Kevin Miller 5:09
Well, I actually so I started my career in a company called Messageme. And I was the first marketing hire, it was a messaging app, just like WhatsApp. I did that for six months, and the company got acquired by Yahoo. And then I started working at Google after that, and they have the most intensive training program that you could imagine. And so I was where I was a, you know, an account executive, if you will. And I was the one building Google campaigns for small and medium businesses. So just like the movie, The Internship, we were working, you know, and we were on the phones with, with small and medium business owners and helping them create campaigns to get more calls into their coffee shop, or whatever it might be. And so there was a six month intensive training on all things, digital marketing, and all things Google Analytics, and all things AdWords. And so that like really gave me a, you know, a foundational understanding of how to track user behavior online, and how to motivate certain types of behaviors and how to understand how to measure revenue for certain businesses and the efficacy of different campaigns. Ironically, I didn’t learn anything about search engine optimization, that is Google’s core competency, that’s their secret sauce, they actually don’t teach anything about SEO, the only people who are inside of Google that know about SEO, or the webspam team, it’s actually not a marketing team. It’s not a sales team. It’s strictly an engineering team. And they’re all focused not on optimization of you know, rankings, they’re focused on search quality, and making sure that if a user is searching for a particular product or service, they find what’s most relevant to them. That’s all that really is at the forefront of those engineers minds. But it gave me an understanding into digital marketing, which then applies to, you know, other areas, other channels, email marketing, Facebook ads, Reddit, Pinterest, etc, SMS marketing, it helped me understand how to measure efficacy of campaigns, no matter what channel they are coming from.
Joshua Chin 7:12
It’s really interesting, because now, I understand that ecom and direct to consumer, SEO is a completely different beast from standard SEO. And I, because of the number of skews that’s involved, the number of products that are involved, it can be a daunting task, and those are pretty tricky. What are the differences? One of the one of the biggest hurdles are in combination combinations that have finds is that SEO is probably not going to be something that I would want to pay attention to, until, like very, very, a very mature stage of my business. Is that the right mindset? Or is that in the blind spots that we’re not seeing?
Kevin Miller 8:03
Well, I think to to address your first point, there’s different types of SEO. So SEO strategies, such as content writing, getting written up in the news, aka backlink building, and on page optimization, those really are transferable across different industries works for DTC businesses, works for b2b businesses works for enterprise businesses. But tactics do change if you’re working with a website that’s very large. So for example, the SEO difficulties and complexities for Airbnb are going to be much different than the SEO difficulties and complexities for Ritual.com, you know, an econ vitamin company with with 20 skews. Because you have millions of pages that same like, you know, SEO for Zillow, or my last company open door, they all have 10 million different properties that are indexed with Google. That’s a much bigger beasts. So we’ll get to that a little bit later. But, um, I always believe that, you know, what I saw in last four or five years with the advent of DTC ECOM companies, um, SEO has been overlooked, because it’s not in as it’s not a sexy channel, if you will, it can’t provide the same scaling opportunities as a paid channel like Facebook or Instagram ads. And so therefore, it typically tends to be put on the backburner for that reason, but also because you need to invest in it pretty much blindly from the beginning, because you will not see returns on that investment for at least the first six to 12 months. And so, in my opinion, for the people who understand and are bought into SEO, it’s very important to do it from day one, because it does take such a long time. But I do understand the viewpoint of a lot of ECOM owners that say, you know, hey, I don’t really have a strong thesis on how to do it right. And it takes a long time. So as a result, I’m going to push it off. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with that. But you know, with the changes with iOS 14 And I was 15. This notion, the, you know, people, when I when people run paid ads, I liken that to or I basically call that as people renting their audience. When they do what I specialize in and what you specialize in, they own their audience. Because they’re actually capturing first party data themselves, they’re able to remarket to them and talk to them multiple times. I think it the the smartest DTC brand owners going into 2022 are going to be people who start with the owned channels, where they are acquiring emails, acquiring phones, acquiring traffic via organic search and direct traffic. And those are their, you know, their first four channels, and then they’re layering in the paid ads, and you know, the other paid channels just to acquire more phone numbers, emails, etc, and other first party data. But building, you know, spending money on ads before you have those real own channel funnels built up, you know, is really a waste of money, in my opinion. And I think the smartest DTC owners are ones who are going to start with SEO as well as the other own channels from the beginning, they take a while to mature. But that’s why they’re so valuable, indispensable, because a new competitor can’t start tomorrow, and build up organic traffic, there’s a moat there.
