Podcast: Download (Duration: 52:28 — 49.0MB)
Get Notified Of Future Episodes Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Blubrry | TuneIn | Deezer | Anghami | RSS | More
A lot of businesses are still buying SEO the old way. They get a long audit, a longer task list, and a monthly retainer that never seems to end. Rankings might move. Reports look busy. Yet when the owner asks, “Where is the money?”, the answer is vague.
James invites SEO Leverage’s Gert Mellak to talk about a different model. Not SEO for activity. SEO for revenue. Start with the leak. Fix the one thing that is costing the site real money. Then move on.
Table of contents:
1. Why traditional SEO audits stall
2. The hard part is deleting content
3. From retainers to revenue sprints
4. How a calculator changes the conversation
5. Why focus beats volume now
6. What this means for business owners
Why traditional SEO audits stall
For years the standard play was simple. Crawl the whole site. Compare to competitors. Deliver a 30, 80 or even 120 page report. Then ask the client to start working through it.
The problem is obvious. Not every task inside that audit has a commercial upside. Updating 8,000 meta descriptions is not the same as recovering a money page that is stuck on page two. Clients pay in time and attention. Agencies keep coming back for approvals, content edits, internal links, redirects. The cost sits with the client, not the agency.
Gert saw this pattern and cut it. Instead of doing everything that is technically possible, his team started asking a better question. What is the next SEO action that is most likely to produce revenue for this site? That is a very different lens.
The hard part is deleting content
James gave a perfect real world example. His site had thousands of pages. Many of them got no impressions. Google was still asked to index them. They existed because someone once thought they were a good idea.
The data said otherwise.
So the recommendation was simple. Delete what does not get seen. Keep what works. Publish only what has a purpose. It sounds easy, but it hits the sunk cost nerve. People remember how long an article took, who was interviewed, how proud the team was.
Search engines do not care about effort. They care about value. If a page does not attract visits, rankings or conversions, it is clutter. Removing it makes the rest of the site clearer. It also forces the business to ask the question, What is the point of this piece of content? If the answer is not “to help people buy” or “to move them to the most wanted action,” it should not go live in the first place.
From retainers to revenue sprints
The most useful shift was the delivery model. Instead of a forever retainer, Gert moved to 30-day sprints. One sprint, one goal, one clear set of approvals from the client. Then everyone goes back to their normal work.
That model respects reality. Business owners do not want to talk about SEO every week. They want the site to make more money. A sprint makes that possible because it reduces the number of moving parts. If the task is “prune low value pages” or “rework the homepage copy for the main offer” or “fix internal links to the high intent pages,” it will get done.
It is also much easier to show the client what changed. Before the sprint, this page was on page three. After the sprint, it moved. Before the sprint, this product did not get clicked. After the sprint, it did. That is the kind of SEO that is simple to defend in a budget meeting.
How a calculator changes the conversation
Another smart piece was Gert’s public calculator. Anyone can punch in traffic, average order value and conversion rate, then see what a ranking improvement could be worth. Once a number is on the screen, SEO stops being abstract. If a site is leaking fifteen thousand dollars a month because a page is stuck behind competitors, then spending seven and a half to fix the issue is logical.
The calculator also helps prioritize. If three leaks are identified, the one with the highest potential recovery goes first. That keeps the business focused on the biggest prize, not the longest list.
Why focus beats volume now
The web is noisier. AI content has made it easy to publish a lot of average material. Google has responded by tightening what it rewards. That means the old volume play is riskier. You can publish 50,000 near identical posts, see them rank for a while, then watch a core update wipe them out.
Original, useful, clearly-purposed content is harder to produce, but it survives. James mentioned his surf site. Original videos, real photos, real words. That kind of content signals value. The same applies to e-commerce. A store that uses its own photography and product copy is easier for Google to trust than a store that imports the same feed as 500 other sellers.
So the real advantage today is not more. It is sharper. Get rid of dead pages. Fix technical issues that hurt click-throughs. Make product and offer pages clearer. Point internal links to the pages that matter most. Then measure.
What this means for business owners
If you are buying SEO, you can make it simpler:
-
1. Ask for the revenue impact first.
2. Work in 30-day projects, not open-ended retainers, unless you truly have a large ongoing program.
3. Delete what is not working.
4. Give your SEO team access to someone who can approve content fast.
5. Make sure every action is tied to a page, a term and a commercial outcome.
This is the same rhythm James uses inside his own mentoring. One action per week that matters. Do the thing that makes everything else easier or unnecessary. SEO can be run the same way.
See where your site might be leaking. Use Gert’s free revenue calculator at SEOLeverage.com/calculator
Liked the show? Enjoy all the episodes when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts
