Category: Uncategorized

John Jantsch (00:01.272)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m going to talk about a topic that I’m seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You’ve got people saying it is dead. You’ve got people saying, no, it’s not dead. It’s just changing. I’m talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer’s friend.

I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google’s changing the way that they’re returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google’s giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you’re getting AI overviews, that truly outline.

Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn’t very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren’t looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don’t panic.

they, the, the drop in traffic, if you’ve seen it, doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I’m going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can’t remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I’m going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.

The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin

John Jantsch (02:24.974)

kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today’s search is not a three-word, four-word search. It’s a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so…

Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I’m going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it’s got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.

to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you’re ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I’ve seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They’re not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,

that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That’s a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I’ve been talking about, and then build content clusters.

groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don’t worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I’ll give you an option we’ve created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How’s that? But everything I’m talking about you

John Jantsch (04:43.982)

can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we’re going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that’s just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That’s the human part of it. But there’s a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.

You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You’re going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you’re going to, you’re going to do the UX still. You’re going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.

You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what’s the best brand for X? You’ll start to see some traction around that.

So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don’t worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it’s going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.

All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.

John Jantsch (06:36.546)

That search isn’t going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they’re in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let’s say you’re a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don’t even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it’ll go away in two years, but right now.

is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a

a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what’s the best

countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they’re also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don’t care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you’ve probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.

You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that’s going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it’s an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren’t thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.

John Jantsch (08:54.624)

If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A’s, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that’s, if you’re doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?

intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they’re looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody’s trying to say, you know, what’s the safest car I could buy? That’s just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn’t matter.

Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That’s what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it’s more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You’ve probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.

Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they’re trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they’re trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.

Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they’re going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.

John Jantsch (11:12.066)

build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re looking to buy. And that’s different than somebody that you’re just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.

So it’s a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we’ve gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we’re trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,

I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they’d be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,

Google doesn’t even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn’t see as very authoritative. So you’re have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that’s been going away for years, but it’s just absolutely silly now to do because it’s a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.

So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That’s the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I’ll probably link back to that.

John Jantsch (13:33.566)

It’s branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So

It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.

four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you’d be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don’t worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it’s all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,

for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.

is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you’re getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,

John Jantsch (15:56.118)

I that’s what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that’s a pretty darn good indication that there’s not only high intent, but that you’re going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you’re an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my…

six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you’re thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there’s no sense in creating any kind of

visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you’re, you’re who you’re trying to attract, what you do that’s different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we’re going to help you build not only helpful content, but we’re going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You’ve got to

If you’re local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it’s the most underutilized tool. It’s free. And it’s the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.

to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that’s actually going to tell an accurate story. if you’re listening to this and you want to know more, it’s just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.

John Jantsch (18:03.7)

somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we’re employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you’re an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I’m going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I’m going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.

Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It’s just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.272)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m going to talk about a topic that I’m seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You’ve got people saying it is dead. You’ve got people saying, no, it’s not dead. It’s just changing. I’m talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer’s friend.

I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google’s changing the way that they’re returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google’s giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you’re getting AI overviews, that truly outline.

Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn’t very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren’t looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don’t panic.

they, the, the drop in traffic, if you’ve seen it, doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I’m going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can’t remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I’m going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.

The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin

John Jantsch (02:24.974)

kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today’s search is not a three-word, four-word search. It’s a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so…

Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I’m going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it’s got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.

to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you’re ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I’ve seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They’re not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,

that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That’s a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I’ve been talking about, and then build content clusters.

groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don’t worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I’ll give you an option we’ve created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How’s that? But everything I’m talking about you

John Jantsch (04:43.982)

can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we’re going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that’s just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That’s the human part of it. But there’s a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.

You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You’re going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you’re going to, you’re going to do the UX still. You’re going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.

You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what’s the best brand for X? You’ll start to see some traction around that.

So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don’t worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it’s going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.

All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.

John Jantsch (06:36.546)

That search isn’t going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they’re in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let’s say you’re a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don’t even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it’ll go away in two years, but right now.

is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a

a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what’s the best

countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they’re also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don’t care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you’ve probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.

You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that’s going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it’s an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren’t thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.

John Jantsch (08:54.624)

If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A’s, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that’s, if you’re doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?

intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they’re looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody’s trying to say, you know, what’s the safest car I could buy? That’s just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn’t matter.

Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That’s what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it’s more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You’ve probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.

Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they’re trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they’re trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.

Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they’re going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.

John Jantsch (11:12.066)

build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re looking to buy. And that’s different than somebody that you’re just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.

So it’s a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we’ve gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we’re trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,

I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they’d be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,

Google doesn’t even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn’t see as very authoritative. So you’re have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that’s been going away for years, but it’s just absolutely silly now to do because it’s a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.

So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That’s the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I’ll probably link back to that.

John Jantsch (13:33.566)

It’s branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So

It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.

four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you’d be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don’t worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it’s all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,

for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.

is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you’re getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,

John Jantsch (15:56.118)

I that’s what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that’s a pretty darn good indication that there’s not only high intent, but that you’re going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you’re an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my…

six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you’re thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there’s no sense in creating any kind of

visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you’re, you’re who you’re trying to attract, what you do that’s different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we’re going to help you build not only helpful content, but we’re going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You’ve got to

If you’re local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it’s the most underutilized tool. It’s free. And it’s the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.

to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that’s actually going to tell an accurate story. if you’re listening to this and you want to know more, it’s just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.

John Jantsch (18:03.7)

somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we’re employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you’re an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I’m going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I’m going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.

Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It’s just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.272)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m going to talk about a topic that I’m seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You’ve got people saying it is dead. You’ve got people saying, no, it’s not dead. It’s just changing. I’m talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer’s friend.

I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google’s changing the way that they’re returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google’s giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you’re getting AI overviews, that truly outline.

Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn’t very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren’t looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don’t panic.

they, the, the drop in traffic, if you’ve seen it, doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I’m going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can’t remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I’m going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.

The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin

John Jantsch (02:24.974)

kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today’s search is not a three-word, four-word search. It’s a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so…

Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I’m going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it’s got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.

to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you’re ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I’ve seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They’re not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,

that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That’s a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I’ve been talking about, and then build content clusters.

groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don’t worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I’ll give you an option we’ve created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How’s that? But everything I’m talking about you

John Jantsch (04:43.982)

can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we’re going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that’s just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That’s the human part of it. But there’s a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.

You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You’re going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you’re going to, you’re going to do the UX still. You’re going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.

You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what’s the best brand for X? You’ll start to see some traction around that.

So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don’t worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it’s going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.

All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.

John Jantsch (06:36.546)

That search isn’t going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they’re in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let’s say you’re a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don’t even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it’ll go away in two years, but right now.

is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a

a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what’s the best

countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they’re also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don’t care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you’ve probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.

You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that’s going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it’s an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren’t thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.

John Jantsch (08:54.624)

If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A’s, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that’s, if you’re doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?

intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they’re looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody’s trying to say, you know, what’s the safest car I could buy? That’s just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn’t matter.

Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That’s what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it’s more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You’ve probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.

Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they’re trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they’re trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.

Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they’re going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.

John Jantsch (11:12.066)

build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re looking to buy. And that’s different than somebody that you’re just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.

So it’s a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we’ve gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we’re trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,

I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they’d be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,

Google doesn’t even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn’t see as very authoritative. So you’re have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that’s been going away for years, but it’s just absolutely silly now to do because it’s a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.

So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That’s the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I’ll probably link back to that.

John Jantsch (13:33.566)

It’s branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So

It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.

four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you’d be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don’t worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it’s all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,

for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.

is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you’re getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,

John Jantsch (15:56.118)

I that’s what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that’s a pretty darn good indication that there’s not only high intent, but that you’re going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you’re an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my…

six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you’re thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there’s no sense in creating any kind of

visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you’re, you’re who you’re trying to attract, what you do that’s different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we’re going to help you build not only helpful content, but we’re going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You’ve got to

If you’re local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it’s the most underutilized tool. It’s free. And it’s the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.

to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that’s actually going to tell an accurate story. if you’re listening to this and you want to know more, it’s just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.

John Jantsch (18:03.7)

somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we’re employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you’re an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I’m going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I’m going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.

Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It’s just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.272)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m going to talk about a topic that I’m seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You’ve got people saying it is dead. You’ve got people saying, no, it’s not dead. It’s just changing. I’m talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer’s friend.

I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google’s changing the way that they’re returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google’s giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you’re getting AI overviews, that truly outline.

Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn’t very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren’t looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don’t panic.

they, the, the drop in traffic, if you’ve seen it, doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I’m going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can’t remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I’m going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.

