In this episode of the Cannabis Success Show, Guillermo interviews Nick Musica, CEO and Founder of Optics In, who shares his extensive knowledge on optimizing search engine performance for cannabis companies. They discuss the essentials of SEO, its specific applications in the cannabis industry, and the importance of ethical practices. Nick emphasizes the long-term benefits of SEO and the need for realistic expectations. He also touches on the challenges posed by regulatory restrictions and the limitations of AI-generated content.
“If you want to build a brand and build a company for the long term, SEO is by far one of the best vehicles to use because it has a long-term impact on traffic.” – Nick Musica
The finer details of this episode:
Episode resources:
Timestamps:
The basics of SEO (00:01:18)
Nick Musica explains the impact of website activities on SEO and his entry into the SEO field.
Unethical SEO practices (00:03:31)
Nick describes his experience with a firm using unethical SEO practices and the importance of managing expectations.
Understanding SEO for cannabis companies (00:07:04)
Nick explains the direct impact of SEO on search engine results and the relevance of being in the search engine results page.
SEO applicability in different cannabis verticals (00:09:13)
Discussion on the applicability of SEO in different cannabis verticals and the differences in customer types.
Measuring SEO effectiveness (00:11:34)
Nick explains the use of Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure SEO effectiveness.
ROI and long-term impact of SEO (00:13:47)
Nick discusses the long-term impact of SEO on business growth and the comparison of SEO to investing for long-term results.
Managing expectations and avoiding unethical practices in SEO (00:18:20)
Nick emphasizes the importance of managing expectations in SEO and the dangers of unethical SEO practices.
The impact of black hat tactics (00:20:28)
Discussion about the negative consequences of using black hat tactics in SEO and the long-term impact on domain ranking.
Choosing a professional for SEO (00:22:15)
Considerations for choosing an SEO professional, including industry experience, credentials, and referral-based hiring.
SEO considerations for cannabis companies (00:24:25)
Discussion of technical, content, and off-site SEO considerations, with a focus on language risks related to CBD and THC.
Compliance and state-specific SEO challenges (00:28:13)
Considerations related to compliance, shipping restrictions, and state-specific challenges for cannabis companies in SEO.
Impact of AI content on SEO (00:34:31)
The potential negative impact of AI-generated content on SEO rankings and the importance of critical thinking in content creation.
Time commitment for SEO projects (00:40:16)
Discussion of the time commitment and process for working with an SEO professional, including project-based and retainer-based engagements.
Project and Retainer Options (00:41:36)
Nick explains the different options for engaging in SEO services, including projects and retainers.
Clarity in Service Offerings (00:43:09)
Nick emphasizes the importance of clear communication and managing expectations in SEO service contracts.
Guidance and Explanation (00:45:12)
Nick discusses the need for clear explanations and guidance in understanding SEO services, using simple language.
Contacting and Reaching Out (00:46:35)
Nick provides information on how to reach out to him for a discovery call or to schedule a consultation.
Intro (00:00:00) - Welcome to the CannaBiz Success Show. If you're a cannabis company owner or operator who's ready to scale your business, grow your profits and plant the seeds to take your business to new heights. This show is for you. We'll share expert insights, industry trends, and actionable strategies to help you blaze a trail of success in the cannabis industry.
Guillermo (00:00:25) - Well, welcome to the CannaBiz Success Show. Today we're continuing a conversation we had last week on marketing. We'll be talking about SEOs. One of the key pieces of marketing is SEO or search engine optimization for cannabis companies and we're interviewing Nick Musica today. He's been in the SEO field for well over 20 years, and he co-authored a book in 2009. He's taught at NYU and has been running his own agency for years. So, Nick, thanks so much for coming to the show today.
Nick (00:01:03) - Hey, thanks so much, Guillermo.
Guillermo (00:01:04) - Yeah. Before we jump into talking about SEO, can you tell us a little bit about your background and your story and how you got into SEO and particularly working with clients and SEO on in the cannabis space.
Nick (00:01:18) - And cannabis. Sure, sure, sure. So, I've been in the SEO field, like you said, for about 20 years and here's the thing about SEO, which was true then it's still true today. Like if you are touching your website, you are quote unquote, doing the SEO because anything on your website, and there's other aspects, but let's just, let's just focus on the website for a moment. Anything you, you touch on the website, be it someone who's writing an article, are they using the right language that people are searching for? If you're a graphic designer and you're grabbing images and uploading them for those articles, you are impacting SEO, right? So, for the writer in this case, do they use the right language? Do they address the right questions? or did they just have an idea and they wanted to write about something? But you're going to get potentially two very different results based on those two starting points for the graphic designer. Did you grab an image off of your phone at high res or bring it down from Adobe Stock at high res and just pop it up and it's a Meg, and you didn't optimize it for the file size and the physical size.
Nick (00:02:23) - If you didn't, then you're, you're slowly throwing blockages in front of Google, which is going to slow the bot down the crawler down and therefore get you negative, SEO results at some point in time. So, anyone touching the website, be it a technical person or marketing person, has an impact on SEO and so, I got into SEO because of those things. I was writing content, designing the sites, I was grabbing the pictures and at some point, I realized, oh, I'm, I'm impacting SEO of this website, and this was this was 20 something years ago working for one of the babies of AT&T and we hired a firm. We hired a firm to do a six-month contract and they gave us; I think it was I think it was like $6,000 a month at the time. This was this was like 20 years ago. and the deliverable every month for three months in a row was for four PDF screenshots of the website with slight edits to pages and they did that for three months in the row.
