Billy Gee

This transcript has been edited for readability: Henry Harrison Welcome to the Entrepreneurs, Business and Finance podcast series. We’re very excited today to welcome Billy Gee to the program. Billy is an expert in internet marketing and just about anything related to the web. As we all know, the web is a daily part of our lives. Some people interact with it almost every minute of the day, so it’s a topic I find very interesting. Of course, we also love entrepreneurs, and Billy is one himself. He owns his own business. Billy, welcome to the show. Billy Gee Thanks for having me, Henry. I’m excited to be here. Henry Harrison Let’s start with some background. How in the world did you become an expert — someone people pay to help them with web marketing, websites, and all the various things you do online? Billy Gee A little over ten years ago, I was bouncing around online trying to figure out how to do something different. I had been in the restaurant business for more than twenty years, and it’s exhausting work. I started to realize that the end of that road was getting closer, so I began looking online for other opportunities. I had heard about people doing affiliate marketing and making money by selling other people’s products. I remember thinking, “These guys don’t seem that smart. I ought to be able to figure some of this out.” So I started searching around and letting people know I wanted to build a website. At the time, it was for the survival niche. The site was called Survivalism 101. Eventually I met Randy Meyers, who owns a company called Operation Web. They’re still in business and doing really well out of the Coachella Valley in Southern California. Randy had already been in internet marketing for six or seven years. He came from the early days, back when Google was still the Wild West. He took me under his wing, and together we worked on that project. That’s where I learned the basics: keyword research, page structure, blogging, what we now call content marketing or inbound marketing, and social media strategies. From there we got into Amazon marketing. We started sourcing products from China and selling them on Amazon. That became very successful. At one point, when California became the first state to implement a law requiring people to pay for shopping bags, we thought, “Let’s sell reusable shopping bags.” We bought around 20,000 units from China, and they sold like crazy. After that we moved into survival tools and a variety of other products. That experience was really where I cut my teeth in internet marketing. Henry Harrison It’s such an interesting and amazing field. Today people take it for granted. If they want to find a product or service, they just search for it online. Sometimes they even discover things they didn’t know existed. What you help people do is different from the old model of putting a storefront on a busy corner and paying high rent. Instead, you help businesses get in front of people who are already looking for their services through the internet. And I believe one of the keys to that is something called local SEO. Billy Gee Yes, that’s absolutely been my experience. One of the big lessons we learned from Amazon is that it turned retail on its head. Traditionally, you might have an idea for a product, but you wouldn’t know whether people wanted it. You would do your own research, produce the product, and hope it became popular enough to support a business. Amazon changed that because it gave us keyword data. You could see what people were already searching for. And if a search term was underserved on Amazon, we could go source that product and sell it. So instead of letting our own preferences or ideas dictate what we sold, we let the keyword data tell us what the market wanted. That mindset naturally transitioned into local marketing and local SEO. It’s also what inspired me to start an agency. I think a lot of small business owners don’t fully understand how much they can transform their businesses with even a little bit of marketing. More importantly, many don’t realize how powerful Google’s data can be if used correctly. Over the last ten years, my goal has been to help small business owners targeting local audiences use that data to drive traffic, generate calls, and create sales. Henry Harrison That has to be very satisfying. I know that firsthand because I had an internet marketing company when we first met. My approach was different — I understood the concepts and had people do the technical work — but you were one of the people helping me back then, and of course you’re still helping with my businesses now. I know how valuable it has been to me. It must be very satisfying when you help clients get found by customers who are genuinely looking for what they offer. Billy Gee It’s what I live for in business. Just the other day, one of my clients — a scrap metal recycling company in Southern California — contacted me and said, “I can’t believe it. You’re the only reason we’re staying afloat right now.” How could that not put a smile on your face? It’s incredibly motivating. Henry Harrison Exactly. People need that service, but they might never find it without someone like you who knows how to navigate the internet and help customers connect with the business. Billy Gee That’s right. And the interesting thing is that the more internet marketing changes, the more it stays the same. SEO, in particular, has always been built on the same core principles: good content, solid keyword research, and link building. At its core, SEO really hasn’t changed. There’s always been what people call the black-hat community — people trying to push the limits of Google’s terms of service and manipulate search results. Most of Google’s updates have really been about combating those tactics. Google’s product is its search results. If people search for something and don’t find what they want, then Google has a problem. So Google is always working to make sure the best, most relevant content appears in the results. That’s why they’ve become the dominant search engine. They’re simply better at delivering reliable results than the alternatives. So while the algorithm evolves, the