Amr Selim | 00:02
If your computer gets stuck or glitches and is getting you nowhere, wouldn’t you just hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE and restart it? Easy! Why is it then, when our lives feel stuck or not going the way we want it to go, we don’t do the same? It’s not as easy. If we could just restart, Hi, I am Amr Saleem. Most people call me the Internet Guy. It’s because they can’t pronounce my name. But I’m a professional restorter. I’ve gone from an amateur musician in Egypt to a tech consultant and an entrepreneur in Canada. Along the way, I’ve navigated four continents, six countries and seven different industries. I have lost count of how many times I’ve had to start again from zero. I wrote the book, I called it, And this podcast is the living version of that journey. Every episode, I’ll be bringing you the raw stories and strategies from people who have the guts to hit that reset button with their lives. You will learn how to find your thread.
You know… Those portable skills like character and people-person grit That will always go with you wherever you go, when you network and you’re friends with it. Whether you’re 22 and terrified of your first steps into the business world, or 50 and wondering if it’s too late to switch lanes now, This show is for you. Now, let’s get moving. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 2 of Restart. From saving lives to saving businesses, my guest today, Sam Sarston, has done that. It was a bold career move, and what’s even more impressing is that he did this in his 20s. He didn’t wait long enough. He didn’t stay stuck long enough. He realized when he was feeling misaligned, and even though he loved his job being an EMT rushing people to emergencies, he felt that It was misaligned, something was not clicking. It left him looking for a new path. Through an accidental web design project that landed in his lap, he was able to transform and restart into a successful local SEO expert who’s helping businesses, local businesses with physical locations thrive online.
So in this episode, we explore how do you go from applying pressure on wounds to applying digital strategies online, helping businesses, especially businesses in your local area, grow and thrive online. So without further ado, let’s go and meet Sam and learn about the story as well as learn about local SEO and how It’s a great tool for anyone with a physical business location. Today I have a special guest. I’m going to let him introduce himself. His name is Sam. Hey, Sam.
[email protected] | 02:54
Hey, thanks for having me on, Amber. This is great.
Yeah, my name is Sam Sarsen. I’m the founder of Vencan SEO and Websites. We’re a small local SEO agency out in Bend, Oregon, but we serve clients all over the country, including Canada. And, And I am the founder of Local SEO Academy.
So I teach a few dozen, almost 100 now, people how to do local SEO. So people, mostly web designers and small agency owners that are trying to add local SEO as a growth service.
Amr Selim | 03:21
That’s very nice. I mean, I like the fact that you’re teaching as well. You’re not just doing it. Do you find that sometimes students who learned it and who are more than capable of doing it themselves still hire you?
[email protected] | 03:33
I… I feel like, yeah, sometimes, yeah.
I mean, most of the students. I guess.
Amr Selim | 03:39
That was email deliverability all the time. It’s like, dude, you took the course. You’re pretty good with it. I’ve seen you do the work. I hate it. I’d rather somebody else do it for me.
[email protected] | 03:51
Yeah. I mean, that’s part of it too, right?
You know, being a business owner, sometimes you just got to let stuff go.
Amr Selim | 03:55
Yeah. Yeah. The things that don’t interest you or your passion, it’s not where your passion is. And sometimes you just get busy.
So Sam, I wanted to learn a little bit more about you. So what we both have been on Josh’s, Josh Hall’s Web Designer Pro platform as members. I’ve seen some of your posts there. I’ve seen some of your posts on LinkedIn. And it clearly shows that you have a passion for SEO. But before we discuss SEO, I just want to go a little bit through the journey How did you start?
Like where… The first entrepreneurship, the first switch from whatever you had a job or college or whatever to entrepreneurship. What happened there?
[email protected] | 04:32
– That’s a good question. I think though, Yeah. I’m not as young as some people think I am. I just turned 35 this year. You’ve got this thing.
Amr Selim | 04:39
Face, man, which is a good I should get a hat.
[email protected] | 04:41
I know, right? It’s a good thing.
Yeah. I have people tell me I look 25, but then I show them my hairline and they’re like, are you 45? No, just kidding.
Amr Selim | 04:48
Good idea.
[email protected] | 04:49
Yeah. That’s my secret. No.
So, I mean, as a proper millennial, I was raised to believe that if I just went to college, everything would be okay. Right? And so that was kind of my plan from the get-go. Went to Oregon State, got my little diploma over there, got a degree in biology from a top research university. I thought I was a smart guy. I was an EMT for a couple of years. And the plan was to, you know, go on, get some more schooling and get a nice career. And, you know, somewhere along the way, I really needed like a reset. And in that journey, I started to figure out that, you know, it’s always been really important for me to help people.
Like my plan A was to, you know, do something in the medical field. I can see a cat’s tail walking across the screen right now. If you’re just listening to this, you’re missing out on a good visual. But you know, my plan A was to do something in the medical field. But along the way, I learned that you don’t have to helping people doesn’t just involve like applying pressure to a wound.
Like there’s lots of ways to help people. And I’ve always really been interested in technology. Pretty much ever since I learned you can play NBA Jam on your PSP. I thought that was really cool. And so, but I always figured like I wouldn’t be a coder or something like that, but it opened my mind that that’s a way that you could potentially help people. And so… As I was kind of resetting my life and trying to get things aligned, like I feel like that was a big part of the second part of my 20s was like, how do I make sure the things I say I’m doing are aligned with what I’m actually doing? And I started to really look at like, I think there’s ways that I can help people with technology. And that’s what really got me to start to think about the entrepreneurial journey. I never really… I thought that was the way to go. It seems scary. That was the way it was presented to me. It’s like, you go off and you do these things, you know, if you have a job, it’s stable, you have health insurance and you know, all these the job?
Amr Selim | 06:25
Things. You had.
[email protected] | 06:27
– Well, I mean, you know, I’ve had many jobs over the years, but the, you know, in my early 20s, I was an EMT. My last job I had, I was actually just working as an office manager.
Amr Selim | 06:37
Okay. EMT and office manager, something that has you outside all the time and something that has you inside all Yeah.
[email protected] | 06:43
The time. Yeah, I know. Quite the gamut.
Amr Selim | 06:46
EMT is that like first responder, right? You drive ambulances and you treat people and stuff.
[email protected] | 06:52
Like- Yeah, it was pretty boring. That’s pretty stressful. Well- It was like a, it was kind of like a stepping stone job for most people in the industry.
So, you know, in here in the States, paramedics is like kind of the top, you got to get like finish your college for that. And so EMT is like the stepping stone.
So we worked for like a non-emergency ambulance service. And so the way that works is we basically took people back and forth from the hospital to nursing homes or like picked up, I’m not sure what the right term is these days. Believe me, this is.
Amr Selim | 07:17
Fun. Sometimes better than being a paramedic in this part.
Like West US and West Canada is plagued with addiction and stuff. Like you don’t want to see this day in and day out. It will just rub off on you somehow. You’ll be sad. Yeah. My daughter wants to do it. And no matter how many times we tell her how stressful it is, she’s adamant.
So her course starts in May.
[email protected] | 07:38
The hardest part for me was the hours, you know, cause, eventually I was working for an ambulance service and we worked 24 on 48 off. So you work 24 hours on and 48 hours off. And a lot of times you get to the end of your shift and your replacement would be there.
So then you’d work a 48 hour shift. You have to be back in 24 hours for your next shift that was already on the schedules. That was pretty hard.
