I recently joined The Couch Pod with host Charles from Ivy Flip to discuss how couch flippers and furniture resellers can leverage SEO and digital marketing to grow their businesses. We covered everything from optimizing Google Business Profiles to building websites that generate consistent leads—without relying on marketplace algorithms. Charles is a great podcast host. Thank you Charles, and you team, for having me.
I also had the opportunity to join the Ivy Flip Industry Mastermind, where I did a live SEO audit for couch flippers looking to rank higher on Google and attract more buyers. Check out that session for even more in-depth strategies!
Read the full edited transcript below:
Charles: Welcome to another episode of the couch pod. Today, I’m joined by Emanuel Petrescu, a digital marketing and SEO expert with 10 years of experience based out of Toronto. He also runs a newsletter How About Some Marketing? The link to that will be in the description below. And he’s worked with some big firms, Kantar, Yellow Pages, very fortunate to have him on the pod today to unravel some strategies for growing your furniture business or your couch flipping business. Emanuel, thank you so much for coming on.
Emanuel: Thank you so much for having me, Charles. It’s funny enough. We’re talking about coaches, but I’m doing this episode from a chair.
Charles: I need to get a couch. I actually sit just on this chair. I have the hammock behind me, but I move frequently because I’m like kind of a digital nomad. So I don’t really get to choose where my podcast setup is. And so you’ll see me in different backgrounds and different episodes, but that is a great idea. We got to get the couch going on, make the branding on point. Okay. So Emanuel, you have a amazing background working with different clients.
And of course you got your start working at Yellow Pages as an SEO manager. Could you tell us a little bit about that experience? Because I know Yellow Pages. Used to just be this big book that they handed out and then eventually they digitize their business. And if you are in a small business, being in a directory can be really important.
So that gives you firsthand and behind scenes experience in SEO that I think is really unique.
Emanuel: That indeed is a world recognized brand. That big book was present. I don’t think there’s any country that didn’t have the version of Yellow Pages. Obviously I work on the digital side. I had experiences before in digital marketing, working with other agencies.
And I started off actually in traditional media, getting paid to watch television. That’s how I like to joke, and then transition to digital marketing. But in SEO, I started off roughly exclusively SEO, roughly about five, six years ago, and it was a great experience, a great place to learn and to understand the impact of SEO, especially on small to medium sized businesses.
In terms of, their location and so on. And as a fun fact, I believe that the big book, it’s still going around, especially in Canada.
Charles: I assume like the older generation, maybe they got used to having like physical medium they can page through, but in the U.S. It’s kind of on the, it’s been on the way out for a while.
Emanuel: Most likely. Yes. And Canada has some remote places where it’s easier to get mail than email.
Charles: Interesting. Oh, cool. Well, you know, now they have the satellite internet with Starlink and the AI stuff. So I imagined that.
Emanuel: Things will change for sure. Things will change.
Charles: Some people get set in their ways though, you know, like my grandmother is 86 years old and so she does use Facebook.
She doesn’t really speak English, but she does use Facebook. I never thought I’d see the day because when I was growing up, we used to always have like these VHS tapes of like Cambodian TV shows. And even today, if you go to her house, like she still has those VHS tapes, but at 86 years old, she does like, you know, she has a phone.
She goes on Facebook. She likes my videos sometimes. So shout out to grandma.
Emanuel: Shout out to Grandma. And that show us how the users adapt to the requirements and pleasures the new technology brings up.
Charles: Absolutely. And I think users are actually faster to adopt new technologies and new interfaces, new experiences, oftentimes than businesses are.
And this is something that I know intimately myself because I ran a marketing agency for about a period of four years, let’s say from 2015 to 2019. And we were still working at, you know, in that time period, it was surprising to me, the number of small businesses that didn’t have a website, that weren’t tech savvy.
And of course, if you fast forward to 2025, it’s even more surprising. And yet there still are people that have failed to adapt to the digital age. And I think there’s like maybe an initial surprise when you understand the scope of the issue of how many people are not tech savvy, but as you become accustomed to that fact.
You realize the experiences and how the technology and the ability of the average business owner to engage with technology is actually very limited. And so it’s like all this technology revolution is happening and it’s kind of speeding past a lot of the average small business owner. So what are some of the things that you find challenging when working with, you know, like an HVAC company or let’s say a furniture store that’s trying to go digital and, you know, trying to attract people to their business.
Emanuel: I’ll make two comments based on what you said and very well said. I’m going to go back to the recording and use it in my pitches as well. Thank you for that, Charles. Still many businesses don’t have a website.
I believe that the website is still -should be- at the center of any kind of marketing effort. I’ve been to some trade shows, to some fairs or people hand you their business cards and you see their Instagram over there, but not a website and the regular Gmail address. These are not big investments. I often tell people, listen: 15 years ago, instead of giving me your website, you would have given me your MySpace. Would that still be accurate in 2025? Not really. In 2040, for example, 15 years from now, I believe the website will still be relevant. However, your Instagram account might not be around. So food for thought.