Joshua Chin 11:20
I like that it’s kind of like building a, a conversion, fishing that is almost before investing in traffic, that fight may or may not convert.
Kevin Miller 11:36
And you want to maximize the traffic when you paying for it. And you can’t do that if you don’t have pop ups built up or different offers and a certain landing pages, it makes it much harder to have a you know, a real positive return on investment.
Joshua Chin 11:49
I see I see the exact same trend with with our clients to the most successful startups that we work with are those who think about the channels that come after a customer comes into the store and have experienced brand eugenic channels, their own channels. But when it comes to SEO, just touching a little bit on the investment and time to return, I guess, type time to get ROI kind of a thing. What’s the what’s the right expectation to have per set of expectations? As a as an econ business owner?
Kevin Miller 12:28
Well, that’s probably a great question. And it’s probably the hardest question for anyone in SEO field to answer, but I’ll do my best. So basically, if you have a brand new website, it will take at least 912 months in order to see any type of return on your investment. And I mean, and the reason for that is because you have no history of Google who doesn’t know who you are. So I started a website called Word counter, on the same day that I started my SEO agency. And the reason was, I wanted to prove that I knew what I was doing. You know, I wanted to give people a real concrete reason as to why they hired me to be their SEO consultant. And so I published five articles per business day. And I still do to this day, it’s been two years. And I didn’t see any return on investment. And any real traffic for the first year, I started to see impressions. But I didn’t see really many clicks. Now the site does about a million unique visitors a month. But all of that picked up in the last 12 months, not the first 12 months. Now, if you have a website that’s been operating, you’ve been in business for a while, you have a history with Google, you can see a payback period, within six months or less, it just it you know, you need to have a domain authority of 35 or 40, or 50, something in that neighborhood. Because that means Google already knows about you, they already trust you to a certain degree, the higher your domain authority, the faster and better your new pages on your website will rank. And so that’s the there’s this motion of the Google Sandbox. And that’s typically like you started you and I buy a domain right after this call. And we start publishing content, you’ll see no traction at all for probably the first 90 days. That means Google is feeling you out. Are you a real site? Or are you you know, a scheme are you just like building the site to run ads to it for a short term thing. But if you’re publishing every day, you’re you’re sending signals to Google that, Hey, I am a domain expert on protein powder. And I will be continuing to launch products and I will be continuing to educate consumers on this base because I’m passionate about it. And there’s a lot of different factors that go into that putting out a press release is a is a trust factor that makes you more legitimate because you have to pay money for it. And it’s a real story. And so, that is the payback period or their time for return on investment fluctuates mainly on how frequently are you publishing content. My recommendation is once per day if you’re really serious about Driving Siri you know, hundreds of 1000s of new visitors per month? And then it depends on how trustworthy your website is and your reputation with Google.
Joshua Chin 15:12
once per day now that’s that, that that is, I think, something most people wouldn’t think about, like having to invest content on a very, very regular basis, every single day and frequency of publishing. What’s the best way for someone who, you know, may not be working with with GR0 or an SEO agency? What’s the best way for them to to embark on this journey? With that? Would you recommend hiring, like a full time content writer that puts out content every single day or?
