This is Stephan’s podcast appearance Rise of the Entrepreneur.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the latest episode of the Rise of the Entrepreneur. The Internet is changing on a daily basis, and there's no telling what is next. Remember when Yahoo was the most popular search engine in the world, and most of us were connected to the Internet through AOL? Nearly a decade ago, everyone was talking about MySpace.

And now it's all about Facebook. Now, we also include social media and mobile marketing. No matter what the latest trends are, one thing continues to stay the same. And that's how people rely on the search results to give them the information they're looking for. And the average person using the Internet probably doesn't even think twice about why Google delivers the search results that they do.

However, it's definitely on the minds of every site owner and online marketer. To rank in the search results, you need to understand search engine optimization and how the search engines work. It's easier said than done, right? So, to clear up any confusion and make the concept of ranking in the search results easier, today we have Stephan Spencer on the show, and he's made quite a career out of being one of the top SEO experts in the world.

We're all thirsty for more online traffic. So let's sit back and pass around the link juice in this latest episode of Rise of the Entrepreneur with special guest Stephan Spencer.

Hello, Stephan, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here today. How's everything going with you? Awesome. Thanks. All right. Now, we all know how powerful it is to have a business on the Internet, but if you aren't building quality content and links back to your site, it may never appear at the top of the search results.

And when it comes to search engine optimization, you literally wrote the book on it. With over a decade of experience in the world of online marketing and SEO, you've become quite the expert. Why don't you tell everyone about yourself, how you got started, and how it's led you to where you are today?  

No, sure. So, yeah, fun story. I actually dropped out of a PhD program in biochemistry to start my agency, which was called Netconcepts, back in 1995, a long time ago in the internet age. And it was an interactive agency back then when they didn't have SEO. So, I started doing SEO in the latter part of the nineties and really became specialized, and it kind of morphed my agency, which was called Netconcepts.

Into an SEO agency instead of just web development and design. And I've been doing SEO for a very long time. I sold my agency in 2010. It was an acquisition by a Cavario, and I had a successful exit, earned my earnings, and then left later in 2010 to do my own thing. So. As you said, I've been writing books and so forth, also speak at a lot of conferences, and I have, some individual, you know, solo consulting, clients that I work with, some retailers, some startups, some, business to business, a range of different types of folks.

Excellent. And when someone starts talking about SEO, they might be completely lost and think that you need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. And as you mentioned, it's so funny because you actually have your master's in biochemistry. But when you were back in school, you didn't want to be an SEO master. So, what were your plans early on?

Yeah, right. Well, you know, I actually started. I taught myself how to program when I was a kid, so my love of technology goes back to my very early days. I wrote my own bulletin board system from scratch, and as a young teenager, I taught myself assembly language, machine language, and other things programming languages as a kid. So yeah, I was quite a geek. I got so geeky spending all night long during the summer programming and so forth that I decided I had to stop it and become like a normal kid. So, I sold my computer and gave away all the software that I had acquired. Then I joined the track team, cross country team, and cycling club, and I went completely full circle.

But it's funny. I was studying molecular biology and then biochemistry, and I realized that this internet thing is really hot. I should jump into that. I actually met one of the guys from Netscape before anybody had even heard of Netscape at a conference in 1994. The guy's name is Rob McCool.

He's the guy who wrote Apache, and I was enamored. So I was like, "Okay, I gotta jump on this bandwagon." So I didn't join Netscape, but I did quit my Ph.D. and started a business without any knowledge of how businesses worked or marketing or anything. I just knew it. I had a penchant for doing this and didn't look back. So, it's been a fun ride.

Yeah, definitely. That's so funny. And was that the first company that evolved into Netconcepts?

Yeah, so I started it as Netconcepts and then ran it for 15 years. I actually decided to move to New Zealand four years into it. And I thought, you know, it's a coin toss whether I'm gonna be able to keep this business, this US-based business, running halfway around the world in New Zealand.

