In this episode of Career Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Bradley Benner, founder of Semantic Mastery. Bradley shares his journey from being an electrician to becoming an SEO expert and entrepreneur. He discusses the evolution of SEO, the impact of AI on search and marketing, and offers insights on navigating career opportunities in local marketing. The conversation also covers the importance of choosing the right industry, building a holistic marketing agency, and the value of white label services. Listeners will gain actionable tips on validating industry viability and staying updated with trends in SEO and AI integration.
In this episode of Career Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Bradley Benner, founder of Semantic Mastery. Bradley shares his journey from being an electrician to becoming an SEO expert and entrepreneur. He discusses the evolution of SEO, the impact of AI on search and marketing, and offers insights on navigating career opportunities in local marketing. The conversation also covers the importance of choosing the right industry, building a holistic marketing agency, and the value of white label services. Listeners will gain actionable tips on validating industry viability and staying updated with trends in SEO and AI integration.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:02.175)
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I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Career Spotlight. My name is Michael Bernzweig, the founder of Software Oasis and host of Career Spotlight. This week we're joined by Bradley Benner. He's actually the founder of Symantec Mastery and he's joining us live. So with that, Bradley, welcome to the podcast.
Bradley Benner (00:27.672)
Thank you for having me, Michael. Appreciate it.
Michael Bernzweig (00:29.619)
Yeah, very excited to have you. And I can see by some of the questions that came in before the episode that tons of interest in this topic. So I will try to sprinkle some of the questions from the community into the podcast. But overall, I was really hoping you could share for anyone that may not be familiar with either yourself or Symantec Mastery, if you could share a little bit about your career journey.
Bradley Benner (00:46.382)
Okay.
Michael Bernzweig (00:57.665)
getting to where you are and a little bit about what's going on out there at Symantec Mastery.
Bradley Benner (01:02.798)
Sure, I appreciate the opportunity to come on and thank you for having me. so, yeah, so my name is Bradley Benner. I'm the founder and or co-founder and CEO, president of Semantic Mastering and which is a coaching and information product or information business, information product business about local SEO and how to create a business, run an agency, become a local SEO professional that provides marketing services and lead generation and SEO related services for
businesses that serve their local markets. So I got involved with that because I was telling Michael previously that I was an electrician and I was an electrician for almost 20 years. And the last three years that I did electrical work, I had my own contracting business and I was looking to learn how to kind of, I'm sorry, Michael, did you say something? Okay. So yeah, so I wanted to learn how to start generating leads. This was in 2009, right around the,
Michael Bernzweig (01:52.966)
no, no, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
Bradley Benner (02:00.91)
turn of 2010 is when I started looking at to generate leads for my own contracting business. And so I was asking some of the other contractors that I worked with, know, plumbers and HVAC guys and that kind of stuff that there were the more successful companies. I was asking them like, you know, how do you guys generate leads for your your businesses? And they the more successful companies at that time had a strong online presence. And this was again around 2010, right around the beginning of that year. And so I didn't know anything about I could barely turn on a computer.
At that time, like no kidding. So I, but I decided to, you know, I didn't really have the money to go hire an agency at the time to do it. So I decided to learn it on my own and like how to do search engine optimization and how to get my company to show up in the search results when somebody would search for, know, electrician, electrician in my area or plus the city name or whatever. And so I started learning how to do search engine optimization and I fell in love with the process. I became absolutely fascinated with our ability.
to manipulate Google search results. There's a lot of power in that as a skill, right? And so I started testing with my own site that I'd created. And at the time was called Google Places. Now they're called Google Business Profiles. But at the time, way back then, it was called Google Places. And so I learned how to create Google Places listings and then websites using WordPress. And I started testing for my own business. And then I asked some of the other contractors that I worked with.
Michael Bernzweig (03:16.992)
Sure.
Bradley Benner (03:28.864)
If I, hey, if I set up a website and a Google places listing for your products and services and I can get it ranked and start generating leads, would you be interested in renting the site from me or purchasing the leads from me once it's producing? And I had a number of contractors take me up on the offer and I told them, I'm not going to bill you anything until we have leads coming in and then we'll have a chat about it. And so I needed that.
Michael Bernzweig (03:53.301)
Sure.
Bradley Benner (03:55.138)
the other test sites in order to test different things as I was learning SEO. So I needed to test sites anyways, and I figured why build sites that just for testing purposes, if I can build sites that if successful, I can then monetize. so I started doing testing with other industries that I worked with, carpet cleaners, locksmiths, roofers, things like that. And sure enough, within about six to eight months, I started ranking several websites and Google business listings.
at the time Google Places. so sure, started generating from doing my electrical work. I started generating more business for myself for my electrical business. And then I started generating leads and selling or renting the sites to other contractors. And so I really did kind of both for about two years from 2010 to 2012. I had both businesses, my electrical business and my lead generation business that was built around SEO.