Kevin Miller 15:47
I would. So there’s two things you really need. And I think it depends on the niche that you’re in. So for example, I just spoke with someone who runs a coffee subscription company. And one per day is, is certainly aggressive. But that can be the entire driver of the whole business, which is why it’s it’s so important to invest in. In a niche like coffee, there’s 5 million people a month who search for the term coffee. Underneath that parent topic, there’s hundreds of questions that people ask about coffee, such as how much caffeine is in one cup of coffee? How do I make coffee at home? What’s the difference between cold brew coffee and regular coffee? Um, how do I make you know, all the different types of coffee drinks that people order at Starbucks, these are questions that can be answered in long form pieces of blog content. And you can continually you know, pop up and ranked number one, two, or three for each of those longtail questions and become a true authority in the coffee space. And then you can launch, you know, your own coffee subscription company, or you can launch your own beans, you can launch, you know, a curious competitor, you have a lot of different opportunities once you once you own the, you know, the some sort of share voice in the copy space. And so, if there’s some industries where there’s not a lot to write on, for example, we work with a company that’s focused on outdoor advertising. And there’s not a lot of consumers who search about that, right? That’s a b2b business. Um, content marketing doesn’t work amazing for that SEO works, okay, but not great. Where it’s best as for things like, you know, sneakers, protein, powder, vitamins, things that are ubiquitous water, um, you know, Keto Recipes, things like that. And that’s where there’s really endless topics that are differentiated to write on, right, the more the more you write, the better. And the key really is just that each post needs to be incredibly thorough and detailed. So we’re talking like 14 or 1500 words of content per blog post, that’s what’s required these days, in order to earn the top spot on Google, there’s too much competition, there’s billions of websites competing, all for the same type of, you know, keyword. And so remember, Google’s whole purpose is to serve up the best and most relevant and thorough answer to a question that a consumer has. And so you have to really earn that’s hard these days.
Joshua Chin 18:06
That sounds like a lot of investment in first, six to 12 months of, of basically not seeing results. But stuff. But I mean, as you spoke about, it’s it’s a long term, it most definitely is long term investment. But what I’m curious about is because as a client, you don’t lock anyone in for 12 months, term of any kind, you have like a three months, kind of kickstart process, and then it’s month on month, and your contract. How do you go about thinking about that, when people typically don’t see results in the first six months? And I would imagine a lot of people coming to you and saying, Hey, Kevin, I’m not seeing any results. It’s been three months. I went, I went out. Yeah, how you respond to then? What’s the?
Kevin Miller 19:03
Well, I think a few ways. Number one, on a practical business sense. No one wants to be stuck into a contract, ever, whether it’s your cell phone, or your SEO company. So when you’re building a new business, like ours, negative word of mouth can spread 10 times as fast as positive word of mouth. And so if someone’s unhappy, I let them out of the contract. And we don’t want to be if you’re not getting value, and you’re reinforced to pay, I mean, what’s it there’s no worse situation. So we just don’t do that out of principle. It’s not a good business tactic. But secondly, I do a lot of expectation setting in the initial sales calls and you know, sort of Journey to Understanding if we can really help someone, we typically don’t let someone sign up unless they really understand what they’re getting into. Um, it is a lot of investment in the first six months to not see a lot of traction, but it really is typically a drop in the bucket relative to what brands are spending on paid channels. So if someone’s gonna spend 100 grand a month on Google ads, I tried to just convinced them to give us 8000 of that spend 92,000 on paid ads spent eight with us. And by comparison, it’s just like chipping off 8% of it, um, which is not too significant. But it gives us a lot of money to work with and like, make progress. And so that’s kind of how I think about it. One thing we can show is an increase in impressions and an increase in overall keyword ranking. So for example, let’s say your website ranks for 1000 keywords, at the end of month six, we can probably get it to rank for probably 20,000. So the in that means you’re now showing up for a lot of things. Unfortunately, though, you’re not showing up on page two or page three. So you’re not seeing a lot of clicks, but you’re seeing a huge jump in impressions. Usually, when I can show that graph to people, it’s almost like the analogy of an iceberg. People know that there is something building underneath the surface. But yeah, it just needs to get into the click through rate range, which is positions one through four. So as long as I can show that clients are typically encouraged, and they they understand, hey, like, you know, it is coming. But yeah, if someone’s not happy, we try to just let them out of it and spend their money in a channel where they are happy.
Joshua Chin 21:13
Gotcha, who inspires you, Kevin, in entrepreneurship in starting the business, it’s, it’s an incredible sight to see what you’ve built in just two years, for a very short amount of time.