The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin

John Jantsch (02:24.974)

kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today’s search is not a three-word, four-word search. It’s a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so…

Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I’m going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it’s got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.

to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you’re ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I’ve seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They’re not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,

that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That’s a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I’ve been talking about, and then build content clusters.

groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don’t worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I’ll give you an option we’ve created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How’s that? But everything I’m talking about you

John Jantsch (04:43.982)

can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we’re going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that’s just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That’s the human part of it. But there’s a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.

You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You’re going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you’re going to, you’re going to do the UX still. You’re going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.

You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what’s the best brand for X? You’ll start to see some traction around that.

So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don’t worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it’s going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.

All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.

John Jantsch (06:36.546)

That search isn’t going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they’re in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let’s say you’re a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don’t even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it’ll go away in two years, but right now.

is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a

a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what’s the best

countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they’re also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don’t care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you’ve probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.

You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that’s going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it’s an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren’t thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.

John Jantsch (08:54.624)

If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A’s, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that’s, if you’re doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?

intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they’re looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody’s trying to say, you know, what’s the safest car I could buy? That’s just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn’t matter.

Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That’s what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it’s more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You’ve probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.

Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they’re trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they’re trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.

Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they’re going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.

John Jantsch (11:12.066)

build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re looking to buy. And that’s different than somebody that you’re just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.

So it’s a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we’ve gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we’re trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,

I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they’d be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,

Google doesn’t even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn’t see as very authoritative. So you’re have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that’s been going away for years, but it’s just absolutely silly now to do because it’s a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.

So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That’s the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I’ll probably link back to that.

John Jantsch (13:33.566)

It’s branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So

It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.

four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you’d be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don’t worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it’s all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,

for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.

is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you’re getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,

John Jantsch (15:56.118)

I that’s what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that’s a pretty darn good indication that there’s not only high intent, but that you’re going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you’re an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my…

six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you’re thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there’s no sense in creating any kind of

visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you’re, you’re who you’re trying to attract, what you do that’s different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we’re going to help you build not only helpful content, but we’re going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You’ve got to

If you’re local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it’s the most underutilized tool. It’s free. And it’s the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.

to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that’s actually going to tell an accurate story. if you’re listening to this and you want to know more, it’s just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.

John Jantsch (18:03.7)

somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we’re employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you’re an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I’m going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I’m going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.

Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It’s just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.272)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m going to talk about a topic that I’m seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You’ve got people saying it is dead. You’ve got people saying, no, it’s not dead. It’s just changing. I’m talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer’s friend.

I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google’s changing the way that they’re returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google’s giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you’re getting AI overviews, that truly outline.

Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn’t very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren’t looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don’t panic.

they, the, the drop in traffic, if you’ve seen it, doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I’m going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can’t remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I’m going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.

The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin

John Jantsch (02:24.974)

kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today’s search is not a three-word, four-word search. It’s a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so…

Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I’m going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it’s got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.

to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you’re ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I’ve seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They’re not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,

that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That’s a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I’ve been talking about, and then build content clusters.

groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don’t worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I’ll give you an option we’ve created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How’s that? But everything I’m talking about you

John Jantsch (04:43.982)

can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we’re going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that’s just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That’s the human part of it. But there’s a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.

You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You’re going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you’re going to, you’re going to do the UX still. You’re going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.

You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what’s the best brand for X? You’ll start to see some traction around that.

So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don’t worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it’s going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.

All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.

John Jantsch (06:36.546)

That search isn’t going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they’re in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let’s say you’re a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don’t even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it’ll go away in two years, but right now.

is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a

a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what’s the best

countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they’re also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don’t care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you’ve probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.

You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that’s going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it’s an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren’t thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.

John Jantsch (08:54.624)

If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A’s, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that’s, if you’re doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?

intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they’re looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody’s trying to say, you know, what’s the safest car I could buy? That’s just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn’t matter.

Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That’s what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it’s more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You’ve probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.

Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they’re trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they’re trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.

Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they’re going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.

John Jantsch (11:12.066)

build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re looking to buy. And that’s different than somebody that you’re just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.

So it’s a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we’ve gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we’re trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,

I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they’d be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,

Google doesn’t even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn’t see as very authoritative. So you’re have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that’s been going away for years, but it’s just absolutely silly now to do because it’s a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.

So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That’s the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I’ll probably link back to that.

John Jantsch (13:33.566)

It’s branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So

It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.

four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you’d be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don’t worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it’s all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,

for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.

is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you’re getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,

John Jantsch (15:56.118)

I that’s what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that’s a pretty darn good indication that there’s not only high intent, but that you’re going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you’re an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my…

six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you’re thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there’s no sense in creating any kind of

visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you’re, you’re who you’re trying to attract, what you do that’s different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we’re going to help you build not only helpful content, but we’re going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You’ve got to

If you’re local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it’s the most underutilized tool. It’s free. And it’s the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.

to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that’s actually going to tell an accurate story. if you’re listening to this and you want to know more, it’s just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.

John Jantsch (18:03.7)

somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we’re employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you’re an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I’m going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I’m going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.

Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It’s just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.272)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m going to talk about a topic that I’m seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You’ve got people saying it is dead. You’ve got people saying, no, it’s not dead. It’s just changing. I’m talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer’s friend.

I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google’s changing the way that they’re returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google’s giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you’re getting AI overviews, that truly outline.

Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn’t very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren’t looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don’t panic.

they, the, the drop in traffic, if you’ve seen it, doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I’m going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can’t remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I’m going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.

The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin

John Jantsch (02:24.974)

kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today’s search is not a three-word, four-word search. It’s a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so…

Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I’m going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it’s got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.

to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you’re ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I’ve seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They’re not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,

that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That’s a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I’ve been talking about, and then build content clusters.

groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don’t worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I’ll give you an option we’ve created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How’s that? But everything I’m talking about you

John Jantsch (04:43.982)

can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we’re going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that’s just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That’s the human part of it. But there’s a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.

You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You’re going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you’re going to, you’re going to do the UX still. You’re going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.

You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what’s the best brand for X? You’ll start to see some traction around that.

So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don’t worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it’s going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.

All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.

John Jantsch (06:36.546)

That search isn’t going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they’re in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let’s say you’re a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don’t even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it’ll go away in two years, but right now.

is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a

a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what’s the best

countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they’re also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don’t care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you’ve probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.

You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that’s going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it’s an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren’t thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.

John Jantsch (08:54.624)

If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A’s, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that’s, if you’re doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?

intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they’re looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody’s trying to say, you know, what’s the safest car I could buy? That’s just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn’t matter.

Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That’s what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it’s more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You’ve probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.

Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they’re trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they’re trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.

Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they’re going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.

John Jantsch (11:12.066)

build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re looking to buy. And that’s different than somebody that you’re just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.

So it’s a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we’ve gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we’re trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,

I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they’d be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,

Google doesn’t even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn’t see as very authoritative. So you’re have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that’s been going away for years, but it’s just absolutely silly now to do because it’s a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.

So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That’s the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I’ll probably link back to that.

John Jantsch (13:33.566)

It’s branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So

It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.

four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you’d be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don’t worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it’s all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,

for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.

is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you’re getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,

John Jantsch (15:56.118)

I that’s what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that’s a pretty darn good indication that there’s not only high intent, but that you’re going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you’re an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my…

six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you’re thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there’s no sense in creating any kind of

visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you’re, you’re who you’re trying to attract, what you do that’s different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we’re going to help you build not only helpful content, but we’re going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You’ve got to

If you’re local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it’s the most underutilized tool. It’s free. And it’s the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.

to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that’s actually going to tell an accurate story. if you’re listening to this and you want to know more, it’s just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.

John Jantsch (18:03.7)

somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we’re employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you’re an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I’m going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I’m going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.

Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It’s just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.272)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I’m going to do a solo show. I’m going to talk about a topic that I’m seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You’ve got people saying it is dead. You’ve got people saying, no, it’s not dead. It’s just changing. I’m talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer’s friend.

I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google’s changing the way that they’re returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google’s giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you’re getting AI overviews, that truly outline.

Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn’t very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren’t looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don’t panic.

they, the, the drop in traffic, if you’ve seen it, doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I’m going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can’t remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I’m going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.

The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin

John Jantsch (02:24.974)

kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today’s search is not a three-word, four-word search. It’s a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so…

Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I’m going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it’s got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.

to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you’re ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I’ve seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They’re not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,

that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That’s a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I’ve been talking about, and then build content clusters.

groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don’t worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I’ll give you an option we’ve created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How’s that? But everything I’m talking about you

John Jantsch (04:43.982)

can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we’re going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that’s just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That’s the human part of it. But there’s a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.

You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You’re going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you’re going to, you’re going to do the UX still. You’re going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.

You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what’s the best brand for X? You’ll start to see some traction around that.

So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don’t worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it’s going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.

All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.

John Jantsch (06:36.546)

That search isn’t going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they’re in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let’s say you’re a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don’t even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it’ll go away in two years, but right now.

is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a

a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what’s the best

countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they’re also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don’t care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you’ve probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.