I mean, if I wasn’t 20 or whatever I was like 22 at the time, you know, I wasn’t that age. I don’t know how I would have done it, but, Yeah, that was pretty rough and taught me that I wanted to, let me do something a little different. You person, right?
Amr Selim | 08:09
Felt like, yeah, you felt, Internally, you felt like it’s not aligning with what you want to do as a.
[email protected] | 08:15
Yeah. I mean, one of the big things I saw a lot by being in the nursing homes is, you know, you kind of get to see like the miracle of modern science, which keeps life going for a long time. But it kind of shows you the other side of that where it’s like, dang, like there’s a lot of people that are still alive because modern medicine keeps them alive.
Yeah. I don’t know if they should be. And so that was really, that was hard to see on a day in and day out basis.
Yeah.
Amr Selim | 08:36
I mean, it hits you know, especially when you see people who are you know, frail and like helpless and it feels like I got to do something about it. That’s it.
Like science is already doing its work and There’s nothing.
[email protected] | 08:53
Else. Yeah. And really your job is just to take them from point A to point B.
You know, you can do a little bit. You can, you know, you try to be present on the call and things like that. But yeah, you’re really limited. And it felt like it was just going to be like that over and over again. And so, you know, that was kind of like my shift to technology or entrepreneurial.
So I was like, you know, maybe I could have a bigger impact, maybe not a huge impact, but like maybe it could spread a little bit more than just to the. You Yeah.
Amr Selim | 09:18
Said something that was very interesting to me. Your interest in tech came from gaming?
[email protected] | 09:24
Yeah. I remember.
Yeah, I think it was. So I remember being about 13-ish. It was around junior high and the PSP had just come out. If anybody remembers that, the old Sony handheld. And I remember, you know, this is, I want to say we still had dial-up internet back then, but maybe we had like the first version of broadband. Was it 13?
Yeah. And so it was ADSL.
Yeah. Yeah. It was probably some kind of something like that. But I learned that you could kind of hack your PSP, you know, the equivalent of jailbreaking.
So you can put emulators and roms obviously they’re all legally obtained if anybody’s listening but you know but being able to play you know nba jam sonic like the game i used to play with my dad you know from a rented console from blockbuster back in the day like it was that nostalgia my god i was already having nostalgia at 13 i just thought that was so cool and and so that always stayed in my head and i kind of played around some stuff during college blockbuster There’s actually the last blockbuster in the world is actually in Bend, there now?
Amr Selim | 10:12
Was my favorite shop Oregon, where I live. Really?
So what do they do now? What can you rent.
[email protected] | 10:21
They still have new releases and stuff. Yeah, I think they mostly make money off the merch now because the rentals are still ridiculously cheap.
Yeah.
And I said, sure enough. OK, let’s do this. Surely AI won’t take the programming jobs at some point. Right. Right. We didn’t know better back then. And so I was kind of going down that path, took a couple of different courses, did some fun projects. And I was actually getting ready to go back to school. And this was around the time I got that office manager job, which was stable, was nice. It paid the bills. It wasn’t a lot, but I figured, OK, I can do this during the day, go to school at night. A couple of years from now, I’ll have the new degree. I can get started. But in that first year of doing that, you know, I’m taking these courses with these like 18 year old kids, which is fine. But, you know, it’s just like, man, I’m back to square one, it felt like. But I had this feeling like, man, I’m about to tap into this new industry. I’m going to be at square one. I’m going to be, you know, about 32. And I’m going to really have to build my way up to even get to a place where I’m making enough money to consider buying a home in Bend, which is expensive, which I’m sure it’s like in British Columbia. And so it’s like, you know, yeah, it’s crazy. The average house here is 750,000, I think the last time I could Yeah.
Amr Selim | 11:47
Probably buy in Oregon, but not in B.C.
[email protected] | 11:50
So I was like, you know, that’s what kind of got me thinking like, okay, so it was a little bit of the money freedom. I think it really boils down to two things for a lot of people. It’s money freedom or time freedom. Right.
So for me, the money freedom started to like started the itch a little bit. And then, And then I had a friend reach out and he said, hey, I have a small business. I want to build a website. Can you help me with it? And I said, yeah, sure. And at the time I was like man, I was playing around with like React and all these other JavaScript frameworks. I wanted to test project. I was like, I’m going to make it stick, dude. I’m going to custom code. It’s going to be great. And he said, hey, can you just use WordPress? And I was like, is that still a Yeah, but last time I’d used WordPress was like in college for like a blog or something.
Amr Selim | 12:26
Thing? Yeah, but it was my coding skills.
[email protected] | 12:31
So I was like, all right, I’ll do it. I’ll figure it out. It was Friday. I said, give me the weekend. I’ll give you something. And, you know, I remember it was gosh, what’s that guy’s name? It’s escaping my mind. The party people, hate party people, whatever his name is. He’s got a whole bunch of Divi tutorials on there, but I followed like a Divi or Elementor tutorial and I wasn’t done with the site, but it was like 75% done. And I was amazed at how much progress I was able to make in just a weekend because I wasn’t having to custom code anything. You You didn’t have to code anything.
Amr Selim | 12:54
Didn’t have to code, exactly.
[email protected] | 12:56
I was just reusing stuff and swapping out the colors. And when I got done, he looked at it, he was like, dang, this is pretty good. And I was like, yeah, it is.
So that really opened my mind of like, okay, web designers are not custom coding websites. You became Accidental web designer.
Amr Selim | 13:09
An accidental web designer.
[email protected] | 13:13
Yeah. And so that’s what really opened my mind.
And then, you know, the rest is kind of history, but that’s when I found Josh Hall’s podcast. And what does he say at the start of his podcast back in the day? He says, give you the life and something that give you the freedom you love, right? And that’s what kind of opened up. The funny thing is I would listen to his podcast when I was driving back and forth. Was it the web that you love yeah it’s a lady’s voice it’s not yeah.
Amr Selim | 13:29
Design business that give you the freedom, the life? Freedom. What was the last thing in the tagline that you hope for? I don’t know. Josh’s voice.
[email protected] | 13:42
And yeah. And then I remember driving back and forth to my parents’ place where my brothers live and it’s like a three hour drive.
So I’m working at the office place and I’d listen to his podcast on that drive and listen on the way back. And because I was the office manager, small business, I was the office everything. And so like, I felt guilty to take a Friday off. I felt guilty to take a Monday off because we would get behind. And, you know, I had that freedom, the owner, you know, If you ever listen to any of these podcasts, I’m not, you know, saying anything against you. I know you would give me time off, but it was like this personal, you know, this was my, you know, cross the bears that I had to, I didn’t want to get behind. And so I would like rush back and forth to see my family. And so that really opened up the time freedom aspect for us.
Like, man, if I could control when and where I work, like, man, that would be really nice. And it would open up this door for freedom to hang out with family more. And, you know, for, you know, with friends and build relationships and all these This was actually, this was like late 2022.
Amr Selim | 14:32
Things. That was what, 2018 or 19, something like that? So it’s after COVID. Okay.
[email protected] | 14:41
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And so, yeah, post COVID. And yeah.
And then that was really the thing that kind of gave me the impetus to say, let’s start. And so it was the start of 2023. I sat there with my, on New Year’s Eve with my Martinelli’s and I said, I wish this was something stronger so I could blame it on this, but I want to start a business this year.
Amr Selim | 15:00
That’s pretty good. The inspiration came from the podcast.
