Dennis Yu / CEO Blitzmetrics

How to Rank Without Breaking the Bank - The Truth and Myths about SEO

Join us on the Headsmack Podcast as we welcome Dennis Yu, a search engine engineering expert and digital marketing guru. 

Discover how Dennis transformed the analytics landscape at Yahoo and is now dedicated to helping local businesses become visible online. 

From spending billions on ads for major companies to empowering young adults with digital skills, Dennis shares invaluable insights that are not just theoretical but practically applicable. 

Tune in to learn how you can make your business 'Googleable' and thrive in the digital age.

P.S. This episode will make SEO "experts" mad.

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Hey, welcome to the Headsmack Podcast. My name is Paul Povolni. So good to have you along. I'm here with another misfit. Dennis Yu, so glad to have you here, man.

Dennis Yu (02:30.912)
Hahaha!

Dennis Yu (02:45.92)
Awesome, Paul. I'm glad to be a misfit.

Paul Povolni (02:48.206)
You definitely are because, and we're going to talk about ways that you are as we go along. Dennis is a search engine engineer who built the analytics at Google. Sorry, Yahoo. Yeah, yeah. There you go. And is now educating local service businesses about how to be Googleable. I love that word Googleable. He has spent billions.

Dennis Yu (03:00.896)
It became Google, but yeah, a lot of my people went to Google. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (03:13.39)
of dollars on Google and Facebook ads for big companies. And he's now equipping young adults to succeed with their local agencies and is also a best -selling author. Dennis, so glad to have you on. Sorry, I messed up the company name with the yo in Google. I know, I know that's okay. And I love the word Googleable. And so we're going to talk about what that means because in part of our conversation you had mentioned.

Dennis Yu (03:29.088)
I can't even say your last name.

Paul Povolni (03:39.662)
about Googling yourself. So I wanna talk about that definitely. But I'd also like to start kind of at your origin story. Obviously you've done a lot of stuff. You've had a lot of experience. So let's start at the beginning as early on as you want. And tell me a little bit about your origin story. Where did Dennis start?

Dennis Yu (03:58.496)
Well, I was born in Dayton, Ohio, so I'm an American, but I didn't speak English because my parents wanted the kids at school to teach me. So I was made fun of. I was put in the, what is the, I can't say retarded children class, whatever I was, but that's what it was called back then special. Yeah. I was special in a bad way. And I didn't know how to make friends and I didn't know how to communicate. I was just a total loser, but I vowed that.

Paul Povolni (04:11.246)
Special needs, yeah.

Dennis Yu (04:27.136)
I would learn how to speak English and I eventually, as you can tell, became a public speaker. I represented California in the national spelling bee in 1988 in Washington, DC. And I became a search engine engineer before the internet was a thing. And I was good at math and I'd competed in math contests as a child. So that naturally led towards programming and working with large data sets. And that's.

been my journey as like a math guy and never thought that would have turned into something that'd be helpful for analyzing data on the internet. And so I built the, yeah, go ahead. I built the internal analytics at Yahoo. And that eventually became what you see today with a lot of the engineering at Google. And I want to teach people math in a non anxiety driven sort of way. I want to teach business owners and young adults and VAs.

Paul Povolni (05:04.686)
So you'll go ahead.

Paul Povolni (05:09.582)
That's amazing.

Paul Povolni (05:22.638)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (05:26.464)
that you can own your own marketing following a few simple rules that are not a secret that you don't have to pay someone a ton of money for that basically will kill all these marketing agencies. Don't even realize that they're already dead. There's clear standards to show up on Google.

Paul Povolni (05:38.03)
Nice. Well, I want to talk about those secrets. So how did a math guy get into, uh, into the, the backend of, of the internet and into the early internet? How, what was that first job? How did you get into something like that?

Dennis Yu (05:54.016)
I had a mentor and he was the CEO of American Airlines and he was very well connected with living presidents of the United States or CEOs of these other companies. So I met a lot of these high profile people, had dinner with them and had no real legitimate reason to meet any of these people. But this one guy took me under his wing and sort of adopted me in some way and mentored me.

And open doors for me and I got all kinds of things that I didn't deserve. But when you're given these opportunities, why wouldn't you step through those doors? Why wouldn't you say, yes, Hey, you know, we're I'm having dinner with George HW Bush. Do you want to join me? Or do you want to meet the Margaret Thatcher? Or do you want to meet the, I'm having lunch with the CEO of all state insurance tomorrow. All state insurance. I mean that all state. Yeah. That multi -billion dollar company. Like, do you want to come? Like I.

Paul Povolni (06:37.294)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (06:46.958)
Wow.

Dennis Yu (06:50.304)
I'd love to come. I just, I'm an idiot. I don't know anything, but sure. Yeah. All right.

Paul Povolni (06:50.958)
Yeah, yeah. So how'd you connect with such a high profile, highly connected mentor?

Dennis Yu (07:01.344)
This guy, Al Casey, he spoke at Southern Methodist University where I was an undergrad at the time. And I noticed these people would come in and guest lecture because the university would bring in these important people that would give a speech. Right. And for some reason, I just felt motivated to walk down to the stage or whatever after he was done. And there was no one else that like, no one talks to these people for some reason, either they just.

Paul Povolni (07:28.846)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (07:29.056)
These people just leave right away, but sometimes they hang around for a little bit and like almost nobody wants to come up, which surprises me. Like, you're in a big auditorium and your parents are paying a lot of money for this tuition. Why would you just leave? I mean, otherwise just watch YouTube videos if you're not going to engage with the people who come, right? The university brings these people in. So I went down there and for some reason I just wanted to ask him, so running American Airlines, that's like 30 ,000 employees. How do you even decide?

Paul Povolni (07:45.87)
Right.

Dennis Yu (07:58.784)
what to do. Like, how do you decide what a plane ticket should cost? Because the cost of the plane ticket goes up and down and we have no idea what, you know, doesn't make any sense to me at all. How do you do that? And then you're buying planes from Boeing or you're dealing with strikes because the flight attendants or pilots will strike, right? And then passengers can't fly. So how do you deal with that? That's got to be the most wild job running an airline. How do you even get qualified to do something like that?

Right. And so he, I guess he thought my questions were intelligent and he was also doing some other teaching. So he invited me along and I was a good kind of pupil mentee. And as a good mentee, I did small tasks, right? Now I mentor a lot of young adults now too, and I give them small tasks. So it's not private coaching, but I give them small tasks as an apprentice.

Paul Povolni (08:47.79)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Yu (08:58.336)
And they, you know, I, they're in a program where I'm giving them basically agencies and making introductions, just like I got mentored and I'm paying this forward the best way I know how, cause he's no longer on this planet. And a lot of the stories and experiences that we've had, a lot of the things that he's taught me, the only one who remembers those things are me. And this is before the days of like being on zoom and everyone was okay. Like today, like.

Paul Povolni (09:09.262)
That's amazing.

Paul Povolni (09:13.55)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (09:22.638)
Wow.

