G’day folks, Troy Dean here from WP Elevation. And I’m very excited this week to be speaking with Stephan Spencer on the podcast. He is one of the original authors of The Art of SEO, book. We talk about writing books, we talk about public speaking, we talk about being on television, and we also talk about the possibility that robots are going to replace all of us. It’s a fascinating episode. It’s a little longer than usual, but there is tons of gold in this episode. Stay with us.

G’day folks, Troy Dean here, and I’m very pleased to have you with me on the show, Stephan Spencer. Hey Stephan, how are you?

I’m doing great, thanks.

Awesome, thanks for joining us on the show. We are gonna be talking all things SEO, we’re gonna be talking writing books, we’re gonna be talking speaking, how to get on television. But before we get there, let’s fill people in for those people who don’t know who you are. Tell us a little bit about your background and why you’re here.

Yeah, I’m most known for The Art of SEO, which is the Bible of SEO. I actually have it right here for your viewers.

Wow. That’s a heavy book.

Yeah. It’s a little intimidating for some. It’s a thousand pages.

Whoa.

So, I’m co-authoring that. I did get some help, of course, but yeah, it’s in its third edition, and it’s the Bible on SEO fundamentals.

How did that come about? How did you get yourself into a position? Because the saying is, well, we’ve got to hire that guy because he wrote the book. It’s the ultimate authority play, isn’t it?

I never get tired of hearing that one.

And it’s the ultimate authority play, isn’t it? It’s like, well, if anyone’s ever negotiating on price or negotiating on your process or trying to micromanage you, you’re like, “Dude, I wrote the book on this stuff. It’s like. What are you arguing with me for?” So how did that come about? How did you get into a position where you were involved in writing a book called The Art of SEO?

Yeah, so the book came about because I was being very generous in sharing my knowledge at a conference called SMX Advanced. It was the very first SMX Advanced, and I believe in karma, business karma, that what you put out there in the universe, you get back, and you shouldn’t put stuff out in the universe.

Because you expect stuff back, but just because that’s how you operate in the world. So, I gave away some of my best tips. The actual second idea was called Give It Up. And I came up with that idea. And yeah, at this conference, everybody who was in the SEO industry, who was big at the time was there, including Rand Fishkin.

Three weeks later, I hadn’t really spoken to him before. So, when he came up to me in the speaker room at the next conference, which was SES Toronto, a few weeks later, he came up and gave me a hug. And I wasn’t expecting that because I had never spoken to him before. And we just had a great conversation. We decided to do a book together.

Well, so Rand’s a hugger.

He is, yeah.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years. Rand Fishkin, of course, is also the founder of Moz, which is the fabulous SEO software that we all know and love. So, you’d never written a book before, before the out of SEO, and there were four, including yourself and Rand, there are four co-authors of that first edition, is that right?

Yeah. Here, let me take a drink of water.

Sure. There was, I believe, yourself, Eric, Jesse and Rand. Did you all work on the first edition?

Yeah, we worked on the first and second editions, and then the third edition, Rand dropped off.

Cool. How was that collaborating on a book of that magnitude with three other authors? What was the process like?

Yeah, it’s really, you know what they say, camel is a horse designed by committee. Yeah, it’s tricky. It’s really, really tricky. Getting the voice to be consistent. We had a ghostwriter help us, more of a ghost editor. Yeah, so get it all in one consistent voice, fill in the gaps and so forth.

And why SEO, like why did you end up in that place where SEO became something that, you know, I was talking to someone the other day, a friend of mine, Gonzales, and he said, you know, “Life, we’re built to solve problems, and if we don’t choose the problems to solve, then life will just throw us” problems to solve. And so his philosophy is he likes to be proactive, and he likes to actually choose the rabbit holes he wants to go down rather than just have life throw him a rabbit hole to go down. So, why did SEO become the rabbit hole that you wanted to go down and become a specialist in?

Well, I was actually studying for a PhD in biochemistry, and I decided, you know, that this wasn’t my path. This was 1994, and SEO wasn’t really a thing yet. Web development was just starting to really take off. People were using Mosaic back then as a web browser. And at a conference in 1994, I met one of the guys behind Netscape. It was the creator of the Netscape server, which was also, at the time, the creator of the NCSA web server. Later, he became the creator of Apache. Well, I met Rob McCool at this second international worldwide web conference. Tim Berners-Lee was the keynote speaker on the web. And I was starstruck. So I’m like, “Wow, I need to get into this internet game.”

I had made a couple of websites on the side for fun, but I realized that this was my path. And it goes back to where I was in my early years, writing my own bulletin board system, BBS, from scratch. When I was a kid teaching myself assembly language, not just basic, but assembly language as a kid, like programming and hexadecimal, I was a total geek. So, it made a lot of sense for me to go back to my roots and start building a website. 

I dropped out of my PhD and started an agency called Net Concepts, and then we started specializing in SEO over the next few years, and one of my big breaks, this is a great tip for all of your audience. It’s just a blue chip client, even if you have to buy that client. It’s what I did in the early days before we had big-name clients as our SEO clients. We had big-name clients but from a web development side of things. Bird’s Eye was a client.