You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that’s going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it’s an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren’t thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.

John Jantsch (08:54.624)

If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A’s, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that’s, if you’re doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?

intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they’re looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody’s trying to say, you know, what’s the safest car I could buy? That’s just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn’t matter.

Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That’s what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it’s more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You’ve probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.

Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they’re trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they’re trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.

Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they’re going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.

John Jantsch (11:12.066)

build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re looking to buy. And that’s different than somebody that you’re just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.

So it’s a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we’ve gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we’re trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,

I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they’d be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,

Google doesn’t even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn’t see as very authoritative. So you’re have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that’s been going away for years, but it’s just absolutely silly now to do because it’s a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.

So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That’s the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I’ll probably link back to that.

John Jantsch (13:33.566)

It’s branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So

It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.

four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you’d be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don’t worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it’s all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,

for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.

is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you’re getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,

John Jantsch (15:56.118)

I that’s what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that’s a pretty darn good indication that there’s not only high intent, but that you’re going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you’re an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my…

six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you’re thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there’s no sense in creating any kind of

visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you’re, you’re who you’re trying to attract, what you do that’s different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we’re going to help you build not only helpful content, but we’re going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You’ve got to

If you’re local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it’s the most underutilized tool. It’s free. And it’s the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.

to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that’s actually going to tell an accurate story. if you’re listening to this and you want to know more, it’s just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.

John Jantsch (18:03.7)

somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we’re employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you’re an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I’m going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I’m going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.

Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It’s just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:00.92)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Margie Warrell. From the outback Australia to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and the US Congress, Dr. Margie Warrell is a global authority on leadership, courage and navigating risk. Bestselling author, speaker and coach, she empowers people to make bold decisions. She’s also the host of a show like this called The Live Brave Live.

There go. I’ll get it right. Live brave podcast. We’re going to talk about her sixth book today, the courage gap, five steps to braver action. So Margie, welcome to the show. So are you living in Australia? No, you can’t be. It would.

Margie Warrell (00:38.333)

Great to be with you, John.

Margie Warrell (00:43.038)

No, I am living on the same terra firma as you. I actually live just south of Washington DC, in North Virginia.

John Jantsch (00:50.711)

Okay, I was gonna say it would be a terrible hour to be doing a podcast in Australia right now. Yes. So let’s start with the with the title of the book, The Courage Gap. What is it?

Margie Warrell (00:53.696)

It would, 5 a.m.

Margie Warrell (01:04.804)

Yeah, well, John, have you ever had one of those times where you knew there was something you should do? Like you knew you needed to have a conversation, you knew you needed to make a change and you needed to move someone out of a role or and yet you held back and you hesitated and you procrastinated and you rationalized and I can see you nodding. Well, you know, it is not a lack of knowledge that creates that gap between

John Jantsch (01:24.494)

Yeah, of course. Who has it?

Margie Warrell (01:32.936)

between what we should do and what we do. It is a lack of courage and that gap is widened by our fear. What will happen? What if this person gets upset? What if I mess it up? What if I lose money? What if I get it wrong? What if it’s really ugly and awkward and there’s a huge fallout? What will people say? What if I fail? And so our fear creates the gap between the actions we’re entirely capable of taking, holding someone to account.

you know, getting rid of someone out of your business because they’re not a fit, et cetera. Having a difficult conversation with your co-owner and what we actually do. And it takes courage to close that gap. But as I make the case at the start of the book, when we fail to take those risks, to make the change, take the chance, speak up, et cetera, we actually become more vulnerable to worse outcomes over time.

So the discomfort we’re trying to save ourselves, the thing we’re trying to avoid, we actually end up suffering way more over time and end up in a worse place. And it’s why, John, that most people, when I speak to them and I do a lot of speaking and run programs, and I’ll say, hey, who here can sometimes regret that they took too long to do a difficult thing? And most people go, yep, yep, yep.

John Jantsch (02:54.766)

Yeah. You know, I’ve, I’ve actually been in business 30 years. And so a couple of things I’ve learned over the years is every now and then you like go through that fear and you do the thing. And actually what happened was way less worse than you thought it was going to be right. And you, start banking that, but then there are also been times when I’ve paused and that was the right thing to do too. So how do you kind of like, how do you differentiate between fear-based procrastination and a strategic pause?

Margie Warrell (03:24.198)

Yeah, well, I think a pause can be very wise. That is just before plowing forward, stepping back, just re-grounding for a moment in like, okay, what’s going on here? Where are my emotions getting away with me? And I think recognizing there’s a difference between being brave and courageous and being reckless and foolhardy and impulsive and reactive.

I’m talking about considered action. And I think what you’re saying is that sometimes procrastination, but I would call it not procrastination. You’re not, know, oh, it’s all too hard. It’s actually saying, I’m just gonna just stop for a moment and consider things thoughtfully. I’m gonna try and get the emotions out of this. And as objectively as I can, think through the pros and cons short term and

far term of different courses of action and align with my values. What feels right for me? What has integrity here? What aligns with the kind of person, leader, business owner I want to be? Okay, now I’m going to move forward. And so there is a distinct difference. And I think practicing a pause is a lot of power in a pause. And I actually think that when we can stop the busy doing, doing, doing,

John Jantsch (04:46.296)

Yeah, yeah.

Margie Warrell (04:51.072)

and reconnect to who we’re being, which let’s face it, a lot of business owners really do. It actually high grades the actions we take. It’s like, ah, this is what I need to do. It actually can help us be way more effective than just sometimes scurrying furiously and going in circles.

John Jantsch (05:08.327)

So I’m going to probably wade into dangerous territory here. We’re going to talk about courage, you’re right. Is there a difference in this gap, real or perceived, between men and women? I’m a white male born in America. I think I’m entitled to everything. So why would I have imposter syndrome, right? I’m being somewhat facetious, but not.

Margie Warrell (05:11.774)

Okay, let’s go. Let’s go. And we’re talking about courage.

you

Margie Warrell (05:24.008)

Yes.

John Jantsch (05:37.038)

Is it much harder, say, for a woman to particularly, or somebody who doesn’t have the advantages that feels like that imposter syndrome is because they’re like, do I belong here?

Margie Warrell (05:51.838)

Yes, there is absolutely a difference, gendered difference in our experience of our circumstances, of ourselves, of our ability to navigate risk, what might feel risky. And let me just start by saying that this concept of courage, one, yes, it’s a trait. Some people naturally come out of the womb with just a higher tolerance for risk.

John Jantsch (06:09.934)

Mm-hmm.

Margie Warrell (06:20.464)

than others. And yes, there’s even there’s a gender element to that too. You know, I think of my sons like, Mom, look, no hands riding their bike down a hill and my daughter never did that. But yes, I mean, I’m generalizing, but I think there’s some truth to that. Men like sticking out at high adrenaline activities more so than women. So I think part of that might be nature, part of it nurture, we’re not going to debate that. But recognizing courage isn’t just choosing to take action in the presence of fear.

It is also the management of our fear. And often we have more fear than we need to have. So we have this magnified perception of risk. I could never do that. my God, that would be just terrifying. And actually you can do it. And it’s as only as terrifying as you’re making it to be like to start a business, to expand into a new market, to…

John Jantsch (06:55.926)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:07.79)

you

Margie Warrell (07:12.34)

hold someone accountable, et cetera. And as you said before, sometimes we lay awake in bed, I’ll let this person go, I gotta hold them accountable. And then we do it, go, it wasn’t that hard, I should have just done it. But for women, and speaking as a woman, and I grew up in Australia, where I think there’s also a cultural difference in Australia as well to the USA, but I think women, partially because of our social conditioning, do struggle more with self-doubt.

Do second guess themselves more. not often not feel as confident to put themselves out there to just try something and wing it. I’ve seen a lot of men going, hey, let’s just try this. I don’t know quite what I’m doing, but I’ll just wing it and I’ll fumble through and I’ll mess up a few times. And when I do, I’ll just go, yeah, whatever, learn something, move on. Women, we ruminate, we second guess, we beat ourselves up when we don’t do things perfectly.

John Jantsch (07:40.94)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:57.846)

you

John Jantsch (08:06.562)

Well, or let’s let’s be honest, sometimes you don’t get a second chance. You know, where is just what you said, you know, so there’s this fear of like, can’t screw up.

Margie Warrell (08:11.497)

and s-

Margie Warrell (08:15.816)

Yeah, and that’s true. Women are judged more harshly when they don’t get things right. You know, we know with the glass cliff phenomena, etc. But I also think as women, we can sometimes unwittingly internalize misogyny. Like we are biased against ourselves. We judge ourselves more harshly. We also judge other women more harshly. This is actually backed by a lot of data. Women are harder on other women.

John Jantsch (08:36.994)

Interesting.