Kevin Miller 21:29
Thank you for that, um, you know, I, my father was a very successful entrepreneur, very inspired by him. He worked in the car rental space for many years. I think that, you know, Steve Weiss is the CEO Meet Six, he’s a close friend of mine, he built an amazing digital marketing agency that that sold a couple years ago and has over 500 employees, I’m inspired by people like that, who do business the right way, and are able to put food on the table for 500 plus different families has really cool. And, you know, I fell in love with entrepreneurship, because it gives me freedom of time, and choice. So like, for example, my partner is in Miami right now, he’s just been participating in our basil. We both we didn’t, we’re not one of those. And he’s getting a ton of business, they’re getting to meet people, which is what he’s best at. You know, neither of us graduated college and immediately became entrepreneurs, you know, I wanted to be that guy who could go do that have a technology company that was funded by Y Combinator, that was my dream, it didn’t happen, I had to grind it out a little bit more. But I had the chance to work at five or six different companies. And, you know, you can’t take off any day that you want when you’re working for somebody else. So I’m inspired just by the that sort of freedom of time and freedom of creativity to do stuff like this come up with different product lines. Um, but I try not to get too inspired or infatuated with like, the money making side of entrepreneurship, because I’ve learned that, that you know, that doesn’t lead to happiness. It’s not a direct line to being being happy. So I’m focused on building stuff that’s cool that people think is interesting that offers value. I think that’s what’s most inspiring is just as an adult, having the freedom to go work on what I want to work on. That’s a luxury that, you know, most most people in the world don’t have. So that’s kind of how I think about it.
Joshua Chin 23:29
I can I can definitely relate to, to that.
Kevin Miller 23:33
Like the fact that you were here in LA from Singapore, I was fascinated by that. You know, and you’ve got your own agency, on the other side of the world, and you learned about GeekOut wanted to come and be around like minded people on a weekday. You know, I thought that was really cool. I especially at your age doesn’t, most people don’t have that liberty, they definitely can’t afford it. And they don’t have a real business reason to be there. But you did.
Joshua Chin 23:59
It’s a privilege is 100% of privilege. And I don’t take that lightly. Now. Kevin, I’m personally really curious about your business and what you’ve achieved. And what could you share with with me and listeners some of the behind the scenes, successes or struggles of how you’ve built GR0 to what it is today. So quickly, because I’ve been there done that, like in the same path that you’ve been? And we took a long time we took four years. Yeah. To get to 80 employees. So it’s, it’s insane what you’ve done in just two years. What happened in turnaround time?
Kevin Miller 24:47
Well, I think the first thing that happened was my partner and I are huge SEO nerds. We genuinely love Seo. There’s no prior to any of the successes we’ve had we reach owned and operated probably five Six different sites that failed, lost a ton of money. So there’s no question that you or anyone else could ask that we haven’t seen or heard or dealt with on a personal level. So when it comes to doing sales, no one else at our company does sales really, other than myself and my partner, we have a few other sales team members that are being trained up now. But it’s like a very rigorous training and they’re doing really well. But we’re the ones who are, we don’t have it, we don’t have a group of people that sell it don’t know, SEO. So that’s one of the big keys. The second would be, we have a lot of referral partners, people that we pay to send us leads. So if you refer to lead to grow, we would pay you, you know, 5% of the total contract value for the first year. And so that’s what a lot of people call like mailbox money, your passive income. And if you have a big Twitter following, like, you know, for example, Jason Wong, who runs Doe Lashes, you know, he can make 1010 grand a month for something like this. Now, they have to believe that we provide good service. And you know, and you know, no one who refers us business does, because it’s their personal reputation on the line. But that’s the second sort of key as to how we grew so fast. And the third would be, we’re very aggressive with how we do our account management. So we try to make sure that no matter what contract you signed with us, whatever you need is taken care of, we’re always communicating with our clients, they never have to wonder, Where do I stand with this? Where do I stand with that they can call us anytime of the day or night. And truly, like, John and I, and my partner will, I will answer our cell phones and solve any problem that they have, no matter what they pays, that’s the big key. We have clients that pay $30,000 a month, we have clients that pay $3,000 a month, we treat them the same, the $30,000 client might have a bigger team. Oh, with regards to sense of urgency, there is no difference. And so I think people can feel that. And then what happens is those customers start to refer us more people. And they say, Hey, actually, my aunt runs a business or my roommate has a new company, can you talk to them. And that’s when we really have a very strong viral sort of word of mouth. And that’s what it is in this business, because the ticket price is high. And our average deal is 70 $580,000. And that’s a lot of money. Not a ton of people can afford that. The way that you get these deals signed is you have a good personal friend that calls the other friend says, hey, you know, I actually do know, Kevin, I know he is a serious business guy. And you should sign otherwise, they might not sign but that’s what happened. That’s that’s the X Factor. They need third party validation from someone that they trust.
