This week's teardown · Aim, don't flood Your budget isn't too small. Your map is too big. Hey Reader, I want to save you some money this week, so let me be blunt about the most expensive habit I see in local advertising. It's not that your budget is too small. It's that your map is too big. Here's the usual story. You set up an ad campaign, you type in your city, you hit go. Then the money leaves and the phone stays quiet, and you decide ads don't work or you need to spend more. Neither is...
7 days ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · The conversion graveyard The ads worked. The page was a graveyard. Hey Reader, Quick ghost story for the last week of spooky season, and this one is real. I looked at a campaign this month that had everything going for it. Thousands of clicks. About four percent of those people made it to the landing page and watched the video. And then zero of them booked an appointment. Not one. The ads worked. The page was a graveyard. And this is the trap almost everyone falls into:...
15 days ago • 2 min read
This week's teardown · Get quoted by the machine The machine is answering. It just picked someone else's name. Hey Reader, Quick spooky-season truth to start your week. Right now, someone is asking Google or ChatGPT a question your business is the perfect answer to. And the machine is answering them. It just picked someone else's name to say. That's the AI Overview, the answer box now sitting at the top of search, and it's changing the game. Search used to be ten blue links and a click. More...
21 days ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · Don't go dark Going dark for the season will haunt you in spring. Hey Reader, Since it's still October, one more spooky story. A seasonal business wraps up its last booking of the year, and then goes fully dark. Ads off. Blog silent. Website untouched for months. Come spring, they flip the lights back on and find a graveyard where their traffic used to be, while a competitor who stayed warm all winter is booked through June. Assuming Google will hold your spot while you...
29 days ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · The undead edition There are zombies shuffling around your website. Hey Reader, It's October, so let's talk about the undead. Specifically, the ones living on your website right now. I call it zombie content. Old blog posts and forgotten pages that get no traffic, rank for nothing, and convert nobody. They're not dead, because Google still has them indexed. They're not alive, because they earn you nothing. They just shuffle along. And they are not harmless: What the...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · Claim your lane The map pack is the podium. Three spots, no page one. Hey Reader, Quick one this week, because it's the highest-return hour in local marketing and almost nobody spends it. When someone searches “near me,” Google doesn't lead with ten links. It leads with a map and three businesses. That's the podium. If you're not one of the three, your website never even gets a shot at the click. The good news: getting into that map pack doesn't take a six-month content...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
This week's teardown · One mothership You're splitting your horsepower five ways. Hey Reader, Quick gut check. How many websites does your business actually own? Not how many do you use. How many exist. The main site, sure. But also the course site. The landing page for that webinar. The microsite from the launch two years ago. The blog someone parked on a subdomain. Go count them. I'll wait. The 90-second sprawl count 01 List every domain and subdomain your business owns. Check your...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · Take out the bricks Your site isn't underpowered. The trunk is full of bricks. Hey Reader, Quick question: when did you last open your own website on your phone, with the wifi off, and actually count the seconds until it loaded? That's the connection a lot of your customers are on. And if you're tapping your foot waiting, so are they, right before they hit the back button and click your competitor. A beautiful website that loads slowly is still a slow website. That's...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · Volume vs. intent 30,000 visitors. Zero bookings. Hey Reader, An agency once bragged to a business owner that they'd sent him 30,000 visitors in a single month. He was thrilled. Then he checked his calendar. Zero new bookings. Not one. Here's what went wrong, and it's the most common mistake I see: he was chasing volume instead of intent. Volume with no strategy is a dragster with no steering. Big search numbers feel like winning. Loud, fast in a straight line, useless...
2 months ago • 2 min read