And, but I was telling Michael, I, and I live in Virginia. And so I was only working with local contractors that were colleagues of mine in the construction industry. And, in the winter in Virginia, it's severe enough that construction slows down significantly. And so for two winters in a row, I had my revenue, my side hustle revenue, which was my lead generation in SEO business, it was declined seriously during those, those winter months.
And so in 2012, I decided I want to try to more stabilize my income a bit, that income. So I opened up an agency so that then I could go pitch my services to other local businesses under traditional retainer based model. And so I ended up creating my company and starting a marketing agency. It was called Big Bamboo Marketing. And then I...
For one additional year from 2012 to 2013, I continued to do both my electrical business and marketing while I was building my client base for my agency. And then in 2013, I had enough client revenue coming in from client, know, retainer revenue, essentially from clients that I closed during that first year that I was and I still had my lead generation business. So I had enough revenue coming in from those that I was able to then quit doing electrical work and go full time into marketing.
Bradley Benner (06:10.25)
And one year later, so this is getting to how semantic mastery came to be. One year later in 2014, excuse me, I had gotten connected in a mastermind group, like in a forum and a discussion group and with other SEO and marketing, know, people that were aspiring to build their marketing and related businesses, et cetera. And I had started a weekly accountability meeting with just members that wanted to show up and attend. And that was between
2013 and 2014, I had this weekly accountability meeting, which was just other like-minded individuals we would meet and just discuss what's working, what's not working, what successes we had, what challenges we had. And we ended up creating quite a following from this mastermind forum community that we were all paid members of. were paying $200 a month to be in this community, but we were getting more value from this weekly group that I had set up.
which was just at the time was was hosted on what was called Google Hangouts. Now it's YouTube Live.
Michael Bernzweig (07:08.37)
Yeah. And there wasn't a lot of community or anything like that back then. So it sounds like you really followed, know, and, and,
Bradley Benner (07:12.066)
No
Bradley Benner (07:18.274)
Yeah, and so, you know, that's what happened was I got connected with there was what happened with that kind of Google Hangout, which was the weekly accountability meeting is it ended up being that there was about five of us that would participate and contribute on a regular basis. And then we'd have a lot of other people attend, but we're just like wallflowers. They were just there to listen and consume. And it ended up being about five of us that were consistently contributing and had things to share every week. And so I after about a year of that, I said, why are we paying this
Group two hundred dollars a month and we're doing all this for free when we're generating a larger following. You know what mean so I said let's monetize this so I ended up starting semantic mastery LLC which is with with four other partners. And those other five so it was the five of us we started by approaching so let's let's let's monetize this is create a business out of this and so we get me caught a semantic mastery because we knew that.
Michael Bernzweig (07:55.295)
Yeah.
Bradley Benner (08:12.312)
This was back in 2014. We knew that Google was adopting semantic web technologies and that the algorithm was changing. And so we named ourselves Semantic Mastery in preparation for what we assumed was coming. It took a lot longer than I expected because it was really around 2020 to that timeframe that the algorithm really did shift away from a keyword based algorithm to what's now an entity based algorithm, which is the semantic web essentially. But we launched it in 2014, Semantic Mastery, and we came out with our first information product.
which was called IFTTT SEO, later became rebranded as syndication academy. But basically that was just some SOPs that I had some standard operating procedures that I had created internally for my own agency and my own to be able to train virtual assistants and employees essentially on how to build things that could help local businesses improve their search engine optimization or their search performance.
Michael Bernzweig (09:03.626)
Yeah. And it's interesting what you just said there, because when you said for what we assumed was coming from Google, because Google has always been this black box, very secretive, you know, space where, you know, while they'll, they'll share a lot of the algorithm, not, not everything and, and not, as much as what was just leaked a few months back, but, but at the end of the day,
Bradley Benner (09:11.822)
Mm-hmm.
Bradley Benner (09:29.816)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (09:33.405)
I think the journey in SEO is almost like being a inspector Clouseau, you know, trying to test a lot of theories and it can be very addictive as you mentioned earlier when we spoke before the episode. You know, there's a lot of detail to learn and there's a lot of money to be made by individuals that have mastered a lot of these techniques. And I think
Bradley Benner (09:45.368)
Yes, it is. Yep.
Michael Bernzweig (10:03.072)
That's a, I mean, look at Google, you know, at the end of the day, you know, they need to provide as much search as they need to so that they're functional as a search engine, but you know, the bottom line there, their business is selling advertising. So, you know, that's what pays the bills and being able to decode what's going on and expose a lot of that is interesting.