Joshua Chin 27:39
100%, I can definitely relate to that about 80% of our business is driven with some kind of word of mouth marketing, about 50% of that comes from just direct referrals from partners that we work with. It’s so so huge. It’s, you know, people often say referrals are not something you can scale because it’s not controllable. But it’s one of those, like, we spoke about setting the foundation, right? The organic set of things that the conversion fishing that that’s what it is least for an agency and shout out to Jason Wong. I’ve have had him on the show as well. Yes, great guy. He’s a fun dude.
Kevin Miller 28:22
And he’s one of those entrepreneurs that just supports other entrepreneurs. Like that’s how I tried to Nice. When we met him, he we just hit it off with him. And he’s like, anything I can do for you guys. Like, let me let me help. And we said the same thing to him any anything he needs no matter what if it has to do with, you know, apartment to stay in Los Angeles or like wants to go to dinner not even SEO related, like, we’ll drop everything because he’s so hospitable for us. He needed some help with recruiting. So we had our full time recruiter help him for free. So there’s just things that we do for people and it comes full circle, you know, we just like try to try to be helpful.
Joshua Chin 29:02
He, he’s a, he’s a he’s a give first kind of person. Yeah, that’s yeah, that’s what I that’s why I really, really, really respect about Jason. Here, he always thinks about, like, what can I do for you first before asking for anything. Yeah.
Kevin Miller 29:20
And he doesn’t even really have any asks, you know, the only thing he’s ever asked of us is can we help, you know, with a course he was putting together and we’re like, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, and we do the SEO portion. Sure. You know,
Joshua Chin 29:32
that, Kevin, what are some of your personal favorite brands that you look up to your consumer off? Or you’re an agency for?
Kevin Miller 29:44
Well, I love Lululemon. I’m a huge fan of them. Say I’m a I’m a big fan of brands that find their way into your or your friends households, without you knowing why so I would say Lululemon is one of them. We are not working with them as a Plant Venus a floor is is a client of ours, they’re the roses the last year. Um, I love those, they made it. You know, five years ago, I brother got married his wife, my sister in law had a big box of Venus, a FLIR Well, before I started grow, and then they became a client, I was fascinated, I got to meet the founders and tell them, Hey, you made it all the way to Orlando, Florida into my sister in law’s living room, you know, before it was really a big deal. That’s really cool. Because that shows you You’re, you’re doing something right somewhere. Um, and then I love the big, you know, newly public companies like Airbnb, I think it would be amazing to work with them all. Because these three companies provide and deliver an incredible customer experience. If we were able to see their net promoter score, which I’m sure we can from some of the public filings, it’s probably in the high 80s, or low 90s. I think I think it could be, which is incredibly high. And it’s because people love their products. And that’s how these companies grow, you know, so far beyond their workforce is because their own customers are now their salespeople. And so that’s, yeah, that’s the big, the big inflection point, I think, I’m trying to think of newer brands that are like that, I mean, theragun is very much like that now in the fitness community. So it’s a, you know, that’s kind of what those are the four that I would say,
Joshua Chin 31:31
One of the, one of the, one of the core values that we live by at my company is obsess over client success. And that’s a huge part of what how, how we, how we interact with client, how we build relationships with clients, what are some of the core values that that you and your team, uphold as principles or as daily guiding the turns in daily guiding habits, or any explanation
Kevin Miller 32:03