Now, in terms of challenges that small businesses face, there’s a lot going on. Especially today, there’s many things that a business owner needs to be aware of and needs to take care of in order to run their business properly. Fortunately, or unfortunately marketing is one of them. It’s important for them to have a consultant that understands what they need, understands their market in terms of the industry they operate in, as well as your geographical location, because, Canada is a big country where I’m from.
Yet again, you know, Vancouver in British Columbia, it’s not Toronto and Ontario. Right now we have almost a meter of snow here in Toronto. You asked me HVAC examples, you know, you deal with all kinds of other issues that a business can make money from than somebody in British Columbia, for example.
So I would say that, being aware of where you are and who your target audience is and their problems: that’s one of the things that having a digital marketing consultant, a partner can help with.
Charles: Yeah. What I’ve seen, like, okay, let’s say in Toronto, there are a thousand junk removal companies or a thousand HVAC companies, very likely 90% of those companies are not going to have a deeply thought out or profound digital marketing strategy. They’re, you know, they’ve been in business for a while. They maybe they do some flyering. They get leads from something like an Angie’s list or a Thumbtack, right? And they have very little control over their own lead flow, lead generation.
They’re reliant on third parties, and then let’s say 10 percent or whatever percentage of businesses have really figured it out and they have a fully functioning website. They are on top of Google My Business. So their local SEO is popping off. They’re active on social channels. They have an SEO strategy.
They’re running Google ads. That 10 percent of businesses is probably getting the majority of the opportunities that exist in HVAC or junk removal or whatever service business within that market. And I think it’s because it’s such a high barrier to entry for your average business owner to get really technology and marketing proficient, even though it seems easy, but it’s really not.
Emanuel: Lawyers, plumbers, roofers, any kind of trade business is becoming more and more competitive. Those 10% percent tend to be also the ones who have been in business for a while. They’re not necessarily new. In markets like Toronto and all the major cities in North America, it’s extremely competitive. It’s not uncommon right now to bid for a keyword 80$ and up, you know, and if you’re talking about lawyers, divorce lawyers can come at some astronomical sum, but indeed they tend to get the majority of the businesses because at the end of the day, in terms of Google, my background is in SEO and I always tell my clients and the people I work with, listen, Google, what they want to do is show their users, the people who perform the queries, the best result possible for that specific query. So that’s it. Google has only one function. They figure out how to make money out of that, but at the end of the day, they try to understand what the user wants, what’s the intent behind that search, and serve him with that best possible result that Google might think it is.
And it’s our job. It’s the business’s job to make Google understand that they have that answer, essentially. And there’s different types of queries. You know, there’s, let’s say it’s something emergency plumbing. It’s more of a local results ads, whereas something like a long tail keyword, where there’s a question involved, or, you know, the user is kind of like in a journey or he’s thinking maybe I should change my roof, next summer, you know, what kind of prices should I expect set up my budget and stuff like that. So everything comes regardless of how you put it, comes with an effort. So again, coming back to what you said about an older demographics, you’ll see in the trade business, also the ads, the people who appear in them are also from an older demographic. They all understand that that’s where the people spend their time on right now. Facebook, Instagram, and they invest in it and they made a significant effort to actually do all these things because as you know, it takes a lot of effort to shoot even a one minute video.
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Charles: Absolutely. I mean, I remember doing some campaigns for lawyers, campaigns for HVAC.
I mean, we’re talking 80$ cost per click, like you said, mesothelioma. It’s kind of the main keyword. I don’t know if that’s still very expensive back in the day, it was like, you know, 400$ cost per click for mesothelioma. So where there are pockets of opportunity and you know, people have figured out, if I build a funnel here and I pour money into it, more money comes out.
Once they figure out that strategy, they ratchet it up. It can be very difficult for someone who’s just starting out with a modest budget to put in money and get a reasonable return, something that even allows them to get a foundation for getting data on what’s working, what’s not, so that they can, you know, get to the next level.
Emanuel: It’s not an easy conversation when you’re that you’re having as a consultant with a small business owner who’s just starting out and you need to tell him that he needs to think about at least $2,000 U.S. Or Canadian doesn’t matter, and up. So not just the minimum, but end up because you need a good website.
You need some good images. You need proper branding that costs money. You need a good content strategy. Somebody is going to execute on that blog. There’s time spent doing the research. Competition, backlinks, keywords, locations, and so forth. There’s a significant investment in paid advertising as well. So that’s the reality of today’s business.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s, I haven’t seen great results with a, fairly modest budget with a company that didn’t have much history. So don’t give up.
Charles: The really interesting thing about couch flipping as a market, and in contrast to a lot, how a lot of other businesses get started is it’s extremely low barrier to entry and it’s low barrier to entry, not only in terms of capital equipment or assets or things that you need to buy to get started.
That requirement is obviously low because you can start with a single product, one couch, one trailer, one storage unit, even less, right? You could, if you have a truck to throw it in your truck, rent a U Haul, or you could just, you know, flip out of a storage, like out of your garage. So the startup capital is very, very limited, but more importantly, and I think this is the underappreciated fact about why there is an opportunity to make money flipping, it’s that you get to tap into people’s attention for basically free. And if you’ve run any other business over the past few decades, right, you know, that attention is the most precious commodity. And so as digital marketers, you know, we’re used to paying for radio ads or TV spots, flyers, you go to a business networking event, you’re putting money into Google ads, SEO, Facebook ads.