Bradley Benner (10:24.31)
Yeah. Well, what's interesting though, Michael, is the different like, you know, now SEO, like the title SEO or search engine optimization, you know, professional, whatever, is a lot more than just search engine optimization. Now it's that is a blanket term that we use to identify like, you know, what industry we're in. But SEO is not just about search engine optimization anymore, especially with the onset of large language models. Like because now, you know, Google is losing market share.
to people, especially the younger generation that are going straight to the chat apps like chat GPT, perplexity, et cetera, and querying them for like giving who's the best tree contractor in whatever their city is, you know, and so we can no longer as marketing professionals, I call myself a local marketing professional because I serve businesses that serve their local markets. And, you know, I think the kind of onset of large language model search being used
Michael Bernzweig (10:55.552)
completely out of the AI.
Michael Bernzweig (11:05.312)
Yeah.
Bradley Benner (11:22.082)
more than Google search is it's affecting traditional like organic and informational type queries more than it does local search queries. It's slower to affect local search than it is general search in my opinion, but we still see a decline where Google is losing market share. And so we have to evolve and find other ways to help our business clients, our local business clients still achieve
Michael Bernzweig (11:37.022)
Interesting. Yeah.
Bradley Benner (11:49.727)
results and get the traffic and leads that they need, the exposure that they need.
Michael Bernzweig (11:52.629)
Yeah. And I think when you look at it at a macro level, at the end of the day, Google, while they may be or may have been dominant in search with a large portion of the share, traditional search, Google, Bing, Yahoo, all of that is declining annually. And on the flip side of it, everyone that's listening to this podcast in some way or another,
AI touches touches your day in and day out life and more and more people every day, every year, every month are starting their searches and their research with AI, Google, Grop, Gemini. And the challenge for Google at the end of the day is they don't dominate AI. And, you know, so they're really scrambling to try to figure out, you know,
how do we dominate the space that we're not the market leader in? Clearly, it's a very fragmented market. No one in AI search at this point, even perplexity, no one has figured out or is even focused on advertising. At the end of the day, all of these AI search engines search
whatever you want to call them, are focused on market share, because it's very early on. So it's a very strange place for Google. think the best that they've been able to figure out how to do is to include some of the AI in their AI overviews and search generated results and all of that. for someone that's listening to this podcast that may be in another space, another industry, and they're like, you know what?
Bradley Benner (13:17.196)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (13:42.825)
I'm not happy with what I'm doing. I need to make a switch in my career. I need to wake up every day and enjoy what I'm doing. What are some of the different possible roles in this industry that they could look into and consider?
Bradley Benner (13:56.686)
Great question.
Bradley Benner (14:01.262)
Well, OK, so, you know, in my experience now, 15 years now that I've been running marketing related agencies and I've got four SEO related businesses, one is that my own local SEO agency, which is I serve tree service contractors. And so this is how I'm going to answer your question is how I would I recommend applying a applying whatever knowledge you want to learn in the local marketing space into one particular industry. And we'll get to that in just a moment. But then I have two white label agencies where I provide
marketing fulfillment services, SEO related fulfillment services for other local marketing agencies. So essentially I provide wholesale services that they then sell retail. And then I also have my educational and consulting business, which is Semantic Mastery. That's what we're talking really about today. But specifically, if somebody wanted to get into this industry as a local marketing professional, there's a number of genres or subcategories that you could get plugged into search engine optimization.
PPC or paid advertising, paid media, et cetera, PR, so public relations, social media. There's now AI and AI implementation. And that's something that I think that is going to be kind of more the future. Like search engine optimization is still important, but we have to learn how to optimize for AI answer engines and for large language models as well. And that's where, like you just mentioned a moment ago, seeing the AI summary show up in the top of Google search now.
Michael Bernzweig (15:04.534)
Yeah.
Bradley Benner (15:26.722)
and the search generative experience and all that kind of stuff. Those are all AI generated summaries. And so we need to know how to kind of not only manipulate Google, in search engines in general, but also large language models to hopefully have the large language models return data that is favorable or return answers that is favorable to the clients that are our clients. Like so that when somebody is searching for like, you know, the top tree service company in
whatever city we hope that our clients site will appear not only in Google search but also in large language models as being one of the recommended companies and so but then in addition to just really kind of helping companies get found via Google and search large language models chats etc. there's also the implementation of AI into the businesses right like that is a huge market that is going to explode very very quickly that's going to be I mean it's already exploding but that is going to become a very highly lucrative market if you know how to implement.
doesn't mean you have to be somebody that develops AI, custom AI apps and everything, but how do you integrate existing AI solutions into a business so that it helps them to become more efficient, do things faster, cheaper, better, all of that kind of stuff. And so I think right now, you like, if somebody was considering getting into the local marketing space, I would highly recommend identifying a particular industry.
that you want to work with going through a process to validate that it is a viable industry. know, one that has like, here's an example.