[email protected] | 15:05
Yeah, actually, it’s like crazy that, but yeah, it was kind of like I said, I was going to go back to school for computer science. I paused and built the website for the friend, started to listen to Josh’s podcast, and then There was a little bit more. I actually, at the time, I was actually fresh off of, I was working on some self-development things and some job development stuff through the WorkSource program here in Oregon. And they actually paid for me to do Josh’s courses, which was pretty amazing that the state would do something like that.
And then if not for that, I don’t know if I would have actually jumped in. But his podcast, like Planted the Seed, then I did the courses right away.
And then there’s like a moved them to…
Amr Selim | 15:40
Funny story. When they were still on the website, like before you.
[email protected] | 15:45
Yeah, and Pro was like, still had just started it wasn’t the club anymore it was pro and then i There was like a funny story where I like paid for one of the courses and then I asked for a refund because I’m like, hey, I’m going to get the bundle, but the state’s going to pay for it. But I need an invoice. Josh, will you do this? And I felt so scared. I reached out to this internet person like my gosh, is he going to write me back? And yeah, he ended up being great.
And then the money I got back for the course was like 300 bucks. And so I told myself, I’m going to take this $300. I’m going to invest it in pro for the next three months and we’ll just see what happens. And I haven’t left pro since.
Amr Selim | 16:20
Man, I love the community. It’s unbelievable.
Yeah. I’ve been there on the Facebook groups and… As a person, I don’t prefer Facebook for anything at all. I’ve been on it from 2008. And in the beginning, the greatest thing about it is that I connected with my school friends and third degree cousins that I haven’t seen in a long time. And many of the people who you had no way of communicating with. And it was great because you’d remember, it will give you an… A notification when it’s somebody’s birthday whatever and it was nice for these social interactions until I remember, I think, what was it, 2011, whatever was called the Arab Spring, when all the Arab countries started to revolt at the same time, and then Facebook became extremely political.
And then from that moment onwards, they kept on changing the interface, being more focused on ads. Like in one, I remember one time I’d open and I can’t even see real people. Everything on my timeline was posts, but they’re like, you know, bumped up posts.
[email protected] | 17:21
Ads. Yeah. It’s like Google’s like.
Amr Selim | 17:27
And then towards, I don’t know, I think completely last year, April, 2025, when we had our elections in Canada, we and people started to fight and I’ve been called names and whatever. It felt like, dude, like why am I even there? It’s just wasting so much time.
So I still have the account. I go there from time to time. I have some like friends groups that I want to check out from time to time, but I’m not really, I don’t post anymore. I’m not active.
And then same thing with Twitter. Like I would log into Twitter once every six months just to have a quick look and get the hell out of there. I don’t do Instagram. I have an account that has been dormant. I don’t do TikTok. Don’t even have the app. And you know, like the peace of mind that I have kind of having no social media or that kind of limited social media.
Well, I tell you, but I’ve been on these groups with Josh from the beginning.
[email protected] | 18:19
I was going to say, you were like one of the OGs, one of the first ones.
Amr Selim | 18:23
Yeah, and you see like It’s morphing. It’s like it starts like very positive. Everything is about the course and everything is about web design. Then you get the old one who wants to promote something and probably something not even related to web, like whatever they have a product, a real product.
Well, I mean, it’s not like web is not real, but like a physical product. And then you get the people fighting over somebody who said, I don’t know, Elementor is better than Divi or whatever.
And then you get all these long conversations threads. And it feels like just a total waste of time.
So I was really pleased when he decided to move everything to a platform that’s not Facebook. And I’m really glad that Circle works in this amazing way that gives you an interface that you will be kind of familiar with.
So you’re not lost in there, but there’s no distraction from all the other like politics and fights. And it’s kind of a clean, nice, like, I don’t want to repeat that word again, but like if you hear the interview with Josh, you’ll figure out what we called it. But Yeah.
[email protected] | 19:26
I think I saw that part.
Amr Selim | 19:28
It’s coming from one of my ex-managers, actually. He used to call the social part of a learning management system. He used to call it that.
So, yeah. So this is a great thing because I think when you joined, there was no Facebook groups anymore. Right. It was Circle. You had the course on the website and the community on Circle.
And then you introduce yourself and everybody connects with everybody. And it’s funny because you have some people there who have been there as long as I’ve been.
Like kind of founder members, right? And it’s like the community that welcomes every newcomer. Yeah. You’ll always get an email from certain people.
You know that they’re waiting for somebody new to come to say, hey, you know, if you need anything, we’re here. I love that. I love that.
So you got in there and then what happens? Did you do all Josh’s courses?
Like, I think there’s, what, business.
[email protected] | 20:14
12 of them? Yeah, I don’t know because I know he’s added a couple. You did the I get in a high level community, not a Facebook group, you know, like some there are, you know, I’m sure there are good Facebook groups out there, but they’re hard.
Amr Selim | 20:18
I think everybody does the business course because then.
[email protected] | 20:52
They’re few and far between. It’s like invest a little bit of money, get in a good community.
You know, if you’re a web designer, you might as well just join Web Designer Pro because it’s the best thing around. And like showing up to those calls, getting Josh’s feedback and then feedback from other members, too, where it’s like, Yeah, I was still figuring out the principles of design. And so it’s like having people basically grill your website and be like, well, you should really move the button like this. Or maybe turn that orange down a little bit.
You know, you don’t really want to put black on this. You want it to be white because it’s contrast and it’s like, whoa. And so like the getting out there and getting the reps, I feel like it really helped me grow a lot faster than if I just would have taken the courses and tried to build sites myself and just lived in kind of like a silo.
Like it’s so easy, especially after COVID, you know, during that time, everybody got so isolated and separated and there’s all this, you know, division, whether it’s real or not, that’s portrayed out there. But it’s like, yeah.
Amr Selim | 21:43
To become people again, because I think all the lockdowns and that part, I want to erase it from my memory. I did get a lot of business. The COVID year was very successful for me because I built e-commerce websites for everybody who had a shop because they couldn’t trade. They needed somewhere online.
So business-wise, it was one of my best years income-wise, but I was sad as a person. And I had my family with me.
So it’s not like I’m locked out away from everyone that I love and whatever. But it was just sad. You go out in the streets and like shops are closed. And the problem is even after they reopened with everything else and the cost of living and, you know, all the inflation that hit us here, many businesses, many small businesses closed.
So your favorite shot for this and that is no longer there. So it makes it really sadder, like, God, if we didn’t have COVID, maybe, you know, these people would have survived and maybe we didn’t, we wouldn’t have had that like big inflation that we had because the Canadian government was basically printing money.
So they just printed more money and gave it to people and they gave They called it CERB, which is like the government kind of income because you lost your income. So they were giving everyone $2,000. And I appreciate the fact that they did it really quickly.
Like within a few weeks, it was on and it went to people’s bank accounts. But they had kind of no scrutiny. And now they’re trying to get their money back from people who were not eligible. And of course, people are not paying back. And I think that the amount is like, I don’t know, I may be wrong about the number, but I think it’s around $14 billion, which is a lot of money.
[email protected] | 23:20
Small chunk of change.
Amr Selim | 23:22
Yeah. So it was, yeah, I don’t know.
So the whole thing about COVID was sad. I think it accelerated the online world, which is, I’ve been pushing for e-commerce.
Like basically I was an e-commerce consultant for a big firm before and people were pushing back against e-commerce, but people with shops and a good turnover who are selling physical goods, they didn’t want to go online. No matter how hard you push them, they didn’t want to go online. They didn’t understand it. They didn’t want to have a, someone dedicated to manage the online storefront and update the stocks and whatever. They felt that, why bother? It’s too much work. Comes COVID and everyone jumps there. And even some of the people got it wrong, but everyone now has a presence, which is a good thing because they have a presence, but they don’t know what to do with it.