Dennis Yu (09:27.2)
Yeah. The videos on back then, like film costs money to take a picture. I mean, you had to like intentionally take a picture. You didn't just like take a picture. You didn't take selfies. Are you kidding? So I feel guilty because I didn't document the times I had. Now I have pieces of paper, but I never recorded a single video with him. Not one.

Paul Povolni (09:33.006)
Right? Right?

Paul Povolni (09:38.67)
Right.

Paul Povolni (09:42.414)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (09:49.55)
Yeah. Wow. Well, and I think, and even like using a little micro cassette recorder to record the audio would have even then been kind of odd. Whereas now we record everything from our lunch to our meetings, to our vacation. Like now we document everything. Whereas then it...

Dennis Yu (09:58.944)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (10:05.024)
Back then, cell phones didn't even have cameras on them. Back in the 1989 -ish time, I mean, 1990, that's a long time ago.

Paul Povolni (10:08.174)
Right.

Paul Povolni (10:12.526)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that mentorship came about from, first of all, you being bold enough to walk up to somebody that was out of your league, right? You were just a student. And the second thing was, you know, you asked good questions from the get -go. Many people have these opportunities to get in front of their idols, somebody they look up to, and they're just like googly -eyed, but they don't know what to say or what to do. And you immediately stood out and created this.

Dennis Yu (10:22.336)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (10:37.952)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (10:41.454)
relationship because you had a really legitimately good question. And so he honored that, honored that first of all, you had the boldness to walk up to him. Then you asked a good question. And so that kind of led into this relationship, you know, with you guys where he was, he became your mentor. Was that a, a thing that you asked him to become, or he just started inviting you to things.

Dennis Yu (10:51.136)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (11:01.056)
No, no, he, he said to me, Dennis, you have a smile that could sell toothpaste for the toothpaste company. And I think what happens is that when people reach a certain phase in their life, they want to give back. They start charities, they donate, they do all kinds of things because they know they're in their last third of their life. Cause the first third of your life.

Paul Povolni (11:10.062)
You

Paul Povolni (11:20.846)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Yu (11:30.176)
You're building a career and learning skills and whatever the second third of your life, you're a manager, a business owner, you're doing deals and the third phase of your life, you're giving back. And I just happened to be very lucky to be at that point. And now I'm turning 50 this year. I can see why people in that stage do that. Cause I find myself doing that too.

Paul Povolni (11:40.046)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (11:55.086)
Right? Thinking about legacy. So what do you think, yeah. So what do you think is the greatest lesson that you got from him?

Dennis Yu (11:56.736)
Yeah. So I just happened to be the lucky recipient. So why not? Right.

Dennis Yu (12:05.728)
That it's not about, I know this is all like aphorisms and stuff that's like obvious to us, but for me, it wasn't as a Chinese math study all the time, get good grades kind of person. I thought the answer is just to work harder and learn more and just beat everyone on the exam. Right. I was a really good test taker. And so that was just the model that I had because I was good at it. And he taught me that it was all about relationships.

Paul Povolni (12:12.27)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:25.934)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (12:35.488)
And now I wish I knew this like 30 years ago. Now, if I don't know the answer to something, I know who to ask. And they will know the answer, which I know sounds ridiculous. And I'm sure everyone else is like, yeah, well, it's obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me. And because I'm like a squirrel who's just been hoarding as many nuts as possible. Cause I read 4 ,500 books. I would spend six, seven hours a day at the library, even on the weekends, just reading.

Paul Povolni (12:44.654)
Well, yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:51.886)
Brian.

Paul Povolni (12:57.934)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (13:05.408)
Cause I just wanted to have more knowledge than anybody else. And that helped me because if I didn't have that knowledge, I couldn't have built websites, which is what got me started. So it's not like that was a complete waste. I'm not saying like, Oh, well, just cause you know people, you don't need to know anything. I'm not saying that, but I wish I knew that I didn't have to rely upon myself as a really hard worker. Cause I believe like, well, if you want to make sure it gets done, you need to do it yourself. Right. That, that helped me.

Paul Povolni (13:12.942)
Right. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (13:34.784)
in the initial part of my career, but actually hurt me later because I couldn't grow as an entrepreneur.

Paul Povolni (13:39.534)
Wow. Wow. And I think, you know, you, you said that it seems so obvious, but I think, you know, when it comes to some things in our lives, and that's why I came up with head smack, head smack is those slap your forehead. Oh my goodness. That's so obvious. That's the missing piece. And that's what I hope to do with, you know, this podcast is, you know, for somebody that has achieved a certain level of success, they've had a very interesting journey and they've had those moments that were transformational.

And sometimes super obvious, but we need to be reminded of, and we need, you know, somebody will listen to this and they'll be like, Oh my goodness. What he just said was the missing piece. Like I've known that all along, but I didn't realize the value of it and the power of it. And so I appreciate you sharing that. And so that, you know, those relationships kind of led you into your first job as a, were you freelancing as a web developer or did you get a job somewhere else as a web developer for that first time?

Dennis Yu (14:36.128)
I did a lot of freelancing. I've been building websites for 30 something years, but long story short, I started doing it at American Airlines. And this was before the internet was even a thing. So we put up web pages. You could learn about the airline. You could do a fair quote. You could check how many miles you had. And I parlayed that into Yahoo because I learned how to do public speaking because I had a mentor who did a lot of public speaking. And so I spoke at conferences because at American Airlines,

Paul Povolni (14:37.934)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (15:05.056)
I was buying software on behalf of American Airlines back in the, as the internet was starting to become a thing. And I would go to Silicon Valley and I would buy software from Oracle and you know, broad vision and Cona and DB2 and all these other guys are trying to sell their database software. And Oracle would say like, you should buy ours, you know, Oracle enterprise and all the things that come with it. And I was like, well, why would I do that when.

I can just as easily use all these other databases. Well, our stuff does, you know, fault tolerant and mirroring and we do all, you know, higher load transaction processing or we have a stronger indexing and analytics and yeah, that's great. But that's your salesperson just trying to get more money from us. Why would I want to switch? Yes, I'm on IBM DB2, which is old as hell, but why would I want to switch to this cool new analytics database?

Paul Povolni (15:53.262)
Ha ha.

Paul Povolni (15:58.062)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (16:00.992)
They add a Silicon Valley to all the big dotcoms are using because it's scalable and whatever. Like I have no reason to do that. That's more work for me. And besides, I don't even know how Oracle works. So you, you need to teach me, not sell me. I know you're like trying, I know you're making a million dollars a year selling Oracle to all these other companies and you just see me as another paycheck for you. Right. So there's, there's a book Oracle Essentials by Larry Stachowiak, which, who he wrote the book.

Paul Povolni (16:07.662)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (16:11.886)
Ha ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (16:22.446)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (16:28.992)
on how to use Oracle, how to use this database. And he worked at Oracle. So I said, well, why don't you have Larry Stokowiak teach me? And so Larry Stokowiak would fly out and see me in Dallas. And so I learned from the top people in Silicon Valley, because everyone wanted to have American Airlines be a client. So I would use that as leverage. And I remember like Epiphany, which was a marketing CRM software, which then I think got absorbed by another company, but they said, hey, we'd really love to power American Airlines.