basic rules stay the same: create good content that is relevant to the search term, have a fast website, make it mobile responsive, and give Google every reason to rank your page. If you do those things the right way and stay patient, you’ll win in the long run. That’s our philosophy. Henry Harrison That really is a terrific philosophy. Google’s product is helping people find what they’re looking for. A person tries to think through the words they would search in order to find a product or service — or even to discover whether that kind of product exists. Your challenge is figuring out what that person is likely to search for and then presenting the answer in a way that matches exactly what they need. That sounds simple, but implementing it takes real expertise. I know you’ve been focusing your agency in a very specific direction. Why don’t you wrap up by talking about that focus? Billy Gee Sure. That ties perfectly into what we’ve been discussing. The current name of my agency is WA Rank — “WA” for Washington — but we’re now rebranding under Shield Web Design because we want to expand nationally. We’re going to use the same strategies we use for our clients and apply them on a larger scale. Our focus is on web design, pay-per-click advertising through Google and Bing, and link building. The reason I focus on local business owners is because many of them market to multiple cities. That might be a lawyer, a doctor, or a home service provider such as a plumber, window installer, or gate repair specialist. Many of these businesses cover an entire county or even a large metro area. Ideally, their websites should have what are called city pages — unique pages of content dedicated to a specific service in a specific geographic area. For example, if you’re a plumber offering emergency plumbing, commercial plumbing, and residential plumbing, and you serve Waco, Texas, then you should have separate pages for: Waco emergency plumbing Waco commercial plumbing Waco residential plumbing That level of specificity gives Google something it can rank. If a page is highly relevant and geographically specific, Google will eventually reward it. For people who aren’t specialists, ranking simply means showing up on page one of Google. If you’re not on page one, you may as well not exist if your goal is to get search traffic. If a local business serves more than two or three cities, then it should usually have a dedicated city-specific landing page for each service in each city. The beauty of those pages is that they’re often much easier to rank, especially in the smaller cities surrounding a major metro area. They may not drive as much traffic as a city like Dallas, but the smaller surrounding cities still add up. A single page for a city like Plano might only generate a few calls a month, but when you multiply that across hundreds of pages, it becomes significant. If you have 100 cities and 5 services, that’s 500 pages. Even if each page produces only one call every other month, that still adds up to 250 calls a month. It’s remarkable. Henry Harrison That’s exactly what we saw years ago when you helped me with a catering company project. They didn’t have much of an online presence beyond their company name. If someone searched directly for their brand, they could find them. But if someone searched for a catering company, they would find everyone else instead. What made it even more frustrating was that this company had real differentiators. They handled corporate events, had a specific style of home cooking, and offered services people wanted. We built city pages for them throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and in the first year they were able to attribute about a one-third increase in revenue to that strategy. Those are the kinds of results you help people achieve. Billy Gee Exactly. And there’s one more thing that’s important to mention. These landing pages work hand-in-hand with a strategy called SKAG, which stands for single keyword ad group. In a Google Ads campaign, you can run a broad campaign and send everyone to your homepage, but that usually leads to lower quality scores, higher cost per click, and lower conversion rates. If you’re sending five different types of searchers to one page that doesn’t specifically address their needs, the campaign won’t perform nearly as well. But when you build these city-specific landing pages, you can pair each one with its own highly targeted ad campaign. Each page gets its own tight cluster of keywords and its own dedicated ad group. That drives quality scores up, lowers the cost per click, and improves conversions. It can save 10 to 20 percent in ad spend while also improving conversions by a similar amount. A lot of business owners assume that the highest bidder automatically gets the top paid result on Google, but that’s not always true. Google also cares about relevance. If one advertiser bids five dollars a click but has a weak landing page, and another advertiser bids three dollars a click but has highly relevant content that exactly matches the user’s search, the second advertiser can often win the top spot. That’s because Google is not going to sacrifice user experience just to take a higher bid. That principle is really the foundation of my local business strategy: build highly relevant city pages and pair them with tightly aligned single keyword ad group campaigns. To make this scalable, I work with a software engineer who has developed tools that scrape websites, pull in metadata, assign keywords to pages, and build out full Google Ads campaign structures on spreadsheets. That means instead of manually building 500 campaigns over the course of months, I can generate and upload them in about a week. That’s one of the things we’re most excited about right now as we prepare to launch the new Shield Web Design website nationally. We believe this strategy is proven, and in many cases it can absolutely transform a business. Henry Harrison It’s fantastic to talk with a real expert. Thank you for being on the show, and we’ll follow up again soon. Billy Gee Thanks, Henry. I really appreciate it. I had a lot of fun and look forward to the next one.