Nick (00:03:31) - And then the fourth month, was this deliverable about cross linking on your website, you know, linking from the home page to an internal page or back and forth and blog articles, whatever it was, and it was a very basic, it was like it was templated. It was a templated deliverable and so, I grabbed it. I dumped the copy I dumped into Google, and I got back pages that were very similar, and I went back to my boss, and I said, you know, we we've talked about this, we're paying $6,000 a month and we're getting very light deliverables here and, and here's the last one, like, I literally saw the same things that I at, at Google and they didn't even give us recommendations of linked from this page to this page, use this copy. They're just saying best practices of internal linking. It's important, like it's important to clean your house to stay clean like great but like you didn't even look at my kitchen. Didn't even look at my bathroom.
Nick (00:04:19) - Like nothing like that and so, we said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go find someone to train us, so they validate what we know and what we don't know, and then we're going to fire this firm. Okay, okay. Great and so, we did that, and we brought in Shari Thoreau and she's, she's the, the SEO that I, I end up writing a book with a couple years later. So, that's how I got into it.
Guillermo (00:04:40) - And the results that that what you mentioned there is where the consultant didn't do the extra step. Is that do you mean they didn't come back? Not only did they not have the recommendations, but also explaining the results of the work that they did was that a missing piece there to were.
Nick (00:04:59) - We. Yeah, we didn't even get to that part. Right. Because the deliverables were so light, and we were early in the contract. it would be akin to like in the cannabis space of someone saying, you know, I'm having problem having a problem with my plant.
Nick (00:05:11) - My plant isn't growing. You know, there's bugs on it and someone sends you a one-page PDF that says, here's how, here's how you grow weed and you're like, that's not helpful. Like, that has nothing to do with my plant. There's nothing to do with my situation. It's a really nice, high-level thing, but not going to be helpful for me.
Guillermo (00:05:28) - And then and so, at that point then, you brought someone into to training on the SEO and what you did know. What was the, what happened there next that then led you to the work that you're doing today?
Nick (00:05:42) - Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was funny. You know, she said, here's what typically happens when I train people. They get jobs in a couple of months. They get new jobs typically in a couple of months and at the time I was doing a bunch of different things. I was writing the copy. I was coding the pages, you know, everything for, for the website, managing vendors.
Nick (00:06:00) - And then when I left that company and got a new job, as she predicted, it was squarely within SEO and so, a lot of the same things I was doing, but it was through a very specific lens now through SEO, going for a very specific result. So, that was different. The result was different versus make sure the website is quote unquote working and now it was well, it is, it should still be working and what working means is we rank better, we get more traffic, we sell more things.
Guillermo (00:06:29) - Yeah.
Guillermo (00:06:30) - And so, let's I want to get to that was 20 years ago just how SEO has changed over the years but let's just take a step back because we dove right into the details of it. But for someone who hasn't heard about it I think we know what SEO is but with just like anything, I think sometimes we make assumptions of like we think we know what it means, particularly when we're not experts in a topic. Can you just give us the basics of really what is SEO and how companies use this to drive higher sales in cannabis?
Nick (00:07:04) - Absolutely.
Nick (00:07:05) - For sure. For sure. Yeah. So, if you were to go to Google, Bing or your favorite search engine, most people use Google these days and you type in a query into the box at the top. It could be a Blue Dream. It could be best cannabis to sleep or something like that, right? You're going to get certain search results that show and those certain search results less any ads. We're not talking about the ads. We're talking about anything else that shows are a direct result of SEO and so, the conversation with cannabis companies or any other type of company is where are the opportunities in the SERPs? The search engine results page SERP is the acronym and so, now how do we get there? So, again if you go back to Blue Dream as the general query where to buy blue dream is Blue Dream right for me or whatever those queries are that are blue dream versus anything else that you would want to you'd want to smoke or ingest or whatever may be then Northern Lights, for example, then maybe, then maybe our opportunity is to be in an informational query or if we're e-commerce are up, or our opportunities is to get in front of someone.
Nick (00:08:16) - So, they have a landing page for e-commerce and then, they can add it to cart and then they convert on the website. So, you generally want to be where the user is at the time of query based on what you sell and that that relevance is highly, highly key.
Guillermo (00:08:33) - So for let's just take for example a cannabis retailer. There's some that are doing, some are in e-commerce, some are not. Right. Depending on the state or the market based on the different verticals within cannabis, whether that's cultivation or a processor, they have different customers. Right. like a cultivator will have very large customers. Retailers have smaller transactions, and a higher volume of transactions is SEO applicable to all the areas of the vertical or how would you engage on the different areas that.
Nick (00:09:13) - Yeah, yeah, I from my experience, I have found, and this is an entirely true, but I would say largely true. There are some categories that do better without SEO and so, I'd say like financial planners, every time I've talked to a financial planner, they go, but I'm looking for people who have a net worth of minimally $1 million to invest.