You know, every time you get someone’s attention that is valuable and that costs money typically. But in the case of a flipper, you take your product, take some good photos, throw it up on Kijiji, Craigslist, Facebook marketplace. And these marketplaces connect you to a consumer who is not just any consumer.
It’s like a guy that is near you that wants what you have. And how amazing is that? And people are able to scale six figure businesses just on the backs of these marketplaces. And I think the challenge that we’re seeing in our audience is that once you build your business up to a certain point, on the back of a marketplace, when you’re used to getting attention for free, making this transition into paying for attention on a platform that you own and control is very difficult, right?
Because they’re, they’re used to like doing nothing, like not nothing, but they’re used to like they publish on marketplace, they get the attention and for them to like put up a website, put their listings up on a website and then drive traffic to that website and get performance out of that can feel very difficult.
Emanuel: It’s true. One thing that, I think everybody realizes: you can only grow up to a point in those places. So any businesses, main goal is to grow and expand and make more money. So you will reach a plateau more or less on those platforms because there’s only so much. So then you’ll need to expand to places where your potential buyers, your audience is.
I believe it’s a natural transition. We all have seen it across many different domains and including couch flipping as well. But, to your point, yeah, there’s an investment that they need to make and not just necessarily the money, but the time that’s required to figure out the website, figure out the SEO strategy, figure out the ads, figure out even the social media stuff, which is becoming more and more addictive. I probably, like everyone else, spend more time than I should on watching all kinds of videos, including every now and then somebody, even a couch flipper or any other trade business that started creating content. And the algorithm kind of like figures out what’s the potential audience for that specific video.
So a video like that doesn’t necessarily cost money, but takes the time to come up with it. So if somebody would ask me, what would you suggest in terms of a marketing strategy to grow? I would say, think about long term. Think about started creating a brand around what you’re doing. Give it a name, give it a clear logo, choose some colors and think long term, think big. I’m not sure that you’re going to turn up like IKEA or Leons or anything like that, but, there’s always possibility, especially in digital market. You don’t know exactly until you start doing it, where your channel is, you might have been successful on Facebook marketplace, for example, but once you start putting up some videos on TikTok, you might blow up and that will inevitably result in some other kind of revenue, but I would suggest to your point, thinking about long term, thinking of, you know, giving it a name, having a logo, putting a brand to it and start doing some research, research, meaning, you know, what are people looking for?
Is there enough volume? Is there enough intent? Is it actually worth it?
Charles: Absolutely. I think people complain about the algorithm on these marketplaces. I’m not getting views this week. I’m not getting clicks this week and last summer so much better. And I think there was a community wide moment where listings really were getting less views than what people are accustomed to.
And I think that moment, sometime middle of last year is what led some flippers to start diversifying and thinking about other channels, which they could reach their consumers on. And if you think about your total addressable market in Toronto, once again, let’s say 20% percent of them are going to be on these local marketplaces like Kijiji and Facebook.
And then 80% percent are nowhere to be found on these local markets. And these are just rough numbers, right? And everyone that is flipping couches or selling furniture might be competing for that same slice of customers because it’s the low barrier to entry thing to do. It’s the other 80% percent that is locked behind Google or locked behind, you know, some other channel that a little bit harder to access. That is kind of a new frontier for people. And I think once some people start figuring out the strategy for how to be successful with the website, how to be successful on Google, that is going to spill over, you know, because people talk and strategies get shared, but I don’t think it’s happened in this community for couch, couch flippers as of yet.
Now, if you were in the shoes of a couch flipper, you have a business making $300,000 a year. You have a little storefront, a warehouse, you have a box truck, you’re making, you know, decent money, like $50K a month, right? $300,000 a year. That’d be $600,000. Yeah. So you’re making $25,000 a month, right? So you have a nice little business for yourself.
However. It’s all reliant on Facebook and you want to diversify onto another channel. Would you recommend trying a little bit of everything or would you recommend picking a channel and focusing in and getting that to work? So what would you do?
Emanuel: Preparing for this podcast, I did a couple of searches, you know, for what kind of keywords people are looking for on Google.
And we can see, for example, across U.S. an average monthly search for a keyword like affordable sectional couches or cheap couch or a sectional couch for sale and stuff like that. 30,000 searches and up. So based on the data, we know that there’s volume. You can figure out locally what kind of volume is there in the area you operate in, especially if you have a location, a storefront goes without saying that you should have a Google My Business, Google Business Profile, as they call it now, the old Google map listings, which you can optimize and often pops up in searches for your main keywords, but for some other long tail keywords and queries that people use, because still today in 2025, around 20, less than 20 percent of the daily searches are searches that were never done before, right? And these users see results.
In terms of, trying different things, there’s this thing called the spaghetti technique, right?
You throw a spaghetti out of the wall, see what sticks and double down on that. That’s always something that you can try, but I believe in 2025, there’s enough data to support any kind of decision that you want to make. So I can tell you from a search perspective that there’s an intent and there’s volume for that.