Paul Povolni (16:37.23)
Wow.

Wow.

Paul Povolni (16:47.534)
Right, right. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (16:58.912)
And I said, you know, I love what your software does, but I think you just assigned some random person to implement the software for us. I don't want that. I want Donald DeRoe who implemented it for Amazon. He did it for, he implemented that software for Amazon. He should come over and implement it for American airlines. And like, no, we can't do that because Donald's working on, on Amazon and he only works on, you know, a couple of these other accounts. Cause I know you would give me some junior person, right. If I signed the deal. Cause the salesperson would give me some junior person. So I said.

Paul Povolni (17:24.91)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Yu (17:28.352)
No, I'm sorry. I have, you know, we're going to build our own CRM or we're going to use someone else's CRM. Why would we use your CRM? Cause you're going to give me some, I mean, if your software is so good, and if you really care about American airlines, you're going to give me this guy, Donald DeRoe. And you're going to give me this other guy, Bob Dunphy, because I could tell who the good people were. Right. I'm like, I want this guy and I want that guy. Right. And they did. And they gave me those guys and we did. We did great. Well, they did awesome work for us. And then I got to be the closing keynote speaker at their conference.

Paul Povolni (17:44.366)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dennis Yu (17:58.048)
with 2000 people in the room because it wasn't because I was amazing. It was because here's what American airlines is doing about the future of internet marketing, integrating all the channels because we're integrating the call center and email and the website. And if you go to the gate and you complain, like all that information is being stored in one place. Right. And I gave these compelling talks because I was American airlines. So when Kodak wanted a CRM.

Paul Povolni (18:00.206)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:16.686)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (18:23.214)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (18:25.504)
they would get referred to American Airlines. So who would answer that reference call? Me. And Starwood or Hilton or these big companies, McDonald's or whatnot, they're looking at, hey, you know, we want to implement a CRM. Well, so then at the epiphany, that software, the different reps would say, well, bring in Dennis, right? Bring in American Airlines to be the reference. Cause then the CMO at Kodak would have a conversation with me and say, so, you know, we're, you know,

Paul Povolni (18:46.318)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (18:54.592)
peer to peer, like here's like the challenge we're facing. I'll say, yeah, you know, yes, yes, us as the airline, we're dealing with the same issue. We have this vendor and that system and these people building the website and all this. And here's how we use Epiphany software to tie it all together. And here's how long it took and here's how much it cost. And here's like the real deal on how we actually use the software. So I was kind of like a secret closer because these CMOs of these huge companies would trust me because I'm a fellow peer. I'm.

Paul Povolni (19:17.262)
Wow.

Dennis Yu (19:22.496)
did it at American Airlines and I was well known because I was speaking at all these conferences. And it wasn't Paul because I was a great speaker. It was because I was what was called and is still called today a logo speaker. Have you heard of that?

Paul Povolni (19:23.822)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (19:36.014)
I haven't looked at it, tell me about it.

Dennis Yu (19:37.888)
So have you ever been to a conference, a big conference and it'll say, you know, this big company and this big company and this big company are going to be speaking there. So you don't even know who the person is from Microsoft or eBay or whoever it is that's speaking at the thing. So I was a logo speaker and it wasn't because Dennis Yu is a big deal, but it's because American Airlines is talking about the future of marketing and how to do one -to -one personalization and how to do email because we send.

Paul Povolni (19:46.318)
Right, right. Right, right.

Paul Povolni (20:01.23)
Ah, yes. Okay.

Dennis Yu (20:07.296)
Millions of emails out every week telling people how many miles they have, you know? And so I was the representative. And so I use that. And so as a logo speaker, I got to speak at lots of conferences because who wouldn't want American airlines to talk about what they're doing with internet marketing.

Paul Povolni (20:11.534)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:18.958)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:23.182)
Right. Well, and it sounds like even through some of the journey of, of, uh, what you've shared so far is you are asking once again, back to college, Dennis, where you went and talked to the big speaker and you, you know, I want to talk to you when I have questions, even when you were negotiating with these software companies, it's like, I want to talk to the big person, you know, and so, so that college Dennis attitude kind of followed you along your career of why not.

Dennis Yu (20:43.328)
Yeah. That's the hack. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:51.31)
go for the big thing. Like all these other students that came in were wowed by this speaker. You were the one that went and had the guts to say, I'm going to actually walk to walk up to this person and get even more from them. And so that seems like it followed you through your career and you asked for the moon. You asked for the big thing, right?

Dennis Yu (21:09.824)
I didn't ask for anything. I just had a question. I didn't ask for a job. I didn't ask for any of these things. They all were given to me.

Paul Povolni (21:12.302)
Well, you said you've mentioned you, yeah, you said you asked, yeah.

Yeah. Well, I was referencing when you asked to talk to the author of the book on Oracle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And so you've talked about how then now you've started also mentoring people. What are you mentoring them in?

Dennis Yu (21:24.)
Oh, on that. Yeah. Well then I knew I carried the big stick because I could sign checks up to a quarter million dollars. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (21:37.728)
Same thing I got mentored in. So last week, one of my mentees, his name is Danny Lee Brandt. If you Google him, a knowledge panel shows up, which is typically for famous people. He's a 20 year old kid. And he was telling me he had the same sort of limiting self belief, you know, misfit thing that I had back then. And he said, he said, Dennis, I'm a nobody. I don't deserve to be on the internet. I shouldn't be podcasting. I don't know anything. I'm not a big deal. I'm just some kid. But I saw.

That this kid had a lot of talent and he understood copywriting and he understood local SEO. Cause he's gone through our training on how to rank on Google, that whole thing. And I said, but Danny, you actually can let me interview you on my podcast. And that was a year ago. Last week he was with me in Seattle and he was a keynote speaker at Digimarkon in a big room of people. And then three or four days ago, we were in San Diego.

And he also gave a speech on local SEO and he crushed it. He posted pictures of it on his LinkedIn and Facebook and all that, you know, who wouldn't be proud to be able to give a keynote speech in front of a room full of executives. And I, when he was speaking, I felt kind of like a moment of parental pride. It's like, you know, you, you've got a kid who scores a goal and you, you sort of like win to vicariously like I'm a soccer dad or whatever.

Paul Povolni (22:49.358)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (22:59.342)
Yeah, yeah, really.

Paul Povolni (23:06.926)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Yu (23:07.744)
Cause I saw him overcome the same thing that I had 30 some years ago, because he, you know, people are scared to like speak on stage is number one fear that whole thing, but he spoke on stage. He did a great job. We rehearsed the whole presentation and what exactly the key points were going to be. And people came up to him afterwards saying that was amazing. Wow. I learned so much. That was the worth the whole price of the conference.

and coming out just to hear your speech on how to do local and what's really changing in SEO. And he quoted stuff from Google. He quoted me. He showed how he was building relationships. It wasn't a sales pitch, but he did show the results that he's been generating because he chose pest control for his agency, which is a whole weird thing. But, you know, we want all these young adults to choose one thing, like choose plumbing or choose carpentry or choose landscaping or choose real estate. Choose a category, a local category.