Michael Bernzweig (16:58.336)
really mitching down to something that you understand inside and out or have an interest in.
Bradley Benner (17:02.542)
Correct. Or something that you have an industry that you have a desire to work with within. think also that's an important component in my opinion. My own local SEO agency, I work with tree service contractors, so tree care companies. That's what I work with. I don't have any passion for the tree service industry. Don't get me wrong. It's very lucrative. I enjoy working with those guys and everything else.
Michael Bernzweig (17:27.222)
Yeah.
Bradley Benner (17:31.01)
I didn't get into that industry because I had a desire to. It kind of fell under my lap. And it just ended up being very lucrative working with tree contractors. So that's why my agency was really focused in around working with tree contractors. But looking back, in retrospect, would have, and I tell this to my students all the time, identify industries that you have a genuine interest in. then if that becomes, if it's a viable industry for
local marketing services, which most of them are. I'll describe very quickly how you can tell a very quick way as to which industries like just basic niche selection or industry selection research. But I always say if you pick an industry that you have somewhat of it like a genuine desire or curiosity about, then it makes it feel less like work as you're working in that industry. And so, you know, that's something that I always keep telling people, keep in mind when you're selecting an industry to work in.
Michael Bernzweig (18:14.998)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (18:19.83)
I'll let you get to that in a second not to break up your thought, but for someone that's listening to this podcast that may be in a completely different field, maybe somebody's a nurse and they want to make a transition to this industry. Maybe even focusing on providing a solution to individuals in their former career might be a space, but yeah, I'll let you continue with that thought as to how they figure out if it's a viable.
Bradley Benner (18:22.583)
No, no worries.
Bradley Benner (18:41.762)
Maybe,
Michael Bernzweig (18:49.078)
viable space.
Bradley Benner (18:49.794)
Yeah, well you make a really good point to if somebody already has experience in a particular industry then that will shortcut your learning curve and being able to provide and produce results for that industry because you have less learning to do. And so that's and that goes back to why I was saying it's important to select a particular industry because in order to be truly effective as a marketer you can't like it you know I've heard SEO's other that don't agree with me about this that say well if you know how to rank stuff you can rank stuff for anybody yeah that's true.
That's true if you understand search engine optimization, can rank things for anybody. But how effective is whatever it is that you rank in producing the desired result for the client? So if you understand marketing and you understand their business and their industry and their consumers needs and their consumers desires and also what is the business owners problems? What are their challenges? If you understand all of that about a particular industry, you can certainly be a lot more effective, right? Because not only can you get things to show up better when people are looking for it.
those specific products or services, then the, the, the, whatever you get to show up is much more likely to convert because you, you understand that the business and what is compelling and you understand how to do copy, you know, write copy that is compelling and all of that. And besides just what, you know, just the marketing side of things, what I've discovered is that businesses don't really need it in the industry that I work in with tree contractors. It's very small organizations or operations. Most of them are, you know,
one crew operations. the owner is usually the lead arborist or the person actually, they're working contractors. In other words, a lot of the times the owners are actually out in the field climbing trees or managing crews and things like that. So they're working, they're actually out in the field. They don't have offices and reception staff. Most of the companies that I work with don't. And so they don't need separate, a marketing agency and a content agency and
Michael Bernzweig (20:34.634)
Right.
Bradley Benner (20:41.922)
you know, another agency that helps them do manage leads and appointment booking services and all that, like, because that becomes too cumbersome for the small business that serves the local market to manage. And so what I found is being more of a holistic solution for that industry to not just focus on marketing, but also help them to optimize their business and build systems and processes into their business to add efficiency and better lead management, better followups, you know,
doing things like database or list reactivation or customer comeback campaigns, things like that, that a lot of these local businesses don't do because they've never been shown how to do it or it's too cumbersome or too hard for them to connect all those moving pieces. So if we come in as a niche specific boutique type of an agency where we can help them set up systems, marketing and lead generation is on the front end.
But what happens once we generate that lead for the client? How do they manage that lead? And can we help them to improve that process so that they will close more of those leads and convert them into sales versus just leads? And so that's where I found that if you understand an industry, it's not just about learning the kind of technical aspects of marketing and search engine optimization and now large language model optimization and all that kind of stuff, but it's also how can you be effective in the industry that you've selected?
And because then instead of, if you are just a marketer or lead generation, you're a commodity that can be replaced by somebody else that pitches the same services for less money. But when you become a, when you understand that the business, the industry that you're working in as much, if not better than the business owners themselves of that industry or in that industry, then you become a valuable, trusted business advisor. And it's a hell of a lot harder to get rid of you or to replace you.