is great, you ask because we’re actually redoing them right now, we just pulled our entire company see what they care about most. Um, however, there’s a few that are, are going to stay, you know, constant. The first one is to be 1%, better every day, we believe that you should constantly be striving to be better, you know, at work, but also personally eat a little bit healthier, or your mom a little bit more frequently, you know, things like that. Because that’s what you know, the purpose of living is just the be your best version of yourself, in my opinion. And so that’s one of our core values. And it extends, like I said, personally and professionally, the next is to treat others the way you want to be treated. I think that that’s a, that’s a value that I grew up with that my mom, you know, instilled in my families from a young age. And I think that if we treat employees the way we want to be treated clients, friends, anything, it always just yields a good results, and a positive outcome. And that’s becoming more and more important in the workplace. These days, like people don’t just work for money, they need to be respected, they need to be, you know, treated the right way, in a way that they feel good about, they need to be motivated. And that’s how you get the best work out of people. And the third one that I think is most consistent is to exhibit endless curiosity. I think the smartest people are the ones that are just constantly asking questions, and are tenacious and finding those answers. And so that’s what you know, we try to encourage at this company, is that there’s no question that you can’t ask or there’s nothing that’s not possible with regards to like, a new service that we might offer to clients, or a different way of doing our reporting. I don’t want anyone working at grow, that is just gonna follow what’s there before I want them asking, Hey, there’s probably a good reason why we’re doing reporting this way. But what is it? Because I don’t know, I actually think it can be done this way. What do you think? That’s what makes, you know, for a really exceptional company, and scale is if everyone is asking those questions, then you’re constantly updating your processes, you’re never staying in the same spot.
Joshua Chin 34:13
And growth happens. organically, true, true people versus just founders and leaders coming in with ideas. And everyone has a new idea of that. Kevin, what’s your best advice for people listening? Either starting your econ businesses or growing their ecommerce businesses or veterans in the space?
Kevin Miller 34:39
My best advice is to call other people who have done it before you and ask them how they did it. I think I think there’s a lot you can and there’s one prerequisite though you have to do the homework yourself before making those calls. So like, watch the YouTube videos, do the online courses. Let the person know whose time you’re asking like, Hey, I already did all the stuff I can do on my own But I have these questions for you. And I can’t tell you how many, you know, probably like millions of dollars, we’ve saved ourselves by asking people, hey, what insurance is doing yet? And who do we get them from? Um, you know, what, what’s the best lawyer to use? Because you can avoid you losing, you know, 100 grand on a bad lawyer. You know, where we get our office space? How do we negotiate our lease? Things that I would have no idea how to do? Yeah, you know, you know, how do I, how do I negotiate my equity with my co founder, like, you need someone who’s experienced in your ear to help you make those, get those questions, right. And get right answers that can save you, you know, years worth of, you know, like, difficulty. And that’s my best advice, because it applies to anything, any question that someone has about their business, find the person who’s done it before you ask them how they did it, they’ll be happy to give you advice.
Joshua Chin 36:00
That’s, that’s good advice. It’s really good advice. And I would add to that, and say that the you, you’d be surprised at how often you get a response, if your questions are crafted, well, if it’s just, hey, how do I grow my business? That’s not a well thought out question. No, no. And in the time, yeah, specificity that relates to the person’s strengths of whoever you’re asking. It’s gonna it’s gonna work out, you’re gonna get a lot more yeses. And then surprisingly, so.
Kevin Miller 36:42
You will, you will. And I’ve done that over and over and over again in my career, and then you build strong relationships get to meet in person. It’s a fun thing all around.
Joshua Chin 36:50
I love that. Kevin, thank you so much for being on the show. What’s the best way to connect with you, people listening, wanting to learn about GR0? And potentially, how are you guys? Where can they find you?
Kevin Miller 37:03
The best way is gr0.com, gr zero dot com. And my email is Kevin@gr0.com. And I’m always very responsive on that. So those two are great. But Josh, thank you so much for having me, man. It’s a pleasure.
Joshua Chin 37:16
No problem. It’s been fun.
Outro 37:21
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
