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SEO Success Through Strategic Planning and Patience with Nick Musica · Talk Commerce

• Brent Peterson (00:01.272) Okay, so now this is where you go ahead and give us your introduction. Nick Musica (00:06.34) Hi, name is Nick Musica of OpticsIn. That's OpticsIn.com. I'm here to talk today about SEO and why it's crucial to help you grow your business. Brent Peterson (00:16.014) Perfect, yeah, we'll see how that works. All right, here we go. Now we're really gonna start. All right, welcome to this episode of Talk Com. Geez, well good thing we did that. I don't know how I could screw that up. I've only done it 300 times. All right, three, two, one. Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Nick Musica with Optics In. Nick, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Nick Musica (00:46.193) Yeah. Yeah. My day to day, day to day role is running Optics in, which is a search agency, specifically SEO and website design agency, where we, we specifically work with web WordPress. when we're building websites, when we're auditing websites, we're working on them. It doesn't matter what the platform is, but if we're going to build it for you, it's going to be in WordPress. something that I'm passionate about. I love me a good day of surfing. So I live in Southern California and when the waves are good, it's a, it's a great. time to be in Southern California. Brent Peterson (01:18.616) That's awesome. I am moving in December to somewhere that has a lot of surf and I've been trying to surf and I'm kind of old, but I'm going to get it down this year. My son is able to surf now, but I'm looking forward to actually getting in the water and doing some surfing this year or next year, I should say. Nick Musica (01:35.921) Yeah. Great. Yeah. Let's chat more about that if you want to. I'd love to hear more. Brent Peterson (01:42.219) Absolutely. All right, Nick, before we talk about surfing and Southern California and really fun SEO items, I have to tell you a joke. And all you have to do is give me a rating one through five. It's called the Free Joke Project. Anyways, here we go. And I've got some really good ones for you today. Why can't towels tell jokes? Because they have a dry sense of humor. Nick Musica (02:10.525) I'm going to give it a five. I love it. It's a bad joke. It's not a great joke, which makes it a great joke. Brent Peterson (02:21.067) Good, thank you. had a follow-up- I'm gonna tell you the follow-up joke anyways. Purple is my favorite color. I love it more than red and blue combined. Nick Musica (02:29.565) That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully you know a little bit about color. I know a little bit about color. Brent Peterson (02:36.814) Yeah, they have to be thinking jokes and I do have a lot of people from not in the US and some people just don't get it. It's kind of fun to, you know, either that doesn't matter. All right, let's let's talk about SEO. Tell us yours kind of your your how did you get into it? Tell us your story of how you got to do what you're doing now. Nick Musica (03:01.127) Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I started doing SEO roughly around 2003 in New Jersey. I was working for a, one of the babies of AT &T. AT &T was big in New Jersey. And when it got, when it got split up as a company, one of the companies that got shot off was a company called EasyLink. And I was working there for a while and they had, they had a little Skunk Works office in Long Island. that had a project that they didn't care about until it started to do well. And as corporations will do, they brought that project to the headquarters. And I think it was more about we want to keep it internal versus more than anything else. They didn't really like the project, but regardless, we started working on it. There was a team of four people. I was one of them. And I was doing everything. I was writing the copy, I designing the website. putting all the pages together, doing the code, I was doing all of it. And we decided that we weren't getting SEO results. So we hired a firm and we were paying the firm, this is 2003, we were paying the firm $6,000 a month. for time six and months one, two, and three, the deliverables were, it was a PDF, page one, two, three, and four each month, four pages of a PDF. And what was included in those PDFs were pages of the website that were SEO audited or edited. And if someone said a services, was internet fact services, right? Things like that. For $6,000, $6,000. And then I went to my boss and like, this is costing us $6,000. This is crazy. And he was like, okay, well, let's see what they give us next month. So month four, what they gave us was a best practices in cross-linking, interlinking on the website. It's so important. Here's what it is. Here's what it does. But they didn't actually give recommendations. So for $6,000, we got a page and a half of why cross-linking is important. Nick Musica (05:20.165) And now go ahead and you're armed with why it's important. Go do it. And I gave it to my boss and he said, so, so what do think now? All right, we're going to cancel the contract, but here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to find someone who's going to train us so they can validate what we know and inform us on things we don't. So I found Shari Thoreau. She's been doing SEO since before 2000. And she came in, she trained us, validated everything we knew, correct things we didn't know. And at the end of the training, she says, one or both of you are going to get a new job in the next three to four months. And I didn't, I didn't really like my job. So, you know, I raised my hand and said, so why do you say that? And she