So they got to meet you now to know what to do with it. So from web design, so your agency was a web design agency at first, right?
Like regular web design agency, you take a project, you build a website or refresh a website and you deliver to the client. Why you thought that your passion is not here, if I’m allowed to say that, because I can clearly see your passion is search engine optimization. It’s kind of, I almost hate the word SEO anyway, but it’s findability. That’s what I like to call it.
Like the SEO, I call it findability. It’s like you do stuff for your prospect clients to find you. Because you could be doing something great, but not many people know about it.
So you need to do some work. So what made you think like, why don’t I do something with SEO?
[email protected] | 24:57
Yeah, that was kind of the big shift, right? So early on in that first year, I left the office manager job, probably earlier than I should have, but that’s, let’s see the here, the there, that was decisions that Sam made. And so I was out there and I was trying to get clients and I told people, hey, I build websites for small businesses. And what I kept hearing is cool.
So to Squarespace. And I was like, dang it.
And then they would. But then they’d always follow that question up with, what do you know about ranking higher on Google? And I was like. And so it’s like, I just started to take notes. And I remember it was around the end of the first year. I was about to make a decision to start offering local SEO services. I dabbled a little, you know, done some stuff for some clients. I felt confident enough where I can go forth and I can start selling these services. And I said, should I go all in on SEO? And, you know, it made me really think because my impression of SEO is the same impression that everybody else gets when they get their 40 emails a day that says that somebody can rank them first on Google, right? The industry feels scammy. My name’s Sam. It’s only one letter away from scam. Am I going to be running this scammy SEO agency now where I’m ripping people off? Scammy Sam. Scammy Sam.
And then I said, hold on a second here. This is my business, right? I get to run it how I want to run it. And, you know, I went back to that, you know, primary core value of service, wanting to help people, you know, back in the day, it was on the ambulance with the websites. It was to hopefully, you know, build websites that would help businesses. But at the end of the day, They got to get results, baby. You can spend all this money on this amazing website, but if nobody’s getting to it, it’s not going to actually make them any money. And so, you know, that was really the turning point there. And I said, okay, I’m going to go forth. I’m going to try to provide the best SEO I can possible to hopefully get the best results for clients. And once I made that shift, that’s kind of where the business started to blow up because, you know, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re maybe a web designer too, you might have felt that feast or famine cycle between projects, right? And it kind of stinks when you don’t know when the next check is going to come in from the next project or that delivery check because you finished a web design project. And so the nice thing about having a growth service, as Josh likes to call it, whether it be SEO or social media content or whatever it is that you do, like there is this recurring aspect.
So you kind of get this stable income, even if it’s just a little bit, like just knowing your rent is paid for every month, that’s a nice feeling. And so, and then eventually, you know, it’s not just your rent or your mortgage, it’s, you know, this bill. And the next thing you know, you’re like, I actually have a business that’s sustaining me. And that’s where I really felt the shift from like job to business, worked on building a team around me.
And then the team quickly pointed out that we need systems and they can’t all live in Sam’s head. And I was like, that’s a good point. And yeah, here we are just a few years later, but you know, we have a couple dozen clients, team of about seven or eight people, depending on how you count it. And, you know, looking to keep helping more people show up higher locally. And like you said, findability is one way to say it. I’ve been talking a lot more about recommendations lately.
I mean, that’s really what Google’s doing, right? It’s recommending, but it feels more apt to like the AI search that’s been going on, right? When I go on ChatGPT, I’m asking for a recommendation, kind of like we’d ask for a recommendation from our friend back in the day. But because of COVID, because a lot of people moved around over the last couple of years and don’t make friends in real life as much as they used to, we turn to our electronic friends to ask us for advice and we need a recommendation. You move to a new town and you notice that your fence is dirty, you know, you need to call a fence cleaning company. And you know, if you’re too scared to walk across the street and ask your neighbor who a good fence cleaning company is, you’re just going to go to Google. Maybe you’ll ask Chad GPT. Most people still use Google, but it’s true. My wife.
Amr Selim | 28:20
Is saying to my kids, is Chad GPT now a family member? Every time we say something, my son or my daughter would say, I asked chat GPT and it told me to do this. And I said, like, You do know that it hallucinates sometimes.
Like, it’s not…
[email protected] | 28:38
Yeah. It hallucinates a lot more than we think. When you really sit down and look at it, you’re like, wait a minute. And we had this like… Wave of like six months where it was just completely sycophantic.
So basically anything you said was a good idea according to it.
Amr Selim | 28:50
It’s very useful sometimes and at other times it’s absolutely crap, but… I it every day.
[email protected] | 28:57
Use.
Amr Selim | 29:00
I woke up this morning. I have a VPS server. And I woke up this morning. The server is working, but the sites are not responding. And I’m thinking, like, the first thing you think is like, could it be a denial of service attack or something?
Like somebody’s over flooding something. With requests.
I mean, when I logged in the arrow log was that big. I didn’t understand it because it’s full of stuff.
Like where do I even start? So I copied everything, put it in chat GPT and like simply after all this, it said your PHP is not running. It’s like, really? It’s like, I was so worried.
Like, it’s a denial of service attack. Is this, is that?
And then At the end of the day, it turns out that I had PHP 8 twice so one of them is conflicting with the other so both of them are not running and like I don’t know why I had it twice or what happened like I was working on the website last night it was okay there was no issues I go to bed wake up 6 in the morning this started So if I didn’t have chat GPT or Gemini or anything like that, I wouldn’t have. You’d probably right?
[email protected] | 30:02
Still be working on it right now and trying to figure it out.
Amr Selim | 30:04
Yeah. I was even considering, should I send to Sam and say like, you know, I’m dealing with a problem. Maybe we should reschedule, whatever. But like I was, once I knew what it is, I was able to fix it within like 10, 15 minutes. My cat is here.
Well, yeah, I don’t think the camera got him. He’s He loves being on these calls.
[email protected] | 30:19
Covering. I could see one ear.
Amr Selim | 30:23
Like he’s been on so many of my podcast episodes.
[email protected] | 30:26
That’s awesome. Yeah. I have a dog who usually comes in. She’s not as quiet though. She’s not.
Amr Selim | 30:32
Talking. Like he’s very talkative, but now he’s not talking. I think he’s, I did some changes to the room yesterday.
So I think he’s trying to figure it out. So yeah, but another time I asked Chad GPT, but I have an offline version running on one of my computers. And I asked Chad GPT about myself. My God, it made up a story about a carpet salesman who’s called Amr the internet guy. Who’s it? Gone viral on TikTok and it’s like, what the heck is this? It’s like, the story was brilliant. If only I wasn’t the person that does nothing So when you say local SEO, what’s the difference between local SEO and if you just say the word SEO?
[email protected] | 31:02
Like it. Who knows? Maybe the story is still unfolding.
Yeah, in my other life, I still have carpets. That’s funny.
Yeah. So there’s a couple of different flavors of SEO as I like to call it. And so, you know, usually if you go on YouTube and you look up something like, you know, SEO, what you’re probably talking about is national SEO. And a lot of people will get confused. They think, does that mean like just ranking in Canada or just ranking in America? No, I mean, that really just means like trying to rank for everything. But it really is more related to informational searches first leading to like a commercial decision. And so like, let’s say, you know, we had, let’s use Josh as an example, right? He’s a web design coach and he has a community, right? He has courses. And so if he wanted to rank for web design coach, He doesn’t care if the person’s in Columbus, which is the city he’s in, or if the person’s in, you know, Australia. He just wants to show up for that search. And so that would be an example of national SEO.