Michael Bernzweig (22:09.065)
Right.
Bradley Benner (22:29.696)
And so I always recommend selecting a particular industry. And one of the ways you can just go to Google Trends, trends.google.com, and you can look at various top level service category type terms and see over just set the time frame to five years and look at the interest. I always recommend either selecting an industry that has steady demand, like home service industries, home contracting and home service industries are always, they're evergreen.
So always look at five year history for top level search terms in whatever industry I'm considering. And you can see, it steady demand, increasing demand or declining demand? If it's declining, don't go into it. If it's steady demand or increasing in demand historically over time, then that's an industry that you should consider pursuing. And so again, like I said, becoming kind of a trusted business advisor and that has really helped and focusing my agency specifically to only target and attract tree contractors.
It has really helped my agency to be able to scale because instead of having to reinvent the wheel for new each new business that's in different industries that would be coming into my agency and I'd have to do all the research to understand the keywords and the pain points and what's compelling and all that other kind of stuff. I've already figured all that out with tree contractors because I've been working in that industry now for over five years exclusively. And so.
I know it works. so whenever I land a new client, I've already have all the deliverables ready to go. All we do is swap out logos, location information, et cetera, and deploy the assets that we already have proven are effective and get results. And so we're able to scale and reduce our workload considerably when you have kind of developed a system and processes in a particular industry.
Michael Bernzweig (24:09.206)
Makes a lot of sense. And obviously for someone that's looking to make that transition, it makes the transition easier. And obviously they're providing value to their clients, which is the right way to go. And obviously it's going to keep clients aboard for the longterm. So when someone's getting started, would you recommend that they apprentice under someone else or what's the right way to get started? Like, how do you, how do you.
Bradley Benner (24:36.536)
Great question.
Michael Bernzweig (24:36.928)
the right framework to be able to land on your feet and find success versus kind of wandering around in the desert for a few weeks trying to reinvent the wheel.
Bradley Benner (24:48.846)
Well, that's a great question and I really appreciate it actually because in our industry as a coach and with our company Semantic Mastery where we teach aspiring marketing professionals that want to create a business around local marketing, what we find is that most people come into this industry thinking that they want, as long as they learn how to...
do search engine optimization, et cetera, that they're gonna be fine. They're gonna be able to monetize that skill very easily. And that is not the case. It's very difficult to operate a business around, like build an entire business around search engine optimization and local marketing, et cetera, because you have to learn so much about the various aspects of running the business and monetizing the service and doing marketing and sales to then generate revenue, sell that service. And how do you manage clients? And all of that kind of stuff is not,
Michael Bernzweig (25:29.686)
Sure.
Bradley Benner (25:41.336)
You don't learn that in the technical learning how to rank stuff side of SEO. SEO is SEO, but operating a business around that skill is very, very different. so I typically recommend, because here's the thing, most people come into this industry and they think that if they just learn SEO, they'll be fine. So they focus their initial energy and attention on learning how to rank things, how to get results in Google search. So they spend weeks, months and
hundreds or thousands of dollars on education and testing and training and programs and masterminds and all this other kind of stuff before they're ever out there monetizing any skill because they haven't developed a skill yet. And what I recommend instead is anybody that's interested in getting into this business is find a trusted white label provider that you can outsource. a third party fulfillment provider that you can outsource that has got historic, you know, historically has results, has, you know, case studies, has good
good reviews, et cetera, that have fulfillment services that you can sell and learn an industry, like I just mentioned, select an industry and learn everything you can about that industry and learn how to market and sell SEO related or marketing related services to that industry first and use a white label provider to do the fulfillment. And don't learn the whole technical side of SEO until you have developed some revenue and learned how to sell it because.
The problem is I know a lot of SEOs that learn SEO, but they have no, they're terrible at selling and they have no desire to go out and learn sales because they want to just stay behind the computer, which is why they started with SEO to begin with. If that makes sense. I always recommend that's backwards. Learn how to do marketing and selling of them SEO services or market, you know, marketing related services to whatever industry you've selected, finding out a third party fulfillment provider that you can trust to.
Fulfill the services that you're selling with just a markup. So there's a profit margin there so that you can start to develop monthly recurring revenue. Get your cash flow needs met first to operate, to support your business and your monthly income goals, your personal revenue goals. And once that is met, then you can start to bring operations in house, fulfillment operations in house, if you'd like, and learn all of the SEO. But why not build the business around marketing and sales, which is the lifeblood of any business, right?