said, because it happens every time that I train someone. Great. Sure enough. That was the start of me focusing on SEO, right? Cause I knew I was doing something with SEO, but I didn't know if I was doing the right things. And, and, and here's the sticky wicket, but all. If you are touching the website, I don't care what your role is, you are quote unquote doing the SEO, right? And so once you're armed with your role and where you can influence good or bad, the SEO that's super powerful. Cause then you're contributing to something that can really support the business for long-term. But that was the shift in my career change from going from all things on a website to this very small, very specific lens of SEO. Brent Peterson (06:48.588) Yeah, that's interesting. And I think that that experience you described is pretty typical, especially in the earlier days of SEO, where people saw it as smoke and mirrors. there wasn't so much, there was a lot of recommendations put in and not a lot of action put in by SEO companies. And it seemed like they would work for six months and go on to the next, next job, right. And, kind of leave the client. with this unpleasant feeling about what does it mean in SEO or what does SEO mean to you? And I guess, you know, a lot of things have changed since 2000 and they continue to change even quarter over quarter, right, for SEO. Nick Musica (07:27.069) Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say this. like you can go back to, pick your favorite SEO industry website, search engine land, whatever, whatever, maybe it doesn't matter. And go look for some technical information about 404s. And just like as a random, a 404, page not found. And largely the information you find from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it's gonna still be relevant, right? There's a lot of relevant information. However, a lot of it has also changed, right? So here's what's been consistent for 20 plus years is that there's three pillars to SEO. There's technical, can Google crawl and index your website? Yes or no, and or how efficient. There's your on-page, what you do and how you talk about that. And then there's your off-page, what other websites say about you and are they linking to you? So those three elements have been at play forever. It's just a matter of how they are expressed. know, technology changes. Can Google crawl and index it? Language changes. Are you using the right language? Are you using corporate speak or are you actually creating a category, right? That you're going to be the leader in the category, right? There was once waterfall in terms of producing software. Now we have agile. Well, agile wasn't a thing at some point, and now it's a thing. Right? So the language changed. And then you have off page. It used to be go buy a ton of links and bully the algorithm and you can get a good result. Well, that changed. Fewer good quality links are much better the way to go. They're also harder to get. So here's the tip for anyone looking for links. If it's easy to get, don't get them. They're garbage links. It should be hard. If it's not hard, here's what the best case scenario is for you. You get a lot of those, your results are going to go up. And then they're going to fall off like a rock and you're going to wonder what happened. And I'm going to tell you right now what happened. You bought bad links. That's what happened. You bullied the algorithm for some period of time and then it caught up to you. Brent Peterson (09:37.858) Yeah, you know, think that's the back linking and the cross, even the internal cross linking is something that most people overlook in SEO. Do you have a sort of a list of the top things that you see people that are low hanging fruit that they should be doing? And you talked about on page, I think off page is something is a little bit more difficult for people to get a hold of, but on page should be the things that people have down no matter what. Nick Musica (09:47.069) Mm-hmm. Nick Musica (10:06.455) Yeah, you should. But, here's sometimes what we run into is, people sort of don't understand their product. Sometimes they don't know who their primary audience is. They don't know what they're buying and why they're buying it. Right. And that, that makes our job very difficult. So if you were producing software for argument's sake, we can write a ton of pages about software, the types of software. what it does, I mean, you can just use your imagination, all the things you can type, you can write about. But if you're producing a very specific type of software for a very specific person in a very specific industry, in a very specific role, that query volume is going to be way less. But also, you're going to have a very high chance to rank. And those are high quality queries. Those are people who have their credit card in hand, they just don't know what to do with it. So SEO shouldn't be this spray and pray model where you get a bunch of traffic. You rank really well for some terms that don't support your business. You want to be as focused as you can, as targeted as you can within reason while you build what SEO's, and there's no better phrase for it, but this authority of the website. We refer to it as the aboutness of the website. What is this website about? You have a very small website. I don't care how big your website is. It could be thousands of pages. In the context of the internet, it's still a small website. Brent Peterson (11:48.952) Hey Nick, let's pause for a second because you're having an issue on your end, I think. Brent Peterson (11:56.534) I hear you, yeah, but it just gave me a warning that your site isn't recording. Brent Peterson (12:07.118) Why don't you refresh your browser really quick. Brent