You know, there’s top of funnel keywords, which are more informational. You know, how do I get started in web design? Things that you’re asking yourself.
And then bottom of the funnel would be more like web design coaches or like web design courses, things like that, which is a more commercial intent where somebody has their hand over their wallet, they’re ready to go. So that’s national SEO. Another flavor is like e-commerce SEO. You’re talking about e-commerce. A little while ago, you know, so there’s a lot of e-bike shops in town. And so, you know, if somebody was looking up e-bike, you know, then, you know, not only are you optimizing for like the broad category that your business does, but you’re doing like category pages. And product pages, right? And so it’s like Vins clothing and, you know, even like shirts and then this specific type of shirt, right?
So there’s a lot of like sub things you could be ranking for. And then there’s SaaS and there’s all sorts of other things.
So those are the flavors that Sam is not an expert on, but he knows a little bit.
Amr Selim | 32:54
About. No, but like I want to ask you about something here, but let’s just hold this conversation because we need to continue this conversation. And I’m sorry that I interrupted, but because I’m thinking most business owners don’t even know what we’re talking about you know, when you say about category page.
So I just wanted to clarify that because this is the dilemma that people, business owners have as well. They try to rank the homepage, but their homepage is everything to do about the business.
So it’s not really focused about a product, a specific product. So the homepage is the hardest thing to rank unless it’s a landing page about one thing and one thing only. But if it’s a page about what you do as a business or what you do as a specialist in your field, it’s not going to rank that high because it doesn’t really talk to anything specific other than you. But when you’re trying to rank, as you said, like you have a category, you’re a clothing shop.
So you’ve got your homepage is a clothing shop, even if it’s an online store. But you got to have a page per category.
So one for t-shirts, one for jackets, one for pants, one for whatever. And then for each one of those, you want to rank.
And then for each specific product that comes under the category, you want to rank. So there is… It’s like a hierarchy, but in each step of the hierarchy, you got to do some work. It’s not like, you know, I set it and forget it. It’s not like, hey, I will put you on the first page of Google. Okay, good luck. Even if you work with Google, you can do that.
[email protected] | 34:25
Yeah. And I mean, listen to all the complexity of that.
I mean, that’s for e-commerce store. And I mean, even if you only have, 15 products it starts to get super complicated and so there’s a reason why I chose local SEO so that’s the last flavor of Yeah.
Amr Selim | 34:41
My list now the local SEO let’s go yeah.
[email protected] | 34:43
And so local SEO is basically, you know, you’re trying to do SEO in a specific geographic region. Now, why would you do that? Now that would, that’s usually for like service-based businesses. Now there are some product businesses that are, you know, local, like a gift shop or something like that, but I’m thinking more of our service providers, you know, people that go to your house.
Yeah. Or yeah. Professional holistic medicine, you know, your naturopaths, acupuncturists, things like that. Right. And so the, Those people can only work with people within a certain range. Now, sometimes there’s some flexibility with that.
You know, a therapist can maybe work with people in the whole province or state that they’re in or something like that. But typically, they would be very happy to get just a handful of clients from their specific area. And so when it comes to local SEO, the reason why I like it, and this is, you know, my thing that I love to show up on the rooftops, is it really only comes down to three things. Your Google business profile, your website, and building authority through industry-related- I’m glad you said Yes.
Amr Selim | 35:34
Google business profile first.
[email protected] | 35:37
Because, I mean, the map pack’s the first thing that shows up. So if you could show up there, you can start getting leads right away. Because even if.
Amr Selim | 35:41
You can’t rank, many people don’t know that. If you have very high competition in your field and you cannot rank for your specific keyword, but you have a good Google business profile, when people search, on top of the page, you get the searches that come from Google Maps.
So you’ll be there on page one anyway, even though you’re not on the results in page one, you’re on the Google Maps, which is coming from Google My Business. So that’s a great hack.
Like, you know, because I don’t know, like you cannot rank for sneakers, for example. Like it’s going to.
[email protected] | 36:12
Be hard. And that’s the thing. It’s like think about the competition.
You know, if you’re trying to rank for sneakers because maybe you have a small clothing store in your area, like you are kind of competing against Nike at all times. Exactly. Exactly. But if you’re a roofer, even if you’re in a bigger town like Vancouver, it’s like there’s only maybe 100 roofers. And so it’s like, okay, you got a chance, right? And, you know, there’s… One in whatever.
Amr Selim | 36:31
100 is better than one in 10 million or.
[email protected] | 36:34
Yeah. And so it’s like there’s some big companies that have been around for a long time that clog up the first page and usually the map pack. But you can chip away at those.
You know, we had a little… I was going to say we had a little father-son company here in town and they started from nothing. They had a little Wix site they built that was like one page and we said, “Okay, we’re going to build you a new site and then we’re going to start working on your SEO.” And it took about a year and a half, but they started to rank right there. It was like guys that have billboards, guys that have giant team and marketing division, them, and then the next big company. And it’s like, “Hey, look, this stuff can work, one?
Amr Selim | 37:05
But-” It’s just below the big players. Yeah.
Yeah. Which is where you want to be. You said Google My Business website. What was the third.
[email protected] | 37:12
Yeah, the third one is building authority, which has to do with getting backlinks, especially locally relevant and industry relevant backlinks. And so a backlink, for those that don’t know, is just basically another website having a link that’s going back to your website.
Amr Selim | 37:25
It’s like somebody recommending you or somebody talking about you. So the Google is that there is interest in what you do in the community.
[email protected] | 37:34
Yeah. And it could be as simple as a citation to, you know, having your Yelp page filled out, having your, you know, for like a service pro, having your home advisor, your Angie. Yelp is still a thing? Yelp is still a thing. It’s usually one of the first search results in local SEO, actually.
So you don’t necessarily need to show higher in Yelp. Who knows how that works?
Amr Selim | 37:53
Yeah, and you don’t have to pay Yelp for the premium, whatever they will call you and try to offer to you. Yeah. Let’s take this case because it’s interesting. You said… Google My Business website and build authority.
So with the case of the father and son company, So they… I’m assuming they didn’t have Google My Business and you were saying they just built One page on Wix.
Yeah. So when you got to, when you were introduced to them, what was the first things that you told them we need to work on?
[email protected] | 38:23
Well, the first thing we worked on was website. You know, I think that You know, I like to think of a marketing pie chart a lot, especially as we’ve worked with more businesses that are a little bit bigger. It’s like, you know, there’s more than one way to peel an orange, as they say. You’re not supposed to say the way you’re supposed to. You used to say it, but there’s more than one ways to make money as a service business. And so it’s like you can use Google ads, you can use mailers in your town, you can use meta ads, you can, you know, you can do all sorts of stuff. I like organic because that, you know, when you pay for ads, it’s like a faucet, right? You turn it on, you’re getting leads, you turn it off, they’re gone. And you still have to optimize all those platforms, even local service ads, which are great. They’re expensive, but they’re great. But you still have to optimize that. You still got to listen to make, you know, if you get a spam call, you got to, you know, put in a claim. And a lot of business owners get too busy and that kind of falls apart. Now, I’m not saying it can’t be part of your strategy. But anyway, I like organic because it doesn’t go away right away. And so for these guys, they’re They really didn’t have any presence. And so I, and so I’m like, Hey, you know, you guys are still going to be knocking on doors. You’re still going to be trying to get referrals from your first couple of clients.