I'll keep a small team of people in my Madison, Wisconsin office to maintain our clients, which include folks like Birdseye and so forth. So we already have some good brands in our portfolio. It's just that it's the founder of living halfway around the world, starting another office there, and so forth.

I didn't know if it would work or not, but I figured, you know, if you don't try, you're never going to get it. So, I gave it a go and ended up living there for almost eight years. It was magic. It was just incredible. Then, I moved back to the States to sell my business. So, just a couple of years later, two and a half years later, I ended up doing that.

Very nice. I had the chance to visit New Zealand, and it was quite amazing.

Oh, it's, yeah, it's paradise. It's like the Lord of the Rings movies. It really is, except you don't have that big tower with the eye in it.

Oh, yeah, definitely. We actually went on one of the tours there and got to see where one of the castles was actually based. There was nothing there, but they would show us pictures of what it looked like in the movie and then what it was like when we were actually there. It's pretty cool. And so Netconcepts went from being a design and marketing company to actually SEO later on. What type of SEO did you focus on? Was it more for personal sites or more e-commerce-based?

Yeah, it was more e-commerce, and maybe it would be good to step back and describe what SEO is and what it's not. So, SEO, you could break it down into three major areas: content, architecture, and links. Those are the three pillars of SEO. So you've got content, which includes keyword research, identifying the right keywords to weave into your copy or to base your content plan on.

The architecture includes all the technical elements, not just the URL structure and the internal linking structure but also the geekier stuff like XML sitemaps and robust that takes TXT files and 301 redirects and, you know, the Microdata markup, all that sort of stuff. And then the third pillar, which arguably is the hardest to master is the linking side of it.

Really powerful, authoritative, important links point to your site. A lot of folks go after the shortcuts, and then they get burned because they get a Google penalty. So SEO, for the long term, focuses on those three core pillars, and then there are the shortcuts that will get you burned, and that's.

Black hat stuff that will catch up with you at some point. So if you think about how SEO is to Google engineers, it's manipulation, you know, it's playing tricks. It's not the sort of thing that they appreciate. They don't want to have their editorial control kind of messed with. So, if you try to take shortcuts and buy links or build low-quality links out of a third-world country for cheap, you're going to get burned. And it's more than just that. You're going to have to clean up the mess, but it may take a long period of time before Google lets you in. And they're kind of keeping records on you, like a rap sheet, over time.

So, as you cross the line, they may not penalize you yet, but they're going to make a note of it. And, eventually, you're going to get what you deserve. So you just have to kind of work within the guidelines and play by the rules because Google really is the one that holds all the cards. You know, it's the golden rule, "He who owns the gold rules." So, we basically have to play by Google's rules.

Right, exactly. And getting back to the e-commerce concept, we all know that it's easy to create content that's entertainment-based or celebrity-based, and you can get a lot of attention and link-backs. But for a retail site that just started on the Internet, it's not very easy for them to get people to talk about their website or link back to them. What's something that they should know about when they're first starting online?

Great. Well, first of all, it's not just e-commerce sites that suffer from this problem. Yeah, it's a pretty boring type of site. Usually, that is just an online catalog, but there are so many boring sites out there. They're just brochure wear, or they're very passive, kind of Not engaging, or maybe they're useful or interesting, but they're not remarkable, and that's the key to whether it's an e-commerce site or a business-to-business lead gen affiliate site or anything like that. You have to be remarkable.

And when I say remarkable, I'm using Seth Godin's definition of remarkable, which is simply this it's worth remarking about. If it's not worth remarking about, if it's not a purple cow, as Seth Godin also puts it, you're not gonna stand out from the crowd. There's so much noise on the Internet so much. I mean, it's like, what is it? Trillions of pages and trillions of URLs have been discovered by Google. It's just, yeah, a wash with information, so it's not enough simply to be good and have useful and interesting content. You have to be remarkable so that you have a shot at getting authoritative links. And it's not a given you could write the most compelling, amazing piece of content and work a great viral hook into it.