Paul Povolni (23:35.438)
Yeah. Wow.

Paul Povolni (23:50.158)
Yeah.

Wow. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (23:59.246)
Right.

Dennis Yu (24:04.672)
Right. So he chose pest control and so he's been crushing it in pest control and getting more referrals and pest control. And the public speaking is elevating his brand. And the same thing that happened to me many years ago has been happening to Danny Lee brand and has been happening to so many young adults yesterday. This girl Mia, who works or who's the daughter of a restoration company. So a restoration company, if you had.

Paul Povolni (24:04.942)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (24:09.966)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (24:20.11)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (24:34.144)
A flood or your house burned down or there's mold. Like they come in and they fix things, right? They're also called the remediation company and her dad, Jeremy runs a successful remediation company in San Antonio. And Jonathan always, or sorry, Jeremy always wanted to work with his daughter in some way. And the daughter's graduate in college in a week and he didn't want to.

be doing the remediation remodeling company for the rest of his life. Cause he just, you know, he's tired of it. At some point you get tired. You want to do something else. And we got on a call yesterday and, and Jeremy introduced another friend of his who runs a remediation company in New Orleans or no in Lafayette, Louisiana. And Jeremy also runs a group of 10 ,000 restoration companies. So he happened to.

build a group too, cause he was successful. When you do well, then you mentor other people in your industry. And we were doing an audit on his friend's site who got burned by the last three agencies. And one of my young adults, Parker was the one doing the audit. I just like to sit and watch and I'll chime in once in a while. I posted it publicly. Everyone could watch the recording. I post hundreds of these. And during it, we realized, you know what Mia, you've been working on how to do this for your dad's business. Why?

Paul Povolni (25:32.974)
Right, right.

Dennis Yu (25:59.36)
You know, going through our training, working with Parker, why don't you do it for this, this other guy? Why don't you do it for other people that are in Jeremy's network? And she never really thought about that. And then I said to Jeremy's friend, I said, you know what? Jeremy's daughter, she's been doing it for Jeremy learning how to do digital marketing in our program. Based on the things that are broken with your website and your digital marketing, which we clearly pointed out, you should hire Mia.

Paul Povolni (26:04.622)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (26:10.094)
Ha ha.

Dennis Yu (26:28.896)
You should pay her $1500 ,500 a month for three months and give her her first real client. In fact, Mia, you should, I recommend you start an agency right now. And this is your first client right here based on this audit, because I know you can do it. Cause instead of like us doing the audit, I said, okay, before I explain what's going on with why you're not showing up on Google, what do you think the reason is? Mia, go ahead and do the diagnosis.

Paul Povolni (26:41.358)
Wow. That's awesome.

Dennis Yu (26:58.688)
Right. And she did, and it was right on. I said, yep, see, you know, what's wrong. You know, what Google's guidelines are. So Mia explained to everyone, how is this previous company that was working on this guy's website, how are they violating Google's guidelines and how do we fix it? And she says, well, it's obvious you do this, this, and this like, yes, that's correct. Mia, do you think that you could do this? Yeah, I think, I think I could. Okay. You're graduating in a week and.

Paul Povolni (26:59.598)
Yeah. Wow.

Paul Povolni (27:16.014)
That is so cool.

Dennis Yu (27:27.264)
You know, you could start an agency doing this. Don't you think? Yeah, I think I could. Okay. So what I want you to do is set up your, the name of your agency, like Mia's restoration agency or whatever it is, go to the bank, you know, go to bank of America or chase or whoever, set up your bank account, set up all the stuff to be able to go in business. And then once that you have that stuff ready, then you restoration company owner. You pay Mia, you go to that link to sign up for their thing, put in your credit card and you pay, and this will be your first client. And.

Paul Povolni (27:38.382)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (27:55.822)
Wow.

Dennis Yu (27:56.992)
Then Jeremy called me afterwards and he's like, I can't believe like, this is such a magical thing. Cause you know, this thing for the, my daughter, it all sort of like came together perfectly. And I would like to start referring in all these other restoration companies in our network so that Mia can help them fix all the broken stuff. Cause they all been burned by the marketing companies and we recorded it and we published it for anyone to see on the internet. How that went down.

Paul Povolni (28:15.47)
Wow. Wow. That's amazing. Wow. Well, I love your genius around this area and I do want to spend a lot of time talking about that. You know, we've used the word Googleable. We've used the, you know, you said that so many people make mistakes and they'll make mistakes in this area. So let's, first of all, let's talk about what it means to be Googleable.

Dennis Yu (28:41.6)
Well, Google me. What do you see when you type in Dennis space? YU you see a full knowledge panel pop up. You see articles and videos and my experience and podcasts and people that I'm with and conferences and Twitter's and like, you see all this kind of stuff, right? Books that I've written, all that stuff shows up. So all of us as business owners, if I Google the name of your business, what shows up? Do you rank?

Paul Povolni (28:48.878)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (29:09.024)
In Google maps, if you're a plumber in San Antonio and I'm in San Antonio and I search plumber near me, or I search broken pipe, or I search something that would be obvious, you know, clogged toilet, who shows up? If I search your name, if I search your Headsmack podcast, what shows up? So to be Googleable, you have to show up in all the different ways that Google's going to show the results. Cause they show a mix of things. They'll show a video.

They'll show a LinkedIn profile. They'll show maps. They'll show people also ask. They'll show ads. They'll show shopping results. They show news. There's all this stuff they can show, right? So to be Google -able is to show up when people are searching something that is a fit for what you do. But if you don't demonstrate to Google, you have those things, then all these other people are going to show up. It's that simple.

Paul Povolni (29:49.678)
Yeah, right.

Paul Povolni (29:58.414)
So.

Paul Povolni (30:02.83)
Right. Well, and you'd mentioned that, um, you know, um, you know, she was able to help, you know, people in the restoration space because others had done things wrong. They didn't understand Google's things. So what are some things that people can start looking at to get more Google -able that when somebody checks them out, they're right. And the mistakes that they've been making, what are some of the mistakes that they've just like thought, well, I thought this was the way to do it. And it's like, no, it's not even close. What are some of those things?

Dennis Yu (30:32.192)
Number one mistake is they think this is a big technical thing and I am just a landscaper or I'm just a pest control company. And this other person's an SEO expert and they do websites and their social media expert or whatever kind of expert they claim that they're in. And I'm just going to hire this expert to do their thing while I do my thing, which is spraying for ants or mosquitoes or whatever it is, right? Cause I'm a pest control guy. I go around and spray and you go and do your thing, which is the thing that these.

Paul Povolni (30:54.382)
Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

Dennis Yu (31:00.544)
marketing companies want you to believe that's a load of BS. So when you overcome that thing that they want you to believe, then you realize, wait, the key to be Googleable is you actually have to have proof that you do the thing that you say you do. So this guy, an hour and a half ago, Tommy Lench, his son, Mario Lench started a pavement striping company. So you know how like,

There's lines in the parking lot where it says like visitors park here or make a right turn here or what, like lines, colored lines in the parking lot. So his son, Mario started a company just doing this pavement striping thing. And he's starting to generate more business because he's done it for like the Chick -fil -A for the mall. I mean, cause someone's got to paint those lines. Right. I mean, I don't know anything about painting lines, but, but he's been posting videos and pictures.