Peterson (12:37.454) All right, there you go. Yep, we're back. Yeah, perfect. All right, so we just got done with talking about the SEO and the size of your site and all that is the same, right? Nick Musica (12:38.632) We're back, back in action. Okay, fantastic. Nick Musica (12:54.184) Yeah. Yeah. So what you need to do is for on page, a lot of people miss just the nuances of what their site's about. mean, the best story I have about this is when I was working in East Shirts in San Francisco and I was working across departments. Typically SEO is a cross functional role. So you're working with developers, you're working with marketing, you're working with writers. And I was working with a very talented writer named John and I got John's paper, his draft of a page. And I called John over and John knew he was a good writer. And so he's like, what's, what's this SEO guy going to tell me that I already don't know. We started to read the page and it sounded something like this when you're shopping for insurance, et cetera. when you get into an accident, here's what you need to do. And I said, John, so we don't sell insurance here at insurance. And he goes, what are you talking about? So we, we sell car insurance. We sell home insurance. We sell renters insurance. Insurance is a category. is not a product called insurance. It's a category. We sell these products, right? So what type of insurance? When you talk about accident in the context of insurance, is that a slip and fall accident? Is that a car accident? What type of accident is that? Well, Nick, duh, it's a auto insurance page. It's a car accident. You got to tell me, you got to tell me on the page, type of accident it is. Right. and, when you give that page context and the next page context and the next page context, then your entire site is about something. Once it's about something, it now has a chance to rank for what that is. But if we only said accident without a qualifier, if only said insurance without a qualifier, the site would still rank because it had a good, it had a lot of good history, had a ton of links. but it wouldn't rank for what we wanted to. It's a very intentional thing. I want to do this, therefore write it like that. Brent Peterson (14:57.122) Yeah, think that brings up one of the things that I think has changed over the last couple of years, and that's keywords. There's no, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no such thing as keyword stuffing anymore. There's just context that you can read and that Google's, my speculation is Google's giving you higher ranking for people that are on your page longer because they're reading something that they'd like to see. rather than just seeing words on the page that Google likes to see. Nick Musica (15:30.662) Yeah. Yeah. So I would find that a little bit. So back in the day, we had keyword, keyword meta tags and that was before Google. And when Google came into the game, Google never used the keywords because pre Google, if you said car insurance on your page 20 times, and I said it 40 times in the meta keywords, I won because 40 times versus 20, that was just how it was. Right. So that's one of the things that has evolved over time, right? Still, still important. What we say, how we say it, right. in terms of how it's expressed, that's one of those things. But in terms of those other ranking factors, you're getting at there, Brent, when someone gets to your page and they're involved in your page and your copy is worth reading, it's findable, it's worth reading, it's shareable. It doesn't sound like a third grader wrote it because stuff, stuff, stuff keywords, but it actually has something that's of value and it happens to have the right keywords to be found. That's pretty much the magic sauce right there. Because no one's going to buy from someone that says, offer great insurance. I offer the best car insurance in the world, save on cheap car insurance. You're going to go, what? This sounds so odd. But when someone says, I can save you $500 on car insurance, for most people, give me a call. I'd be happy to give you a quote. I mean, that sounds reasonable. You go, okay, let me see. Let me see if there's a fit here for me. And that's what your pages sound like. Brent Peterson (16:56.396) Yeah, that's good way to look at it. I think, well, I should ask, is that the reason why recipes put the recipe at the bottom of the page and they have whole bunch of garbage at the top that you have to try to figure out where the recipes at so they make you sit there forever to get through to the bottom of it? Nick Musica (17:11.742) So it's terrible, right? It's terrible. Yeah, terrible. mean, so recipes by nature are, what are they? They're 200 words at best, right? And so here's what's happened and this has changed recently. So the more the better content on the page used to be the better content in terms of SEO. Is 500 words enough? Yes. And then it wasn't. Was a thousand words on the page enough? Yes, then it wasn't. Then we got into this thing called pillar pages, you 5,000 words. It got to be ridiculous. And Google came back and said, well, it is ridiculous. And now we're making corrections. So what are the other factors instead of a thousand words that pushes down what's called the main content, in this case, the recipe, what can we do to actually get those pages to rank better? So there's various factors that bring up a page. These days in specifically recipe land, to make sure that it actually, Google is bringing up the right content. And to be honest, Google is struggling with that type of content these days. It's having a hard time. That's why there's so many core and Reddit results in the search results. But what is, what is still very