The Essential Six-Step Framework To Build Your Brand

Many people sell SEO services, but I believe if someone is truly good at something, they should have a proven SOP and make it public and free. At Yahoo, we built a lot before Google became Google, and many of the people I trained went on to work there. With my experience in search engines, why not learn from someone who’s been doing it for a long time?

I want to demystify SEO. Before I spoke to Adil Klevit on her podcast, I told her to Google me. When you search “Dennis Yu,” you’ll see a full knowledge panel with all the colored boxes. Some say that’s only for celebrities or famous people with millions of followers, but that’s not the case.

It’s about whether Google understands who you are factually—what you’ve done, the companies you’re involved with, the organizations you’re part of, the guests on your podcast, and the news you’ve been mentioned in.

These are factual things, like publishing a book. If you want to achieve this yourself, follow the checklist of others who have done it. If you want to learn how to lose weight, don’t follow someone who’s obese. They might give good advice, but clearly, they don’t follow it themselves.

I’m a big fan of following practitioners who actively do what they talk about and make it public. SEO is such a cesspool—almost all of it is garbage, and people are just selling.

Many businesses think they need to buy SEO services or hire an SEO person to rank number one on Google, “whatever that means”. As a search engine engineer, I can confidently say it’s not possible to “do” SEO in the way it’s often sold. How can anyone argue with that?

The analogy is simple: If you want to lose weight, can you hire someone to do it for you? No. You don’t just “engage in losing weight.” You change your diet, exercise, get proper sleep—there are multiple actions you take, and the result is weight loss.

Similarly, if you want to rank on Google for “pest control Portland, Oregon,” there are things you do. You build relationships, take care of your customers, ensure your website loads faster, share your expertise, gather positive mentions, and maybe start a podcast. These actions lead to better rankings in Google.

You don’t hire someone to “do” SEO for you because SEO isn’t a thing you do. The misconception that you can is likely perpetuated by those selling these services, but it’s a lie from the start. Just as you can’t hire someone to lose weight for you, you can’t hire someone to do SEO for you.

Someone can process your content, build your website, buy ads for you, and handle other tasks to assist you, but they can’t “do” SEO for you. SEO isn’t a single action—it’s the result of many coordinated efforts.

The six-phase process which we call the content factory is simple. It starts with real evidence that you actually do what you claim. Last week, I visited Nike and met with my friend Ken Vandegeen, who runs EcoCare Pest Control in Portland. They’ve been in the business a long time, with tons of five-star reviews, vans all over the city, and a proven track record of effective pest control.

There’s clear evidence they do a great job. We ensure that evidence—happy customers, knowledgeable technicians, detailed reviews—is visible to Google. It appears in Google reviews, YouTube, Yelp, Facebook, and even in local community activities.

We then equip his team and hire virtual assistants and young adults running agencies to amplify that signal. The key is that if you truly do what you say you do, you can amplify that signal. If you do bad work or don’t exist, no amount of SEO will fix it.

Digital marketing, SEO, and ads are amplifiers. If you’re good at what you do, the signal will be stronger. But if you have a 2.7-star review and think you can cover it up with ads or SEO, you’re misunderstanding how this world works.

Phase 1: Setting up—Digital Plumbing

This involves semi-technical tasks like conversion tracking. I track where my phone calls are coming from through Google Analytics, so I can see which marketing sources are working. Is it TV, radio, Google Ads, or word of mouth? By connecting everything—pixels, UTM parameters, and more—I can tie all marketing efforts to business performance, like phone calls, sales, and leads.

Digital plumbing is about connecting that data. Without it, any analysis of a business is just guessing.

Phase 2: Setting Clear Goals for Success

Once you have the data, you can determine what you need to achieve. For example, if you’re a plumbing HVAC company in Las Vegas like Pure Plumbing (full disclosure: they’re a client), your goal might be to generate phone calls for less than $100. You know that 35-40% of those calls will turn into customers after an estimate.

If you don’t have a clear goal, even with digital plumbing in place, you’re just collecting data without direction. You need to know your acceptable thresholds. For instance, does your cost per call need to be under $60 because your average job is $400 or, if you’re dealing with HVAC units, is $1,000 per new customer acceptable?

You need to understand these numbers. If you had 52 phone calls last week, is that good or bad? It depends on your revenue target. A $1 million company will have different expectations than a $14 million company. With the data in hand, you can move to phase two—setting and assessing goals against your business targets.

Phase 3: Crafting Content That Drives Results

If your goal isn’t within the threshold—whether it’s low conversion rates, not enough calls, high cost per click, poor close rates, or low lead quality—you need to take action. In digital marketing, it all revolves around content.

For example, if you’re a plumbing HVAC company and want more air conditioning jobs because of record-breaking heat, but most of your content focuses on plumbing, that’s on you. To shift to more HVAC jobs, you need to create content around HVAC. If your landing page isn’t converting well, you need better content.