Paul Povolni (31:31.246)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (31:35.566)
Ryan. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (31:50.862)
Right, right. We don't even think about it. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (31:56.416)
As okay, well today I'm coming over to this store and I'm painting their parking lot. Right. And he's showing as he's doing his thing and making the lines and I don't know anything about paving parking lots, but it looks good to me. Like here's before where it's like all old and faded and then like, here's a new one and all the lines are nice and clean and like, it looks good to me. Right. And because he's showing what he's doing and because he's tying it to his Google my business, because it's on his website, because he puts it on his social.

Paul Povolni (32:08.238)
Right.

Paul Povolni (32:13.998)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (32:26.4)
It drives referrals. Google can see the referrals. Google can see who's clicking on stuff. Google can see that this guy is tweeting about it and putting on Instagram. And so when someone searched for pavement, striping, San Diego, or whatever the city is, a suburb name is, they type in the thing that you do, plus the city or near me, which is what a local search is, then he's starting to show up in the maps.

And his name is a difficult one. Mario Lench, L E N S C H I think. But he's, it's starting to work, but Mario doesn't know a thing about SEO. He doesn't know. I'm a search engine engineer. He doesn't know anything about how search engines operate, but he doesn't need to because the search engines are merely looking for the evidence that you actually do the thing you do. Now, if you know that that's what Google's looking for, and I'm intentionally avoiding a lot of technical terms, I'm simplifying into.

Paul Povolni (33:07.982)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (33:11.63)
Wow.

Dennis Yu (33:22.464)
normal words, then how is someone who is an SEO expert from Pakistan or some other random place, if they don't know San Diego and the suburbs in San Diego, and if they don't know anything about how do you stripe a parking lot, can they help Mario lunch with his radiant striping parking or radiant striping? That's the name of his company. Yeah. Will they be able to help? No, because they don't have experience. They don't know anything about.

Paul Povolni (33:44.622)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (33:50.496)
doing parking lots, they don't know anything about San Diego, right? Like maybe because it's near the beach, the salt water is more likely to corrode the parking or the, the asphalt's different or there's different rules that the city has or like, you know, you gotta be there. So the person best equipped to help you rank in Google is yourself. Cause you have the acumen and the thing that you do and you know, the local businesses in San Diego. So yesterday when we were talking with Mia.

Paul Povolni (34:05.742)
Right.

Dennis Yu (34:18.56)
And this other dude who has the restoration company in Lafayette, Louisiana. Paul, do you know anything about Lafayette, Louisiana? Do you know what the neighboring towns are? Do you know that there's a crawfish boil in Lafayette, Louisiana this weekend? And it's being sponsored by this restoration company. And at this crawfish boil contest on who has the best jambalaya and whatnot. Do you understand like what makes a good jambalaya?

Paul Povolni (34:26.35)
I have no idea. I've driven through it, but I have no idea.

Paul Povolni (34:46.638)
I have no idea.

Dennis Yu (34:47.776)
I don't either. So can, can we really help that client establish authenticity in Lafayette, Louisiana.

No, who can do a better job? And this is the question I asked at the end that had everyone basically laughing because after an hour of having this discussion, I then asked this guy who owns a restoration company in Lafayette, Louisiana. I said, so who do you think can do a better job in helping your SEO to be so you rank better in Google? Mia, who is about to graduate college, whose daddy owns a restoration company or Dennis.

who is a search engine engineer, who's going to help you rank better in search, the search engine engineer or Mia, who can do a better job? And he said, he said, well, yeah, I know it's like, I'm like, I would think that you would be the guy, but clearly the reason you're asking the question is because you believe that Mia could do a better job. And I said, that's correct. Do you know why? Why do you think this 20 year old can do a better job than arguably?

Paul Povolni (35:34.35)
Well, most people would assume you, right?

Paul Povolni (35:44.206)
Wow.

Dennis Yu (35:53.44)
one of the most well -known people in the world of SEO.

Well, because she knows about restoration. She knows about fire, flood, mold damage, you know, what happens to when you, when the company has to come in and take pictures and submit claims to the insurance company. So Paul, if you and I started a restoration company today, Paul and Dennis's restoration company. And we were magically able to get a lead and somebody's house was burned down. Okay. For some reason, and you and I were there taking pictures.

Paul Povolni (36:14.766)
Well.

Dennis Yu (36:27.456)
of the fire and all the damage, and then we have to submit it to the insurance company. How likely would our claim get disapproved? How likely would we get the full amount of the claim? Right? Because we would have missed the detail. Like we wouldn't have filled out everything properly. We don't know how to fill out the claims to the insurance company. Insurance company is going to deny us, right Paul?

Paul Povolni (36:36.462)
Right, yeah, yeah, right, right.

Paul Povolni (36:46.99)
Yeah, though in my case, the photos will look really nice, but that's not what it's all about.

Dennis Yu (36:52.128)
But, but the insurance company for good reason, it's not that they're evil for good reason. They want to see certain kinds of documentation from certain angles and what kind of carpet was there and you know, what kind of wood was used in the, like what kind of foundation was like, there's all this stuff you have to document and you and I don't know how to do it. But Mia does because her daddy runs a business that does that. And she's been around these businesses. She knows, I mean, she's not a restoration company yourself, but she's been around restoration companies.

Paul Povolni (36:58.99)
Right? Right?

Paul Povolni (37:09.134)
Yeah. Right. Right.

Dennis Yu (37:21.952)
And she's chosen restoration companies to be her niche. So she knows all about restoration companies. And if you know all about it, then you can create the content that Google deems is authentic because the users, other restoration companies see it as legit. If, if you and I, Paul, and let's say you have a $60 ,000 red camera and you know how to take pictures. Do you think that we would be able to take pictures and make videos enough that would fool someone who is an owner of a restoration company?

Paul Povolni (37:28.014)
Right. Right.

Paul Povolni (37:38.894)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (37:51.502)
No, not at all. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (37:52.576)
No. So it's not trying to fool Google. That's what people miss about SEO. It's demonstrating enough expertise that it would pass the test of someone who does it for a living in that field.

Paul Povolni (38:04.174)
Wow. Well, I think there's, I think there's somebody sitting there right now that have listened to this podcast so far, and they're probably seeing stars swirling around their head from the head smacks they've just received regarding SEO and Google. You know, when it comes, it's basically you're creating evidence of you do, like you said, you, you do what you do, where you do it and putting that online. And, but that takes a lot of time to create that content is, you know, I don't know, does it?

Dennis Yu (38:29.856)
Does it? There's no creating of content. This is what people miss, Paul. It's not creating content. It's not like, oh, it's Valentine's day. Now we've got to create some content around love your mom. No, it's documenting what you do. It's having the people that do the work and like Danny does pest control company, you know, Danny Lebrant does pest control. So any of these pest control companies.

