Transcript:

Michelle Grasek:

Hello Bryan.  Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Bryan Fikes:

Another beautiful Wednesday.

Michelle Grasek:

Before we get into it, would you mind introducing yourself for the audience?

Bryan Fikes:

Sure. Bryan Fikes with Bonsai Marketing. I have been at this for, I don’t know, a few decades.

I got into it back in early 2000 before they even called it search engine optimization. It was playing with directories and figuring out the old interwebs. I had a huge fascination as a kid with the internet and computers.

So my first computer I was gifted Commodore 64 when I was eight years old.

Michelle Grasek:

That is amazing. You have this business where you are helping it sounds like all different sized businesses. So from small businesses like local to much larger like enterprise businesses, you are helping them wrangle their digital marketing all in one place.

So Google Business Profile, SEO, Google Ads, all of the things.

Bryan Fikes:

Yeah, yeah. I started as a local search engine optimization was my core service offering when I first started. It’s something that I felt I could, and you never said guarantee, but it was within 99% accuracy I was going to help you go from nowhere to somewhere.

And so that grew into a fascination with all things internet branding and all of the components of marketing and I’ve had a fantastic career. I was semi-retired at 40-ish. So I’ve been out of the game for four or five years.

I’ve got a personal story that I’m starting to unfold where I partied a little too hard and didn’t dedicate my life on this like I should have and so I made a huge change to focus back on my wife and my family and where I’m going personally. It’s led to some incredible revelations. This whole new AI space and the adaption of a lot of the principles of what is the core SEO which I know you’ve heard still stay true. But there’s some adaptions that are going to matter so we can dive into that. That’s why we’re here.

Michelle Grasek:

Absolutely. I really appreciate that you are pulling together all of these different parts of digital marketing because I think for a lot of people as small business owners we tend to think of them very individually, or we have in the past. And I’m always trying to teach my students that it’s kind of like an ecosystem. Your Google Business Profile should support your website and your website should support your Google Business Profile. And how does your social media impact your digital presence, etc. Everything fits together.

So when someone comes to you for help how would you usually approach that? You’re doing all of the pieces together or you’re seeing what they need first you’re doing a diagnostic?

Bryan Fikes:

So every business obviously has their own independent challenges depending on where they’re at in the nation, what industry they’re in. Obviously acupuncture and chiropractors have slightly different business models on the West Coast and East Coast. They have a slightly different model in California than Kentucky. And so knowing those individual variables, what kind of customer that you’re looking for, comes into play.

I’ve coined it as a foundation assessment and essentially what I’m trying to figure out is what opportunities are you currently grabbing with the way that you’re marketing and what opportunities are there still on the table? And with intelligent data you can literally go down to the point where it’s like. “Hey, there’s a few million dollars still sitting on the table between 30 or 40 or 50 providers of this service or product. How are we going to go put that into our own corner?”

Michelle Grasek:

How we going to grab that, yeah. How do we divert those eyeballs onto us?

One question that I have for you, and I have so many, but one is that people are always asking me: How long is it going to take before they start seeing results from different digital marketing avenues? I think things are changing all the time but I found on your website, I think it was in the FAQs, if someone worked on their Google Business Profile it would take two to four weeks to see a change. Versus SEO can take – actually now I don’t remember how long you said.

Bryan Fikes:

That’s okay. Yeah, well the easiest way to think about Google is, it’s a big filing cabinet and so somewhere in there is your document or documents. So if you’re a small local service business and you have a five, seven, nine page website, which is very typical, you’re nine pages in a trillion, right? And you want to be one of the first to be pulled up. It used to be stated that it was about a 21 day period. So every 21 days Google’s refreshing. Of course it’s refreshing every second, but there’s these pools of indexing. Indexing is the term. You can’t necessarily say, “Hey tomorrow I’m going to organically show up for x y and z,” because of the way the system is. You can’t gamify the way it functions. That’s where paid ads come in and there are what we call sprints.

So if a business owner came to me and said, “Hey, in the next 90 days, I can’t wait for my organic results to start. I need a plan for now and I need a plan for the long term.” Long term is your SEO, your long game. And so a lot of people miss that then when they come to us. They’re in a panic mode. Obviously they’re searching for something that they don’t currently have.