effective regarding SEO is folks who have products and services, lawyers, accountants, coaches. those folks who actually can convert on their, on their sites or get the leads on their sites. Very helpful folks who have a product. Very helpful, but small businesses, I'm sorry, small, small publishers. They're having a hard time right now. Even Forbes and bigger publishers have gotten a correction in the past week or so. Affiliates they're having a hard time. It's it's brands with. products that are offering products and services that they sell themselves are gaining the most from SEO these days. Brent Peterson (19:16.743) You mentioned you mainly work on WordPress. In my background, it's always been e-commerce, especially Magento. Cannibalization is something that it seems like e-commerce sites handle better than WordPress sites. Explain what cannibalization means and how can, well, let's just say you look at a site and you find that there's 100 pages that show up for cannibalization. How do you help the client through that? Nick Musica (19:45.618) Yeah. So let's go back to Magento versus Shopify versus WordPress versus pick your favorite CMS. I ran into someone, a new one today. it's, sort of doesn't matter. So what we'll optimize any of those frameworks. Doesn't matter. when we go to build our specialty is building WordPress websites. And so we could bring in WooCommerce and build shopping, shipping carts off of WooCommerce. and it's less about the platform. as versus the controls in the platform. Right. So if you're going to have what, what we call tags run wild, facets run wild, and they're all available to the search engine. So tags run wild, right? So think about it as this is typical for blogs and like, well, and, but the same concept applies to e-commerce. Right. So I write one piece of content and I go, this is about red, green, blue, let's use your colors. and in all the colors in the rainbow. Right. And then you go to slash red slash red, green slash blue, et cetera. And that one same piece of content is on all those pages. Right. It's so which page should Google actually crawl index and rank? It's, it's the same content across all the colors of the rainbow, AKA the pages. It has to choose. And once you give Google, you tell them implicitly or explicitly to choose, you're losing the SEO game. You're losing. And so apply that same idea to products. Because services, not so much, but products, if you have a shirt and it comes in small, medium, and large, and it comes in three different colors, and it's made of fabric X, Y, and Z, right? Well, now you have essentially the same shirt, but 10 different variations of that shirt with 10 different URLs. So you're cannibalizing your results via through duplicate content. Again, you're asking Google, Please make the best choice because we are not able to give you what we feel is the best choice technically. So we're really letting you do that all by yourself. So when you take that idea of one shirt, five variations for the sake of easy math and multiply your products out by a hundred, you don't have a hundred pages anymore. You have 500 pages. And now they're all competing with variations of themselves. Right. And so it's a mess. So what you need to do is make sure that there is a Nick Musica (22:13.16) It's called a canonical URL, the true URL for this product and make sure that you manage all the other versions. So you tell Google, no, no, no, no, not these pages, this page. And then the user goes there and goes, I love the shirt. I wonder if it comes in. It does small, medium, and large. I wonder if it comes in. It does color one, two, three, right? And that's how we play the SEO game and it maps to e-commerce. Brent Peterson (22:35.554) Yeah, guess canonical is the word that I missed there. And I know that Magento does that well, but maybe WordPress doesn't well, but maybe I just don't know enough about WordPress to understand canonical work, how it works inside of WordPress. Nick Musica (22:46.014) Yeah, they all, from what I've seen, the vast majority of them, and I don't want to pan any platform, but the vast majority of them have all the controls. It's just a matter of do we implement it correctly? And some of them are better out of the gate than others. Brent Peterson (23:04.492) Got it. From a consumer standpoint then when they're trying to find something, let's just, we'll put cannibalization to bed. Just having the content there and having, is there types of content that are gonna win? Is video now the kind of thing that people should be looking for? Or is it a mixture of everything that you'd like to see on that page? Nick Musica (23:34.173) It's it's a, it's a great question and it's a terrible answer because the answer is it depends. Right. So when we're building out pages for folks, when we're looking at what's going to be successful, what we want to do is put a few queries in that page that could rank for, right? The concept of the page could rank for, and then analyze the SERP, the search engine results page. What's actually showing up? Is it videos? Is it infographics? Are there, is it news? Like where are our options for ranking? And then we go, okay, so if we're to build this page and this is our landscape to compete in, we know that black copy on a white page will only get us so far. It's a great starting point, but we may stay on page two and never see the light of day page one. Doesn't mean we shouldn't produce the page. We should, if it's a good page, produce the page, get history on that page. Let it get crawled, let it get indexed, let it get ranked, build history. Cause a page without history, it's sort of like getting your driver's license. I mean, kids come out of, you know, they get your