You know, there are different kinds of hooks, like humor hooks, utility quality hooks, new, worthy hooks, controversy hooks, et cetera. You can work in those great hooks and have a really remarkable article, top 10 list infographic personality test, whatever, and at the end of the day, who's gonna see it if your blog or whatever, wherever you're launching this from.

Let's say you tuck it away somewhere on your e-commerce site. How are they going to find it? How are they going to spread it if it's just being pushed out through your own social media channels and you don't have a big fan base or subscriber base, and you put it on your blog, and you don't have very many readers? So you have to enlist power users. To help spread the get that initial snowball effect happening,

Right? And so then these websites are trying to sell their stuff online, and they're good at selling, But they don't know how to do all this SEO and link building, and then they go on the Internet and start looking for SEO services, and they're overwhelmed They see very expensive services, and then they see the low-end services So, what should they be looking out for? What to do and what not to do?

Right. So, it's a dangerous place to play, honestly, because, like I said before, if you do the wrong thing, you buy the wrong types of services, and you will be digging yourself out of a very deep hole. You can't just pick up the phone and say, "Hey, Sergey, Larry, I'm really sorry. I kind of pushed the envelope here. Can you let me back in?"

So, depending on the type of penalty, it could be algorithmic, manual, or it could be a very long time before you get back in. For example, the Penguin algorithm, which looks for low-quality links, only gets updated maybe twice a year. It hasn't gotten an update since October of last year, so now we're already into July.

It's just painful. If you got hit by a penguin, you're going to be waiting a long time after you do the cleanup. You're just waiting, hoping that what you did was enough to get you back in. You can't. Do anything else because the algorithm has to have a data refresh before you get back in.

So, if you're looking at SEO services, first of all, start with referrals. And, get folks who rank highly, who you respect and trust, to refer you to folks who are really good and look for signs of credibility with those SEOs. Like, are they speaking at conferences or writing articles for reputable online journals and so forth, like Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch. Are they, or have they written books? You mentioned the book's author. I co-authored The Art of SEO. I authored Google Power Search. And, just coming out now with Social E-commerce in like a week. So, definitely very busy with book writing.

You know, you want to look for signs of credibility, and then here's the trick. This is going to save you a ton of money: Look for potential trick questions that you can ask. Basically, the idea is that you're giving them enough rope to hang themselves. So, for example, you could ask them about meta tags.

You could ask them for meta keywords specifically. Tell me your procedure for optimizing my meta keywords. That's a trick question. Why is it a trick question? Because meta keywords are a complete, utter waste of time, and they always have been. Google never counted them. Okay, so if you ever cared about Google and ranking in that algorithm, it never counted, and Google went on record to say this.

They did not count meta keywords from day one. They said this on their Google Webmaster Central blog. So you could ask them a question: What's your procedure for optimizing my meta keywords? And if they say anything other than meta keywords, seriously? Those never counted. Well, then you show them the door.

So you have maybe a half dozen of these trick questions that you slip into the conversation. I actually created a cheat sheet of such trick questions. So, you know, I am happy to provide your listeners with that document so that they can just send an email to my assistant admin@stephanspencer.com.

That, I think, is a really powerful approach, and most people don't take that. Another thing you could do, in addition to asking the trick questions, is bring on somebody who is an expert calling a favor. For example, if you're trying to hire an in-house SEO, get your high-powered SEO consultant to vet that candidate and maybe conduct a second interview.

I do that for some of my clients. I say, all right, well, tell me, you know, some of these things that you've done with, tell me about some of the tools that you use. And I catch all sorts of things. They're just making stuff up. It's ridiculous. It's like, "Wow, that tool doesn't do that. Interesting." 

That name of that metric, that SEO Majestic, metric, AC rank. Yeah. Yeah. They stopped using that several years ago, but yeah, thanks for playing. So it's a lot of fun.  

Yeah, definitely. I love that idea of putting the fake questions in there and seeing what type of responses you get.

Yeah, it's powerful.

Also, right now, there are so many companies sending out emails to everybody, trying to pull back all the link-building that they did from previous years. Yeah, whether it be an authentic original link or a garbage link that they paid someone to do. What are your thoughts on this?