So let’s build up that website. Let’s get some photos of the projects you’ve done already.
So that way you have that hub of your marketing started. Then from there we can build on top of that.
So the website was the first thing we did. And then we started to work on Google business profile and really starting to optimize things out, building a location pages so they could rank all over our town. And that’s where we got some easy wins and we’re able to get them showing up in the city He’s, you know, near our kind of hub suburb city. And then, yeah, building authority, which is something you want to do over time.
You know, I always tell people like your number one goal when you’re doing SEO is you want to look natural. You want to kind of pretend like you’re the business when you’re doing it. And so it’s like, just because we can bust out 200 pages overnight now with chat GPT or whatever, doesn’t mean we should. Right. And with building links, you can build all these links.
You know, you can pay somebody on Fiverr to build all these links for a couple hundred bucks probably in a day. But what’s that going to look like to Google when they see you just got all these links overnight? And so like something to be said about getting.
You know, a natural profile of like high, medium and low quality, not spammy, but low, lower quality links, over time And same thing with like your pages, like it’s good to have a page for each one of your services. It’s good to have a page for that in each location, but don’t do it right away.
Like kind of space it out. I’m not saying you have to do like one a month, but you know, just space it out a little bit, make it look more natural.
Amr Selim | 40:46
And it’s the beauty of local SEO as well. It forces the business owner to think, where do I want to show like electronically, like online? Because if you ask anyone starting a business, they would like to have clients from anywhere. It doesn’t really matter where the clients come from. But as you rightfully said, for service businesses, if you can just feel like, let’s say you work by appointment and you do physiotherapy, right? Once your day is booked. That’s it. Once your five days a week are booked, that’s it. You cannot take any more clients.
So if these five days a week are booked by people who live around you, that’s it. You’re done. You’re like, you’re done in a good way.
Yeah.
[email protected] | 41:26
You’re at capacity. Yeah. You don’t.
Amr Selim | 41:27
Need, yeah. You don’t need to show for people in the town, which is adjacent to your town or in your state or whatever.
Like if you can get all your appointments filled by your local clients, success, that’s it. You don’t need to do, you know, anymore. You need to maintain that success, but like, that’s it.
[email protected] | 41:45
So you kind of get to decide if you want to grow or if you want to, like you said, like kind of, I like to call it like building a moat, you know, like when we do get our clients trying really highly, okay, how do we not lose? Because the competition is, And.
Amr Selim | 41:59
Maybe they’re not necessarily doing a better job than you in your industry, but they’re doing a better job marketing themselves online. So you got to, yeah, you got to stay awake. I’m, I mean, you already answered it, but like, I still get like 40 odd emails a week. With people in other parts of the world trying to offer me SEO services. The funny thing is They tried to offer me web design. And like, there were some cases when I got irritated and I responded by, do you even know what we do for living?
Yeah, I get those emails because I love the fact when they send these because some of my clients on my maintenance plan, they get these emails too when they ask me.
[email protected] | 42:31
They’re like, did you know we can get you to rank number one? I was like, go look up our top keywords. We are ranking number one. Have a good day.
Amr Selim | 42:45
And that’s all it was email to me. The worst one I see is when they go and write, your website is not ranking, but that’s it. It’s not, there’s no details. It’s like, okay, it’s not ranking for what?
Like what keyword, what industry, what? No, they just send your website is not ranking. And that spammy email is meant to scare the, whoever receives it. It’s like my God, I am not ranking.
Yeah. Like you’re a plumber. Would you want to rank for Nike shoes?
Like.
[email protected] | 43:13
You know what I mean? Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Amr Selim | 43:14
You’re not ranking for what? That’s the question.
[email protected] | 43:17
Yeah. And then they promise they can get you to rank number one, but they’ll get you to rank for some obscure term that nobody ever searches ever. And like, look, you’re ranking number one. And it’s like, cool.
Amr Selim | 43:24
So in the age of AI and now that AI would give summaries and stuff like, I know I still search Google, but then in the results page, I get the Yeah, I get the AI first, then I get the results that are coming from Google Maps, then I get the regular results underneath.
[email protected] | 43:35
AI. Review.
Amr Selim | 43:43
Do you think that it’s changing a bit how things used to be done in order to rank for specific keywords before AI started and now? Because I think it’s becoming, in my opinion, I think it’s becoming more human, like more human-based. It’s no longer kind of a keyword as per se, but it’s kind of a, it’s picking up the story. That’s the way I see it. But I don’t know, do you see the same or is it different?
[email protected] | 44:08
Yeah, so I think anybody that says that AI is not having an impact on search is naive. Go ask any publisher how they’re doing after last year.
Like those guys got decimated because their whole job was to basically answer questions with their pages and now AI overviews answers the question for you so you don’t get to their pages, so they don’t make the right revenue, you know, their dollars are down, things are bad over there. And so now the question is this going to happen to local businesses? And the answer is that the AI overviews haven’t shown up as much, but they do, especially if you search like longer searches, then it tends to pop up and say, They’ve been experimenting very recently with like an AI generated map pack.
So we’ll see if they keep playing around with that. They definitely, I think Google, they’ve tried this before and they kind of rolled it back to the MatPak. I think they’ve realized the MatPak is a good user experience. But we’ll see what they do with that.
At the end of the day, one thing I really think about a lot, one of my one of the other agency owners in town said this. I’m glad that Josh teaches coopetition, right? We can talk to our editor and find those places where we can actually work together. And he said I asked him this because I was still pretty new. This was still back in 2023 when I first started. And I said, do you ever get worried about AI in our industry? And he said, let me tell you this, Sam said, I think that no matter what, when it comes to people that want to work with people in their area, like that part’s not going to go away, right? People are going to need to work with people in their area until the fence can get cleaned by a robot, until a roof can get installed by, you know, some automated system, you know, It’s still going to be humans working with humans, right? And the key is like, no matter how we use the internet, like right now it’s through browsers on our computers, phones and tablets and stuff like that. Right. He’s like, even if we switch to headsets and goggles and all this stuff, like there will probably be people in the middle that are helping small businesses get connected to people in their area. And I was like, Ooh, That is a good point. And I think that’s going to be true. And I think we’ve started to see the first real shift because although like if you actually look at the numbers, Google is still usually over 90% of the market share, especially for local searches.
So it’s like most people are still starting on Google, especially for local search, but they might do some of their research on chat GPT, right? Especially like a kitchen remodel in Bend costs like 50 to 80 to maybe even a hundred thousand dollars depending on how big your home is.
So it’s like you’re going to take your time looking that up. And so you might ask some questions. You might start on chat GPT or Claude or Grok or whatever you like to use, right? Gemini.
I mean, you might just say like, okay, so like, do I need to remodel? Like, you know, you start off with these basic questions with your assistant and then you might get to the place where you’re like, maybe I’ll start asking for recommendations.
And then you get those first couple and then maybe you hop over to Google so you can actually look at the reviews and you go to their websites because if you’re going to invest that much money, you’re going to try to learn everything you can. Right. And so, Again, this kind of goes back to being like a recommendation thing.
Like, how do we make sure we’re getting recommended by these tools that people are doing deeper research? But how do we still show up in Google for when, you know, you’re a locksmith and somebody’s just locked out of their car at the Safeway and they want to get into their car, right? You just want Yeah, they don’t really care about your backstory and all that stuff.