Michelle Grasek:

I think that’s a really good example, the filing cabinet. How would you recommend people go about that? If someone comes to you and says, “I really need the phone to ring like yesterday.” And they’re also interested in building their SEO. They understand SEO is a long-term game but they need to do something right away. What are the layers that you would recommend people approach that from?

Bryan Fikes:

The easiest way is immediate, hyper-focused pay-per-click. Paid ads still have a huge foundation for every client. We typically put a little bit more on paid if they’re in the, “I need it now,” phase. And then as the organic slowly starts catching up to what we’re paying for, we don’t have to pay as much for position. We can start shifting what that budget looks like. So if someone came to me and they need a 90-day plan, it’s going to be a lot of great content. It’s going to be a paid strategy. And it’s also going to be looking at certain social channels that work with effort, sweat equity.

So if the business owner’s like, “Hey, I need this ASAP,” I’m like, “Great, I’ll work with you. I’ll do this but you understand that for every hour I put in, a paid professional hour, I can give you some tools where you can put three, four or five hours. You can go hyper focused on this on the weekend. I’ll give you the tools so you can do that.”

Michelle Grasek:

So what kind of suggestions would you make for people? What would you want them to be doing in their for five hours on the weekend?

Bryan Fikes:

They don’t have to be great photographers but there is more and more evidence that taking photos of your work and having social proof and having it geotagged is important. Yes and you’re going to hear different opinions on that. If you get two SEOs in a room, it’s like, what exactly is the playbook?

The other thing that I would really focus on is your Google Business Profile, of course. That is where the map is. Even with the AI world that’s still going to be a long-term, short-term, even mid-term strategy. So there’s a thing called Google Business Posts and a lot of people don’t know about them. It’s not that necessarily someone’s going to see your post but Google is and it becomes a signal that you’re paying attention to your own business by giving Google content. Because Google just wants content. That’s how you feed Google.

Michelle Grasek:

I was speaking to someone recently and she was advocating for writing blog posts and we were talking about the pushback that we sometimes get. Because we both recommend writing blog posts for content geared toward your ideal patient and sometimes people are like, “Isn’t blogging dead? Nobody’s reading blogs anymore.” Well, maybe your patients aren’t going to binge your blog posts but Google is.

Bryan Fikes:

Absolutely and the AI platforms, too.

I’ve been trying to prepare. I’m fortunate that when I made the push and came back, I started networking. I went to some meetups and went to Snowflake. I’m fortunate I’m in the Bay Area so I’m right next to Google. I’ve worked with Facebook and Google in the past.

So I kind of rewoke my network and everyone was telling me, “Hey, if you’re local services, you got to start paying attention to some pieces that are happening because there’s a huge change.” For example, Google announced the search bar is going away. People don’t understand. The AI mode that’s up on the left hand corner, that’s what the new model is.

So over the next year you won’t see a typical Google search bar when you type in Google.com.

Michelle Grasek:

So how will how will I ask questions?

Bryan Fikes:

Exactly.  How do you ask questions? How do you provide the answers, is what people should be thinking. Be the engine. Understand what questions are about to be asked in order to satisfy, because AI is hungry. Search engines are hungry. How do you feed it? It just wants to be fed.

Michelle Grasek:

So if there’s no search bar, how does it know what I want to look for?

Bryan Fikes:

You’re going to speak it. That’s the other shift in the market. Voice is going to become a very big factor in how to market.

I do this to show the advancements but I’ve been programming my own AI chatbot and so this is ChatGPT. Over the course of the four years I’ve been using I actually gave it a persona and I started calling him Bodie about a year and a half ago. Bodie, good morning.

Bodie AI Chatbot (British accent):

Good morning, and I’m honored to have evolved alongside you.

Bryan Fikes:

Bodie, you’re being recorded right now. Potentially there’s a lot of acupuncture and chiropractors are to be listening to you. Can you give them the number one thing they should be paying attention to for their local marketing as it as it relates to finding patients?

Bodie AI Chatbot:

I’m ready. Acupuncturist and chiropractors, your local goldmine is your Google Business Profile. Make sure it’s fully optimized.