Right, so this is tricky because you have to show Google some amount of kind of remediation that you are working hard to clean up the mess that you made. You can't just submit what's called a disavow file and just kind of wash your hands of it. You have to show that you've worked hard to clean up the mess.

So, you have to send out requests to Webmasters of sites where you've built low-quality links or purchased links and get those removed now. Google is going to understand that you're going to have a low hit rate, you know, probably a single-digit percentage of the people that you're outreaching to will respond.

But you have to do your best, document this, and submit it now if you're on the receiving end. I'm on the receiving end because I own a number of blogs, and I get these requests every so often. It's because the previous SEO was really dodgy and used tools like guestbook spamming to build evil links.

Blog comment spamming tools and so forth. Well, I'm getting picked up in the cleanup mass sometimes, even though I have reputable sites. I mean, I don't engage in any dodgy stuff, obviously, but the thing is, if their SEO, the rogue SEO built low-quality links by doing blog comment spamming.

Well, that looks bad to Google, even if it's a no-followed link. Sometimes, they've followed links. Not every blog no follows all their comments. And so, some spammy names, like used-car San Diego. If that got if that slipped through the cracks or somebody put a comment that was like, Oh, this was really insightful, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, used cars, San Diego or something, sometimes that slips through because you get so many comments and so forth. And, yeah, that's got to get cleaned up. So I'll honor those if I get those. but it's pretty rare that it's actually that kind of a spammy comment. That slipped through because I'm pretty good at moderating and have been since like 2004 when I started blogging.

It's probably more the fact that they're overaggressive and cleaning up links that are innocuous or helpful. And that's dumb because, of course, you're going to not only wash away the dirt, but a lot of good stuff that you're getting from your authoritative important links and so forth—they're just going to get caught in this net as well.

And then you lose a lot of your authority. So you have to be careful, use a tool like Link Detox, which gives you a sense of which links are innocuous or suspicious and which are most likely toxic and then just go after the toxic ones and then the suspicious ones. You need to kind of hand-check to make sure that you're going after the ones that are really dodgy and not that are actually okay.

You can also use a tool for your outreach, like Pitchbox, which will allow you to do multiple outreaches and track the workflow. You know, you can have an outreach pipeline report that you look at and so forth. And it's really important to do follow-ups when you're sending out these emails.

Like I said, you have to show some progress, even if it's a small percentage. You can't just have a couple of Webmasters removing links; it needs to be sizable enough. So, always send follow-up emails because the first email will probably get ignored. So you send a second one and then a third one if they don't respond. You know, wait a week, ten days, before you send a follow-up.

But a tool like Pitchbox will automate that for you. You write a template. Ideally, you customize each individual email that goes out, so it's not complete. You know, I just wrote kind of a generic thing. So if you mention something about their specific site that makes it clear that you've been to their site, you're gonna get a higher hit rate. Even if it's a spammy site, it's like, hey, I understand that we bought a link from you in 2011 and, you know, back then. Yeah, I don't know. I just basically made a bad choice. So, I, you know, you actually do have some decent content on here about cars and whatever. I just need the link removed.

Any chance that you could please, please, do that for me. I need to show some progress when I submit my disavow, and that would go over better. Then, just a generic email where it's not clear that you've ever been to their site. It could be a legitimate link, or it could be a spammy link. We don't know because you've never been there.

Yeah, definitely. The whole industry is seeing a lot of this right now on both sides, whether you're a blogger or you're actually a site. So these emails are going all over the place, and lots of people are trying to remove links.

Yeah, it's a mess.

So, what are some of the top tools that people can use to actually track their SEO efforts? Because they're going to be building links, but they're not sure what's working. So how can they kind of zone in on that?

Right. So, some of my favorite tools. First of all, you got it. Let me break them into categories. Link Analysis, you got Link Research Tools. Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, which is part of the Moz.com tool set, and Ahrefs are all excellent tools. I have paid accounts on all of them.

