Google is Not Your Friend: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 1)

Google is Not Your Friend: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 1)

TRANSCRIPT: Hi. This is Steve Stauning with another Steve Stauning Short & Sweet video training lesson. Today’s lesson: How to stop the SEO and SEM theft that’s happening in dealerships across American today. Now, this was originally recorded live as part of the Undeniable Advantage live video webcast series. To make sure you never miss a live video webcast, go to UndeniableAdvantage.com right now.

All right, today is all about gaining the Undeniable Advantage. This is the great SEO, SEM robbery, and how to stop the thievery in automotive search. Now, I want to start today to understand that you understand that this is not a class on Google analytics. This is not a technical training. This is not how to write PPC keyword algorithms on your own.

Today is about how to stop your SEO and SEM vendors from wasting your money. You do not need to be an expert on Google analytics to do this. You do not need to be an expert on PPC keyword algorithms to do this; your vendors do. You just need to know how to stop the theft, the fraud and the waste, and you need to know what good performance looks like.

Now, let’s level set right from the beginning. Google is not your friend. For PPC, Google is a vendor. This doesn’t make them bad, it’s just important that we level set this. Google provides a service in exchange for money. Buy more of their service, they make more money. This means we need to keep everything. We need to take everything that Google says about PPC and weigh it against their interests and our interests. It’s really not that hard to do. In fact, Google and their premier partners, they want to make the most money off of you that they can.

So when someone comes to you and says, “Hey, we’re a Google premier partner.” Hey, that’s great. I don’t know what that means for me though. So let’s remember that, they’re a vendor. Now, that’s okay. It’s okay that Google and its premier partners want to make as much money as they can off of you; that’s how capitalism works. But Google’s own advice to their partners, the vendors who are selling you the PPC, is that they don’t even want these vendors having humans managing your campaigns, and that’s a mistake. They want your vendors to, and this is Google’s words, just use a bid optimization program and let it run. There are a lot of problems with that.

We see crazy costs for keywords, we see terrible ROI, we see lots and lots of waste when that happens. So understand this: Google is a vendor. Again, it doesn’t make them a bad people, it’s just we need to understand that Google’s advice of pay-per-click, that should be looked at at the same way that you might take Lamar’s advice on billboards, the the billboard company, and how you might take their advice.

See, Lamar’s motivated to tell you how great billboards are, aren’t they? And Google’s motivated to tell you how great PPC is, to point you in all their research to spending more on PPC and to doing YouTube pre roll.

Now I’m not saying these companies are bad. Lamar’s not bad, Google’s not bad, but they don’t make money telling you to spend your budget elsewhere, do they? So let’s level set that. And just for a minute, and this is really big for my folks who are in automotive, I don’t know what this crazy obsession is with all things Google; it’s just odd to me. No offense to those of you who ooh and aw when you visit the Googleplex like you’re standing at the birthplace of humanity, or you’re hanging with Beyonce. But ask yourself, would I snap selfies in front of Lamar Headquarters in 1981, 1985? Would I go to the billboard company and say, “Hey look Mom, I’m at CVS Outdoor or Lamar?”

We’ve got to put Google in the right bucket, in the right place. Google is a vendor and they should be treated as such. Your ad agency and your SEO providers, they’re vendors and they should be treated as such. Now, while all these vendors claim that they’re going to provide you unbiased advice, the fact remains that none of them makes more money when you spend less.

So they’re not your friends, they’re your vendors. Of course though, just to level set again on Google, it would be foolish not to always take Google’s advice on SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Why? Listen, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, done against Google’s wishes, could earn you penalties for your website that will cost you business. And when it comes to SEO, Google isn’t trying to sell you a thing. They just want to return the most relevant organic results to their users.