Michael Bernzweig (28:00.567)
That makes a lot of sense. mean, at the end of the day, you know, your clients really just care that the deliverable meets their needs. They're, you know, how it gets done is kind of insignificant. So really that makes a lot of sense. Build the business first and then figure out if you're going to provide the solution or outsource it or white label it or what have you. So are there...
Bradley Benner (28:10.798)
That's right.
Bradley Benner (28:18.51)
That's right.
Michael Bernzweig (28:28.944)
Options to do something like that. It's something very unique that I've never
Bradley Benner (28:34.476)
Well, yeah, and that's part of the reason why I have white label services, because honestly, I never I used white label services in my own agency for many years. And so I had my agency, Lo Treecare HQ, which is my local marketing agency works with tree contractors. And then I had semantic mastery. And that was it. Those were my two businesses. And it wasn't until twenty twenty two that I started white label agencies. And that's because for years as a coach at semantic mastery and an information product developer,
Michael Bernzweig (28:51.936)
Mm-hmm.
Bradley Benner (29:04.297)
We would get people that would buy our products, our information products, or we'd go through our training courses, et cetera. And then they would reach out and say, man, this is awesome, but it's a lot of work. Can you do it for us? And for years I heard that. And for years I kept saying, no, we don't do it. You've got the training. It's an SOP format. Build your own team. after I kept like, it's like people wanting to give you money. If they keep telling you they want to give you money and you keep turning it down, eventually you say, OK, fine. So that's what I did. started, I said, look, fine. If there's enough interest.
for so long from our students or members that were asking, can you do it for me? I decided to kind of build my own white label services so that I could offer that. And so, yes, there are white label services. We provide white label services for the trainings and the methods that we use and like that we teach essentially. So everything that I teach to our audience are things that I've developed for my own local SEO agency. So the real world tested and proven services that work.
And then I teach them in semantic mastery to our students, our members. And then I have white label services for those that want us to do those fulfillment services for them. And so that's part of the, you part of what my funnel is for semantic mastery is we get people into our training. And a lot of the times they go through the training and they end up coming to the white label services and say, and they end up bringing as they're building their agency and their client base, they bring their clients to us to do the fulfillment services. So.
It's kind of where I'm double dipping, so to speak, because not only do I get them on the coaching side, right? They come in a lot of the times on the coaching side, but then I end up getting a lot of their client work as as white label service work. And sometimes it's vice versa. Sometimes I'll get white label clients because I also do marketing prospecting for landing agency clients. So I do stuff outside of just our coaching community. have, you know, we do cold email. We have appointment setting companies that are doing cold calls and all that stuff to generate leads for my white label agencies, which are
marketing professionals and other marketing agencies are who we contact. But sometimes they'll come into the white label services and then come over to the coaching as well, like to also purchase a training so that their team can be trained up better and that kind of stuff. And so, like I said, I think, you know, the best way to go about it is to answer your question is to get plugged in with a group, a mastermind community, something that is updated regularly, buying a training course, especially in the SEO industry and now
Michael Bernzweig (31:15.19)
Thank
Bradley Benner (31:28.738)
just any kind of digital marketing, if you buy a one-off training course, it typically is outdated very, very quickly. That's right. So join an active community, like a mastermind or whatever, where there's weekly training and stuff that's constantly in discussion groups so that it's current. And then what I recommend is that you, again, pick an industry, validate it, verify that it's a valid industry, then learn how to start
Michael Bernzweig (31:34.218)
I was going to say it's outdated as soon as it's printed, right? It's unfortunate.
Bradley Benner (31:58.504)
marketing and selling to that industry, marketing services that you have access to from some white, whether it's me or anybody else, I don't care. Just find trusted third party fulfillment providers that you can refer or not refer work to, but have fulfilled the work that you sell to your clients and build your business that way. Because that way you validate that it's a that you can be successful in there. You can generate revenue and you can start making money to get your
monetary goals met, your cashflow needs met before you add the complexity into your business of building a fulfillment and an operations team. You can run an arbitrage type of a business very lean with you and a virtual assistant or two. You could run quite an operation, market local marketing agency using white label fulfillment providers and not have the complexity of managing a large team.
Michael Bernzweig (32:35.659)
So.
Michael Bernzweig (32:52.714)
So two questions come to mind and I always like to leave listeners with a couple of actionable tips. So in terms of, mentioned validating an idea. So do you have a few bullet points as to how you recommend individuals validate an industry is a viable industry to provide services in two?