Margie Warrell (08:45.542)

So there was a great experiment out of Columbia, the Heidi Howard experiment, where they were looking at the CVs, they were exactly the same. And some of them were titled Heidi and some of them were titled Howard, exact same words. And when people were looking at it, would you want to employ this one or this one? And they were described as being ambitious and competitive. When it was Howard, like, yeah, he sounds like a good guy to have on the team. When it was Heidi, it’s like, I don’t want to have her, ambitious and competitive. So just recognizing we can be hard on ourselves.

And so I think I have done a lot of work with women, business owners, women leaders, entrepreneurs over the years. And I wrote about this in my prior book called, You’ve Got This. I’ve had to say so many times, you’ve got this, go for it, back yourself, take the risk. Don’t wait until you know exactly what you’re doing. Do not wait until you are 100 % confident, just do it and give yourself permission to figure it out as you go along.

And I really have to, I don’t have to say that as much to men.

John Jantsch (09:46.594)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad we went there. Obviously, that was a little off topic. No, no, no, no.

Margie Warrell (09:49.376)

And that’s not critical, by the way, that is not critical of men. I’m often like, just do more of what he does because hey, it’s working for him.

John Jantsch (09:58.476)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so let me, let me, let me go straight to a topic I hear all the time. I mean, very specific, courage gap. I work with a lot of marketing consultants, marketing agencies. We, do training, we license our methodologies to them. And one of the things I have to work on the most right from the beginning is getting them to understand they need to raise their prices. and that’s one that a lot of businesses, you know, they sit in front of a client and they’re like, will they

Amy, can I say this? And sometimes I just say, look, just do it. Just like next time you have a sale is called double your price and just say it and see what happens. Like what could happen, right? They could say no, or they, or you got a really high paying client and boy do they struggle.

Margie Warrell (10:43.328)

Do you notice a gender difference?

John Jantsch (10:45.326)

Not as much as you’d think, actually, in that. But again, and we do, mean, we probably, at least 50 % of the folks that join our program are women. And so I don’t see that so much, but they all undercharge. And there’s really, and I think it’s, goes to this, I, I don’t even think it’s like, will I get rejected? It’s, am I worth it? So how do you get through that gap?

Margie Warrell (10:52.448)

Okay, okay, that’s good.

Margie Warrell (11:16.8)

Yeah. So am I worth it? think it’s such a big question to ask ourselves. And what is my worth? What is my value? And am I going to ask more than the market can bear? And I’m like, well, the only way you find that out is by risking asking for more than the market can bear. And you’re like, okay, well, they didn’t, you know, they weren’t willing to pay 50K. Okay. Well, how’s 40? You know, but if you’re asking 20, then you’re not going to get 30 or 40. So, but I do think being willing to ask

John Jantsch (11:23.416)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:41.134)

Right, right, right.

Margie Warrell (11:45.376)

for what you really think you’re worth. And being clear here too, what is this commercially worth to them? Because often we think about, am I worth $30,000? Well, I’m like, man, if the outcomes people get, I do a lot of work with CEOs and C-suite leaders. I’m like, if working with me as a coach could increase your bottom line by half a million bucks or a million or 5 million, or avoid you making a mistake that could cost you

John Jantsch (11:52.716)

Yeah. Right.

Margie Warrell (12:14.97)

way more than that, then man, you know, yeah, that’s worth 50k. So I think, you know, making sure you’re thinking about not in terms of what you think you’re worth, but what is this worth to them too?

John Jantsch (12:18.412)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (12:24.6)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I have used that to really give people a posture too, is really if you’re going back and reviewing results and you can actually say, I doubled their business. You know, what am I only asking X for? You know, it really gets a lot easier, you know, with that data. Do you have some habits, you talk about courage muscles. Do you have some habits or daily exercises that you really seem to work to help people build that courage muscle?

Margie Warrell (12:52.092)

Yeah, well, I think firstly is doing more of whatever helps you bring your best bravest self to whatever challenges and whatever, you know, goals that you’ve got. And I think that can cross over multiple realms. I think of it as physical, mental, emotional and spiritual in terms of what is it that helps you physically have the energy so that you’re not exhausted because it’s hard to climb a mountain and be brave if you’re just exhausted mentally.

Are you focused on the highest leverage things? Or are you overwhelmed? You don’t even know which way to look. So that is crucial. Emotionally, what is it that helps you just process through the stress that you’ve got on and navigate some of those emotions that actually get in the way of you doing the very things you could do? And I think self-doubt is a really big one. And so, for me, I start my day every day with

John Jantsch (13:43.864)

Mm-hmm.

Margie Warrell (13:49.042)

some exercise, I read something, I write down what are my number one, my top three to five goals I want to get done today and who is it I need to be today. And for me at a spiritual level, and I say that without being religious or anything like that, just being, what is it that I feel is going to make the biggest mark and it’s going to make the biggest impact for those I’m here to serve today?

that aligns with my core values and what gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. And so I think all of those things when we’re of regularly doing small little things like those daily habits, whether it’s journaling and it’s exercising, connecting in with people that can hold you to account and bring out your vest, putting some guard rails around those who don’t, those small little things. But a question I often ask myself is what would I do if I was being brave today?

And it’s like, you know what? I would reach out to John and I would say, Hey John, Hey, let’s have coffee, you know, or Hey John, you know, can I be on your podcast? Not that that’s how this came to be, but, but, but put yourself out there. Like ask yourself, what would I do to day if I was being brave? And then do that very thing that comes to mind because courage is a muscle. have to put in the reps.

John Jantsch (15:04.846)

All I’m going to put you in coaching mode here. I am a salesperson and I’m going to call on what could be the biggest account, you know, of my life. And I’m really afraid of getting rejected. How would you help me reframe?

Margie Warrell (15:19.424)

beautiful one. I would start with principle one in the courage gap. Focus on what you want and not on what you fear. So if you’re terrified of being rejected, my gosh, I hope I make this. what if I don’t? my gosh, it’s gonna be so, I’ll feel terrible. But you’re putting all your energy into the outcome you don’t want. It’s like praying for what you don’t want to happen. And what you focus on expands. So I would be like one, what does success look like? Visualize

John Jantsch (15:21.901)

You

John Jantsch (15:29.614)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:39.758)

Right, right,

Margie Warrell (15:49.51)

the best possible outcome. I walk out of there, I’ve landed it. And why is that great? Well, not only because it’s good for you, but how is this serve them? So make sure it’s not just about you. But how is this in service of something bigger than just you? Yeah, you’re great to get the commission, great to get the contract, great for whatever comes through it. But also focus on why is this good, not just for you, but for them? So focus on that win-win and what is your highest intention here? Yeah, you want to get it, but not just for your sake.

John Jantsch (16:00.814)

Alright.

Margie Warrell (16:19.614)

And I think just getting that real clarity of your positive outcome, because if you are not committed and clear in the positive outcome you wanna create, fear is gonna fill the void. And so your commitment to a positive outcome has to exceed your fear of a negative outcome. And if all you’re doing is going, I’m terrified, I’m gonna be rejected. I’m like, stop. I would even have someone write it down. Write down what does wild success look like going into this meeting? Write down.

why this is good, not just for you, but why is this good for them? What is the value that you want to bring? Write down, what is the mindset, the belief that I need to operate from? That I have everything it takes, that I’m fully worthy and deserving, and why not me? Because if it’s not me, it’s going to be John. So why not me? And then ground yourself in the values that define who you want to be and go into that from that place of being worthy, of having integrity.

being brave, of being generous, of being someone that makes others’ lives better. And then I would finally say, shift your posture. Take a big deep breath, breathe in courage, breathe out fear, and stand tall, hold your shoulders back, because our physiology impacts our psychology.

John Jantsch (17:36.686)

So there’s one of the things I’ve noticed this first quarter, maybe we’re turning the corner, I hope so, but there’s a lot of fear based just in unknown right now, geopolitical things, economic things, and that has a tendency to make people sort of freeze. How do get people through the unknown? You know, it’s like, well, I don’t know what’s going to happen, so how do I courageously

Margie Warrell (18:03.936)

Yeah, and when there is a lot of uncertainty, it innately triggers anxiety because we all like certainty. Our brains are wired to make plans. Yeah, to make plans on a future that we can predict with some level of confidence. And right now people go, I don’t know how much confidence I have in my prediction abilities, right? The future has got a lot of unknowns. It’s very volatile. It’s very unpredictable. But here’s what I say to people all the time.

John Jantsch (18:12.46)

Hey change, that’s the only thing we hate.

Margie Warrell (18:33.318)

always been uncertainty, there will always be uncertainty. And if you are waiting for certainty before you make a move, you’re going to get left behind. And you’re going to be in the dust of those who are taking action amid the unknowns. But this isn’t about being reckless. It’s about going, what’s my best guess here? How do I manage potential downsides? I’m not betting the family farm on a racehorse, but I’m going, okay, let me take a few steps forward here.

quickly reassess, this working, not working? What am I learning? And shorten those learning cycles. Because as they say in battle, it is safer to run left or right in the fog of battle in gunfire than it is to stand still. Because when you’re standing still, you’re not getting any information. You’re not getting any feedback. But when you’re in motion, okay, you know, this is working, this isn’t working. You’re getting something that’s going to put you in a better position.

as there is more certainty over time. So to anyone listening to this and you’re holding back, you’re like, do I, don’t I? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Sometimes it can be incremental, but what’s something you can do today that’s moving you forward?