Of course, there are different third parties, algorithms, and data sets that make you crawl the web, build a link map of the Internet and run all sorts of queries and analyses. So, those are awesome tools. If you can only afford one or a couple of them, then I guess my favorite tool is Link Research Tools.

And, but you know, they're all really good. Like Moz.com, it is more than just an open site explorer; I love Open Site Explorer. You know, Rand Fishkin can actually come from Moz.com, co-founder. He is my co-author on The Art of SEO, so I'm a big fan, obviously. You have the Link Analysis Tools. You also have link outreach tools like Pitchbox, which is my favorite in that regard. You have ranking trackers like Authority Labs, and Moz.com has a ranking tracker as well. Let's see, you have on-page SEO Analysis Tools. Like for example, if you wanted to, let's say you're running a WordPress blog, WordPress site, and you want, as you're preparing content or, you know, crafting pages or whatever, you want to check it to see how good the keyword, prominence is and all sorts of other metrics and so forth.

You can use Scribe SEO, a WordPress plugin. That's really good. It's a paid tool, but it's definitely worth it. Let's see. There are Analytics Tools. If you have a big enterprise-type business, then you can look at a tool set like Rio SEO from Cabaret or Conductor. Yes, it's one of those bigger platforms.

If you're a smaller organization, maybe a tool like Raven. There's some cool analytics in there. Yeah, there's just a lot of different tools out there. There are hundreds of different tools out there. You just have to prioritize and get some guidance from somebody who's an expert on which things are the best given the budget that you have.

Oh, another great tool. This one's an installed program, so it's actually installed on your computer. It's Screaming Frog, which is kind of a funny name, but it's a great tool that will spider your website, or basically any website, and look for all sorts of SEO issues in terms of how you've linked and redirected.

It will show you all your pages, including title tags, the different types of redirects, broken links, etc. There are just a lot of great tools out there. But the tools are only as good as the operator. So, get a really good SEO to operate these tools because otherwise, it's a waste of money.

You can spend a bunch of money on an expensive tool set like Rio or Conductor, but if you aren't spending any serious time using the tool or you don't have a dedicated in-house SEO person or a really good SEO consultant helping you, then it's a waste of money.

Yeah, it's definitely a great supply of tools that you mentioned for us. Another great tool is your two books, Google Power Search and The Art of SEO, which you were a co-author on. How did the creation of these books come together, and how have they actually helped propel your business and brand to that next level?

Right. Well, I came out with The Art of SEO with my co-authors, of course. It's an O'Reilly book, by the way. I love O'Reilly, a huge fan, back in 2009. And that definitely helped take my credibility and reputation and so forth to a whole other level. I mean, of course, we had blue chips out of clients, folks like Zappos and so forth as clients. But being a book author, it is a whole other level, so that book actually came about because I really gave away a ton of great information that was not public knowledge at the SMX advanced conference and the session called Give it up, so I gave away some of my the best secrets things that I had figured out like back in the day you had a group to google results it was called host crowding where you would see multiple listings from the same site like you have two listings one would be indented underneath the other well, I figured out that first of all those get grouped because.

It's good for the user experience for the Google searcher, but they're not always in the same position. So, for example, one position one in position ten would get grouped to be positioned one and two. Then, I figured out I could change the search result URL and show nine results per page. Instead of the 10, normal 10, 8 results per page, 7, 6, I could make the indented result disappear and see its true position. So, I was giving really killer stuff away for free at this conference and Rand Fishkin, whom I didn't even really know, I knew of him. But we had never spoken at the next conference a month later because I'm on the speaking circuit a lot, right? So I saw each other in the speaker room, and he came up and gave me a hug. I was like, "Wow, it was nice to meet you."

He's like, "Dude, you really brought it at that last conference, at SMX advanced, you brought it. That was incredible," and we just started talking. I'm like, we should do a book together, and next thing you know, like a few days later, we had our publisher, we had O'Reilly, Danny Sullivan hooked us up with that, and we had a book now it started as the SEO cookbook. Still, we ended up combining forces with Other authors and making a bigger book called The Art of SEO, which is now in its second edition and will be in its third edition next year.