Bradley Benner (33:15.81)
Yeah, so there's like I mentioned a moment ago, look at Google Trends, go to trends.google.com, go to Google business or excuse me, Google Maps and do some searches for products or services that the industries that you're considering would provide. And then look at the Google business categories that are showing and then use that as the search term over Google Trends. So you go to Google Trends and you take the category. So like HVAC contractor, plumber, tree service, can look at optometrist, right?
dentists, orthopedic surgeons. These are all Google business categories, but those are top level service categories. And what you do is go to Google Trends, look, set the time frame to five years, select the country, whatever country it is, United States, whatever. And then you look at the trend line. You're either going to see the interest going up, staying steady, or going down. And you always want to pick an industry that's either steady or going up.
So it's either steady in demand or increasing in demand historically over the last five years. Nothing is going down. it's declining, that means you're going to run out of clients prospects soon enough. total addressable market is shrinking. So you don't want to target that type of market. So that's step one. Once you've identified some potential industries, then go look at, do some searches. Look and see what are they, are there advertisers? That's one of the best things. Just look at Google search. Look at the top advertisers that are at the top of the search results.
Michael Bernzweig (34:17.398)
yeah.
Bradley Benner (34:36.942)
for the search queries for products or services. Yeah, exactly. Because that's the biggest thing. SEO is a, you still have to pay for SEO, right? Because you've got to pay a professional to do SEO work for you. So it's not free. People say it's free traffic. No, it's not. You pay for SEO too. But you don't pay per click like you do with PPC. if you can find advertisers that are local business companies that are
Michael Bernzweig (34:38.272)
to your pain to those results.
Michael Bernzweig (34:56.661)
Right.
Bradley Benner (35:02.446)
spending money to generate leads from Google search. You're going to see them in the advertising section, the ad section above at the very top of the page. And now with local service ads for like service professionals, you'll see what they call local service ads, which are like guaranteed Google ads or whatever. Anyway, the point is you're going to see these advertisers. So identify where the, you know, those industries that are advertising, that means they're spending money to generate leads from Google, which means it's a very good.
indication that they will also be willing to spend money on search engine optimization. And so you can identify through Google Trends the trend lines. You can also identify areas within the country that you've selected that has the highest search interest for those, for those, whatever those categories are that you're looking at. And then you can go search in those areas to look at the top advertisers and get an idea. If you have access to Google Ads, the keyword, you can look at the keyword planner.
Michael Bernzweig (35:34.505)
I love it.
Bradley Benner (35:56.982)
and get some ideas on the CPC or cost per click values that advertisers so local businesses are willing to pay for a click. A click does not mean they're generating a lead. A click means they're just getting a click to their website. And so in the tree service industry, like in the Northern Virginia region right outside Washington, DC, which is where I got started, a tree service or tree service near me, tree removal, tree removal, Fairfax, Virginia, something like that. Any one of those types of keywords can generate.
a 50 to $60 click. That's how much it costs for one click. And an average conversion value, cost per conversion for tree service contractors, a pretty good conversion rate is about 30%, 30 to 35%. So imagine that's three clicks to get one lead. And if you're paying $50 per click, that's $150 that that advertiser, that contractor. That's right. That's right.
Michael Bernzweig (36:39.424)
Thank you.
Michael Bernzweig (36:46.666)
You better have a good closer on the other end of that phone before that lead into an opportunity.
Bradley Benner (36:51.318)
So you can see there's money being spent by local businesses to generate interest from and leads from Google search. So that's how you identify if it's a good company or not. And then just look to see, there, you can also, once you've identified an industry that you're considering, you can also do searches in Google search for, you know, that specific industry marketing agencies. So like tree service marketing agencies, right? Or podiatrist.
marketing agencies and just get a feel out there for is there other niche or industry specific agencies doesn't mean if there are that you can't enter that market that's a good sign by the way if there are niche specific agencies in a particular industry that only cater that out of industry that means that it's a very good sign because it indicates that there's enough business that they are able to run support their entire agency from one industry and I found a lot of members or students of ours that come into semantic mastery say well
I'm afraid that if I narrow my agency down to one industry that I'm going to narrow my total addressable market. that's in my experience, I have found that you end up actually being able to grow your agency a lot faster if you're in a particular industry because you dial everything in, your messaging, your marketing, your sales presentation. Everything is really dialed in to speak to that one specific business owner type.
and you end up being a lot more successful, you can charge higher prices, you typically get results for them faster because all of your deliverables have been down and tested, et cetera. And so I really think it's the exact opposite of what most people are afraid of. If I narrow down to one market, I'm gonna reduce the number of businesses that I can work with when in all reality, you can scale by geography, if that makes sense.
Michael Bernzweig (38:26.282)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (38:34.516)
Yeah, and I guess at the end of the day, as long as the total addressable market is large enough, then you're never going to run out of opportunity.
Bradley Benner (38:43.15)
Right. Like in the tree service industry, Michael, just so you know, and I haven't even looked at these stats in like four years now, but there's over 30,000 tree service companies in the United States alone. Think about that. So.