John Jantsch (19:45.12)

Awesome. Well, Margie, I appreciate you stopping by the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and obviously find out more about the Courage Camp?

Margie Warrell (19:54.258)

Yeah, thanks, John. Well, you can head over to my website, margieworal.com and the courage gap. I have a whole page on there that in a video, et cetera, tells you about it, but you can also get it on Amazon and everywhere good books are sold. And I also encourage people to connect with me on LinkedIn and Insta and social media. I’m everywhere under my name.

John Jantsch (20:13.678)

All right, awesome. Again, appreciate you. Stop by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Margie Warrell (20:18.14)

Awesome, thanks John.

John Jantsch (00:00.92)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Margie Warrell. From the outback Australia to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and the US Congress, Dr. Margie Warrell is a global authority on leadership, courage and navigating risk. Bestselling author, speaker and coach, she empowers people to make bold decisions. She’s also the host of a show like this called The Live Brave Live.

There go. I’ll get it right. Live brave podcast. We’re going to talk about her sixth book today, the courage gap, five steps to braver action. So Margie, welcome to the show. So are you living in Australia? No, you can’t be. It would.

Margie Warrell (00:38.333)

Great to be with you, John.

Margie Warrell (00:43.038)

No, I am living on the same terra firma as you. I actually live just south of Washington DC, in North Virginia.

John Jantsch (00:50.711)

Okay, I was gonna say it would be a terrible hour to be doing a podcast in Australia right now. Yes. So let’s start with the with the title of the book, The Courage Gap. What is it?

Margie Warrell (00:53.696)

It would, 5 a.m.

Margie Warrell (01:04.804)

Yeah, well, John, have you ever had one of those times where you knew there was something you should do? Like you knew you needed to have a conversation, you knew you needed to make a change and you needed to move someone out of a role or and yet you held back and you hesitated and you procrastinated and you rationalized and I can see you nodding. Well, you know, it is not a lack of knowledge that creates that gap between

John Jantsch (01:24.494)

Yeah, of course. Who has it?

Margie Warrell (01:32.936)

between what we should do and what we do. It is a lack of courage and that gap is widened by our fear. What will happen? What if this person gets upset? What if I mess it up? What if I lose money? What if I get it wrong? What if it’s really ugly and awkward and there’s a huge fallout? What will people say? What if I fail? And so our fear creates the gap between the actions we’re entirely capable of taking, holding someone to account.

you know, getting rid of someone out of your business because they’re not a fit, et cetera. Having a difficult conversation with your co-owner and what we actually do. And it takes courage to close that gap. But as I make the case at the start of the book, when we fail to take those risks, to make the change, take the chance, speak up, et cetera, we actually become more vulnerable to worse outcomes over time.

So the discomfort we’re trying to save ourselves, the thing we’re trying to avoid, we actually end up suffering way more over time and end up in a worse place. And it’s why, John, that most people, when I speak to them and I do a lot of speaking and run programs, and I’ll say, hey, who here can sometimes regret that they took too long to do a difficult thing? And most people go, yep, yep, yep.

John Jantsch (02:54.766)

Yeah. You know, I’ve, I’ve actually been in business 30 years. And so a couple of things I’ve learned over the years is every now and then you like go through that fear and you do the thing. And actually what happened was way less worse than you thought it was going to be right. And you, start banking that, but then there are also been times when I’ve paused and that was the right thing to do too. So how do you kind of like, how do you differentiate between fear-based procrastination and a strategic pause?

Margie Warrell (03:24.198)

Yeah, well, I think a pause can be very wise. That is just before plowing forward, stepping back, just re-grounding for a moment in like, okay, what’s going on here? Where are my emotions getting away with me? And I think recognizing there’s a difference between being brave and courageous and being reckless and foolhardy and impulsive and reactive.

I’m talking about considered action. And I think what you’re saying is that sometimes procrastination, but I would call it not procrastination. You’re not, know, oh, it’s all too hard. It’s actually saying, I’m just gonna just stop for a moment and consider things thoughtfully. I’m gonna try and get the emotions out of this. And as objectively as I can, think through the pros and cons short term and

far term of different courses of action and align with my values. What feels right for me? What has integrity here? What aligns with the kind of person, leader, business owner I want to be? Okay, now I’m going to move forward. And so there is a distinct difference. And I think practicing a pause is a lot of power in a pause. And I actually think that when we can stop the busy doing, doing, doing,

John Jantsch (04:46.296)

Yeah, yeah.

Margie Warrell (04:51.072)

and reconnect to who we’re being, which let’s face it, a lot of business owners really do. It actually high grades the actions we take. It’s like, ah, this is what I need to do. It actually can help us be way more effective than just sometimes scurrying furiously and going in circles.

John Jantsch (05:08.327)

So I’m going to probably wade into dangerous territory here. We’re going to talk about courage, you’re right. Is there a difference in this gap, real or perceived, between men and women? I’m a white male born in America. I think I’m entitled to everything. So why would I have imposter syndrome, right? I’m being somewhat facetious, but not.

Margie Warrell (05:11.774)

Okay, let’s go. Let’s go. And we’re talking about courage.

you

Margie Warrell (05:24.008)

Yes.

John Jantsch (05:37.038)

Is it much harder, say, for a woman to particularly, or somebody who doesn’t have the advantages that feels like that imposter syndrome is because they’re like, do I belong here?

Margie Warrell (05:51.838)

Yes, there is absolutely a difference, gendered difference in our experience of our circumstances, of ourselves, of our ability to navigate risk, what might feel risky. And let me just start by saying that this concept of courage, one, yes, it’s a trait. Some people naturally come out of the womb with just a higher tolerance for risk.

John Jantsch (06:09.934)

Mm-hmm.

Margie Warrell (06:20.464)

than others. And yes, there’s even there’s a gender element to that too. You know, I think of my sons like, Mom, look, no hands riding their bike down a hill and my daughter never did that. But yes, I mean, I’m generalizing, but I think there’s some truth to that. Men like sticking out at high adrenaline activities more so than women. So I think part of that might be nature, part of it nurture, we’re not going to debate that. But recognizing courage isn’t just choosing to take action in the presence of fear.

It is also the management of our fear. And often we have more fear than we need to have. So we have this magnified perception of risk. I could never do that. my God, that would be just terrifying. And actually you can do it. And it’s as only as terrifying as you’re making it to be like to start a business, to expand into a new market, to…

John Jantsch (06:55.926)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:07.79)

you

Margie Warrell (07:12.34)

hold someone accountable, et cetera. And as you said before, sometimes we lay awake in bed, I’ll let this person go, I gotta hold them accountable. And then we do it, go, it wasn’t that hard, I should have just done it. But for women, and speaking as a woman, and I grew up in Australia, where I think there’s also a cultural difference in Australia as well to the USA, but I think women, partially because of our social conditioning, do struggle more with self-doubt.

Do second guess themselves more. not often not feel as confident to put themselves out there to just try something and wing it. I’ve seen a lot of men going, hey, let’s just try this. I don’t know quite what I’m doing, but I’ll just wing it and I’ll fumble through and I’ll mess up a few times. And when I do, I’ll just go, yeah, whatever, learn something, move on. Women, we ruminate, we second guess, we beat ourselves up when we don’t do things perfectly.

John Jantsch (07:40.94)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:57.846)

you

John Jantsch (08:06.562)

Well, or let’s let’s be honest, sometimes you don’t get a second chance. You know, where is just what you said, you know, so there’s this fear of like, can’t screw up.

Margie Warrell (08:11.497)

and s-

Margie Warrell (08:15.816)

Yeah, and that’s true. Women are judged more harshly when they don’t get things right. You know, we know with the glass cliff phenomena, etc. But I also think as women, we can sometimes unwittingly internalize misogyny. Like we are biased against ourselves. We judge ourselves more harshly. We also judge other women more harshly. This is actually backed by a lot of data. Women are harder on other women.

John Jantsch (08:36.994)

Interesting.

Margie Warrell (08:45.542)

So there was a great experiment out of Columbia, the Heidi Howard experiment, where they were looking at the CVs, they were exactly the same. And some of them were titled Heidi and some of them were titled Howard, exact same words. And when people were looking at it, would you want to employ this one or this one? And they were described as being ambitious and competitive. When it was Howard, like, yeah, he sounds like a good guy to have on the team. When it was Heidi, it’s like, I don’t want to have her, ambitious and competitive. So just recognizing we can be hard on ourselves.