So if you want to pursue a solid SEO campaign and paid ad strategy for Google, there’s an opportunity there. And it might be even bigger than whatever one channel you’re on right now. And there’s always the thing that you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. They can always, and Facebook did this many times, flip something in the algorithm and completely wash you out.
I’ve also noticed that, some big brands actually have gone through marketplace and they act and they promote their products as a small business would, because it’s successful, but, I would say if they’re looking, to expand, look at the data. Again, somebody in the field will be able to tell you, you know, if there’s a volume, there’s intent, and if there’s opportunity in there.
In search, for example, I just give you an example. So we know there is, I’m pretty sure that on social, there’s something similar. And again, you want to think long term and start building that brand. Because as I said, in the beginning, in 15 years from now, there’s a high chance that your website would still be around.
Whereas your Instagram or TikTok account might not be. And there’s value in tradition. I bought my couch brand new around seven years ago. And I’m, I’m not deciding, decided yet to get a new one, but I’m started thinking of it. When the moment comes, who would I go to? Maybe it’s the guy that I keep seeing for the past couple of years, you know, popping up in my feed, talking about couches, talking about discounts, talking about opportunities, educating me about the difference between a leather couch and some other type of material, or for a big living room, what’s the best type of couch and any kind of conversation that you might have in regards to that.
And, to be honest, if somebody has done this for a while, they already have the first party-data Because they’ve talked to the customers, they’ve mostly been in their houses, you know, taking the couch out or sometimes, you know, even putting it in. So they kind of like understand and get some, anecdotal feedback, and, experience that they can use once they, try to step up.
Charles: I think you made a great point. And generally, I think this is, what’s cool about couch flipping. It’s like I’ve had one of the couch flippers that’s been in the business the longest come on the pod and remarked that couch flipping is kind of like running a lemonade stand for better or for worse. And it’s not to belittle the business model at all.
I think it’s an amazing thing that, you know, there’s an opportunity in the United States and Canada for people who want to work hard to apply their thoughtfulness, their time and their energy and be able to provide a decent living for themselves, their families on their own terms, but it’s a simple business.
So getting started listing products on Facebook marketplace, pretty simple. And if you know what you’re doing, actually, it turns out there’s a playbook for SEO as well. And that playbook is much better understood than, let’s say the playbook for making a social media account go viral. And that’s because at the end of the day, Google is like search engine optimization is a technical activity.
Google is a technical product to your point. They’re trying to match users when they search for something to information that is most relevant to their query. And your website has to be engineered in such a way that Google understands what content is on those pages so that I can serve that information to the person who is searching.
And then Google is also looking for signals that that information is relevant. If you understand that formula and you understand what the algorithm is looking for, then you can play that game. And so it’s well understood. You can predict with probably a high degree of success. If you were to execute a campaign correctly, here are the kinds of results that I could expect.
The problem is if you’ve never done SEO before, it’s a lot to swallow, right? It can be very challenging. It can be very complex. So first I want to break this up into two questions. For someone starting out trying to get leverage from organic search, how would you help them optimize for GMB, Google My Business, and like the local search queries there, and how would you recommend that they get started with a general SEO strategy?
Emanuel: Very solid questions. Thank you for those. I often tell people, because you say I learned the SEO. I often tell people, do you do your taxes yourself or do you hire a tax specialist to help you with those? It’s kind of like the same thing. If you do a quick search on, Google about SEO, you’ll find many results about learning SEO and doing it yourself and all those things, which is, misleading a little bit because SEO is more than just one thing and it’s unrealistic to think that by doing a two hour for four hour course you’ll be able to rank in a highly competitive domain against some big players.
That that doesn’t mean that you should be discouraged and I highly recommend any business owner that I work to be aware and to have an understanding of the principles and what’s important. All the campaigns that I worked on the most successful campaigns had the business owner engaged because he also had that first party data – it can take some time, you know, for the research to show up.
Now to answer your question about the Google business profile and local. There’s this thing called local SEO, which is a branch of SEO that’s focused highly on local businesses and the local results. There’s no secret anymore that if I search something right now from Toronto, I’ll see different results than somebody who’s searching from British Columbia, from Vancouver, or from Nova Scotia, New York, or any other city, right?
Because it’s highly localized and there are many, many directories, including Yellow Pages, but many other directories that don’t require much to register with, AKA for free. So doing the effort of registering over there can give, including Google, that signal that, you know, at that address operating it, that in that region, there’s a business that offers these services.
So the more you have. the more signal for Google to pick up on. Some say you need, there’s no minimum or maximum you can have. It’s better to have more than to have less, if that’s what I say. Google tends to prefer showing the Google business profiles at the top. It was previously called Google My Business and previously Google Maps, so there’s a history in there.