Amr Selim | 47:10
To be very personal. They want the closest locksmith to them that’s open now.
[email protected] | 47:16
So I think, you know, there’s definitely an element where like… You know, you need to still kind of do keyword research to an extent because you need to know what people are searching for on the way to your business, right? You want to make sure you’re matching like actual volume. I just had somebody reach out the other day. I was like, people don’t really search for a keyword.
You know that, right? But it’s, you know, it’s like, So you need to know that. You need to validate that. This.
Amr Selim | 47:33
Is harder than it looks, by the way. Just deciding what keywords. It’s not an easy thing. I.
[email protected] | 47:40
Think it’s less about exact match and it’s more about antics. It’s the way people’s been for a long time, right? But it’s like that entity. It’s like building that entity of like, for instance, for like what we do, you know, it’s like we’re an agency. We provide these services. This is our name, these things. And Google, as well as Open AI and all these other companies start to get an idea of like, this is what this business does. These are all the services they provide. These are the people they can help best. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And same thing with our clients websites. How do we really get that on the website, on the profile, in other places across the internet to build this entity that says, this is what, you know, Carl’s, you know, plumbing service in Vancouver, BC does.
So that way when people are looking for, you know, the pipe has burst, you that’s the business that gets recommended and so yeah it’s an interesting time for sure but i don’t think like because we try to stick to the best practices and our best practices list you know just started a couple years ago we’re because we’re kind of young the other day i had a call a couple calls with a guy and i think he ended up going with a different company which i’m okay with you know i can’t win them all but he was asking like why should i trust a guy that’s only been doing this for a couple years when i could work the nation’s working for 10 years And I said, well, the playbook was different 10 years ago. You know, you’re writing all these blogs and stuffing all these keywords into it. And people still do that strategy and say, hey, we could do it even easier now because we can just have ChatGPT write these blogs. But here’s the thing. Blogs aren’t what people are expecting when they’re searching your keyword, when they’re looking for something like, you know, custom blind installation, you know, Redmond, Oregon, they’re not looking for a blog. They want to know like the company and they want to know what products do you have? Is it going to, you know, is it going to be these kinds of blinds right here? The little fancy, foldy up ones that are really expensive or is it going to be the old ones with the string?
Like, what do they have here? So anyway, that’s, I don’t remember what the original question was, but that was my SEO.
Amr Selim | 49:26
Perfect. I love that.
Like it’s a, yeah, Because people don’t realize that when we say search engine optimization or what I call findability, it’s an industry on its own. It’s not a one thing. It’s not a one way. It’s not like, as you rightfully said, if people are just saying, you know, this agency has been around for two years, but somebody else has been around for longer, it doesn’t necessarily out of the box makes them better.
Like, okay, they could be, we don’t know. But like in general, the number itself doesn’t mean much, like 10 years or whatever.
I mean, I’ve worked with a CEO, God bless his soul, he passed away. But he used to say one thing when we were hiring new employees, he says, when you interview a somebody with 10 years experience, just make sure they have 10 years experience in different things. Not a one year experience repeated 10 times.
Like, yeah, it’s like, this was like a light bulb. Like, wow.
Yeah. That’s brilliant.
So do how many people are aware, like after they come to you and like, sorry, not after, before they come to you. And then when you have the initial discussion that they have to do some work. In order to rank, like, you know, they have to post sometimes even on Google My Business as.
[email protected] | 50:41
Well. Yeah, I think people are pretty savvy these days.
You know, I think there’s been a lot of, especially over the last couple of years, a big wave of people basically saying like, here’s how it works and posting it out in the open. And so most people know that they have to do something with the Google business profile. They know that they have to get a steady stream of reviews, right? They know that they need to add pages to their website. They like people are even starting to know like what backlinks mean and the importance of it. It’s usually just they don’t know the recipe or they can’t build the strategy. And that’s usually where, you know, you kind of have to decide like, OK, what you know, where is my business at? Do I want to DIY this and try to figure this all out myself? Or is it time to hire an agency that maybe I can trust? And so like for like the people out there that are still trying to DIY it, that’s why we have our 30 day local SEO playbook at 30dayseo.com. And it’s like over 100 pages of stuff that basically gives you one day of SEO, you know, like tasks to do.
So that way you can take it one step at a time and try to build up your own strategy. But a lot of people kind of get stuck in that process. And if they do, they…
You know, that’s where an agency can come in. Sorry, my dog did finally.
Amr Selim | 51:52
I don’t know if I should put a tagline on this episode. A dog and a cat with Sam and Hammer come here.
Yeah, I feel like sometimes when people ask for SEO services, they expect everything to be done for you. And while I feel like, yeah, there are some agencies who will even let their team post on your website on your behalf, which is not a bad thing if you’re extremely busy, but I still feel that you should take some ownership as a business owner.
Like it shouldn’t be a complete DIY or a complete done for you. It should be, you know, you work with the agency on the strategy and the tasks and stuff, and then you take some of the things and you do yourself.
So this way your hands are in the business, like you’re the one leading the charge. Yeah.
[email protected] | 52:36
That’s kind of how we set up. I call the first month of, you know, when people work with us long term, I call it the SEO strategy sprint. It’s usually just the first month. We do some of the basic stuff. A lot of people do like the GBP optimization and we do like a technical SEO audit and clean up all that stuff. But the main thing we’re doing is we’re building the strategy. Right. And, you know, one of the first things we do is what we call the SEO kickoff call. And, you know, we ask them basic questions, but they get skipped a lot of times. List every one of the services you do and put them in priority order and all the service areas you service. And again, put those in priority order so that way we can kind of use that as we’re building strategy. And after we’ve done the keyword research to validate, people are actually searching for those services in this area. Then we kind of present the strategy to them. We call it the SEO game plan. And we say, okay, here’s our plan for the year. And kind of like sports, you know, it’s like, okay, this is our plan in quarter one. As the game goes on, we might shift this and adjust a little bit, but here’s our plan right now. Look at it and approve it.
And then we’ll go forth and then it can become a little bit more of a done for you. But if you don’t have a good plan, what you’re really doing is guess CEO. And you don’t want to be doing guess CEO. You want to be doing SEO. I stole that from Nathan Gotch. Shout out to Nathan Josh, was that?
Amr Selim | 53:43
Gotch. Want to say that again? Shout out to I love that.
[email protected] | 53:46
No, I said shout out to Nathan Gotch. He’s an SEO guy. That’s where I stole that from.
Amr Selim | 53:53
Hey, Nathan, I don’t know you, but I love it. How long does it normally take before some good results start to.
[email protected] | 54:00
Show? Yeah, I mean, it depends. The big thing it depends on is the amount of competition you have and your starting point. Hopefully you can’t hear Pete. She’s making all sorts of crazy noises on the ground right now, but…
Amr Selim | 54:12
He’s like, you have a lion now, not a dog.
[email protected] | 54:16
Yeah, she’s like, I want to… It’s playtime. Let’s see if I can take a quick detour in our podcast episode. She stopped. Being crazy.
So, It has to do with the amount of competition. And so… And what you’ve done, you know, so we have, you know, sometimes we work with a business that’s been doing SEO for a long time and they don’t have a lot of competition.
I mean, sometimes it’s just the SEO before this being done was bad, but some authority was built behind the scenes. And so it’s like this might only take a month or some of the wins might be short or quicker, I should say.
And then, you know, sometimes the competition’s really stiff and they haven’t done anything. In that case, you got to give realistic expectations, you know? A recent one is the biggest company we’ve ever worked with.
