This week's teardown · Rent vs. rank Your cost per click is a confession. Hey Reader, Quick gut check. Go look at your Google Ads bill from last month. Now answer this: how many of those keywords could you be ranking for organically, for free, right now? If the answer is “I have no idea,” you're not alone. It's the single most common blind spot I see on sales calls. And it's expensive, because every click you pay for on a keyword you could own is rent. Rent builds equity for the landlord. Not...
7 days ago • 2 min read
This week's teardown · The AI answer era In an AI answer, there is no page two. Hey Reader, Quick experiment for you. It takes 30 seconds and it might change how you think about your marketing for the rest of the year. The 30-second experiment 01 Open ChatGPT right now. Go ahead, I'll wait. 02 Ask it to recommend a business in your industry, in your area, for the thing you actually sell. 03 It probably gave you three names. Confidently, instantly, no scrolling required. The uncomfortable...
14 days ago • 2 min read
This week's teardown · Clicks vs. leads A click is not a lead. Hey Reader, Quick story. An agency told one of my clients they'd landed 100 leads in a month. One hundred. Great number, right? So we did what I always do with great numbers: we went and checked. The diagnostic · what those 100 "leads" actually were → About half were telemarketers. People calling to sell my client something, counted as people who wanted to buy. → A bunch of the rest were bot clicks. Not humans. Not customers....
21 days ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown · The audit hustle 16,962 leads. 21 were real. Hey Reader, Fair warning: I'm fired up this week. I'll explain that headline number in a minute, but first I need to tell you about a client of mine. Let's call him Mike. Mike runs a healthy multi-million dollar business. His campaigns are working: organic traffic climbing, cost per lead dropping, pipeline filling. And every 60 to 90 days, like clockwork, Mike forwards me a PDF. Some agency he's never heard of has run a...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
This week's teardown · A true story He went all-in on AI lead gen. Google quietly stopped indexing his pages. Hey Reader, A business owner came to me recently with a site that wasn't getting traction. And the way he got there is the part I need you to hear, because it started with advice from someone he trusted. A friend of his, a roofer, had gone all-in on AI lead generation. Cancelled his other marketing. Let the AI do the content. And it was working for him. Real results, real leads. So my...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
This week's teardown · The garden edition SEO isn't a finish line. It's a growing season. Hey Reader, On Thursday I asked you to pull up your SEO provider's last report and see if it could answer three questions: what did they do, what changed because of it, and what's next. If that report passed, good. Hold onto that provider. If it failed, today's issue is the follow-through I promised: the exact questions that separate a team tending your garden from a team mailing you a smoke screen. But...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Google won't tell you this. Oliver Pestalozzi will. Hey Reader, Quick one today. The episode I've been teasing all week is live. Google will happily tell you how to spend more money on Google Ads. Oliver Pestalozzi will tell you what Google isn't saying, and he built the training programs to know the difference. This conversation did not stay polite. Oliver doesn't hold back on the traps Google's own recommendations lead business owners into, and we went back and forth hard on the question...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
AI Overviews are eating your clicks. Here's what's left on the plate. Hey Reader, On Thursday I asked you to run a 90-second diagnostic: open Search Console, pull the last six months, and compare impressions against clicks. If you saw impressions climbing while clicks flatlined, you found the gap. Today we're tearing down what's causing it, and more importantly, what you can actually do about it. If you missed Thursday's Pit Stop, run the check now. It takes 90 seconds and the rest of this...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, I want to tell you about a client who came to me recently, because if you've ever hired someone to build your website, or you're about to, this story could save you a lot of money and heartache. This client did everything a responsible business owner should do. They didn't cut corners. They hired someone to build them a custom website on a popular website builder. They paid a fair, decent price for it. They got a genuinely beautiful site, clean design, nice photos, on-brand, and...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