And so I think I have done a lot of work with women, business owners, women leaders, entrepreneurs over the years. And I wrote about this in my prior book called, You’ve Got This. I’ve had to say so many times, you’ve got this, go for it, back yourself, take the risk. Don’t wait until you know exactly what you’re doing. Do not wait until you are 100 % confident, just do it and give yourself permission to figure it out as you go along.

And I really have to, I don’t have to say that as much to men.

John Jantsch (09:46.594)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad we went there. Obviously, that was a little off topic. No, no, no, no.

Margie Warrell (09:49.376)

And that’s not critical, by the way, that is not critical of men. I’m often like, just do more of what he does because hey, it’s working for him.

John Jantsch (09:58.476)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so let me, let me, let me go straight to a topic I hear all the time. I mean, very specific, courage gap. I work with a lot of marketing consultants, marketing agencies. We, do training, we license our methodologies to them. And one of the things I have to work on the most right from the beginning is getting them to understand they need to raise their prices. and that’s one that a lot of businesses, you know, they sit in front of a client and they’re like, will they

Amy, can I say this? And sometimes I just say, look, just do it. Just like next time you have a sale is called double your price and just say it and see what happens. Like what could happen, right? They could say no, or they, or you got a really high paying client and boy do they struggle.

Margie Warrell (10:43.328)

Do you notice a gender difference?

John Jantsch (10:45.326)

Not as much as you’d think, actually, in that. But again, and we do, mean, we probably, at least 50 % of the folks that join our program are women. And so I don’t see that so much, but they all undercharge. And there’s really, and I think it’s, goes to this, I, I don’t even think it’s like, will I get rejected? It’s, am I worth it? So how do you get through that gap?

Margie Warrell (10:52.448)

Okay, okay, that’s good.

Margie Warrell (11:16.8)

Yeah. So am I worth it? think it’s such a big question to ask ourselves. And what is my worth? What is my value? And am I going to ask more than the market can bear? And I’m like, well, the only way you find that out is by risking asking for more than the market can bear. And you’re like, okay, well, they didn’t, you know, they weren’t willing to pay 50K. Okay. Well, how’s 40? You know, but if you’re asking 20, then you’re not going to get 30 or 40. So, but I do think being willing to ask

John Jantsch (11:23.416)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:41.134)

Right, right, right.

Margie Warrell (11:45.376)

for what you really think you’re worth. And being clear here too, what is this commercially worth to them? Because often we think about, am I worth $30,000? Well, I’m like, man, if the outcomes people get, I do a lot of work with CEOs and C-suite leaders. I’m like, if working with me as a coach could increase your bottom line by half a million bucks or a million or 5 million, or avoid you making a mistake that could cost you

John Jantsch (11:52.716)

Yeah. Right.

Margie Warrell (12:14.97)

way more than that, then man, you know, yeah, that’s worth 50k. So I think, you know, making sure you’re thinking about not in terms of what you think you’re worth, but what is this worth to them too?

John Jantsch (12:18.412)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (12:24.6)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I have used that to really give people a posture too, is really if you’re going back and reviewing results and you can actually say, I doubled their business. You know, what am I only asking X for? You know, it really gets a lot easier, you know, with that data. Do you have some habits, you talk about courage muscles. Do you have some habits or daily exercises that you really seem to work to help people build that courage muscle?

Margie Warrell (12:52.092)

Yeah, well, I think firstly is doing more of whatever helps you bring your best bravest self to whatever challenges and whatever, you know, goals that you’ve got. And I think that can cross over multiple realms. I think of it as physical, mental, emotional and spiritual in terms of what is it that helps you physically have the energy so that you’re not exhausted because it’s hard to climb a mountain and be brave if you’re just exhausted mentally.

Are you focused on the highest leverage things? Or are you overwhelmed? You don’t even know which way to look. So that is crucial. Emotionally, what is it that helps you just process through the stress that you’ve got on and navigate some of those emotions that actually get in the way of you doing the very things you could do? And I think self-doubt is a really big one. And so, for me, I start my day every day with

John Jantsch (13:43.864)

Mm-hmm.

Margie Warrell (13:49.042)

some exercise, I read something, I write down what are my number one, my top three to five goals I want to get done today and who is it I need to be today. And for me at a spiritual level, and I say that without being religious or anything like that, just being, what is it that I feel is going to make the biggest mark and it’s going to make the biggest impact for those I’m here to serve today?

that aligns with my core values and what gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. And so I think all of those things when we’re of regularly doing small little things like those daily habits, whether it’s journaling and it’s exercising, connecting in with people that can hold you to account and bring out your vest, putting some guard rails around those who don’t, those small little things. But a question I often ask myself is what would I do if I was being brave today?

And it’s like, you know what? I would reach out to John and I would say, Hey John, Hey, let’s have coffee, you know, or Hey John, you know, can I be on your podcast? Not that that’s how this came to be, but, but, but put yourself out there. Like ask yourself, what would I do to day if I was being brave? And then do that very thing that comes to mind because courage is a muscle. have to put in the reps.

John Jantsch (15:04.846)

All I’m going to put you in coaching mode here. I am a salesperson and I’m going to call on what could be the biggest account, you know, of my life. And I’m really afraid of getting rejected. How would you help me reframe?

Margie Warrell (15:19.424)

beautiful one. I would start with principle one in the courage gap. Focus on what you want and not on what you fear. So if you’re terrified of being rejected, my gosh, I hope I make this. what if I don’t? my gosh, it’s gonna be so, I’ll feel terrible. But you’re putting all your energy into the outcome you don’t want. It’s like praying for what you don’t want to happen. And what you focus on expands. So I would be like one, what does success look like? Visualize

John Jantsch (15:21.901)

You

John Jantsch (15:29.614)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:39.758)

Right, right,

Margie Warrell (15:49.51)

the best possible outcome. I walk out of there, I’ve landed it. And why is that great? Well, not only because it’s good for you, but how is this serve them? So make sure it’s not just about you. But how is this in service of something bigger than just you? Yeah, you’re great to get the commission, great to get the contract, great for whatever comes through it. But also focus on why is this good, not just for you, but for them? So focus on that win-win and what is your highest intention here? Yeah, you want to get it, but not just for your sake.

John Jantsch (16:00.814)

Alright.

Margie Warrell (16:19.614)

And I think just getting that real clarity of your positive outcome, because if you are not committed and clear in the positive outcome you wanna create, fear is gonna fill the void. And so your commitment to a positive outcome has to exceed your fear of a negative outcome. And if all you’re doing is going, I’m terrified, I’m gonna be rejected. I’m like, stop. I would even have someone write it down. Write down what does wild success look like going into this meeting? Write down.

why this is good, not just for you, but why is this good for them? What is the value that you want to bring? Write down, what is the mindset, the belief that I need to operate from? That I have everything it takes, that I’m fully worthy and deserving, and why not me? Because if it’s not me, it’s going to be John. So why not me? And then ground yourself in the values that define who you want to be and go into that from that place of being worthy, of having integrity.

being brave, of being generous, of being someone that makes others’ lives better. And then I would finally say, shift your posture. Take a big deep breath, breathe in courage, breathe out fear, and stand tall, hold your shoulders back, because our physiology impacts our psychology.

John Jantsch (17:36.686)

So there’s one of the things I’ve noticed this first quarter, maybe we’re turning the corner, I hope so, but there’s a lot of fear based just in unknown right now, geopolitical things, economic things, and that has a tendency to make people sort of freeze. How do get people through the unknown? You know, it’s like, well, I don’t know what’s going to happen, so how do I courageously

Margie Warrell (18:03.936)

Yeah, and when there is a lot of uncertainty, it innately triggers anxiety because we all like certainty. Our brains are wired to make plans. Yeah, to make plans on a future that we can predict with some level of confidence. And right now people go, I don’t know how much confidence I have in my prediction abilities, right? The future has got a lot of unknowns. It’s very volatile. It’s very unpredictable. But here’s what I say to people all the time.

John Jantsch (18:12.46)

Hey change, that’s the only thing we hate.

Margie Warrell (18:33.318)

always been uncertainty, there will always be uncertainty. And if you are waiting for certainty before you make a move, you’re going to get left behind. And you’re going to be in the dust of those who are taking action amid the unknowns. But this isn’t about being reckless. It’s about going, what’s my best guess here? How do I manage potential downsides? I’m not betting the family farm on a racehorse, but I’m going, okay, let me take a few steps forward here.

quickly reassess, this working, not working? What am I learning? And shorten those learning cycles. Because as they say in battle, it is safer to run left or right in the fog of battle in gunfire than it is to stand still. Because when you’re standing still, you’re not getting any information. You’re not getting any feedback. But when you’re in motion, okay, you know, this is working, this isn’t working. You’re getting something that’s going to put you in a better position.

as there is more certainty over time. So to anyone listening to this and you’re holding back, you’re like, do I, don’t I? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Sometimes it can be incremental, but what’s something you can do today that’s moving you forward?

John Jantsch (19:45.12)

Awesome. Well, Margie, I appreciate you stopping by the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and obviously find out more about the Courage Camp?