Nick (00:09:35) - Right? And people don't search for it, you know. Hi, my name is, and I have $1 million to invest looking for a financial planner. They do not search that way. They are searching for a financial planner near me, right? They may have a dollar, or they may have $1 million. As an SEO, I can't filter in one group of people and filter out another group. It just doesn't work that way. So, financial planners, from my experience, are not a good fit for me. Cannabis, however. Right. You're going to have two different scenarios. You have a grower supplier or something like that, right? Where that they get one visit and that potential customer worth $1 million, because that's the relationship versus retail, where that customer is worth $20 because they're going to buy a single vape or something like that. Right? So, there's a volume play over here and there's a quality play over here. The quality play is relevant for both folks, but more volume with the retailer versus less volume for the supplier.
Nick (00:10:34) - And that's going to be inherent in the search volume as well. You're just going to have less people searching for distributors or, or whatever it is on, on the growth side or whatever, you know, versus the retailer side where it's people are searching for, papers and bongs and, and flower and gummies and, and there's a ton of volume over there, a ton of volume and so, you want to it goes back to the same type of thing. You want to be in that SERP for that relevant query for the user at the time of query, at the time of intent.
Guillermo (00:11:10) - And so, for someone who is starting to, you know, try to improve their SEO, their visibility to their website, someone particularly in cannabis. How? Let's say they're not working with a professional yet. How do they start to measure how they start to see how effective they're doing at SEO or where it needs improvement?
Nick (00:11:34) - Yeah, yeah. I mean, the easiest way to do it is one load Google Analytics on your website.
Nick (00:11:41) - It's a free application. If you have a Google account, you can grab Google Analytics, put it on your website. You start to generate information. You can see how folks are getting to your website. You can see the mix of traffic to your site, be it direct traffic, someone typing into the address bar, mysite.com, or traffic coming from Google, Bing, Facebook or whatever. So, you can start to get a sense of what's my makeup in terms of people coming to my website and how much and then specifically for SEO, another free tool, Google Search Console. Again, if you have a Google account, go to Google Search Console. You can create an account for free. You grab a line of code, dump it on the on the website, in the code, in the header, and then you start to see specifically data SEO data from Google as it pertains to your website. So, one GA will give Google Analytics will give you this broader view of user behavior and all the traffic sources.
Nick (00:12:39) - But Google Search Console is going to be very specific to SEO and your website.
Guillermo (00:12:44) - Okay, so that's how someone can just very simply go in there and see, you know, where they're right now. The next question that comes up is, I'm sure if you're, you're listening to this right now, you're saying, well, how do I know? My next step, maybe then, is to invest some of my budget or allocate some of my budget for this for the upcoming year and as we know, cannabis companies, especially with the reschedule, are going to be more profitable just from the tax situation. So, there's going to be more dollars that are going to be able to be allocated for professional services, which is great. but looking at this is how does one look at the, the is it, is it possible to look at the return on investment when investing in SEO or is this a more of a like people should think of it as a percentage of their total overhead and how much they spend on SEO.
Guillermo (00:13:47) - Or are you able to kind of just really get to because as you mentioned in retail, you could tie the results directly to sales. Right? But I'm sure there's qualitative factors as well where SEO may get you, just market visibility that you can't quite tie to a sale.
Nick (00:14:06) - That's right. Yeah. So, there's a few factors. I mean, like, so if you're looking to get business tomorrow, SEO is not the vehicle to do it right. So, it's a little bit like, if you were to think about a 401 K plan, versus day trading, right. Like, if you day trade, you're going to, you're looking to make money tomorrow or you buy a stock for a dollar, you sell it for $2 you're making money with a 401 K plan you put a dollar away every day for 12 months. You keep checking month over month over month and it's like it seems like nothing's happening. You keep on putting your dollar in there.
Nick (00:14:40) - Nothing's happening at the end of 12 months, assuming the market's going the right direction, you go, oh my goodness. Like I put $365 in but I'm more than 365. Right. And that's going to and when you do a compound interest calculator like that money $1 a day over ten years, well that's a lot of money that adds up versus, you know, that that day trading type of mentality, put a dollar down and get at least a dollar in a penny back, right. So, one is building immediate revenue. You can do paid ads or not so much for cannabis, really but there's other vehicles where you, you, you're going to get an ROI faster. Your return on investment is going to be faster but if you want to build a brand and build a company for the long term, SEO is by far one of the one of the best vehicles to use to do that, because it has long term impact on the traffic. So, the effort you make today is going to pay dividends down the street.
Guillermo (00:15:36) - Yeah.
Guillermo (00:15:36) - And you can measure that, that traffic. Right. But you're maybe, maybe along that journey you're not able to tie it into sales quite yet. Right. But there's, there is a way to just simply measure the effectiveness of an SEO from a visibility standpoint and other metrics as well. Right?
Nick (00:15:55) - For sure. Yeah. So, you can use you can use, like we said, Google Analytics Search Console and you can do depending on how sophisticated you are with those applications; you can see that X number of people came from Google via SEO. Got on to this product page where you're selling and keep using Blue Dream as the example. Whatever products may be selling, you know, insert here, but, you know, Blue Dream, on a product page and of the hundred people who come in through SEO, how many of them actually convert and what's the value of that conversion? And you can back into the value of that page from an SEO perspective and then you can multiply that out by the number of products you have on the website, how much traffic you could get, and do some rough math around it to get an idea of what that looks like.