Content isn’t just what’s on your website. It’s also what your sales team says during appointments. If they aren’t closing deals or qualifying leads properly, that’s a content issue—they’re not saying the right things, addressing pain points, or handling objections effectively.

Even reviews and testimonials are content. If you want to rank higher on Google, especially in Google Maps, Google cares about the recency and quality of your reviews, not the amount of reviews.

Ultimately, it’s almost always a content problem.

Phase 4: Targeting the Right Audience

Targeting is about who sees your content. You can create great content, but if the right people don’t see it, what’s the point?

I see companies boasting about ranking for a thousand keywords and generating lots of traffic, but if that traffic is coming from places like India or Pakistan, and you’re a Las Vegas plumbing HVAC company, that’s not relevant. Targeting is about reaching the right person—the right customer.

If you’re trying to hire qualified technicians, are you reaching the right people? Are you attracting highly qualified candidates, or are you targeting unemployed people just out of prison? That’s the difference targeting makes.

Good content naturally leads into targeting. Even if your targeting is strong, it won’t matter if your content is bad. The combination of content and targeting is called relevance. Google, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms score this with a relevance or quality score, measuring how well your content aligns with your targeting.

If you put out videos on YouTube, are people staying and watching? That’s the connection between content and targeting. No matter your business, alignment between content and targeting is essential.

If your targeting is too broad—like trying to reach the entire planet because you do business consulting for any kind of business—you won’t have a good content-targeting fit. You need a tight connection between what you’re saying and who you’re saying it to.

Phase 5: Amplification—Boosting Your Impact

Amplification is when you start putting money behind your content. We use a technique called the dollar-a-day strategy for testing. You might have great ideas—short videos, stories, podcasts—but to see what works, you need to test them.

For example, let’s say I have podcasts with Tommy Mello and Roger Wakefield, discussing topics like becoming Googleable or building a marketing team. This content is highly relevant to trades businesses making between $5 and $100 million. However, for businesses under $1 million, this content might not be applicable—they’re not ready to implement these processes yet.

So, targeting ensures we’re reaching the right audience—people who feel like we’re speaking directly to them. Amplification is about putting a dollar a day behind each piece of content for seven days. If I have 10 or 15 pieces of content, I’ll spend $7 on each. This way, I can identify winners based on real engagement, not just likes or followers.

If a piece of content performs well—high relevance, strong content-targeting alignment, and good engagement—I’ll extend the campaign. I might run it for another 30 days at $1 a day, and if the market is big enough, I could increase it to $5 or $10 a day, targeting specific locations or audiences.

The beauty of this strategy is that once you identify winners, the algorithms (Google, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube) learn who the content is for based on engagement. This allows me to continue amplifying that content, even years later, instead of constantly creating new content.

For instance, a friend in financial services thought he needed to create 10 blog posts a week. I told him, “You don’t need to. You have some incredible stories and videos that have already driven leads. Put a dollar a day behind those existing winners.”

Amplification is about testing on different channels—Twitter, YouTube, etc.—to find what works best. If you don’t test, you’re relying solely on organic reach, which most businesses can’t depend on because they’re not media companies.

Phase 6: Optimization—Fine-Tuning for Maximum Results

There’s so much confusion, so many ideas, and opinions, and the stages build on each other. People often want to jump straight to amplifying, but it’s like randomly throwing spaghetti at the wall. Without plumbing in place first, you’re blind—like working in the dark with a blindfold on. You have no idea if it’s working or not.

The process has to be sequential: plumbing, goals, content, targeting, amplification, and then optimization, which is tuning. It’s my favorite part, but I can’t optimize if the first five stages aren’t in place. It’s a domino effect.

That’s the mistake people make—they try to optimize something that can’t be optimized because there’s no content, no plumbing, nothing foundational in place.

This approach is based on 35 years of experience, and I’ve spent over a billion dollars of other people’s money testing this methodology. This isn’t subjective; it’s data-driven. This is how systems operate—whether it’s Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, or any platform where you can run ads. I even run dollar-a-day ads on books on Amazon. They all follow the same fundamental campaign structure: account to campaign to ad. When you choose an objective—awareness, consideration, conversion—it follows this structure.

These social networks, which are free for users but paid for by advertisers, rely on the exact same underlying framework that I’ve laid out in these six phases. It’s not just because I say so—these principles are as real as gravity. You may not understand gravity, but that doesn’t mean you’re not subject to it. Gravity exists whether you know about it or not, just like these six sequential steps.

Ignoring these steps is like randomly throwing ingredients into an oven for a random amount of time at a random temperature—you’re probably not going to get the result you want. That’s what’s happening in the marketing world because people think there’s some secret. But it’s very simple; all of this is well-documented.

That’s what I love because that’s what we’re all about—creating processes for visibility, consistency, and risk mitigation, so people can follow a clear path instead of relying on obscure knowledge.