If you’re a small business owner, I’d be willing to bet you get multiple emails a week trying to sell you on SEO for your business.

While these cold emails are pesky and inbox-crowding (why do they never go to spam??), you may still wonder if SEO could be a good investment for your business. I know I did.

Back in the day when I was a young buck, naive and ready to try anything to grow my small business, I became convinced that SEO was the best way for me to invest revenue back into the company. Listen up, and I’ll tell you my painful story so that you can avoid making the same mistakes I did.

The Mystical, Ever-Changing Google Algorithm

The bane of every SEO agency seems to be the fact that Google constantly revises its search engine algorithms. Every time this happens, all progress made on your site ranking vanishes into thin air, and the SEO team has to scramble to gain back those hard-won results over the course of the next several months. Of course, by the time they do this, Google changes the algorithms again. You get the picture.

The team has to explain this issue to you in the most face-saving manner possible, so SEO guys have perfected the art of scapegoating Google instead of admitting that there is a problem with their entire marketing strategy.

Here’s one of the many explanations I received from my SEO team to explain why they weren’t performing:

“We have site promotion rolling again and things were going well, but Google just rolled an update and we’re down for most terms.”

There was always a positive spin to these updates, always a promise that soon we’d be back to seeing results, but dang it if those Google algorithm updates weren’t always screwing up the SEO team’s otherwise perfect plan.

Here’s a quote from a different monthly report:

“Because of extreme ​fluctuations within Google over the past few months, traffic has dropped off. It is likely they are implementing a significant algorithm update. After this period of turbulence, traffic will again pick back up.”

Wasn’t it obvious to me at the time that I was wasting my money? These SEO engagements weren’t cheap, and my small business was burning cash. I was seeing zero return on investment, but for some reason I kept believing the lie that I had to wait it out — that once my site started ranking better in Google, the leads would come pouring in and the SEO campaign would easily start paying for itself.

Unfortunately, the leads never came.

Leads (I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Leads)

Even when things were supposedly going awesome! according to the SEO team, I wasn’t getting leads. OK, admittedly I did get occasional calls with low-quality leads that wasted my time, but those are about as useful to a business owner as a floppy disk to a Gen Zer.

Tellingly, reports from my SEO teams always focused on how my site was ranking for important keywords. They would send detailed spreadsheets of how my site ranked for each search term, and what improvements (or often, losses) we had seen over a certain time period.

Why should I give a crap how well I’m doing on keywords? Shouldn’t I measure the success of a campaign by how many quality leads I’m getting, and how many conversions I’m making on those leads?

It’s not surprising that the SEO team never asked whether I was getting quality leads or conversions. It wasn’t in their interest to ask a question they already knew the answer to, even though these were ultimately the most important metrics we should have been evaluating.

Content? What Content?

When I finally came to my senses and fired my SEO agency, I was left with nothing in hand. Not a single piece of usable creative content or collateral that I could use to promote my business.

In fact, in a final email I received from the team after not receiving even one conversion in ten months, they included this advice:

“Your site lacks new creative and fresh content. Start making some short videos, promo videos, etc.”

This might be the biggest misperception I had about SEO — that you can simply hire a team to do some behind-the-scenes magic and get your site ranking high enough to generate page visits and leads. The truth is, without fresh, quality content, there’s only so far you can go with optimizing a site, creating backlinks, and writing copy that contains industry keywords.

Show Me the Data!

In addition to ending my SEO engagement with no creative content to my name, I walked away without any usable data. The only data I did have came in the form of useless Excel reports with keyword rankings (and fancy graphs to show how Google algorithm volatility was affecting performance).

I wish I could have walked away with real data to help me target new and existing customers with a fresh, new marketing approach, but instead, I had to start from scratch.

A Happy Ending [Spoiler Alert]

Why didn’t I see the obvious — that I was wasting my money on a marketing strategy that was going nowhere? I spent many cold nights with a glass of bourbon, staring into a fire and asking myself the same question (not really, but figuratively I did).

But don’t feel too sorry for me. I survived, and I was able to take the education with me. All of my bad experiences implementing the wrong marketing approaches, like SEO, helped me see clearly why video advertising was far and away the most effective marketing strategy.

Let’s recap the pain points I experienced with SEO, and I’ll show you why video advertising kicks SEO’s butt:

#1 With digital video advertising, there are no Google algorithms to contend with, no mysterious black magic forces working against you in the background.

Video advertising is all about creating strategic video content to engage with your current and potential customers today. We can get started with your existing channels, and manage a digital ad campaign to boost performance and expand your reach. And when it comes to measuring results, you’ll have access to performance metrics so you can evaluate return on investment.

#2 Video advertising is all about capturing the attention of customers in order to generate quality leads that will convert.

Using strategic planning and the powerful digital advertising tools at our disposal, we specifically target customers who are most likely to be interested in your product or service, which means a higher conversion rate and higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

#3 The beauty of video advertising is that you get creative content in hand right now, and no matter what you choose to do in the future, that content is yours.

And let’s be clear — we ain’t talking generic, outsourced videos. With our strategic muscle behind video production, we’ll collaborate with you to produce creative video content that gets the job done and fits within a larger video advertising plan.

#4 Unlike other marketing strategies, digital video advertising gives you valuable data about your current and potential customers — and that data is yours to keep no matter how long you choose to work with us.

We’d love to connect to learn about the pain points your business is facing, and discuss how video advertising can help grow your business.