Nick (00:16:39) - And ideally, over time, your site gets better. Your conversion gets better, right? Because SEO can get it to can get traffic to your website but let's pretend that for whatever reason, you don't have an add to cart button, right? It fell off the page for whatever reason. You got a million people on that page. You didn't make any money to that page today because the add to cart button fell off. You're going to get a ton of phone calls and a ton of customer service emails, but those aren't the metrics going for. Right? So, as good as your pages and compelling your offer is that that adds to the value of the SEO traffic. So, it's a combination of things that really make it a good time from a marketing and business perspective.
Guillermo (00:17:18) - Yeah. And I remember my, you know, my own journey. I worked in a large corporate environment for many years. This is not something I ever thought about and in 2020, I started I went into consulting and so I quickly was like, well, how do I connect with clients? How do I make myself known? And, I was like, you know, I started a website and, and I was getting calls from a lot of consultants' kind of promise, you know, this many cells by this month or this many leads, right? And I just wish I would have known what you're talking about today.
Guillermo (00:17:54) - That it's a one step at a time, and it's a very long-term thing. So, the best way to think about it really is like it's very similar to investing. That's a great example that you mentioned that the sooner you start you have that that time value of money, its time is much more, much more valuable and impactful when starting an SEO journey. Very similar to investing, right?
Nick (00:18:20) - Yeah, yeah for sure and similar to that conversation. Right. It's like you pick up the phone, call a financial advisor and they're like, what are your goals? Well, I want to be a millionaire tomorrow. What's in your bank account? Because if you have $999,000 like we can, we can totally do that, right? But if you have a dollar, that's a very different conversation. Right? And so, on my side, folks call up and go, I want, but I want to be number one. I want to be like, med Tara or someone.
Nick (00:18:49) - Right? I want big companies. Been doing it for a long time, have a ton of resources. I want to be number one. Like those guys. Every time we do a search there, they're right there. I want to beat them. Well, a couple things. One, if those are your expectations, we have to talk about expectations, right. Because it took a long time to get there. you know, you don't look at someone who's in shape, and go, man, I want, I want, I want to look like you. What do you do? I've been doing this for 20 years. I've been eating right and sleeping right and going to the gym, and, and that's how you get there. Like, it's very simple. And a lot of people go, oh, man, that sounds like a lot of work. Yeah, but, well, do you want the result, or do you not want the result? Right. Like everything that's worth getting is worth the work.
Nick (00:19:32) - Right. So, we have to taper those expectations. The, the, the one caution I would throw out there is that there are some people for sure in the SEO industry who will say, you want to be number one. We can make your number one. Absolutely. Like just sign on the dotted lines here. It's going to be X dollars number a month and we'll get you to be number one and that typically doesn't happen. Sometimes what will happen is they'll go by a bunch of links, or they'll push against the algorithm, Google's algorithm and you may see this spike of results and then what typically happens is it drops like a rock because they're gaming the system and it's a temporary thing. It's not long-term sustainable growth. It's a game of the system. They're pushing on weaker spots in the algorithm. They get there for a certain time. It's called search engine spam. And then the search engines make a correction and they and then they go missing.
Nick (00:20:28) - And not only do they lose rank, but because of the tactics that were used, they essentially burn the domain. And what that means is they put a black mark on the domain and now Google, isn't ranking them as neutral anymore like they were in the beginning of the conversation with this SEO, who promised number one results, right and neutral is we just haven't done anything right to get results but we haven't done anything wrong either but once you once you start doing, what's what are considered black hat tactics, things that are meant to game Google system and manipulate it. Then you start to fall behind. You start to get put in this other bucket. You get categorized as a bad player, and now you need to prove your worth and your trust over a period of time and the judge and jury of that period time is Google.
Guillermo (00:21:18) - Yeah.
Guillermo (00:21:19) - And so, your kind of trying to dig yourself out of a hole. And that's a mistake that you can easily avoid if you don't go down that route.
Guillermo (00:21:26) - And in the first place. Right. I think I learned the hard way, not so much that I went down to that point but didn't know that at the beginning when that was a starting. So, that leads us into the next piece. That is how does someone choose a professional to work with when they're looking at improving their SEO? I think you just mentioned one. Obviously, don't go with someone who promises you immediate results, overnight and indefinitely. There are those people to watch out for but if I'm just thinking through, well, how do I find the right person to work with? What are some of those things that you want, you want to look out for before you start finding someone?
Nick (00:22:15) - Yeah, yeah. Great question and so, here's one indicator and here's a tricky part of the industry. Right. So, if you go to a doctor they have a license. If you go to a CPA they have a license.
Nick (00:22:25) - If you hire a general contractor they have insurance, they will license, SEOs. There are no credentials for it. There's none. So, right. So, anyone can say, hi, my name is and I'm an SEO. Oh, you are fantastic. Great and that's and that's a tricky piece of this puzzle right here. So, so, what you're looking to do ideally, if you can find someone through a referral who's gotten you some results, great but minimally, you're looking for someone who's spent some time in the industry, has some breadcrumbs of their time and their accomplishments, minimally, in the industry, of industry, of SEO and, and that's the conversation you want to have with that type of person, you know, who have you worked with? What does that look like? How long have you been doing this? what do you think? And these are all discovery conversations, and the answers are sort of less important than the feeling you get from the person, right? Like, if they're if they're answering, like, we talked at the top of the, the conversation.