I also have a Social Ecommerce coming out here in about a week to two weeks, so these are all O'Reilly books. Google Power Search is a little one on how to be a power user of Google and find anything, which is very helpful for SEO if you're trying to do a forensic analysis and that sort of thing. It's very helpful to know all the advanced search operators and things like that. But social commerce is a little bit more of a departure from what I've been doing for all these years of SEO because social media is such an important component of SEO nowadays, as far as spreading your content marketing and getting links and social signals that corroborate the link signal and so forth. So, I decided to branch off into that direction of social media and e-commerce.

Very cool. It's always great to hear how our guests talk about the books and how much of a difference it makes for them to actually get to the next level. And it leads to so much more speaking and just branding for themselves and their companies.

Absolutely. And if you've never thought about writing a book, maybe you hate to write, you can hire a ghostwriter and, get what's in your head out onto paper without all the pain. Right? So, for example, I'm working on a self-help book on personal transformation because I went through a huge transformation, which I'm happy to go into if you'd like.

Right. But the idea that I could write about the physical transformation, emotional transformation, spiritual career business, all that in a book really appealed to me because I've gone through some such transition over the last few years, but I didn't really have the time to work on another book, so I did hire a ghostwriter to help me with that one, and I have so much stuff in my head.

I just dump it out by having phone interviews with my ghostwriter. He pulls stuff out of me, and I just start rambling on about all sorts of stories and tips and tricks and so forth. He captures all that, gets it transcribed, and then massages it into a book. So, there is a book in you. If you have the expertise, knowledge, and great stories to share. You should share it, and putting it into a book is powerful. It really gives you a platform.

Yeah, definitely. And as you mentioned, getting a ghostwriter because you see all these people coming out with books, and then you think, do all these people really know how to write a book, and I don't? And then to hear you explain how it's actually done. That's really great.

Right. And if you just start with that book outline and then you just kind of on a weekly basis or just establish some sort of schedule, get on the phone with your ghostwriter or just whip out your recording device and just start writing. Talking to that topic, you know, and just work your way through that book outline. Now you have some great content. You can get that transcribed or services like casting words dot com that will do transcription for you. And then your ghostwriter can massage that into a cohesive book that you then just kind of review and make edits to or provide feedback on, and then you get a publisher.

You can get a publisher first. That's ideal. That means you have to put together a book proposal. Usually, in pays to have connections. You get introduced as if you have another colleague who's been published by a publisher. You want to get published with get them to intro you and that sort of thing.

Very cool. And I also wanted to ask about your daughter, Chloe, because when we talked several years ago, she was making some good money with Google AdSense and her Neopets site, and that was several years ago. So, what has she been up to recently?

Right, so yeah, she started blogging and SEO stuff back when she was fourteen, and now she's twenty-three, so that was a long time ago. Neopets was definitely a popular site back then. It's kind of waned, and it's popularity. They had tens of millions of users. It was owned by Nickelodeon, the TV network. And so she wrote about the popularity of that website by writing a blog. It was a kind of cheat sheet and game cheat site. I gave all sorts of tips and tricks and so forth.

And then, I just kind of gave her a bit of advice. She did all the work, so she did the keyword research. I don't identify which keywords to check and all that. By the way, that's a whole category of tools I forgot to mention. So, for keyword research tools like a Google Keyword Planner, you just have to have a Google AdWords account.

You don't have to spend money on AdWords; you just have to have an account to use it. There's Google Trends, which also has a YouTube feature. So you just change web search to YouTube search, and then you can get all this YouTube data. YouTube's the number two search engine, so you definitely want to take advantage of YouTube and build out your channel and, optimize your videos and so forth.

There's the keyworddiscovery.com tool from Trellian, which is a paid tool. Microsoft, Bing has a keyword tool. So, yeah, there are plenty of great keyword tools out there. So, anyway, back to Chloe, my daughter. She kind of got bored with Neopets after a few years. She was making great passive income with the site, monetizing with Google AdSense. And that went on for a while. She's still getting small checks, but she hasn't blogged there for years.