Paul Povolni (38:34.254)
Okay.

Paul Povolni (38:44.558)
Okay, love that, yeah.

Dennis Yu (38:54.912)
They have technicians that are going around and spraying around the yard and spraying in the garage and spraying for this and ants and cockroaches and all that. Right. So as these technicians are spraying, they're like, oh, here's a cockroach. Well, is it a European cockroach or is it the whatever kind of Asian cockroach? Cause there's different kinds of cockroaches and you have to treat them differently depending on like what kind of cockroach it is. Right. And so these technicians are gathering these things as they're going about their job.

Paul Povolni (39:12.11)
Heheheheh

Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (39:23.936)
It's not on the business owner to have to do that. It's encouraging the employees and the staff to document what they're doing along the way, stick it in a central folder, Google Drive Dropbox, and then Mia or Danny or the virtual assistant can pull from that folder and put that stuff onto the website. Can put that on social media, can edit that video and turn it into a compilation of here's like.

Paul Povolni (39:26.702)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:46.031)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (39:51.936)
15 kinds of cockroaches that we've seen. Cause you know, you take, cause from the folder, from that shared central folder of real experiences, you can create all kinds of content, right? It's not that we're just like generating on a theory. Oh, let me use chat GPT to write an article about the 10 kinds of cockroaches. It's not based on real experience. That's just chat GPT making up stuff. Google's looking for your real experience. So you start from the ingredients of the real experience, which requires your operations and the people.

Paul Povolni (39:54.126)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (40:01.998)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (40:12.686)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Yu (40:20.416)
You know, if you're a real estate company and you've got 15 real estate agents that are going around and showing homes to people, cause that's what they do, right? Oh, let's look at this house. Let's go drive to that house. And we're documenting along the way like, Oh, we're in Denver and my buddy, Justin Martin, who's was the number one real estate agent in Colorado sold more homes than anybody. And he's like, okay, we're in Lodo now and we're, and this is only, you know, three miles from downtown.

And the new stadium is going up. There's a lot of traffic on I -15. Here's a new shopping mall that's going up. And here, this is the best school to be at. Oh, as we drive around, notice here on this side, there's this part of the neighborhood and this is going on. And it's based on real experience as he's going around. Like he's showing someone a house. So I call it, what do you think about this house and that house? Well, I like this house because it's closer to whole foods, but it's more expensive in this other house. We have more of a backyard and here's, but it's also like closer to my wife's work and.

Paul Povolni (40:57.07)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (41:00.526)
Yeah, so it's documenting, yeah.

Yeah.

Dennis Yu (41:16.544)
So he's going around showing as a real estate agent in Denver, Colorado, he's showing different parts of the town. Now I don't know Denver, Colorado. I don't know the different neighborhoods and what's going on. And this is the best Italian restaurant. And I don't know those things. He does.

Paul Povolni (41:25.326)
Right.

Paul Povolni (41:30.734)
Wow, wow, that is so good. So it's documenting. It's not necessarily saying, like you said, here's a Easter post, a Mother's Day post, a Father's Day post. It's documenting you doing the thing that you say you do in the area you do it. And it all comes back down to that. So when it comes...

Dennis Yu (41:47.072)
So Paul, can a third party do that? Can I do that on behalf of Justin Martin? For his real estate and mortgage company?

Paul Povolni (41:51.598)
To a point, I guess. To a point, but probably not as effectively.

Dennis Yu (41:56.832)
Can I? I don't live in Denver.

Paul Povolni (41:59.118)
You can do some research, right?

Dennis Yu (42:01.504)
Is that going to come off as authentic? Can Google see through that? Can Google tell who's going to do a better job? Justin Martin, the guy who goes around and sells homes and does mortgages or the search engine engineer.

Paul Povolni (42:04.398)
Probably.

Paul Povolni (42:13.294)
Well, Justin, obviously. So what about for the search results where, you know, SEO companies are charging thousands, you know, they want to get you ranked on Google. And then there are people that also game the system that, you know, you want to search for the top 10 microphones and then like these things pop up, these affiliate pages that are worthless. Yeah. So how do you get past that?

Dennis Yu (42:15.072)
Yes.

Dennis Yu (42:23.232)
Sure they do.

Dennis Yu (42:30.656)
All the spammy stuff, sure. But they've, a lot of them have been killed. Google has killed 44 % of that spam in the last two weeks because of what they call the March core update, which is honoring their principle of EEAT. This principle has been around forever, but Google hasn't enforced it until recently. So you're right. People have been able to get away with all this trickery. It's not like Google wasn't aware of it.

Paul Povolni (42:41.646)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (42:49.998)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (42:59.168)
Google's known about it for years. I have a lot of friends who are Google because I hired a lot of these people at Yahoo then went to Google. And so like, oh, I've been getting away with this for years, you know, generating basically what's called scaled content, which is what Google calls it, which is like multiplying location service pages and creating garbage. Even with AI tools. I see a lot of people that a lot of marketing people and SEO people are generating garbage without realizing they're actually spammers because they're not including.

Paul Povolni (42:59.342)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:05.486)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:19.054)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:26.638)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (43:28.32)
Real experience. So Google standards of EAT is experience, expertise, authority, trust. So every one of those web pages has to be sprinkled with real experience, not stock art photos, real pictures of your technicians spraying for ants, real videos, real stories, real reviews, real trust marks, real, you know, anecdotes of you and the mayor of that town, or here's your favorite park where you like to go hang out on Sunday and here's the church you go to and here's

Paul Povolni (43:30.158)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:34.19)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:44.526)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (43:58.528)
Here's a technician who just celebrated their third year with the company and so -and -so just had a kid and there's all these things that show real experience, which only you as the business owner can show. Only your people doing the work can do and show.

Paul Povolni (44:07.182)
That is so brilliant. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (44:13.55)
So you kind of shared just super briefly the EAT. Can you talk about that just for a minute of what exactly that is for the person that is going to look at, okay, I want to change. I'm just based on this conversation of what I just heard Dennis say, I am changing my entire strategy, but what does that mean? What does EAT mean?

Dennis Yu (44:33.586)
So Google, which I empathize with because I've been doing this for longer than they've been around. They're trying to give out clear guidelines on what to do and what not to do. They're basically saying, if you're hiring someone to try to trick us, and if they're like creating best chiropractor in Longmont, Colorado, like that's obviously meant for the search engine. It's an H1, it's repeated over and over again. If you're looking for the best chiropractor in Longmont, Colorado.

And if you're looking for a chiropractor near me, if you're suffering from back pain and spinal exam, like, like clearly that was written, that's keyword stuffing. Okay. So Google is trying to show and their search quality rate or guidelines, 170 page document they release every year. They're trying to show don't do this. And yet these SEO experts still pretend like, what do you mean? Google's guidelines are not clear. Are you kidding me? It's so clear.

Paul Povolni (45:12.398)
Right, right.