Michelle Grasek:

That is the best accent, it just sounds so smart. I’ll do whatever it says.

Bryan Fikes:

Yeah, it’s a little too positive sometimes. I’m like, no I need you to be cynical. I need you to tell me this isn’t going to work.

Michelle Grasek:

I heard someone describe ChatGPT recently as “pathologically positive” and I was like, ah yes, that can be true.

Bryan Fikes:

There are settings where they could literally turn it so it’s just very concise very straight, no personality. It adapts and that’s the beauty of it. So instead of having team members right now I’ve built this ecosystem where I literally have five different versions. So that’s Bodie. Kai’s my clock. Kai is my programming. Not to get into the technical weeds.

The most important thing is understanding what questions are being asked. Literally type into your ChatGPT or Claude and say, “What are the top 10 questions patients in my area are going to ask and provide the answers.” And answer those questions in Google Business posts. Do that on your blog, do it on video.

Michelle Grasek:

For things that we can be doing on our end, that would be the content creation that you just mentioned. And you also mentioned taking pictures of us actually working in the space. Are the pictures and video, are they for Google Business Profile and social media?

Bryan Fikes:

Yeah, so that the perfect play is of course to put it in your Google Business Profile, mention it in a Google Business Post, put it on your Yelp, put it on your Facebook, put it in your photo galleries across the other places.

Reddit, it if you’re a big Reddit user and you have karma, Reddit is a source that’s gleaned. I mean it’s pulled. Twitter has become relevant, not necessarily again, but because of short form. That’s why Elon bought Twitter, because it’s the largest amount of short form content.

Michelle Grasek:

Is there anything else that you’d recommend we can do on the back end while you’re working away on our paid ads?

Bryan Fikes:

Your web designer, webmaster, should know some of the basics of what’s called schema. Some people say scheme is not relevant anymore. It is relevant. Again, it’s one of those things where if you get two SEOs in the room, they might disagree, and which one’s right? I would pay attention to schema.

These are the things where old practices still work. We were proponents of always having unique content on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram because they’re different audiences. These other companies came out and then they just said take this one post and put it on 15 different platforms. Well those companies aren’t around anymore because that didn’t work. So yes, the user that’s on Instagram might also be on Facebook, but you got to talk to the audience that you’re in the room with. It’s like having a megaphone that’s on record and going into a chamber meeting and then going to your family party and having the same exact message. You’re like, wait a minute, that’s my family. Why am I telling them the same thing as the Chamber people.

Michelle Grasek:

It’s like shouting, “You need acupuncture,” to your relatives at a family reunion. Not the right message for the audience.

Bryan Fikes:

Yes. Shape the message for the audience, be consistent and answer the questions people are asking.

Michelle Grasek:

Okay, so for ads, are you working mostly with Google Ads or Meta Ads?

Bryan Fikes:

Both. Meta has definitely been an increase in the arsenal that we’re looking at and unfortunately it is harder. It’s very complex. So I always recommend if you’re doing this yourself and you’re getting started, you need to start with three different ad sets. Three different concepts and have them slightly different but keep the core of what your brand is. So an example: a smiling face, the before and after, the benefits of what the service is.

You’ve got to ask yourself, what do I tell clients all the time? You’re going to hear a thing called chunking or building entity authority in the AI space. What that really means is that your content needs to be compartmentalized.

In fact I just did a search locally for an acupuncture in my area and one of the top three that showed up was the one that literally states on their website and in their references that they’ve successfully had over 200,000 sessions. And so that’s when the AI platform is going to say, “Wait a minute, this person’s an authority. They can answer the question.”

Michelle Grasek:

There are a lot of ways that we can teach AI about our authority. Because 200,000 sessions is probably like 35 years in practice, plus. And a lot of people don’t have that. But still we should be listing our degrees, our certifications on our about page. And something that I’m always repeating on my website is that we have over 100 five-star Google reviews and we’ve been voted best acupuncture practice in the region three years in a row, over and over again.

Bryan Fikes:

Yeah, absolutely. Everywhere. Not just on one section of your website.