The site is Neopetsfanatic.com, but yeah, she's been doing really well for a number of years, and she'd speak at conferences and so forth, like blog here and blog world expo and YPulse and so forth. She'd get great links from the media coverage, the bloggers who were there, and so forth, which further enhanced her rankings for Neopets and Neopets-related keywords. So yeah, it was just kind of a virtuous cycle. She also built some other sites on the side, like QuizFanatic.com, for teenage girls to take quizzes, and so forth.

But yeah, now she's just kind of, I don't know, let those sites go to seed because, to be honest, you know, when you're a father, and you see, you know, what are you doing with your, with yourself? You should be, you know, doing this or that or the other thing, you know, that you always want them to be doing something that they're not doing or vice versa.

So, it's like, okay, she's going to live her own life; she's going to let those sites go. That's okay. She still speaks at conferences, though, so that's pretty cool. And she writes occasionally for the Huffington Post, so she's still got some cool things going. Yeah, I really want her to get back into it and build some new sites, but we'll see.

Yeah, it's wonderful to hear that she did so well early on, and then maybe she'll come back to it like you did because you also had that break earlier on.

Yeah, that's funny. I did, and then I kind of went to the other end of the spectrum and then came back years later, even after not even taking computer classes or marketing classes, so it was kind of funny.

All right, when we come back, Stephan Spencer is going to take the hot seat in the pit of fire.   Are you stuck in the endless battle against the nine-to-five and living paycheck to paycheck? Or maybe you already have a business or brand of your own but are struggling to take it to the next level.

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All right, Stephan. Here we are in the pit of fire, and we have three hot questions for you. The first one is that, in addition to speaking at various events, you do a lot of traveling around the world. What are some of the favorite places you've been to, and where are you trying to get to next?

Oh, great question. Okay, so I have been to India, and that was incredible. I went to Chennai, Southern India, to a place called Oneness University, which is just kind of like an ashram. It's like a big temple with incredible energy, and, yeah, it's just had some really amazing transformative experiences there.

So, Oneness University, definitely check that out. I've been to Jerusalem, and that is incredible. I love that city. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. So I did that on a Tony Robbins platinum partner trip. So I was part of Tony's. I don't know if you know who Tony is, but I'm a big fan, and it's got this thing called platinum partnership. And you can travel the world with him and a hundred different folks who are operating at a whole other level. Right? So there's this concept of choose your peer group, and choose your destiny sort of thing where you're, you are the average of the people you hang out with the most. So, if you want to change your life, just simply change your peer group.

So, I was hanging out with people who are billionaires and stuff, going on these crazy exotic trips. Tony Robbins is a great coach and motivational speaker and everything. He's like the king of transformation, right? So, yeah, we went to Israel and Egypt on one trip. We went to India on another trip that wasn't to Oneness University. I went to Oneness on a follow-up trip later on, but we did go and bring the Oneness monks to this other trip in India. We were in Udaipur, which is an incredible place with castles and palaces and so forth on little islands. It's amazing. So those are a couple of my favorite places. I've got plenty more.

And where would you like to get to that you haven't been to yet?

All right. about Bali. Yeah. Love to get to Bali and Tahiti. Yeah. I've been to Fiji. That was amazing. The people there are so friendly and so genuine, really kind of solidly earth people.

Really cool. So, some of those more Polynesian places would be fun, and China would be too. I haven't been to anywhere else in Asia other than India. So, yeah. China, Hong Kong, Singapore, 

I'm sure you'll definitely get to those places soon enough, as well.

Hope so.

And so, for the second question, what was that life-transitioning moment that you talked about earlier

Right, so back in 2009, I was going through a tough time. I was going through a divorce and everything. I was not a happy camper. And I was really geeky, super nerdy and kind of awkward, so I went to a Tony Robbins event called Unleash the Power Within. At the end of the first day, we did a firewalk where we walked on 2,000-degree hot coals, and that was a transition point in my life.