Nick (00:23:27) - Like, I've been doing this for 20 years. coauthored a book taught at NYU. Not everyone's going to have those items in their background. They're going to have other items that are going to be interesting to talk about as well but someone right off the street who's just slinging code and creating AI content and making you big promises for 100 bucks a month if something is too good to be true, it most likely it is.
Guillermo (00:23:50) - Yeah. So, that's a that's a good one is just not, not digging yourself into a hole but how do you find, maybe those is there anything that, is specific to, to cannabis and SEO? Because I'm sure someone can make the mistake of working with someone, that has not worked in cannabis and could make mistakes that could cause, you know, harm their sales or something like that. Is that a big piece of it too, or what are some things that to look out for that could go wrong or that are unique to cannabis from an SEO standpoint?
Nick (00:24:25) - Yeah, yeah.
Nick (00:24:26) - Let's start with the things that are very that are generally common through SEO with everything. Right. And then we'll get to the specific. So, SEO can largely be broken down into three aspects. There's technical which is how does Google Crawl and index your website? Can it access it, and can it do it well? Very basic question and there's a lot of checkpoints along the way and then assuming Google can crawl and index your website, the question now is, well, what is available for Google to index and therefore rank in in search and so, now we're talking about the content, the written content. We're talking about images. We're talking about products. We're talking about videos on the website like what's available and then the third piece of it is what is everyone else out in the world saying, and, and what I mean by that is, social media, other websites linking to our website and that that's the third leg on the, on the stool, so to speak, is what we say, what other people say about us.
Nick (00:25:26) - So, we have our technical. How does Google crawl and rank our website? Crawl, crawl and index what is available for rank our content and what others say about us? Right. So, those three things are always at play for cannabis. Here's one of the trickier parts is the language that is used with CBD for thing. Right. There's a certain risk factor CBD for pain, CBD for anxiety, CBD for sleep whatever, or THC for or whatever it may be. There's an inherent risk factor with that. So, people do search for those terms. I want to sleep better using weed, CBD, whatever, whatever may be and so, now on your page you have the opportunity to have help with sleep. We also know that that type of language is risky, right and you may get a nasty gram. So, there's this there's this threshold of risk that folks need to think about when they're doing any type of marketing tactic with cannabis, and SEO is one of them, because people search for it in very specific ways.
Nick (00:26:36) - So, that that that's one of the bigger things.
Guillermo (00:26:39) - What's a what's a nasty gram? Can you explain that?
Nick (00:26:43) - Yes, yes. If they're going to get a nasty gram from the FDA saying you can't say these specific things on your website and we're going to.
Guillermo (00:26:50) - Yeah, right? Because of the, the claims.
Guillermo (00:26:52) - On CBD and.
Guillermo (00:26:54) - Okay. Yeah.
Nick (00:26:54) - Can't do claims. Right. So, if you say helps with sleep cures anxiety all those things. Right. And some of that language cures anxiety. Right. That's a big promise, so it's not only misleading, but it's at a compliance, but it's misleading all at the same time. Right. So, even if you, even if you cite the studies that, you know, nine out of ten people experience who had anxiety experienced this thing, or nine out of ten people had trouble sleeping, experience better sleep after, using CBD. Here's our CBD you still may get a negative result from doing something like that.
Nick (00:27:34) - And so, that that balance of how I want to run my business and what's the language I want to use to get the result that I want is, is an active conversation that I have with you.
Guillermo (00:27:45) - So, that's that and that's that. That's market wide, right. That example that you gave would affect any cannabis company in any state. Is there anything down to the state level that's that specific in in cannabis when it comes to SEO, or is this the one area where we can kind of think of it more as a national, playing field, or does this is there anything that really comes to, to play at the state level or different markets in different states?
Nick (00:28:13) - Yeah, I mean, there's some states you can't ship to for, for obvious reasons, right? And so, to be aware of where you can and cannot operate as a business and then have that reflect on your website and we can put some controls around it as much as we can but if you're, if you're a, if you're an e-commerce ecommerce store and you're not, headquartered anywhere specifically like a retail store, right.
Nick (00:28:41) - Most retail stores and we know this is entirely true, but most retail stores operate with a license, and they're in states where it's legal. Right. Assuming that's true. Like, you know who your market is, right? And people are showing up to your door and that and local search is different than web search in terms of websites. So, with the e-commerce websites, where are you shipping? Is that okay for you to ship there? And that's another risk tolerance thing. Like I want to ship to all 50 states. Okay. Well, is that legal? No, but I'm still doing it. Okay. Well, that's risk tolerance, right? That that's the price of business according to you, somewhere in in your philosophy. So, keeping in mind what is complaint, what's not complaint and doing the best to manage your business and your website respectively, is going to have a different result based on the direction you go and the in the depth in which you go.
Guillermo (00:29:34) - And I'm sure it can get it can get complex. You also have the hemp side. Things are changing quickly. There's enforcement and sometimes there's not and so, I'm sure there's a lot of gray area to still kind of work through. Right.