Michael Bernzweig (38:53.046)
That's crazy. So I'll end on this note, but something that I think a lot of listeners are probably wondering, you mentioned white labeling the service to get started. If you were to give a short bulleted list of what to look for in a white label provider to avoid issues, what would you run by people that should be on their short list of what to look out for?
Bradley Benner (39:23.286)
That they have some sort of history of being successful in their market, their arena, so to speak. Look to see if they have case studies, look to see if they have testimonials, anything that they can share. You just need to make sure that they're aware of what they're doing because as a white label provider myself, my clients for my white label services are other marketing professionals and agencies.
And all the time, so I'm all the time reviewing the work of other local SEO and local marketing agencies. And what I see is there's a lot of really terrible, awful work being done out there. And all of those agencies are out there pitching their services as they're the best, as we're the best, we're going to get you the best results. And then they bring them to me to fill, fulfill services. And I see the campaigns, their projects are not the best and their websites aren't done properly. And yet, and so I just say, you know, it's important to, if you're going to be
Michael Bernzweig (40:12.896)
Yeah.
Bradley Benner (40:20.062)
using white label services, you want to try to identify those that have a good history and have been around for a while too, because white label agencies come and go and that's because they don't get results. So you want companies that have some history to them.
Michael Bernzweig (40:36.84)
And is it important if you've niched down in who you provide the services to, to find an agency that's niched down in that same way, or is it not so important?
Bradley Benner (40:49.642)
Not so important for white label service for fulfillment services because you know on the fulfillment side of things like we you know. That's right that's right I mean like because you link like for example I have a white label link buildings company called semantic links and semantic links we build links for pretty much any sort of local business because link building is link building if you understand how to build links properly and how to analyze what links should be built and all of that then you can do that for any industry and.
Michael Bernzweig (40:55.294)
Mechanics are the same, right?
Bradley Benner (41:15.788)
We are selling wholesale SEO services, so we don't have to be subject matter experts on each of those industries. But the retail agency that is selling those services retail should be, in my opinion. They should be industry experts.
Michael Bernzweig (41:27.102)
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Really, really good insight there. So, and I'll finish on this note is, you you're seeing a lot of change from where you where you sit in the industry between, you know, all of the transitions and traditional search, AI, everything else that's going on. What excites you about what's coming over the next few years? What areas have you got your eye on?
Bradley Benner (41:52.846)
Well, right now I'm doing a lot of testing with how to get the large language models to return my clients when queries that would be relevant for them to be possibly returned in the results or the answers that the AI search engines and chats can provide. So again, it's kind of a combination of SEO and AI optimization, right? And so that I think is exciting.
Michael Bernzweig (42:10.283)
Sure.
Bradley Benner (42:20.888)
kind of people are engaging and interacting with large language models and AI and kind of moving away from search or how is search going to evolve? All of that is very interesting to me and it's hard to predict where it's gonna go. And so I think it's important to still stay up to date with Google search engine optimization and search engine optimization in general, but Google's still the big kid on the block. But then also trying to...
figure out ways to, and what I found in local SEO is the most important thing is brand authority. you can, so PR, so public relations and things like that, that's going to help give the local business a much greater chance to be referenced in search chat, right? So chat search, excuse me, or large language model search, AI search, whatever, because they are looking at like trusted platforms out there and publications to determine what are the best kind of recommendations to make.
There's some one of my colleagues named Peter Drew. He's been doing a lot of training on this and that's who I've been studying under for this type of manipulation, large language model manipulation, but he calls it. There's no discernment. AI has no discernment. So if it sees enough content on the web or just enough content on the web that says something like this, Apple is blue. The AI can return. Somebody says what color is an Apple? An Apple is blue, right? There's no discernment in the AI. So that's one of the things that we're learning how to kind of do.
Michael Bernzweig (43:22.784)
Shit.
Bradley Benner (43:42.998)
And that may change because like I said, it's such an evolving kind of technology right now. But I think the biggest thing to answer your question is to still stay up to date on what's effective in local search and local marketing, which includes advertising as well, not just search engine optimization, but also advertising and then also incorporating AI, not just the search aspect of it, but also how can you help to implement AI into the business industries that you've selected?
because I think that's where the real value is going to be coming from, if that makes sense.
Michael Bernzweig (44:14.208)
Yeah, no, I love it. anyways, I really appreciate the deep dive. I think that was a lot of valuable insight for anybody that's considering a career in this area and making a transition or anything like that. anyways, this week, joining us from Symantec Mastery, we've had Bradley Benner, and I appreciate your time today.
Bradley Benner (44:38.218)
Thank you so much for having me on.
Michael Bernzweig (44:39.606)
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