights. The longer your ads are on, Google Ads is gonna give you more tools, which is

Rhea Allen (29:59.503)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (30:09.25)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (30:19.442)

Super frustrating, but when you get to a place where they’re like, guess what? You’re now allowed to do this. You’re like, yay. But it’s important because all of those little tweaks are gonna help you like really, like I said, dial in and find the right client. And you also need to be open to, a lot of people will just jump in Google Ads themselves and do like the walkthrough setup.

Rhea Allen (30:26.934)

Yay!

Amber (30:44.79)

And how do I say this without making the Google overlords mad at me, but they’re not necessarily putting your best interests at heart when they’re like, this is a recommendation, do this. It’s a recommendation. Oftentimes it’s a really good way to eat up your budget very fast. So I think just really understanding and reading, don’t just turn on auto all, don’t just say AI takeover. You really wanna make sure, like I said, you’ve clarified like,

Rhea Allen (30:56.194)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rhea Allen (31:01.016)

Mm-hmm.

Amber (31:13.718)

This is a conversion. When the phone rings, that’s a conversion. When there’s all sorts of like, I saw in there now, and you just go in and start setting up an ad, it sets up all these like predetermined conversions it thinks you want. And you get in there in like two weeks and you’re like, I haven’t had 100 conversions. What are they talking about? And then you go and you look and you’re like, none of these things are conversions. Like a conversion is when I close a deal. that’s a conversion. So yeah, I would just say like, learn.

Rhea Allen (31:26.958)

Mm.

Rhea Allen (31:38.21)

Morning.

Amber (31:43.691)

get on YouTube, there’s some really great resources out there. And just make sure that you’re not skimming through and applying all and doing what they say. Just really make sure to read through every single option that they’re handing to you.

Rhea Allen (32:00.217)

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s great advice. AI is only as good as it can, it’s just not, it still has to have human intelligence to use artificial intelligence, right? mean, using, what works and what doesn’t and testing it and giving it time to test and understanding, you know, it’s gonna take a moment.

Amber (32:10.324)

Yeah. Yeah.

Amber (32:16.884)

Yeah. And it will say, pay attention to the search terms that people are searching to find your ad and, like, delete them. If they’re not good search terms, say, no, thank you. Do not ever show my ad for this term because I see that too. Or you’ll log in and you’re like, there’s 1,600 search terms in here. Most of them have nothing to with your business. And they’re just like, I don’t know. I I told Google to add whatever it thinks. And that’s like, again, fastest way to eat up your budget.

Rhea Allen (32:41.824)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense for sure. So what other kinds of things do you do for your clients? You know, SEO, Google Ads, is there other services, you know, besides, well, building the website, but are there other kind of areas that you focus on?

Amber (32:58.742)

Yeah, actually for my local clients near me, I do content creation. So I will still go out. have a couple of shoots tomorrow and we’ll go out and we’ll do some video. We’ll do some photo. I can’t do it for all my clients, you know, especially one in British Columbia, that’d be difficult. But in my past life, I photographed over 600 weddings. And so I have a lot of camera gear, a lot of camera gear.

Rhea Allen (33:20.846)

God bless your heart. 600 weddings and 600 mothers of the bride.

Amber (33:27.542)

Yeah, exactly. Yes, an aunt and the uncle and the cousins. Yeah. So, yeah, and it’s fun because for me, like, yeah, I got burned out in that world. I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I cannot do this anymore. But, yeah, it’s fun.

Rhea Allen (33:30.754)

I’m going ya.

Rhea Allen (33:38.638)

I really, when we first started our business, we thought, we’ll do wedding videos. Yeah, that quickly took a turn. We’re like, we’re not doing that again. No, it’s for us. It really was not necessarily the bride. was the, yeah, like you said, the relatives. was just, my God, these people.

Amber (33:49.878)

This is not for the faint of heart.

Amber (33:56.215)

Yes, it’s mean wedding coordinators. Why are they so mean? Why are you so grumpy all the time?

Rhea Allen (34:00.308)

I know, why?

I mean, get her a glass of wine. might loosen up a little. I don’t know. Or whatever. Maybe she’s hangry. I know.

Amber (34:09.11)

Yeah, just chill out, yeah. No, but it’s fun. And the reason I’ve kind of picked that up again is, A, I have ton of gear laying around, but it’s fun. I love getting to know my client on that level and helping them get out of that stock world. There’s so many businesses that use stock photography. so I’m like, can we go take pictures of your actual crew doing their thing? And it’s fun.

Rhea Allen (34:20.267)

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (34:26.062)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (34:29.486)

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (34:37.262)

Well, like, yeah. People buy from people.