You’ll see it on my site. When your audience comes to my site – look you guys can peel apart my site because it’s got every new widget that’s on there. I’m live testing my own site. There’s a new thing called Google preferred sources. It’s essentially authorship. If you remember back when everyone said on your blog you should have the little avatar picture of yourself with a bio, on every single one of your pages. That says it’s coming from you because that’s the reference point.

The more that someone’s going to bookmark a site, the more that someone’s going to view it for longer. Google says for the longest time, “We don’t record how long a person is on a website.” They know how long you’re on a site. But they say, we don’t use that as a factor. That’s not true. If you go to a site and they’re on for 10 seconds versus a site that’s on for two minutes, which one’s got better value?

Michelle Grasek:

Yea, I’m surprised that Google would try to say that’s not important because bounce rate has always mattered because it shows whether the content was relevant. If I land on your site and I leave immediately, it probably didn’t answer my question. But if I end up binging something and reading your blog posts and I was there for eight minutes, it probably answered my question.

Bryan Fikes:

It’s sticky. 100%. Google is counterintuitive sometimes.

Michelle Grasek:

Well my last question for you, or my second to last question, is really just emphasizing: what kind of DIY can we do that would have the fastest impact? Is that Google Business Profile updates right now?

Bryan Fikes:

I mean yes. I’ve got clients that do it every day. They post every day and that’s not too much. An example is I’ve got an auto repair shop client. We just started putting content in their Google Business posts and then in the old Google engine back in April. And so here we are in June and they’re booked out six weeks. So it’s because they plan. Know what the next season is, be a month ahead, be a two months ahead, just like in retail. Retail clients are almost done with Halloween. We’re looking at Christmas. Unfortunately that’s the part of marketing where you’re like, “I gotta talk about Christmas in June?” But once you plan it, now you’re not you’re not playing a firefighter come October 1st saying, “Oh, we have to do our Christmas stuff ASAP.”

Michelle Grasek:

That is always wild to me how far in advance retail selers are planning their marketing campaigns.

Bryan Fikes:

Well service providers should do the same thing. You should already have your summer planned: how am I going to get people to come into my place while they’re worried about vacations and all the other stuff that’s out there? “Is the stress of summer stressing you out? Come on in, we’ve got air conditioning.” 100%, I’m in.

Michelle Grasek:

Well, thank you so much for all of the insights that you shared today. My last question for you is one that I ask all of my guests, and that is what is your definition of success?

Bryan Fikes:

Oh that is a good one. You know, I changed my lens having gone through – I almost died. I literally had a doctor tell me I was not leaving the hospital and my son came in about an hour later and it was just one of those moments. You know, I was egotistical in my early years. I had to be. I was an entrepreneur with no tools, with nothing. I had to just dedicate everything to doing that. But then I was looking in his eyes and knowing I potentially was going to miss his high school graduation and someday getting married.

I thought, you know what, this is it. I’m changing. So success to me is a combination of business and personal, which is just who I am. I’m 50-50, that’s just who I am. When I take a client that is literally on the verge of having to close their doors or help them resurrect their own vision for their own family.

For example, my roofer that I’ve basically 10 X’d his business is not only going to take care of him and his wife, it’s going to take care of his kids, it’s going to take care of all the employees. Every single one of those employees. That to me is magic. That’s success. I was able to help engineer and create a path for not one person but for many. At the end of the day I can sleep well and look my kid in the eye and go, “Buddy, we had a good day.”

Michelle Grasek:

I love that and you’re still here today, which is wonderful.

Bryan Fikes:

Yeah. Hey, holistic health is where it’s at, I’m telling you.

Michelle Grasek:

Where can everyone find you online? How can they get in touch with you if they need their business to be resurrected? How can they reach you?

Bryan Fikes:

I would be happy to do a foundation assessment, as we do. It’s not hard to find me online, obviously. I apologize to all the other Bryan Fikes is in the world for dominating the first page of that Google search.

Bonsai Marketing is pretty easy to find so BonsaiMarketingCompany.com. Jump in and get an assessment. Let’s talk acupuncture, let’s talk chiropractic awesome.

Michelle Grasek:

Thank you so much for being here.

Bryan Fikes:

Thanks, Michelle.