Nick (00:29:49) - For sure.
Nick (00:29:50) - For sure. Yeah. And some folks are like, you know, that's the cost of business. And other folks, say, you know, I just I don't want to step into that. I don't want to lose my business. I don't want to go to jail. I don't want to like them so there's and those are sort of extreme. to two sides of the coin, shall we say but you know, if you're in the business, you need to run it in some way that feels appropriate based on your risk tolerance, and we lay it out. Right? We just go, this is this is what it looks like. This is what we can do. Here's the results that we're going for, but you need to be comfortable one way or the other.
Nick (00:30:24) - You don't want to say sleep. We'll take sleep off. That's fine. You want to say sleep? We'll say sleep. Right. So, we work with the client based on how they want to play the game. It's.
Guillermo (00:30:32) - So, that's a that's such a great point with, with any service provider. You know for us, as virtual CFO is setting that expectation really talking through the scope of the work what to expect really early on. The sooner you can do that, and the more of a continuous conversation can be, the more successful that relationship can be. So, one of the things that I love about being able to host this podcast is I do. I do some research through this too. I call it anecdotal, but one of the things I'm trying to get at right now is spending, you know, for how much are cannabis companies spending on marketing professional services? In the current year, we know it's been tight over the many years. You've been in the industry for a long time.
Guillermo (00:31:20) - So, 20 years and sometime in cannabis as well. Have you seen, this is the year that, you know, hopefully, with reschedule if it all goes as planned as I mentioned earlier, there'll be additional, the tax burden won't be as, as, as much for cannabis companies it'll be on a normal playing field. Have you seen any shift in spending, whether in the current year, or just kind of historically, as you've seen things on SEO services from cannabis companies or how cannabis companies are thinking through that.
Nick (00:31:58) - Yeah. Yeah. So, I haven't necessarily seen a change in, in shift around like a monthly budget. I haven't seen that. I've seen I've seen it get quieter because, you know, like cannabis or CBD used to be the cool kid. Like, you couldn't get enough of it and then all of a sudden it got flooded. Right? There was a bad year. There are multiple bad years and then and then that got adjusted right. So, so, that will just take people out of the out of the equation in terms of folks who are ready to operate from a marketing perspective, that's really a pass fail, not a oh, I'm at 80% of my budget last year.
Nick (00:32:35) - That's like, I just can't afford to do marketing, right. Different. and then there's folks who and this started to happen about two-ish Novembers ago. Right? I started to become a thing. I content started to become a thing and so, for, for me and for a lot of other folks out there, a lot of, online content start to get, for lack of a better word, farmed out to I write a multiple vendors of I and so a lot of that business, got minimized for me. However, what we're seeing now is and this was predictable, and this is why I want to work with someone who knows how to, you know, bring it back to growing. Right. If you and I don't know anything about growing. So, if someone's listening about growing and you're like, you're just wrong about that, it's fine and that that, helps underscore my point, but where you want to plant a hybrid plant is in sandy soil and here are the reasons why.
Nick (00:33:34) - And so, when you go out to someone's farm who's looking to, put a whole farm together and the soil isn't sandy or it's whatever, rocky or whatever, whatever it is, and they're like, but this is the land. As someone who knows where plants grow, you can look at the land to go. You don't even have a good start here. Like, this is not going to work, right. You're not only are you not going to have anything in a year, but you're going to have nothing in a month because you know, you just don't have the environment for it and so, having someone who can steward you through those conversations and help you avoid the missteps is very, very helpful and where that applies in SEO is, you know, a lot of folks looked at AI content as a savior for their budget and the reality is, after Google had a whole lot of AI content, they can crawl, index and understand. They start to make some corrections, and a lot of folks just lost a lot, a lot of traffic.
Nick (00:34:31) - And a lot of those folks are affiliates. A lot of those folks are small publishers. a lot of the big publishers are still around. It's not clear what's going to happen with those guys right now in terms of AI content, but Google has had mixed communication around how they feel about AI content and, if you've been paying attention for a while, you do know that Google has always put on their negative list, in their guidelines, auto generated content and AI is largely auto generated content, right? I want to built a 500-page article about the benefits of gummies, CBD and sleep and can you generate that for me? Well, if you did that for the purpose of and do that a hundred times, did it for the purpose of quote unquote manipulating the search results, then that's against the Google guidelines and the result is going to be most likely at some point in time, a decrease or a heavy hand in, in decrease of the ranking of your website and you may get some like we talked about earlier, you may get some uplift and you may go, Nick didn't know what he's talking about.
Nick (00:35:42) - Look at these results. Give me a call in six months.
Guillermo (00:35:45) - And so, are you saying that, you know, from your standpoint or the way you see it is that a lot of companies are now starting to realize this was a couple of years back, and they're now starting to kind of sober from the effects of the, the, the rankings, the decrease in rankings and kind of coming back or are you saying this is still kind of something that's happening?
Nick (00:36:10) - It's active right now. Yeah, and I don't know how I really don't know how aware folks are of it. I mean, literally it was yesterday I was talking to someone and they said it was a cannabis company, and they said, you know, we and we're producing content for them and they said, we started to produce AI content and you know, it took us like 15 minutes to write three pages and, you know, it's pretty good. It is pretty good.