Amber (34:38.304)

That’s something else we should wrap into is social media playing into SEO nowadays. You probably know this Ray, but in July, Google announced officially that they’re indexing Instagram captions. So naturally I told all of my SEO clients, I was like, don’t sleep on your social anymore. Don’t just be like, felt cute in the shirt. let’s put some keywords in there. Like let’s make this.

Rhea Allen (34:42.382)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (34:52.002)

Hmm

Amber (35:05.45)

this post more valuable. So I’ve been kind of looping that into some of my, like I said, my local clients, be like, hey, let me help a little bit, put together if you post a week for you, just so we’re following some SEO guidelines. So, you know, especially if it’s like a case study, progress update on a job, let’s get some keywords in there. So if someone’s searching on Instagram, you know, I want a new pool, you’re gonna come up, which is super easy to rank locally too.

Rhea Allen (35:17.934)

Yeah.

Rhea Allen (35:28.419)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (35:31.821)

Yeah, that’s great. I don’t know, think social media, from a business perspective, brands have a hard time getting organic growth. So if this is another added value that they can use for SEO, then it maybe justifies even though they’re not getting a huge following or engagement, but it can help with search engine results. Yeah, that’s good.

Amber (35:57.015)

Yeah, absolutely.

Rhea Allen (35:59.823)

more power to the idea of why social media is still important.

Amber (36:05.142)

It is, and I hate it. tell everybody, I’m like, people are like, do I have to do social? I’m like, it is a necessary evil. I’m not saying you’re gonna get the best leads from social media, but people are definitely looking you up to see like, is this person relevant? Like, do I like them? You know, what do they do? So I tell people like, you gotta do it. Just when you do it, put a little effort into it. Make sure you’re actually talking about what you do in your captions and you’re gonna be okay.

Rhea Allen (36:10.67)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (36:29.376)

Showing your people. really do think to your point there, whenever we post something with our staff or our crew or we’re doing behind the scenes or we’re with a client or something and I always want to feature clients whenever we can, we get so much more traction than just like random, regular, know, sort of not including our people.

Amber (36:51.434)

Yeah, because people like people. We’re drawn to one another. You know, not just our brand.

Rhea Allen (36:56.342)

And it shows the human side of the business too, right? I mean, it’s not just inanimate objects, it’s or, know, inanimate things. It’s, look, this is who we are. This is what we do. This is our culture. This is the, you know, the people that you might get to work with if you work with us or whatever. Yeah. It’s definitely a game changer when you can incorporate your people. And one, you know, thing or objection sometimes they’ll give us is like, well, what if they leave the company? Well, what if?

Amber (36:59.52)

I know.

Rhea Allen (37:25.27)

You know, so what? Guess what? just need to shoot some more pictures or you do some more videos again, you know?

Amber (37:31.196)

Yeah, if anything, it’s just again, you’re just like humanizing the brand people, people love it. I see the same thing like I hate getting on video and stuff for social but second I do I’m like, okay, that silly video of me just whatever made people laugh and now they’re talking to me again like it’s it’s important.

Rhea Allen (37:35.085)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea Allen (37:45.23)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I’ve certainly enjoyed our conversation and I’m sure we could kind of geek out and talk about this for hours if we wanted to. But just to wrap up, don’t you do two things. Give us kind of some final tidbits or nuggets of information that you’d like to share or just tips that they can use. And then also share how people can reach out to you if they would like to use your services for their business.

Amber (38:18.08)

Okay, I think my final tip that I’ll say is grab all of your website copy, look at how you’re being portrayed on your Google business profile, on social media, put all of that into AI and ask AI, like, how can I make this content more cohesive across the board? And that’s the way to use it. Like, look at the responses you’re gonna get and it’s gonna open your eyes. You’re gonna see some things that you didn’t realize from an outsider’s perspective.

I honestly feel like the brands who really start doing that more are the ones that are gonna keep thriving moving forward. And if anyone wants to follow along, I have a free newsletter I put out once a week. It’s called SEO Sidekick. I like to demystify SEO and make it for regular people so they can read along and understand it at least so you feel confident. You’re like, okay, I could totally get this. And yeah.

And you can find me on all the platforms, Amber Goetz, or my brand name is the Active Media.

Rhea Allen (39:18.19)

Good. Excellent. Well, thank you so much Amber for all of the wisdom that you shared today.

Amber (39:22.838)

Thanks Rhea, this was fun.

Rhea Allen (39:24.672)

Absolutely and for those of you listening the best thing that you can do for Amber and I both is to share this podcast with those that you know that could use all of the wisdom that she shared with us and of course give us a review on whatever podcast platform you use to listen to as those reviews are like gold to us so thank you for that and for those of you listening until next time enjoy your marketing journey.