Dennis Yu (45:29.216)
They, they took 170 pages to explain example after, here's how you do it. Here's how you don't do it. I explained it in, in one, one sentence show real experience firsthand of what you do in the city that you do it with people in your neighborhood. Ideally as video that gets repurposed into articles and whatnot to preserve the original signal that you do what you do authentically. And when that happens.

that will show because you get good reviews, cause you do good work. People will talk about you. Your people who work for you on LinkedIn will update their resumes and link to your company. There'll be signals on Twitter and Facebook and whatnot that Google can see that will then say, Oh, this guy, eco care pest control in Portland, Oregon seems to be the number one rated.

because of their thousands of reviews and there's a whole history of them doing good work. And so Ken and Linda Vandegieck who run EcoCare Pest Control, clearly they deserve, and you type in Portland Pest Control, they rank number one or number two in Google. Is it because this old couple that's nearly 70, is it because they know about SEO? These are old people who say that they don't understand this whole technology thing.

Paul Povolni (46:31.054)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (46:48.014)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (46:54.816)
Ken and Linda, I love them to death. They're amazing people. And they have, they have made sure their technicians do good work. Their vans have the latest equipment. You see their vans drive around town with their logo, which is purple and green. And they've developed a really good reputation. And they, their, their people show up on time. They're clean. They charge a fair price. They, they just do good work. Okay. And, and that is why they rank on Portland pest control.

Paul Povolni (47:03.598)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:13.55)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:25.198)
Yeah. So it's not like you said, and what happens for a lot of, um, people that are told about SEO and paying for somebody to SEO of creating a chiropractor in Longmont chiropractor in, you know, Fort Collins chiropractor in Loveland chiropractor in Boulder. It's, you know, and creating these pages that are unlinked, but they're on your website. That's what Google is now flagging and saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're trying to gain the system by creating 50 pages. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (47:51.872)
And, and sites are being penalized. And now all these business owners have been crying the last couple of weeks and all these people that are SEO, that self -declare themselves as SEO experts. That's how I would never say I'm an SEO expert. Cause if you do, you're painting a target on your back. Cause you're saying my job is specifically to try to trick Google. My job is like, that's your job. That's what you're being paid for is to try to rank number one in your town for the thing that you do. I would never do that because what I want to do.

Paul Povolni (47:58.158)
Wow.

Dennis Yu (48:21.664)
Is show people who do good work in the city. They do it. So this guy, Chris Cathy runs a pool building company in Louisville, Colorado. So if you type in custom pools, Louisville, Colorado, maybe you'll see some of his ads. Maybe you'll see him rank on the map results because there's example after example of luxury pools that he's built for mansions in Louisville, Colorado. Now what we're doing.

Paul Povolni (48:48.238)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (48:50.336)
Is because he has all these people, all these clients and his team has built all these really nice pools all across Louisville, Colorado and surrounding cities. We've taken that folder. And so he has had to assemble this folder. So we've, and then from that folder, one of our agencies, which specializes just in pool builders puts all that experience onto those web pages, puts it on social media, puts that real experience everywhere else. And it's nothing to do with SEO. It's a lot of effort.

to your point to have to go back through your phone and all the phones of all your technicians and gather all that stuff. And then as guys are going out and they're digging a hole, cause they're going to build a pool, they're remodeling this pool. They're installing a cabana, a gazebo next to the pool. They're, they have this fireplace thing. Now they want a jacuzzi. Now there, there's this whole other grill and thing next to the pool.

Paul Povolni (49:27.054)
Right, right.

Dennis Yu (49:44.48)
And they're taking pictures of it and they're showing it step by step as it's being built. And now here's the final thing. And here's the before where it was all like dirt and now it's all nice. And, and now the technician saying, you know, the way we did it was because they're, you know, here's like how we had to design it. And they talked about how they're doing it. That's expertise from a real person doing it on the site. The roofer as they're on the roof, they're literally on the roof saying, yeah, there's hail damage. You can see here based on this shingle here, there's damage.

Paul Povolni (50:07.022)
Wow, that's amazing.

Dennis Yu (50:14.24)
it because it's this kind of shingle. And so to replace this roof, here's how we're going to do it. It's going to be like this. Right. Real experience. The guys on the freaking roof of some dude's house talking like, look at the damage here. Now here's how, here's how you can tell this roof needs replacement. It's because of this, this, and this you see here, he's literally showing with this phone. Look, look, see here. Right.

Paul Povolni (50:20.622)
Wow. Wow. So, so.

Paul Povolni (50:32.174)
Yeah. Man, this is, this is amazing. So this is going to create some very awkward conversations between SEO experts and the people that they're serving. So.

Dennis Yu (50:45.44)
The SEO experts, I have three or four conversations like this every day, just like yesterday, this guy who's an SEO expert in roofing. I said, this guy's selling you, he's saying he's charging you $15 ,000 for this magic website that was generated with chat GPT in two minutes. Right. Even admits it was done with Wix, which is using open AI. Don't build your website on Wix. Don't get me started on that. Okay. And clearly I look at these sites that he's worked on, they're all garbage. They violate Google standards.

Paul Povolni (50:49.23)
Hahaha.

Paul Povolni (51:02.016)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (51:07.694)
Hahaha.

Dennis Yu (51:15.04)
I read Google's guidelines. I open up the 170 page document that Google publishes every year, the quality rate or guidelines. Right. And I say, here are the standards in plain English. This is what this other guy is claiming his magic SEO technical. And so this guy's saying, Dennis doesn't know what he's talking about because he doesn't understand SEO. SEO is way more complicated than he makes it out to be. Is it who has more cred? Let's Google you.

Paul Povolni (51:17.422)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (51:22.958)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (51:42.062)
Well.

Dennis Yu (51:43.488)
random SEO expert, I can't even find you on the internet. You don't even have a LinkedIn SEO expert guy. I can't even find you. Then Google me, see who's more reputable. Who can talk more about SEO reputably? The search engine engineer or the other guy who claims to be an expert but hides in the shadows and then claims that Dennis Yu is a scam. Look at my results and look at your results. Why don't you tell me? Why don't you look at Google standards? Tell me.

Paul Povolni (51:44.59)
Hahaha!

Paul Povolni (51:49.678)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Paul Povolni (52:02.35)
So when... Right.

Paul Povolni (52:08.494)
So when you're trying to find help in this, because sometimes the landscaper or the pest control or the roofer, they're busy doing the roofing, the landscaping, the pest control. So.

Dennis Yu (52:19.328)
Sure. They are Google that person Google other, here's something that will off a lot of people. So what we train all of our agency owners to do, because I coach a lot of agencies is I say, choose one category, choose just HVAC companies and just do that. Choose just lawn care, you know, landscaping companies choose like Anthony Hill runs a landscaping company.

Paul Povolni (52:38.702)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (52:47.968)
And so we know a lot about landscaping companies from that agency that serves landscaping companies. But if, if I were to try to serve the landscaping companies and pest control companies and dentists and chiropractors and real estate agents and roofers and electricians. They're all so different. I mean, there's a lot in common because they want to rank on the maps and local all that. But if you are an electrician, you should talk to someone who focuses just on electricians.