Nick (00:36:35) - It reads pretty good. However, there's a fingerprint in there somewhere. And here's what I told them is I had a client about a year ago came to me, and we were talking about a content budget. This was after doing a technical audit. We got the site in shape and because it wasn't ranking for anything and now the site is in shape, it's available to be ranked. But there was nothing on the website to rank. Right? So, we started talking about what it would look like to produce some amount of pages every month for the next six months. I followed up with them the next week and they went, we're not we're not going to move ahead with the project. Well, what's going on? Well, we hired someone to write the AI content. Oh, okay. And we have ten pages up already. Great. I'd love to see them, and you read through them and they do read. They read pretty well and, I thought, well, let's see, let's see what's going on in six months.
Nick (00:37:31) - So, I checked back in six months of the 25 pages they produced of AI content that they published on their site that had good technical at this point, I know, because I worked with them on it. Not one of those pages ranked for anything, nothing. So, absolutely, the content was way cheaper, but you didn't get the result that you wanted.
Guillermo (00:37:53) - Yeah, and then it sounds like the negative effect of that as well. now, thanks for thanks for sharing that story. And so, so it just it seems like we maybe haven't seen it, but there is definitely that impact of I, you know, when we, we use I, I've seen how it can't possibly replace, you know, critical thinking working with an advisor understanding your goals but there's definitely an element of it that could help me as an accountant categorize transactions. Have you seen it help efficiency from that standpoint.
Nick (00:38:33) - For sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah for sure. I mean, it could be used as a lovely tool to help you with efficiency.
Nick (00:38:38) - It should not be used as a tool to output right to magically output content and other and it's not. People are like, oh my God, it's a good, cool keyword research tool. It's not, it's not a keyword research tool. It doesn't know anything about the volume. It doesn't know anything about the seasonality. It doesn't know anything about intent. If you use one of these tools to build a list of keywords, it goes here. The keywords CBD, THC, gummies, whatever, whatever it is. But there's no volume tied to it. There's no, there's no other helpful information tied to it. We have tools that give you all that information. We can see who's ranking for those terms as well. Right. So, I had certainly, had a place but it's not the, you know, be careful when people touted as the best thing since sliced bread, whatever it is, typically it's not an I it fits in that bucket as well.
Guillermo (00:39:32) - And so, it saves I think it sounds like a lot of, a lot of people have seen it, as a way to save cost and probably also time.
Guillermo (00:39:40) - But if you want to get good results, there will be a cost and a time commitment. So, maybe let's let that take us into consideration as we're getting close to the end here. I just want to make sure that those folks understand what it's like to work with you, especially from a time commitment. If someone has not worked on their SEO and they're looking to hire someone. How does that process look? How much time are they really investing per week to work with you on this project to make sure there, their SEO is, is improving and up to date?
Nick (00:40:16) - Yeah.
Nick (00:40:17) - So, typically we work with folks in two capacities. One is going to be by project and the other is retainer. So, projects are largely in the bucket of SEO audits, one and done SEO audits for a lot of folks. They take that information. They have a team internally who's going to go execute on it, be it technical, be it content, resources, whatever it is.
Nick (00:40:37) - And then they work on that. frequently we get brought back in to review the results. and I'll use the phrase of a client. They said it best, which was, well, I want you to QA the results because the team who got me here shouldn't be the team too Q the way the results of your recommendations, we need an independent eye to take a look at that. Oh, okay. So, we'll do that for you. So, we QA the results of the work and make sure everything was done the way that it should have been done. And then we have and so that's for audits. We're looking at about four weeks to get the work done implementation wise. It depends on your resources, and it depends on the findings.
Guillermo (00:41:20) - Yeah. And is that something that, when people reach out to you, you schedule a call and kind of have that discovery, time for that meeting or how does that.
Nick (00:41:29) - Yeah, yeah, we, we have the engagement will kick off with the 30-minute discovery meeting.
Nick (00:41:36) - Right. And so, we'll, we'll talk, and we'll learn about the background of the website, the results that you're going for, what your internal resources look like and figure out what makes sense from there is, is that a project or is it a six-month retainer, or does it look like something different? We have also and we do coach, and we do, we get into businesses as they need us as sort of a, for lack of a better phrase, fractional SEO resource. Right? You don't need a full-time resource, but you need someone watching the ship to make sure it's going in the right direction the entire time and you don't have someone accountable for that and you need someone who's accountable and who knows the domain and can navigate the organization. So, that's typically not a quote unquote SEO specialist, someone who has experience in making sure that SEO is they know how to do SEO, but in that organization, they may fall a little flat so we can come in and help them out with that.
Nick (00:42:30) - And then we have the six-month retainers, which cover the technical, the content and links as a step out the door and then we refine with follow up. So, to make sure that we're refining and really working on the optimization portion of SEO.
Guillermo (00:42:46) - So, it doesn't, it sounds like you don't have to know exactly, how you're going to approach it, you know, as you're thinking through this, but it's really something that you can help kind of navigate. What are the services that we need or what where that, what is that project really going to look like? And that's something you can.
Guillermo (00:43:02) - You know.