It’s also a Google product, so they prefer to show their listings. What’s important and how you can leverage against your competitor is to have it highly optimized because that profile also has a place where you can add description, where you can add product, where you can add services, where you can add pictures and where you can ask your users for reviews, your users, your customers, and so forth. So we know from all the data that’s shared that reviews have a high impact on the search results and having your listing feature in there. It’s a game that’s played in time, so it’s not going to happen overnight, but the sooner you start, the more chances you have and the more better reviews, the higher chance of showing up, at the top can be. So two things, ensure that it’s highly optimized. There’s no missing field. There’s not a field there that you can add and it’s not added. Make sure you include your keywords in there, your main keywords and so forth in the description and in every place that you can. Good images and make sure that you get reviews.
hat, that’s a excellent, excellent start. And any other amenities that you, you might see there, question and answer, FAQs, most common FAQs and so forth. On top of this, there’s an option for Google business profile- there’s an option to post like you would post on Facebook and all social media. And there has been reports, and I’ve seen this myself, where you can actually see a slight increase in the eyeballs that your, your listing is getting.
So long answer to a short question. Let me see, ensure that your Google business profile is optimized. Ensure you have nice pictures. You have your keywords in there. You have all the fields filled out and get as many, good, positive and real reviews you can get.
Charles: Absolutely. Great, thorough answer. And I think for the average flipper who has just moved into a storefront, they have a business address, they can claim their GMB, their Google profile.
It’s kind of the low hanging fruit, right? And the reason I say that is compared to popping up a website and putting out content and making sure that you’re following SEO. Best practices. They give you a much, much simpler and easier interface for being able to be successful with local SEO. You don’t have to know how to code.
You don’t need to do anything technical. In fact, it’s an interface that the average flipper is very accustomed to because it’s similar to interacting with local marketplace, like Facebook, et cetera. So that seems like a great first start. And the advice here seems to be do the basics. Right? Make sure like do the basics, but do them well.
Make sure that all your information is in there. Add photos, solicit reviews, be consistent with that activity over time. It’s going to pay dividends. But as you and I both know, there is like there of the overall opportunity that there is with SEO, only a portion of that is going to be accessible with just a Google My Business profile.
If you want to tap into the whole opportunity. You need a website, you need an SEO strategy proper. So what advice do you have for someone if they’re getting started on that domain?
Emanuel: I know many great SEOs and digital marketers who started off in a different business. They learned the website and the SEO part.
They weren’t successful at their business, but they went and had success consulting in digital marketing. It’s an interesting game that, and it’s a decision that, the business owner will need to make. If you go in the subway right now, I’ve seen ads from, GoDaddy, Squarespace, WIX, and, all these platforms, Shopify that, you know, makes it sound that it’s really easy to put your website together one, two, three and magic happens. To an extent it is. My personal recommendation is to ensure you have complete control over your domain and over your website, which in 2025, it’s still a reality that you don’t actually own some of the things that you think you own. So that will be one thing I would say, think about your budget, get a consultant, get somebody who had some results, some expertise, not your cousin that built your website 20 years ago, but somebody, you know, close that can, somebody that comes with a recommendation and that can create something basic for you with the minimum budget and start from there.
I would say control is more important in the long run. Think about what you want to do and how much do you want to invest? Because it takes time. If you’re talking about products, you know, upload it, take photos, upload it, description and all those things, right? In order to actually see some results from Google, you need to spend the time to optimize the description, the page and all those things you’re already doing that, you know, on all the other platforms, like the marketplaces that where you upload it, so it depends on what you want to do, I would say start and have a conversation with a consultant and figure out what’s the best for you. And where are you most comfortable to hire somebody or to do them yourself?
Charles: And what would you recommend Flipper use as their domain registrar? Where, where should they buy their domain? Where should they park it? Do you have any recommendations in terms of CMSs?
It, you know, these are functionally e commerce stores, but it is a little different because each product is one of one because it’s a used product. So once it’s sold, it’s gone. Any recommendations in terms of technology and getting set up?
Emanuel: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. It’s hard. I can tell you what I use. For example, my domains, I tend to buy them from Namecheap. Hosting, there’s some good hosting companies out there that aren’t charging you an arm and a leg. Cloudways, it’s my preferred one. I prefer to work with the WordPress platform, which is not exactly free as many say, but it’s, more accessible and it’s still the one that you can have the most complete control over.
You won’t believe, but, you know, some of the other, platforms that are quite popular have some sort of a limitation. You cannot add more than a hundred products or for more than a hundred products, you need to upgrade to an extra package. So these are some things that you need to think about when it comes to your cost, because when you’re at the beginning, you budget something that, you know, supposed to cost you $20 a month.
But it ends up, you know, being $80 a month. I’m not sure that that would break your business, but obviously it’s a significant increase. Again, that consultant should theoretically figure out what’s the best way. In terms of my recommendation, I would say, get your domain from your preferred, I use namecheap.Com. I am affiliated with them, but if you type it in, I won’t make any commission. Cloudways is a good hosting platform to host the website and WordPress is the most flexible one in terms of ease of use, but also keeping complete control over it. Now there’s a lot of things that, uh, you know, a business owner, needs to do, especially when he’ll try to scale because he’s doing this because he wants to, you know, move forward.
So again, coming back to my recommendation (hire a consultant).
Charles: Think for the average SEO is not something that you want to do on your own. Probably other forms of digital marketing might be something that you’re going to be better off doing on your own. And I think it’s just the cost to value ratio and hiring out services for digital marketing, especially if you’re a small business.