Everything shifted because I realized that if I could walk on 2,000-degree hot coals without burning my feet, I could do anything. So, two weeks later, I got LASIK surgery. A couple of months after that, I had a hair transplant. Then I lost 25 pounds and started working out at the gym, and, more than that, I was literally unrecognizable.

I looked 15 years younger. It was amazing. And the physical changes were out; the external changes weren't even as extreme as the internal changes. I felt 15 years, 20 years younger. I felt just alive and vibrant and healthy and excited. And this, it was incredible. So, it all started with that Tony Robbins event.

I did a bunch of other Tony Robbins events, some other events, read some self-help books, watched some videos and everything. I just, yeah, delved fully into it and completely shifted my whole life. It was incredible. And, you know, there's no looking back. I mean, I'm a different person than I was four years ago.

Amazing.

I mean, if you Google image search me, you will be shocked to see what I used to look like. Yeah, it's a completely different person. Pretty cool.

Yeah, that's definitely a great story. And it leads right into our last question. Yeah. What is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to you as a result of your personal and business success?

Wow, okay. That's an interesting question. All right, so I'm gonna say that I met my soulmate through a Tony Robbins event. There are a lot of exciting things that happen, but this is the most impactful for me because, I mean, she's changed my whole destiny, so it was a really magical experience.

I prayed for her to show up at 12 and asked God that she show up right away, literally right away. 12 hours later, a mutual friend introduced us, and it was at the very end of a Tony Robbins event called Date with Destiny. Right when it finished, people were leaving, and everything was fine. We met in the lobby, and let's see.

Well, I know that 18 hours after we met, we said I love you to each other and Nine days after I proposed to her. She said I'm not ready. Of course, a woman's got to have some practicality and on and sense of, you know, some common sense because I didn't have any right so for nine days, That's pretty extreme, but I then proposed to her again, nine months later, and she said yes.

We're getting married next year. And yeah, it's just been this magical journey. It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't started on this path. Somebody talked me into going to this Tony Robbins event, and then I ended up walking on fire, which I thought I'd never do. Lo and behold, a Whole different destiny unfolded for me. It's pretty cool.

Excellent story. Congratulations on the engagement, and it's just been great to hear your story. So before you go, please let everyone know how they can find you online and what you're currently working on.

You can find me on Stephanspencer.com, which is my personal site. I've got a lot of blog posts there and articles and things like that on SEO and online marketing and on self-development topics as well.

I also have scienceofseo.com, which is a site for learning about cutting-edge tactics and strategies for SEO. So that's the ScienceofSEO.com. I am on Twitter at SSpencer. Facebook, of course, and Stephan Spencer are my usernames. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and so forth.

And what am I working on now? Well, I'm building out my online training and coaching program, ScienceVest CEO, and some other personal transformation-related ones. So if you're interested in learning more about how to go through a big transformation and not want, you don't want to spend a quarter of a million dollars, as I did on Tony Robbins and following him all around the world and basically, not being able to work full time because you're following him all around the world.

I did that for three years. Then, you might want to check out my book and the information products I'm working on. So that's what I'm up to.

All right, Stephan. It's been awesome. Thanks so much for being here, and I'm sure our audience will be in touch with you soon. All right. Thanks. Thanks again to Stephan for not only sharing his insights on SEO and business but also for his personal stories of growth and success.

A common occurrence with guests on the show is that many of their life-changing moments happen as a result of getting outside of their comfort zone. Stephan, while something like SEO is something that you can manage and have control over, your life might not be as easy to manage. With that said, I just want to stress the importance of living every day to its fullest and pushing your fears aside.

There are only seven days in a week, and someday isn't one of them. As always, thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Rise of the Entrepreneur. Be sure to check out my blog at ZachJohnson.com for show notes and to learn more about how to rank higher in the search results.

Until next time, this is Zach Johnson. Today, I'm going to leave you with a quote from Tony Robbins: "When it seems impossible, when it seems like nothing is going to work, you're usually just a few millimeters away from making it happen. "