driver's license and they're paying two grand a year because why? There's no history on their license. And based on what auto insurance companies have in their books, you're a bad driver because you don't have experience. So we're going to charge you more. Google has the same thing. We don't know what type of citizen of the web you are. So we're going to throttle you back. You need to earn page one. And part of that earning is there's a time factor. But keep in mind that once you get that earning, And you can optimize and build a great page. Your competitors who come out next year, year after, et cetera, et cetera, look at you and go, I can do that by producing the same page. You can't. If you don't have patience, we can do all the right things with technical, with on page, with off page. But if you don't have this, this wonderful thing called patience, and you're going to muddle around with your website and you're going to switch strategies here, there, everywhere, you're not going to get ahead. Right? So, pick a good line in terms of a strategy, know what it takes to get to page one. And SEO has, it really does have the potential to pay you dividends for a very, very long time. When you have a healthy site and a good product, those are the clients you like to work with. If you can't express what you do for a living and your product gets panned by reviews, like, there's nothing SEO can do to save you. We're here to make you give. Nick Musica (25:59.548) good visibility to good products. can't, it's not going to, if you have a lesser product, you can only get so far. Brent Peterson (26:07.758) I want to close out today with the idea of the off page. And my question is specifically around, you know, on our Talk Commerce website, we get all kinds of people that want to drop a link in and link to them. Is that something that we should be pursuing? We charge for a link or we even do a guest blog post or something like that and they get a link in there. I know that this idea of toxic links. Tell us a little bit about backlinks and I understand that's a strategy they're doing. They're buying that link from us so we can link back. Go ahead. Yeah. Nick Musica (26:42.472) Yep. Yep. Yep. buying links is, how the internet works largely. Right. some links are going to be picked up because they have a great product. mean, I, have a, I have a client who you cannot buy her backlink profile. You just can't. She produces content in a specific domain and has a perspective. You can't, you can't buy these links. You literally cannot. However, people want to try to replicate that as best as possible. And so now we get into commerce around links, the basic guidance that we give folks. And then we have to get into the details to understand, well, does this actually map to the guidance and really the spirit behind the guidance is would you link there if they weren't giving you $500? Like, would you talk about this content if they weren't paying you? Right. If you had a meeting on a Monday and you're going, man, we should really have a page about SEO. and how it can support small businesses. And then I reach out to you and go, Hey, Brent, you're like, I'm trying to give visibility for my website, small businesses. I'm willing to pay you for your time. That could be a match. However, if, if I reached out to you with the same communication and you go to this blinking website and you can buy 500 links for a dollar, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but we've seen what these things look like. You don't want to do. You don't want to do that. Right. So there, was some discernment that comes with it where you got, where you can't say 500 is awesome. 5 million is really awesome. Right. Like you're going to tank your website. Don't do that. Brent Peterson (28:26.126) And I suppose there's certain content that we should always steer away from when accepting a guest post, right? And I guess I'm on the other end of the linking thing where people are reaching out to us and they would like to link back. So we're at the tail end of the link exchange network or whatever you want to call it. There's content we should just avoid, right? Nick Musica (28:50.27) I mean, there's, there's naughty categories, right? We don't, don't like if you're going to link, if you're going to, allow someone to go on your website and link out to porn gambling, illegal drugs, like one, it's illegal. a lot of it too. it's just, just, it's just a bad, what's called a bad neighborhood, right? And we, and that's the severe bad neighborhood. but there also may be just low quality websites that you just don't want to be associated with. that you may look at and go, well, what's the harm? Well, from our lens, we can see what the harm is, because we can see what they've been doing with the tools that we use. And you don't want to get caught up in that. Brent Peterson (29:35.598) From the flip side then, if, and I guess I wouldn't be looking to link for Talk Commerce, but if a client is looking for that backlink, is there a strategy that they should be looking for to, let's just say I have an e-commerce site to get people to link to me? Nick Musica (29:53.074) Yeah. So going back to the history, right. We're looking to create a good history. So, a lot of folks go, this is my top selling product. I want this thing to get a lot of links. This is what I want. Can you get me a hundred links tomorrow? I can't. And if I could, I would say no. And here's why, because we haven't built a good history. you want to quote unquote, make it look normal when you're doing these things as well. Right. If you produce a hundred pages a day. How'd you do that? Most people are not producing a hundred pages a day. That's going to be a flag, right? And