Tend to be pretty bad. The problem is digital marketing is also pretty low barrier to entry and it’s hard to tell who’s good and who’s bad. Right. Everybody’s an expert. Everybody’s an expert. You know, I’m a, I’m a kid with a camera and I make Tiktoks. Like I’m a social media influencer. Right. And especially with the agency business model, it’s hard because if you’re working with a bigger agency, now you don’t have like direct access to the founders who are probably the strategists.
People who really put the oomph in the results that they’re getting for their clients early on. You have, you know, like a team that’s working on your thing, but they’re working on like 10, 15 different projects at the same time. And so is anyone really taking accountability for the business result? Only the business owner takes accountability for that, right? And therefore you’re, you’re just going to care a lot more about creating your own social media campaigns, creating emails. And nowadays with chat GPT, you can generate a lot of that content at scale yourself. And you know how to shoot a video, right? You’ve been using your phone.
You’ve been taking pictures of your couches. You know how to do a little selfie video, walk around the couch. Like people know how to do these things. So it’s less complex. SEO is very complex. It’s gotten less complex over time, fortunately, but, even today, like, like I would not touch the SEO of our website myself, right?
Even our engineers did not want to touch it. Like at one point I was like, guys, I think we should just get really good at SEO ourselves. Cause like we’re having trouble finding an SEO consultant that we think is going to do the job. And we, we hired a couple cheap ones here and there. And we were looking at the results that we’re getting back from them.
And we severed ties pretty quickly, but like we have a pretty good deal of digital marketing background and also technology expertise. And if you don’t have that, how can you tell if the work that you’re getting is good? You just rely on the input of the so called expert that you hire. Anyhow, this is a long way of saying, I think it’s reasonable to try and do some aspects of your digital marketing yourself.
It is not really reasonable for your average Couch Flipper, Furniture Store Owner to develop domain expertise in SEO. It’s far, far better to find an expert, but experts are hard to come by.
Emanuel: Yeah. Good point. Sometimes, you need to, you know, trust that you made the right decision. There’s plenty of ways of figuring out what the best consultant for you.
Word of mouth is usually a good place to start. Some Google searches can actually bring up the top results. Usually the top results are also at higher price points, so that’s something to consider as well. But there’s another thing that I feel like we should mention. SEO in 2025 is not the same thing as SEO in 2020, and definitely not the same as SEO in 2015. Or 2010, and so forth.
The foundations have kind of like remained the same, but things have changed. I would say the user has become more aware, he’s doing more research, he’s jumping, he’s, if he was looking at two, three sites before he made the decision, now he’s looking at seven. He most likely first will go to Amazon or some of the big players out there.
So, it’s, definitely a challenge figuring out how to navigate all these and, how to leverage the existing technology, including AI. You, I’m happy that you mentioned Chad GPT, which can be an amazing assistant, which can help you tremendously. Unfortunately, many people still think that it can do the job for you.
And it can to an extent with all these AI agents, but, I don’t know about others, but myself and all the other digital marketers I talked to they told me that and myself, I work more since AI than I used to work. Yes. I got more results. I got better results. I can scale and all these things, but it’s not that I’m working less, but I’m using it as an assistant.
If you would take me, let’s say an hour to come up with 10 topics, good topics for a couch flipper, I can easily type, ask ChatGPT right now, even with the free version to, you know, tell me some, 10 topics of blogs or video scripts that somebody who’s looking to get a couch would be interested in. And that’s something amazing.
Charles: Absolutely. It’s a, it’s a weapon that when wielded correctly can greatly deliver results for your business. So what do you think, given what you know about our audience, an appropriate starting budget would be and like a commitment for them to make if they wanted to see results.
Emanuel: We tell everyone in SEO that we’ll start seeing results after a couple of months and they don’t happen overnight.
It’s fair to say six months to a year. If you’re talking simply with SEO, I would say a thousand bucks a month and up. And that’s a reality, including the website, including the hosting, including some of the research, you know, whatever fee you pay to your consultant and all that. But on average, it starts from there and up.
Again, it depends. A honest digital marketer will tell you that, you know, maybe you should invest first more into paid advertising or paid campaign on social media, which can bring you more results than, you know, creating a content strategy of 20 blogs and 10 pages that will take some time and some other money to develop.
But I would say an average of that. And one thing I, I didn’t, I wanted to mention, I didn’t in terms of the domain. I’m going to make a, a side note here, although Google will tell you that exact match domain don’t make a difference, there’s evidence and you see all over the internet, and I know this for sure that having an exact match domain, something like, you know, couch for sale or second hand couch or red couches or something like that, that you’re really specialized in red couches for you, stuff like that can have a positive impact.
Charles: Very interesting. I mean, there’s always notes on the algorithm updates and what it ranks, what it doesn’t rank, but there’s really nothing like the data in your Search Console or the data in your ad account. Right. Talk best practices all you want.
But the only thing that is real to me is the data that is in front of me that I paid for, you know, at least that is your reality.
Emanuel: That’s everyone’s reality. The Google’s reality.