Margie Warrell (19:54.258)

Yeah, thanks, John. Well, you can head over to my website, margieworal.com and the courage gap. I have a whole page on there that in a video, et cetera, tells you about it, but you can also get it on Amazon and everywhere good books are sold. And I also encourage people to connect with me on LinkedIn and Insta and social media. I’m everywhere under my name.

John Jantsch (20:13.678)

All right, awesome. Again, appreciate you. Stop by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Margie Warrell (20:18.14)

Awesome, thanks John.

John Jantsch (00:00.92)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Margie Warrell. From the outback Australia to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and the US Congress, Dr. Margie Warrell is a global authority on leadership, courage and navigating risk. Bestselling author, speaker and coach, she empowers people to make bold decisions. She’s also the host of a show like this called The Live Brave Live.

There go. I’ll get it right. Live brave podcast. We’re going to talk about her sixth book today, the courage gap, five steps to braver action. So Margie, welcome to the show. So are you living in Australia? No, you can’t be. It would.

Margie Warrell (00:38.333)

Great to be with you, John.

Margie Warrell (00:43.038)

No, I am living on the same terra firma as you. I actually live just south of Washington DC, in North Virginia.

John Jantsch (00:50.711)

Okay, I was gonna say it would be a terrible hour to be doing a podcast in Australia right now. Yes. So let’s start with the with the title of the book, The Courage Gap. What is it?

Margie Warrell (00:53.696)

It would, 5 a.m.

Margie Warrell (01:04.804)

Yeah, well, John, have you ever had one of those times where you knew there was something you should do? Like you knew you needed to have a conversation, you knew you needed to make a change and you needed to move someone out of a role or and yet you held back and you hesitated and you procrastinated and you rationalized and I can see you nodding. Well, you know, it is not a lack of knowledge that creates that gap between

John Jantsch (01:24.494)

Yeah, of course. Who has it?

Margie Warrell (01:32.936)

between what we should do and what we do. It is a lack of courage and that gap is widened by our fear. What will happen? What if this person gets upset? What if I mess it up? What if I lose money? What if I get it wrong? What if it’s really ugly and awkward and there’s a huge fallout? What will people say? What if I fail? And so our fear creates the gap between the actions we’re entirely capable of taking, holding someone to account.

you know, getting rid of someone out of your business because they’re not a fit, et cetera. Having a difficult conversation with your co-owner and what we actually do. And it takes courage to close that gap. But as I make the case at the start of the book, when we fail to take those risks, to make the change, take the chance, speak up, et cetera, we actually become more vulnerable to worse outcomes over time.

So the discomfort we’re trying to save ourselves, the thing we’re trying to avoid, we actually end up suffering way more over time and end up in a worse place. And it’s why, John, that most people, when I speak to them and I do a lot of speaking and run programs, and I’ll say, hey, who here can sometimes regret that they took too long to do a difficult thing? And most people go, yep, yep, yep.

John Jantsch (02:54.766)

Yeah. You know, I’ve, I’ve actually been in business 30 years. And so a couple of things I’ve learned over the years is every now and then you like go through that fear and you do the thing. And actually what happened was way less worse than you thought it was going to be right. And you, start banking that, but then there are also been times when I’ve paused and that was the right thing to do too. So how do you kind of like, how do you differentiate between fear-based procrastination and a strategic pause?

Margie Warrell (03:24.198)

Yeah, well, I think a pause can be very wise. That is just before plowing forward, stepping back, just re-grounding for a moment in like, okay, what’s going on here? Where are my emotions getting away with me? And I think recognizing there’s a difference between being brave and courageous and being reckless and foolhardy and impulsive and reactive.

I’m talking about considered action. And I think what you’re saying is that sometimes procrastination, but I would call it not procrastination. You’re not, know, oh, it’s all too hard. It’s actually saying, I’m just gonna just stop for a moment and consider things thoughtfully. I’m gonna try and get the emotions out of this. And as objectively as I can, think through the pros and cons short term and

far term of different courses of action and align with my values. What feels right for me? What has integrity here? What aligns with the kind of person, leader, business owner I want to be? Okay, now I’m going to move forward. And so there is a distinct difference. And I think practicing a pause is a lot of power in a pause. And I actually think that when we can stop the busy doing, doing, doing,

John Jantsch (04:46.296)

Yeah, yeah.

Margie Warrell (04:51.072)

and reconnect to who we’re being, which let’s face it, a lot of business owners really do. It actually high grades the actions we take. It’s like, ah, this is what I need to do. It actually can help us be way more effective than just sometimes scurrying furiously and going in circles.

John Jantsch (05:08.327)

So I’m going to probably wade into dangerous territory here. We’re going to talk about courage, you’re right. Is there a difference in this gap, real or perceived, between men and women? I’m a white male born in America. I think I’m entitled to everything. So why would I have imposter syndrome, right? I’m being somewhat facetious, but not.

Margie Warrell (05:11.774)

Okay, let’s go. Let’s go. And we’re talking about courage.

you

Margie Warrell (05:24.008)

Yes.

John Jantsch (05:37.038)

Is it much harder, say, for a woman to particularly, or somebody who doesn’t have the advantages that feels like that imposter syndrome is because they’re like, do I belong here?

Margie Warrell (05:51.838)

Yes, there is absolutely a difference, gendered difference in our experience of our circumstances, of ourselves, of our ability to navigate risk, what might feel risky. And let me just start by saying that this concept of courage, one, yes, it’s a trait. Some people naturally come out of the womb with just a higher tolerance for risk.

John Jantsch (06:09.934)

Mm-hmm.

Margie Warrell (06:20.464)

than others. And yes, there’s even there’s a gender element to that too. You know, I think of my sons like, Mom, look, no hands riding their bike down a hill and my daughter never did that. But yes, I mean, I’m generalizing, but I think there’s some truth to that. Men like sticking out at high adrenaline activities more so than women. So I think part of that might be nature, part of it nurture, we’re not going to debate that. But recognizing courage isn’t just choosing to take action in the presence of fear.

It is also the management of our fear. And often we have more fear than we need to have. So we have this magnified perception of risk. I could never do that. my God, that would be just terrifying. And actually you can do it. And it’s as only as terrifying as you’re making it to be like to start a business, to expand into a new market, to…

John Jantsch (06:55.926)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:07.79)

you

Margie Warrell (07:12.34)

hold someone accountable, et cetera. And as you said before, sometimes we lay awake in bed, I’ll let this person go, I gotta hold them accountable. And then we do it, go, it wasn’t that hard, I should have just done it. But for women, and speaking as a woman, and I grew up in Australia, where I think there’s also a cultural difference in Australia as well to the USA, but I think women, partially because of our social conditioning, do struggle more with self-doubt.

Do second guess themselves more. not often not feel as confident to put themselves out there to just try something and wing it. I’ve seen a lot of men going, hey, let’s just try this. I don’t know quite what I’m doing, but I’ll just wing it and I’ll fumble through and I’ll mess up a few times. And when I do, I’ll just go, yeah, whatever, learn something, move on. Women, we ruminate, we second guess, we beat ourselves up when we don’t do things perfectly.

John Jantsch (07:40.94)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:57.846)

you

John Jantsch (08:06.562)

Well, or let’s let’s be honest, sometimes you don’t get a second chance. You know, where is just what you said, you know, so there’s this fear of like, can’t screw up.

Margie Warrell (08:11.497)

and s-

Margie Warrell (08:15.816)

Yeah, and that’s true. Women are judged more harshly when they don’t get things right. You know, we know with the glass cliff phenomena, etc. But I also think as women, we can sometimes unwittingly internalize misogyny. Like we are biased against ourselves. We judge ourselves more harshly. We also judge other women more harshly. This is actually backed by a lot of data. Women are harder on other women.

John Jantsch (08:36.994)

Interesting.

Margie Warrell (08:45.542)

So there was a great experiment out of Columbia, the Heidi Howard experiment, where they were looking at the CVs, they were exactly the same. And some of them were titled Heidi and some of them were titled Howard, exact same words. And when people were looking at it, would you want to employ this one or this one? And they were described as being ambitious and competitive. When it was Howard, like, yeah, he sounds like a good guy to have on the team. When it was Heidi, it’s like, I don’t want to have her, ambitious and competitive. So just recognizing we can be hard on ourselves.

And so I think I have done a lot of work with women, business owners, women leaders, entrepreneurs over the years. And I wrote about this in my prior book called, You’ve Got This. I’ve had to say so many times, you’ve got this, go for it, back yourself, take the risk. Don’t wait until you know exactly what you’re doing. Do not wait until you are 100 % confident, just do it and give yourself permission to figure it out as you go along.

And I really have to, I don’t have to say that as much to men.

John Jantsch (09:46.594)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad we went there. Obviously, that was a little off topic. No, no, no, no.

Margie Warrell (09:49.376)

And that’s not critical, by the way, that is not critical of men. I’m often like, just do more of what he does because hey, it’s working for him.