Guillermo (00:43:02) - Get started and flesh that out probably in your initial, kind of diagnostic.
Guillermo (00:43:07) - Discovery.
Nick (00:43:09) - That's all. Yeah. That's it. And I mean, I would love to work with folks. Anyone listening? I'd love to have a discovery call with you and if you have another agency or firm you want to work with, by all means that works too and so, one of the other things about working with folks, watch out for those expectations.
Nick (00:43:25) - I want to be number one. I can promise you, number one, no one can do that. No one has a special relationship with Google. They can't promise you those number one positions and here's the other thing that showed up just to like a couple weeks ago, which was crazy there was a call with a gentleman, not in cannabis, but he was a lawyer, and he was working with a big firm and I said, well, I'd be happy too, to see what they've been doing and if you're comfortable, I share the contract because there's, there's SEO language in there and so, someone who understands the language would be able to understand what they were looking to do and, and what the result of that that effort would be and he goes, you know, I read the contract multiple times. I couldn't tell you what they signed up to do. Well, do they say they would optimize one page or ten pages. Doesn't say.
Nick (00:44:14) - Does it say they're going to crawl your website and look for technical errors every day, every month, every week, every quarter doesn't say are they going to get you backlinks? 1 or 100 doesn't say, okay, then you really don't know what you're paying for. Got it. Like so we spell it out in our so here's what you're paying, here's what you're getting by month and then we move through the work. We say what we're going to do. We say we're going to do these things. Then we do these things right. Let's keep it simple and just get the work done so we can get a result.
Guillermo (00:44:42) - Yeah. The clarity around that seems to go a long way because even you know, in your, in your, in your example there, your story, your real-life example there, it's an even folks are intelligent. This is just an area that is difficult, historically difficult for professionals of all kinds to understand what they need. They maybe just understand where they need to go.
Guillermo (00:45:05) - But it sounds like you really help guide, and explain what the things are they need with a lot of clarity.
Nick (00:45:12) - Yeah, yeah. And you know, when I'm on the phone with someone who I'm not familiar with their domain and they're talking over my head. So, you know, I'm sorry. I'm just. I'm naive. Break it down like I'm a three-year-old. Like I want to understand what you're talking about. So, if you could break it down for me. I don't speak legalese. I don't speak accounting. Right. So, help me understand what it looks like, and then we can do that, and there will be jargon in there, right? you talk to, you talk to the insurance company, they're going to say liability. If you don't know what liabilities. You ask the question, what does that mean? Right. And so, for SEO there's going to be technical verbiage. I mean I can't change the language. The language is the language, but I can tell you what it means and why it's important.
Guillermo (00:45:50) - Yeah.
Guillermo (00:45:50) - And I think that's a great tip to wrap up with in what to look for. If there's someone you're trying to work with, it is like they know everything, they're not curious, and they're not asking the question. It's very unlikely that someone, even if they are an expert in your industry, understands everything about your business. So, it's a lot like going to the doctor. You never go to the doctor, and they don't ask you questions like how you're feeling or how you're doing. Right.
Guillermo (00:46:16) - You got to figure it out.
Guillermo (00:46:17) - And so that's a that's a big part of the process is no different than with, a service provider and so, Nick, as we wrap up, I just want to make sure where can people find you? How do they reach out to you if they want to work with you or.
Guillermo (00:46:33) - Or.
Guillermo (00:46:33) - Schedule to schedule a call with you?
Nick (00:46:35) - Yeah. Yeah. You can find me on online.
Nick (00:46:39) - You can find me on LinkedIn Nick Musica is the name there, you know, feel free to reach out to me there if you want to have a discovery call. You can go to opticsin.com and you can, you can see some of the results that we have for clients. You can see, there's a contact us page as a form there. I would encourage using LinkedIn if you want to reach out that that form tends to get a bunch of spam. That's the nature of the web but it also does get checked.
Guillermo (00:47:07) - I also.
Guillermo (00:47:08) - Say you have your phone number and your LinkedIn. Is that a good way to.
Guillermo (00:47:12) - Yeah.
Nick (00:47:12) - Give me a buzz. Yeah. Yeah. Give me a call. Yeah. If you're serious, I want to chat. Like. Well, I may not pick up the phone. I typically don't pick up the phone if I don't recognize the number, but that doesn't mean I won't look at it and then give it to you.
Guillermo (00:47:24) - But I think we're going to see a trend towards the phone number again, because I'm talking to more and more people that are like, just call me and I am starting to like that more.
Guillermo (00:47:32) - Just call me on the phone. We'll talk. it's more open and I just noticed that about your LinkedIn. So, I think that's going to start to be a trend here more in the future.
Nick (00:47:43) - Oh, God, I would love that. That sounds great.
Guillermo (00:47:46) - I missed phone calls. Yeah, yeah.
Guillermo (00:47:50) - Well, Nick, thanks. Thanks for joining us. I think people are going to really find this episode insightful and just practical and what you share today and how people can get started, on the journey of improving this very important part of their business. That's all we have for today. And I want to thank everyone for joining us on the CannaBiz Success Show.
Outro (00:48:11) - Enjoy this podcast. Visit our website. Anderscpa.com/virtual-CFO- cannabis to get more tips and strategy for achieving business success in the cannabis industry.