Charles: So imagine you’re taking on a couch flipper as a client and he has a website. It’s a basic five page e commerce site, it has like a homepage and about us, contact page, product catalog, and they have 20 couches listed.
And he said, here you go. Where would you start and why?
Emanuel: If he already has it, then some sort of data is already available to your point. Search console, Google analytics, see what’s happening over there. What kind of keywords, what kind of traffic you get there. I would start of course, by researching again, coming back to a research, a solid research at the beginning, can help you tremendously throughout the campaign. And by research, I divided into local keywords, industry keywords, competitors, who are they? Why are they ranking? Realistically, how much you should invest? It gives you an expectation. You can look at the backlinks, for example, there’s something we didn’t discuss, but backlinks can move the needle faster, then, anything else, but again, backlinks can be expensive and it’s a really hard conversation to have with the business or telling him that, listen, you need to get some backlinks that cost this much theoretically, and this will do what exactly, you know, it’s really hard conversation. This will help you, but you don’t see the results right away.
Whereas if you invest two, $300 in ads, you might see some results in a couple of days. I would look at the competitors. I would look at the industry. I will look at the location and start building a solid content strategy as well. I would include obviously the local pack. I’m ensuring that, you know, his listings are, he has listings on all the major platforms.
Those listings, you know, you add your website again, it’s a signal, as well for, for Google to solidify your, your presence in that area, looking at, creating the content strategy, suggesting repurposing that content strategy, on any other channel: five things you should know before buying your next house can be a good blog for your website can be a good blog or your LinkedIn pulse blog can be a good subreddit, a good blog for a subreddit and can be a great topic for a one minute video.
You can always say, you know, if you want to learn more, go back to our website and all those things. So I would consider, you know, creating the content strategy, repurposing it. And if there’s budget, do PR, do guest posts on other websites, you know, to enhance your, your reputation and solidify yourself as the expert in the field.
So that would be my approach, perhaps, to enterprise-like for a small business, but the reality is that’s where everyone’s going, that’s what we see in the results as well. So if you don’t have that approach, that big, that like a big company would operate, you won’t see the results.
Charles: You can cut corners, but it pays to have a solid foundation.
And you know, there’s a reason why good marketers have a process, right? And oftentimes you want to get straight to the answers, get straight to the results, but you have to do some digging to figure out how that’s going to work for your business. It’s a different story. Of course, if you’re more specialized and let’s say, you know, you specifically had worked with like dozens of clients in the same space and you’re going to see a lot of the same patterns emerge and that’s going to accelerate the learning, but arguably you get to the same place in about the same amount of time.
Emanuel: There’s value in being specialized in your own niche in digital marketing, and I’m pretty sure in couch selling as well, I know.
Think about office couches or stuff like that, lounges, bars, and all those things, you know, there’s value in being niched.
Charles: Could you break down for us what the basic activities in SEO ing are? And, you know, you mentioned backlinks. I think people get the sense like. Okay, we should have a blog, right? Maybe they have some semblance of the keywords on the pages are important.
But I think a lot of this is actually foreign to the average person, right? So maybe you could just break down what you’d be paying for if you were to work with an SEO specialist. I, think that deserves some demystification.
Emanuel: Third question, you mentioned Search Console previously, I’m not sure how many business owners know what the Search Console is, or even if they have a linked it to their website, which many don’t.
Sometimes I go in, they’ve been in business for a while, they got a lot of organic traffic rankings. And you know, I set up Google Search Console and you know, after a couple of day or two, I start seeing stuff and you know, it’s amazing. And they never had a look at this. So for example, Search Console is a, portal from Google is the only way you can kind of like see it’s some sort of a tool, I don’t call it necessarily a tool, but it’s a way for you to see how Google understands you, understands your website. And it’s from Google. It has its own errors. Many times it can create confusion, but, it’s a good thing to have. I often describe SEO as a three legged stool. It’s, legs not always being equal, but those three legs are the website, UX, UI, and the technicals, so ensuring, you know, your website is in good shape when it comes to the technical aspect. And, there’s many issues that come up with, some of the big and major platforms, the most popular ones as well.
There’s issues with the JavaScript. Website, for example, you know, many people go in and I want a fast website and they purchase a website that it’s fast, but Google can’t understand any of it because it uses a certain framework that’s not accessible to the crawler. And that’s a reality. So you have the technicals, the content, content is king can be in many forms, you know, but optimize website pages, the service pages, for example, you would have red couches blue couches, stuff like that. I know couches for small apartments, couches for condos, couches for big apartments, couches for your basement, stuff like that.
And, the third leg would be the backlinks, which again is something that many business owners don’t really understand.
Backlinks are essentially like votes. from other websites that can kind of like give you the okay in the eyes of Google. And we need to remember, you know, I’ve seen sites that rank well without good backlink, what SEOs might call a good backlink profile, and Google will tell you that backlinks don’t count that much, but we need to remember that the backlinks and the algorithm and how Google, the crawler, the search, the search algorithm looks at was what differentiated Google initially from all the other search engines and what made the results good enough for people to switch from other search engines, more popular at that time, AltaVista, Yahoo, and so forth.