John Jantsch (09:58.476)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so let me, let me, let me go straight to a topic I hear all the time. I mean, very specific, courage gap. I work with a lot of marketing consultants, marketing agencies. We, do training, we license our methodologies to them. And one of the things I have to work on the most right from the beginning is getting them to understand they need to raise their prices. and that’s one that a lot of businesses, you know, they sit in front of a client and they’re like, will they

Amy, can I say this? And sometimes I just say, look, just do it. Just like next time you have a sale is called double your price and just say it and see what happens. Like what could happen, right? They could say no, or they, or you got a really high paying client and boy do they struggle.

Margie Warrell (10:43.328)

Do you notice a gender difference?

John Jantsch (10:45.326)

Not as much as you’d think, actually, in that. But again, and we do, mean, we probably, at least 50 % of the folks that join our program are women. And so I don’t see that so much, but they all undercharge. And there’s really, and I think it’s, goes to this, I, I don’t even think it’s like, will I get rejected? It’s, am I worth it? So how do you get through that gap?

Margie Warrell (10:52.448)

Okay, okay, that’s good.

Margie Warrell (11:16.8)

Yeah. So am I worth it? think it’s such a big question to ask ourselves. And what is my worth? What is my value? And am I going to ask more than the market can bear? And I’m like, well, the only way you find that out is by risking asking for more than the market can bear. And you’re like, okay, well, they didn’t, you know, they weren’t willing to pay 50K. Okay. Well, how’s 40? You know, but if you’re asking 20, then you’re not going to get 30 or 40. So, but I do think being willing to ask

John Jantsch (11:23.416)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:41.134)

Right, right, right.

Margie Warrell (11:45.376)

for what you really think you’re worth. And being clear here too, what is this commercially worth to them? Because often we think about, am I worth $30,000? Well, I’m like, man, if the outcomes people get, I do a lot of work with CEOs and C-suite leaders. I’m like, if working with me as a coach could increase your bottom line by half a million bucks or a million or 5 million, or avoid you making a mistake that could cost you

John Jantsch (11:52.716)

Yeah. Right.

Margie Warrell (12:14.97)

way more than that, then man, you know, yeah, that’s worth 50k. So I think, you know, making sure you’re thinking about not in terms of what you think you’re worth, but what is this worth to them too?

John Jantsch (12:18.412)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (12:24.6)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I have used that to really give people a posture too, is really if you’re going back and reviewing results and you can actually say, I doubled their business. You know, what am I only asking X for? You know, it really gets a lot easier, you know, with that data. Do you have some habits, you talk about courage muscles. Do you have some habits or daily exercises that you really seem to work to help people build that courage muscle?

Margie Warrell (12:52.092)

Yeah, well, I think firstly is doing more of whatever helps you bring your best bravest self to whatever challenges and whatever, you know, goals that you’ve got. And I think that can cross over multiple realms. I think of it as physical, mental, emotional and spiritual in terms of what is it that helps you physically have the energy so that you’re not exhausted because it’s hard to climb a mountain and be brave if you’re just exhausted mentally.

Are you focused on the highest leverage things? Or are you overwhelmed? You don’t even know which way to look. So that is crucial. Emotionally, what is it that helps you just process through the stress that you’ve got on and navigate some of those emotions that actually get in the way of you doing the very things you could do? And I think self-doubt is a really big one. And so, for me, I start my day every day with

John Jantsch (13:43.864)

Mm-hmm.

Margie Warrell (13:49.042)

some exercise, I read something, I write down what are my number one, my top three to five goals I want to get done today and who is it I need to be today. And for me at a spiritual level, and I say that without being religious or anything like that, just being, what is it that I feel is going to make the biggest mark and it’s going to make the biggest impact for those I’m here to serve today?

that aligns with my core values and what gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. And so I think all of those things when we’re of regularly doing small little things like those daily habits, whether it’s journaling and it’s exercising, connecting in with people that can hold you to account and bring out your vest, putting some guard rails around those who don’t, those small little things. But a question I often ask myself is what would I do if I was being brave today?

And it’s like, you know what? I would reach out to John and I would say, Hey John, Hey, let’s have coffee, you know, or Hey John, you know, can I be on your podcast? Not that that’s how this came to be, but, but, but put yourself out there. Like ask yourself, what would I do to day if I was being brave? And then do that very thing that comes to mind because courage is a muscle. have to put in the reps.

John Jantsch (15:04.846)

All I’m going to put you in coaching mode here. I am a salesperson and I’m going to call on what could be the biggest account, you know, of my life. And I’m really afraid of getting rejected. How would you help me reframe?

Margie Warrell (15:19.424)

beautiful one. I would start with principle one in the courage gap. Focus on what you want and not on what you fear. So if you’re terrified of being rejected, my gosh, I hope I make this. what if I don’t? my gosh, it’s gonna be so, I’ll feel terrible. But you’re putting all your energy into the outcome you don’t want. It’s like praying for what you don’t want to happen. And what you focus on expands. So I would be like one, what does success look like? Visualize

John Jantsch (15:21.901)

You

John Jantsch (15:29.614)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:39.758)

Right, right,

Margie Warrell (15:49.51)

the best possible outcome. I walk out of there, I’ve landed it. And why is that great? Well, not only because it’s good for you, but how is this serve them? So make sure it’s not just about you. But how is this in service of something bigger than just you? Yeah, you’re great to get the commission, great to get the contract, great for whatever comes through it. But also focus on why is this good, not just for you, but for them? So focus on that win-win and what is your highest intention here? Yeah, you want to get it, but not just for your sake.

John Jantsch (16:00.814)

Alright.

Margie Warrell (16:19.614)

And I think just getting that real clarity of your positive outcome, because if you are not committed and clear in the positive outcome you wanna create, fear is gonna fill the void. And so your commitment to a positive outcome has to exceed your fear of a negative outcome. And if all you’re doing is going, I’m terrified, I’m gonna be rejected. I’m like, stop. I would even have someone write it down. Write down what does wild success look like going into this meeting? Write down.

why this is good, not just for you, but why is this good for them? What is the value that you want to bring? Write down, what is the mindset, the belief that I need to operate from? That I have everything it takes, that I’m fully worthy and deserving, and why not me? Because if it’s not me, it’s going to be John. So why not me? And then ground yourself in the values that define who you want to be and go into that from that place of being worthy, of having integrity.

being brave, of being generous, of being someone that makes others’ lives better. And then I would finally say, shift your posture. Take a big deep breath, breathe in courage, breathe out fear, and stand tall, hold your shoulders back, because our physiology impacts our psychology.

John Jantsch (17:36.686)

So there’s one of the things I’ve noticed this first quarter, maybe we’re turning the corner, I hope so, but there’s a lot of fear based just in unknown right now, geopolitical things, economic things, and that has a tendency to make people sort of freeze. How do get people through the unknown? You know, it’s like, well, I don’t know what’s going to happen, so how do I courageously

Margie Warrell (18:03.936)

Yeah, and when there is a lot of uncertainty, it innately triggers anxiety because we all like certainty. Our brains are wired to make plans. Yeah, to make plans on a future that we can predict with some level of confidence. And right now people go, I don’t know how much confidence I have in my prediction abilities, right? The future has got a lot of unknowns. It’s very volatile. It’s very unpredictable. But here’s what I say to people all the time.

John Jantsch (18:12.46)

Hey change, that’s the only thing we hate.

Margie Warrell (18:33.318)

always been uncertainty, there will always be uncertainty. And if you are waiting for certainty before you make a move, you’re going to get left behind. And you’re going to be in the dust of those who are taking action amid the unknowns. But this isn’t about being reckless. It’s about going, what’s my best guess here? How do I manage potential downsides? I’m not betting the family farm on a racehorse, but I’m going, okay, let me take a few steps forward here.

quickly reassess, this working, not working? What am I learning? And shorten those learning cycles. Because as they say in battle, it is safer to run left or right in the fog of battle in gunfire than it is to stand still. Because when you’re standing still, you’re not getting any information. You’re not getting any feedback. But when you’re in motion, okay, you know, this is working, this isn’t working. You’re getting something that’s going to put you in a better position.

as there is more certainty over time. So to anyone listening to this and you’re holding back, you’re like, do I, don’t I? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Sometimes it can be incremental, but what’s something you can do today that’s moving you forward?

John Jantsch (19:45.12)

Awesome. Well, Margie, I appreciate you stopping by the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and obviously find out more about the Courage Camp?

Margie Warrell (19:54.258)

Yeah, thanks, John. Well, you can head over to my website, margieworal.com and the courage gap. I have a whole page on there that in a video, et cetera, tells you about it, but you can also get it on Amazon and everywhere good books are sold. And I also encourage people to connect with me on LinkedIn and Insta and social media. I’m everywhere under my name.

John Jantsch (20:13.678)

All right, awesome. Again, appreciate you. Stop by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Margie Warrell (20:18.14)

Awesome, thanks John.