people can do that today compared to two-ish years ago because of AI content. Well, that could look a little bit funny and you can also see results for a time, for a small time period and then your results are going to fall off the cliff, right? So same thing with links is well, how easy do you think it is to reach out to people and get alignment around messaging, get them to carve out time to get copy and a link on their website. Is that easy? Like we're all busy. We're all doing something. So if you got a hundred of those links to product pages, does that look natural? And did they come from good websites? Probably not. So we start with, let's start telling people about your company. We're linking to your homepage. You didn't hear us, Nick. We wanted links to the product pages. I heard you. We're not doing that. And here are the reasons why. We're building a good history. At some point we start to see the signals. and we start to see product pages and other content starting to rank better. Well, there's no reason for a page ranking on page three to really get 10 links in a day. There's more reason for a page linking on page two. There's way more reason for a page linking on page one. Brent Peterson (31:35.746) Yeah, that makes sense. Where do you say, is it always best for an end user, a merchant to seek out guidance from an expert like you? Nick Musica (31:51.198) I say yes. And here's why is because SEO is a very specific lens into your website. A lot of, a lot of my clients go, but my, but my technical team is working on my technical SEO. No, they're not. They're, they're busy doing everything that they're doing that they're going to be graded on for their annual review, for their bonus, whatever it is, right? They're there. No one said, I'm going to take it upon myself to do this thing called technical SEO. It just doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. And so what we typically find, and we wait, we make a lot of money on SEO audits. And the reason why we make a lot of money on the audits is because that's a technical lens, because the sites are always banged up to one degree or another. If you don't know what you're looking for, you can't fix it. Even if you know the laundry list of things that you're looking for, you don't have a sense of the impact one or the other can make. So we give folks the guidance around, well, there's a million of these things. That sounds like a bad problem, Nick. No, not really. No, but this one thing that's severe, take care of that thing. Well, why? Here are the reasons why. Right? So someone coming into it doesn't have that experience, doesn't have that perspective and is learning on your dime. We're trying to make you a dime. Right? So we come in and say, are the things that need fixing. Here's the order in which we would address them. Here are the reasons why. Let us know how else we can support you. Brent Peterson (33:17.484) Perfect, Nick. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. I know, go ahead, give us your plug today, whatever you'd like to plug. Nick Musica (33:26.462) This will be a surprise. My shameless plug is reach out if you're interested in SEO, if you want to see one, it a thing for me? Should I be looking at it? Part of the, our first step in the process is a discovery call. We talk to you and figure out is SEO a good idea for you? For some folks, it's a better idea than others depending on where they are with the maturation of their business. Take advantage of it. See if SEO is a thing for you. And ideally we want it to be a thing with us. Right. And if it's not, that's okay too. Right. We're there obviously to support the business, but one step at a time, figure out if it's SEO is a way you want to go. Cause here's what you don't want to do. You don't want to go marketing tactic of the day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and change your mind. You need to pick an SEO, a tactic, a marketing tactic. That is good. Stick with it. Get the results, let it mature, maintain it. Choose a new tactic, right? And that's how you can grow a business for the long term. You don't want to ragdoll your SEO strategy or anything else. So let's start with a discovery call. Brent Peterson (34:32.814) That's good. one comment too, that, you know, I had an e-commerce agency for a long time and we'd always hire SEO people like you that would help us. And the client would oftentimes run out of patience after a month. They'd say, there's nothing's happening. explain the reasoning behind some, just some patience in letting the process work out and how long should that process take? Nick Musica (35:00.158) So it's another great question, another unsatisfying answer. depends. It depends on the use case of the website. Why are we in the situation that we're in? So if you've been behaving badly as a website, bad links, poor content, we're sort of digging ourselves out a hole. We're not SEOing, we're not optimizing, we're digging ourselves out of a hole, right? If you happen to have a website that was sitting there building good history, you don't have good SEO. But you have a good history. Those are wonderful. So that timeframe is going to be shorter than the prior timeframe. The bigger your site, right? The more issues, the more time Google needs to go through all the corrections, validate that those corrections are still there, go back to its index, rescore the website, and then roll out the changes. So it simply takes time. Brent Peterson (35:37.432) Got it. Brent Peterson (35:53.294) Got it. Perfect. All right, Nick, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Nick Musica is the CEO and founder of Optic-In. Thank you so much for being here. Nick Musica (36:06.526) Thanks, Brian.