So again, long answer. Content, technicals and backlinks, not all legs being equal, but something to be aware of.
Charles: Absolutely. And all, all three are important. And those would be like the big buckets of SEO activity. You have to work on all three because let’s say you work on two, then the other is going to be your bottleneck.
And so, you know, if you don’t have enough content, then all the technical optimization in the world’s not really going to help you. If you have zero backlinks, then that’s going to throttle the success of your, your site, even if you have really good content and it is readable to Google. So it is important for average small business to have a balanced plan that addresses all three aspects.
I think the backlinks are so hard not to swallow, right? Because as far as I know, in 2025, a lot of that is pay to play. Now you can tell me, but I think it’s hard to get really good organic backlinks, like you call a journalist and Hey, write a write an article about me or, you know, it seems like a lot of that is pay to play, but, uh, the way to think about it.
If you published a paper, what is a signal that that is a good paper? It’s a fact that that paper is cited by a lot of other papers. It means it was influential that other researchers reference that paper as they’re writing their own paper. And that becomes a signal of the authority of the paper. And similarly, Google has come up with a system where if you have a website.
That has high domain authority that can, and that website is linking to your website, it confers authority to your website. So that’s the whole idea of this web of webs, backlink thing with, with Google.
Emanuel: Conversation that, happens a lot is, against Google. If you read their guidelines, they are against, you know, paying for acquiring backlinks.
Yet there are conversation happening that, you know, you need to tell the business owner, we need to pay $500 to get a backlink with a DR of 80 or something like that. And what’s domain rating, what’s domain authority, what are all these things. So SEO can get more complex than just a simple green light from a plugin that you install on your website because you read about it.
Charles: So we’re about at an hour together, which, you know, flew by really quickly. I think we could go much deeper on a couple of topics here. I want to conclude with two questions. So the first, I’ll ask them one at a time. So the first is how do you think AI is changing SEO specifically? Very curious about this.
Maybe even just my own personal reasons.
Emanuel: I would say I’m a, you’ll see a lot of crap out there, so it’s it’s been out a lot of crap. People abuse it.
AI. I can tell you that the SEOs have experienced firsthand what AI can do long before the ChatGPTs, LLMs have been released in a while to the public somewhere in 2023, right?
We’ll look at the Google algorithm. We look at the paid ads. If you run any kind of paid advertising campaign, sometimes, you know, you just put in the URL over there and Google comes up with the ads themselves, you know, the headlines, the descriptions, the keywords you should bid on and so forth. So that’s AI and it has been available for a while. Obviously it’s changing the game in any industry, not just in SEO. How it impacts SEO, as I said, for me, I’m able to scale and accelerate any kind of activity I’ve been doing before. I’m just going to give you an example. Keyword research. Before I was doing keyword research, I was exporting them, I was using all kinds of filters in Excel, had some templates and do all these things or different tools to cluster them together based on intent, based on volume and all those things.
That could take me even half a day. Right now I can easily say I can do that in a couple of not five minutes, but 15 to 20 minutes, you know, to get a chunk of data and ask them, ask it? Him? It? Tends to be personalized to go through it, filter what’s relevant. Give me a cluster for this. and so forth. So I think that it can accelerate whatever you do.
It can help with content creation as well. Somebody said, I didn’t came up with, but if you’re a mediocre writer, it can help you make common average writer. How relevant and what kind of value is that content bringing? That’s up to the user. Up to Google, the user said, you know, they will figure it out that is crap. And they’re wasting their time reading or watching your content. So I would say for me, it impacted as being able to scale and using it as a personal assistant, having a second opinion and so forth.
Charles: Okay. And the final question that I have for you is I think our conversation has broached a lot of topics, concepts that are unfamiliar for your average couch flipper, furniture store owner. And I don’t want to dissuade them because for me personally, I think that Google and search is a great frontier of opportunity for the people that are early adopters or the pioneers that get in there.
They spend some money, they make some mistakes, but they figure it out because at the end of the day, people rely on search. To connect to products, connect to businesses, to find things that they need. The intention behind a research is why Google has like the largest ad business in the world, right?
There’s value there. What would you say to someone who’s like, they’ve been listening along and they’re interested, they’re curious, but they’re confused, right? Like, is there like a north, is there a north star here? Is there some hope that you could give them that this is?
It is because, you know, every effort is, is rewarded. It has been, and it will be, it can get overwhelming, but take it one step at a time. Do it as you are comfortable in terms of, investing the time and the budget in it and find somebody that you can trust. And, that’s, that’s it. I would say you don’t need to know SEO.
Emanuel: You just need to know a couple of basic things, have a partner that you can trust and work with him to achieve the best, best possible results.
Charles: Absolutely. As mentioned, you probably don’t want to be doing the SEO on your own, but hopefully this conversation has shed some light on things to look out for, basic approaches in terms of process and strategy, and this will help them find that right partner who can take them on their SEO journey.
Emanuel, thank you so much for coming on this episode of the couch pod brought tremendous value to our audience. I look forward to having more conversations with you in the future.
It’s a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you so much for having me and thank you to your audience.