You know, we’re talking an eight figure company, you know, trucks all over town, you know, they have their own buildings, they sponsor events, they have a marketing team, you know, we’re working with the marketing director, not the business owner. This is the biggest company we’ve worked with. We went through, we did the SEO game plan and we said, Hey, like you’re actually showing up pretty good for a lot of your keywords, but you’re not showing up for any of the near me searches. And so one of the examples was painters near me, like, And they, you know, they are supposed to be the painting company in town. And so once they saw that, they’re like, yeah, we’re ticked off about that. And so we said, well, that’s going to be one of the first things we target.
So like within, I want to say it was about two weeks. It took a little bit for the page to get indexed and updated and all that stuff. Right. But within two weeks, They were already showing up like eighth. And now here we are, maybe like three or four months into it. We’ve worked on a little bit more. They’re showing up now second, right behind Yelp.
So they’re the first business that gets recommended when you search painters near me in our area now. And that’s a, it’s a massive search term where it’s getting, you know, hundreds of searches a month. And, you know, they’re spending, the cost per click is like $40 per click. And so think about that difference.
Like, they can now turn that ad spend down because they’re getting those clicks organically as opposed to having to pay for them. And so like, that’s a big difference maker. That’s one thing that people don’t think they’re like, I don’t know if I want to spend, you know, a thousand or 1500, $2,000 on SEO.
Well, it’s like, what if you’re already spending thousands of dollars on ads because you know, you’re driving this revenue for your business. So anyway, it’s yeah, it’s cool to see these, quick win sometimes. But like I said, for that small roofing company, the, that we had a while ago. That was one of our first clients. It took a year and a half before they finally made it to the first page, but that’s because they had nothing and it was competitive.
So it took a lot longer. So it really depends. But you know, if you’re working with somebody that knows a thing or two about SEO, they can usually give you a fair ballpark. But anybody that makes any promises, I get worried about those people, right? I always tell people, I don’t promise I can get you to rank number one, but I do promise me and my team are going to work our asses off for you. And that’s about all I can promise. But usually when we do that, we see good results.
Amr Selim | 56:56
Yeah. And like many people are under the impression that SEO is expensive, but I mean, okay, it’s not cheap, but this is not, it shouldn’t, you shouldn’t look at it as an expense. You should look at it as a return on investment.
So for every dollar spent, how many dollars am I making? And it’s a long-term game.
So, you know, you don’t need, my opinion, you don’t need big pockets because most of the time when you get those like spammy emails and whatever, what they’re doing ads. So you’re paying them to run the ads, but you’re paying Google or Facebook for the ads. That makes it expensive. But when you do organic, You’re only paying for the SEO agency to do the organic work with you.
So it’s not, you’re not paying Google or Facebook or any third party. So it’s not as expensive.
[email protected] | 57:41
Right. And you could still like, and you can get massive results.
I mean, you can get massive results from paid ads. You know, I’ve been on calls with roofing companies that spend, you know, I think they said they spend $20,000 a month on Google ads, but they get $200,000 back.
So it’s like, yeah, it’s all about investment, you know? And so it’s like, yeah, they got it dialed in. They’ve got it figured out. But most small businesses aren’t at the place where they can invest five figures a month in ads.
So, you know, my favorite story is George. We’re starting our third year of working with George. He’s a cabinetmaker in our town. He moved up from a different state. And so his local SEO was nothing because he had to start from scratch in a new town.
So when we met, he was looking to update his website. He thought, maybe that’s all I have to do because that’s kind of the story we get told. Update your website. Do the SEO hotspots and you’re good to go. That’s part of the battle, right? But that’s not the whole battle.
So he did that and he was showing up, but he showed up on like the fourth page. And I kind of, you know, I went up to George and he was actually my first SEO client. And I said, okay, George, I got this new plan.
You know, this is back where my, all my schemes are coming together. I was scam, scammy Sam. No, just kidding. But where I was like, all right, I’m taking the leap. And I kind of pitched him on it. And I said, I think this is really going to help. And, you know, when I looked around, he showed me a shop and he said, hey, man, like it’s empty in here right now.
So I’m not even sure if this is the move right now. But somehow, some way in that week, he said, let me think about it for a week. One little floating shelf job came through his contact form because we didn’t get him to rank for custom cabinets. But what we did get him to rank for was shelving. He was the first result.
So somebody had come through. So he saw a proof of concept. OK, this works. And so he said, all right. Let’s try it for however many months I told me to. I think it was three months at the time.
So I’m still testing it out. And, And we did it. And I came back three months later and I was like, what do you think, George? You want to keep doing it? And he said, look at the shop kit. And it was full. And he had a helper. I was like, where did that guy come from? And it’s just like over the years, I’ve watched him hire more and more people. He expanded to another shop space. And we did an update video. This is about a year ago now where he’s saying he was pulling in about $20,000 to $30,000 per month just from Google. And I talked to him on a call about Three or four months ago after he hired a project manager, he said he gets about 15 to 20 leads per week, almost all from Google. And he basically gets to cherry pick the projects that he wants to do now and grow his business the way he wants to. And it’s like, again, most of that’s from Google. And so, you know, he took the risk. He trusted a provider and, you know, he got the results that he was looking for. And I mean, I think that’s the thing. Not yet. And it wasn’t ads. No, not results Yeah.
Amr Selim | 01:00:09
Without ads. It’s important.
[email protected] | 01:00:12
And he’s like, and he’s there, that authority is earned and it kind of stays there. You know, Google could change a dog. Local SEO has been probably the most stable flavor of SEO over the last couple of years.
Anyway, I still think it’s the right move in 2026 and beyond. Like, remember when chat GBT does a search, which it always does for local things, it’s searching in a search engine, pulling the top results information and presenting it back to you and making a recommendation off of that. And so, If you want to be recommended in ChatGPT, you want a solid SEO foundation. That’s the biggest lesson I can yell from the rooftops at the start of 2026 is if you don’t have a solid SEO foundation, you’re not getting recommended in these AI tools. By the way, not that many people are using those tools, even if you are.
Amr Selim | 01:00:50
Thank you very much, Sam. Where do people find you?
[email protected] | 01:00:53
Yeah. So if you’re interested in learning more about SEO, maybe for your business, maybe working with our agency, I think the best place to go is if you go to BenCannDesigns.com T-H-E-N-C-A-N designs.com slash SEO video. You can actually get a free video from me or one of my team members. You do have to qualify for that because we get a lot of those from our YouTube videos. But yeah, fill that out. We’ll send you back a little 10 minute video of your three next moves for your business. Highly recommend you check that out. If you’re trying to do it yourself, just check out our YouTube channel. Just search Then Can Designs on YouTube. It’ll show up. Again, T-H-E-N-C-A-N, in case you’re listening right now. Multitasking, washing the dishes or mowing the lawn.
And then if you build websites and you’re looking to build more stable income, like I kind of did on my journey, you should check out Local SEO Academy. Where we would you learn how to do SEO, deliver SEO and sell SEO and be support along the way. It includes community. It’s basically. Just like Web Designer Pro, where we found each other. And it’s a little sister community of Pro. Josh likes to support it.
Yeah. Love to connect with you.
Amr Selim | 01:01:59
Thank you, Sam. I’m going to put these links below in the description box if you’re watching on YouTube. And yeah, if you’re listening, you got to take the spelling from Sam right here. Thanks, man. Have a great day.
[email protected] | 01:02:10
Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It was awesome.