Paul Povolni (53:04.878)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Yu (53:18.496)
Cause you got to know something about electricians and like Danny Lee brand, who's the pest control guy. He chose pest control. Why pest control for various reasons? Well, he now, now he's done it for a year. So he's learned a lot about pest control companies. He knows all about it. He's gone out there. He's walked around with the technicians as they spray. He knows how they talk to the folks on the phone. He knows, did you know that if, if someone calls in.

Paul Povolni (53:34.318)
Yeah.

Dennis Yu (53:47.264)
There's a difference between a possum and a raccoon and that you can, someone who calls in for a possum is worth way more than someone who calls in because of a raccoon. Did you know, did you know that it's because the insurance companies will pay more for the possum because the possum has opposable thumbs or fingers, whatever. And the raccoon doesn't. And so the insurance policies treat possums differently. So, but you wouldn't know that unless you've had, you spent time.

Paul Povolni (53:58.542)
I had no idea. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (54:08.078)
Wow. Wow.

Dennis Yu (54:17.344)
with pest control companies, right?

Paul Povolni (54:17.518)
Right. So the key is finding somebody that specializes in the industry that you're in to help you as opposed to a generalist who helps everybody. So when it comes to, yeah.

Dennis Yu (54:26.784)
Yeah. So that's number one. And number two is look, and then talk to that person, say, show me three companies that you've three other pest control company or whatever the thing is you do your landscaping company. Show me three other companies that you have done this for. And that will knock out most of them because they're they all, but it's proprietary. I can't reveal my clients. Like, are you kidding? If the whole point is to make them Googleable, it should be Googleable, right?

Paul Povolni (54:49.806)
Hahaha.

Paul Povolni (54:54.702)
Right, right.

Dennis Yu (54:55.104)
And then number three, if that doesn't knock them out, Google their name and see what shows up. Google my name to see what shows up.

Paul Povolni (54:58.926)
Wow. Wow. So what, so finding somebody that helps in that area, um, what would you Google specialist? I mean, if SEO is not the thing, what would you Google to find a specialist in your area? If you're trying to find a, a roofing specialist or like, what, what would be the terminology? Cause this is really going to help somebody today. I think, I think this is going to blow their mind first of all, and then they're going to be like laying on the floor. What do I do next? Like help me Dennis.

Dennis Yu (55:27.04)
It's so obvious once you know what the thing is, right? So what you do is simply this, you just Google for pest control SEO or go to are you Googleable .com and we have hundreds of agencies, actually thousands now that are going through our training and you can inspect exactly what the standards are. You can look at the training yourself to see what the checklists are. You can grade yourself.

Paul Povolni (55:47.15)
That's amazing.

Dennis Yu (55:55.68)
on do you meet Google standards. You can pay $200 to have a specialist come through and actually audit and analyze your results. Because we pay for a lot of tools that help us do this, right?

Paul Povolni (56:04.526)
That's amazing.

So for, for the person, so say I was, um, I'm in Denver, Colorado. We've kind of been around Colorado. Um, so if I'm in Denver, Colorado, and I'm a specialist in helping, uh, roofers in Denver, Colorado, what, what about the person that says,

Dennis Yu (56:21.216)
Right? No, you're, you're a route, you help roofing companies, but they don't have to be in Denver. If you're a roofer in Denver, that's what you're saying. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (56:26.926)
Well, say, say, um, um, well say I am though. Yeah. If I'm a roofer in Denver and I need help and I go to this specialist that does roofing and then there's another roofer that's also in Denver. How do you, how do you tell them that there's not going to be a conflict where you're not going to be having two experts.

Dennis Yu (56:45.568)
It's not all the same. Some do commercial, which is like aluminum roofs, right? Some specialize in single family. Some specialize in hail damage and working with the insurance companies. Some specialize in roof replacement. Some specialize in a certain kind of tile or shingle. There's, you know, there's many different, with any, any category, there's many different angles. And in Denver is a huge market. It's not like there's only enough room for one roof in Denver. And there's many suburbs within Denver.

Paul Povolni (57:07.086)
Yeah. Right. But if you're working for the same roofers in the same city, how do you differentiate? Yeah. Okay. That's what I was looking for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause, cause you know, I know that sometimes people are concerned about, well, if I hire the same person as the other person in the same industry, I'm fighting. Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (57:16.128)
In a big city, you don't want to take on more than three. If you're an agency, just cap it at three. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (57:28.608)
No, that's a conflict of interest. Yeah. It's just bad. Cause then the other guy would say like, yeah, well you're working with these other two. It's like having three wives, right? Don't do that. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (57:34.862)
Dennis, this has been amazing. I mean, you know, so much more that we can unwrap, I'm sure. But, you know, how do people get a hold of you? Like this is really, for some people, this has been amazing.

Dennis Yu (57:45.536)
We're talking about being Googleable. Google me. You'll see my LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, like happy to connect, happy to answer questions, happy to refer people to young adults that are in our program. Cause I just love seeing the Mia's and Danny's and Parker's and Keegan's. And I just love seeing these guys thrive. And I love crushing these marketing companies that are ripping off good local businesses.

Paul Povolni (57:48.59)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (57:59.406)
Yeah, yeah.

That's amazing.

Paul Povolni (58:07.886)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did Google myself. I'm happy with the way I showed up, though it's not as good as it could be, especially the profile that you mentioned. So I need to work on that and get that fixed out. But man, this has been amazing. Anything else that you want?

Dennis Yu (58:18.24)
Yeah. Yeah.

Let's share this out here. Let's see what the feedback is. And if people want to hear more, we can do a part two.

Paul Povolni (58:25.486)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cause yeah, for some people this.

Dennis Yu (58:29.344)
Let's make this episode Googleable. Let's turn it to a podcast episode. That's an article. Let's put it on social media. I'll link to it. I'll promote it via our dollar a day technique and we can help more people. Let's practice what we preach.

Paul Povolni (58:34.414)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:39.566)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cause I think there's so many businesses that could, especially when things are a little tougher, I think they, you know, marketing is the first thing that they scale back on. It seems like, which is kind of counterintuitive, but what you've shared today, like it's not, you don't need a huge budget. You have a phone, like you have a phone, you have accounts, just not capturing what you do in the area you're doing it. If you don't have, if don't have the time, don't have the capability, you can connect with one of these, uh,

Dennis Yu (58:50.912)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (59:09.134)
folks that Dennis is mentoring and get in touch with them and they can help you with some of that process and getting some of that stuff done. But don't feel that you're stuck. Don't feel that you're at a place where you can't, you know, I just don't have the budget. I just don't have the time. There are ways to do that. And I think what Dennis has shared is incredibly powerful towards that.

Dennis Yu (59:15.776)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Yu (59:29.024)
Amen. Well, thank you, Paul. And anyone can do it for free. You can go through the training and do it for free for yourself. But we also have young adults. You can have your age. You have an in -house team, have them go through the standards. It's all public. Thank you, Paul. And thank you everybody.

Paul Povolni (59:32.526)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (59:40.046)
Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Take care.