Wow.

It’s a big client.

It’s a big client, yeah.

What we didn’t have was big SEO clients. And I wanted a huge one that was an e-commerce client but also a household name. So we went after Target, Target.com.

Wow.

And we offered to do a website audit and an SEO audit for free in exchange for a testimonial. Wow. That’s genius because if you get a testimonial from a huge company like Target that you post on your website and in your marketing collateral and so forth, you don’t; it’s basically like having a thousand-page book. I mean, yeah. We didn’t even talk about my other two books.

We’ll get there. We’ll get there. So that’s awesome social proof. I imagine that doing a web SEO audit on a website like Target.com must have cost you considerable resources.

It did, but it was well worth it. I mean, if we’re going to spend, let’s say, $10,000 at a trade show.

Yeah, that’s hitting me.

I’d rather spend that doing an audit for Target for free and getting a testimonial and the ability to use their logo.

Yeah. So you then, if I’m not mistaken, you then sold that business. And what have you been kind of doing since you got out of the agency game?

Yeah. And to be fair, I wouldn’t even call it an agency. I would call it an amalgamation of agency and software-as-a-service revenue because we were actually generating the majority of our revenue at Netconcepts from software-as-a-service (SaaS revenue). So, what we were doing is we were taking very difficult to optimize websites, large-scale websites that would take maybe a year or two to optimize because of issues with their platform, their e-commerce platform, and the technology stack and everything. It’s not like these days where you have, you know, most websites running WordPress and everything, it’s pretty easy to optimize. But when you’re running something like IBM WebSphere commerce, it’s painful to implement just the simplest changes like URL rewrites.

So, I had a technology platform that allowed us to go in and just optimize everything without doing the changes on their web server. It was at a middle layer. It was the first proxy technology, so we were able to essentially kind of swap in stuff without doing it on their server. It looked like it was on their server because of the proxy. So, we were charging on a cost-per-click basis for that 15 cents a click. We were making a lot of money off of click revenue, millions. And that was a good time. So, that’s the main reason why my agency “Got acquired” was that technology platform and all that recurring revenue. Clients like Zappos pay us a lot of money.

Wow.

I’ll just say seven figures, too.

Wow.

Just kidding you.

Wow.

And when you compare that to SEO consultants back in the day, at that time, they were charging, at best, maybe ten grand a month. You know, maybe you can find 15 grand sort of size clients, maybe. That’s it.

That’s a good comparison.

No comparison. Six figures a month can click revenue from SEO was just a game changer.

Wow. And so since you sold that business, obviously you’ve been writing books, since you’ve been doing some speaking, what does your business today look like? What’s the kind of the mix and the makeup?

Yeah, so I’m still doing consulting. It’s pretty selective who I take on because I decided not to build another agency and have another big team with, you know, we had at our peak like 65 staff and three different countries. One of those businesses is still going. I don’t have any involvement in it. Net Concepts China is still operating and doing really, really well to service the Chinese market. But yeah, Net Concepts in the US got acquired by Cavario.

Cavario was acquired by Dentsu Aegis, a multi-billion dollar ad agency conglomerate. So the team, the technology, and so forth kind of got absorbed by different companies, but then my personal brand—you know, here’s another thing too—for your audience is always look after your personal brand. Cause that’s what you carry with you to the grave—your company.

Like for you, WP Elevation that’s your company today, but is it gonna be your company in 20 years?

Yeah, that’s right. That’s fine.

So, you always will have your personal brand, and you just keep putting that off. Oh yeah, I really should work on my Troy Dean website.

Yeah.

We have time. That’s a bad idea to push that to the sidelines because that’s the brand you carry with you all the way to the grave.

Have you been stalking me, Stephan? Have you been? Is my office bugged? Very timely conversation. I actually said to my wife last night. I wonder if anyone’s gonna tune in and watch my live streams when I’m 64. You know, like, you know, like, oh yeah, I hope so too. But I’m kind of starting to think, you know, 20 years in the future. And I’m starting to have that conversation with myself and the team here about my personal brand. It’s a conversation that we’re actually having right now as we speak. So it’s very timely that you bring this up. Anyway, sorry.

Yeah, so that’s part of being on TV. That’s part of having your own books. So, this book, Google Power Search, you notice is solo-authored. Because I wanted to have a book that I was the only author of. I also wanted to make sure that my personal brand wasn’t just pigeonholed into SEO. Oh, he’s the SEO guy. That’s not his first.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, I have The Art of SEO, but I also have this book, Social ECommerce. Social ECommerce has nothing to do with SEO. I’m multi-talented. I have depth and breadth, both. So I can go deep into social media marketing as well as SEO and other areas too, conversion optimization, e-commerce, email marketing and so forth. You don’t want to be a one-trick pony. Build your personal brand so that you have at least two distinct areas. That’s another way to prevent the robots from taking your job. You do one thing, and programming is to be fair. One of those things will be replaced later by the robots driving cars and, stacking shelves and checking people out at the register at the grocery store.

So, you have, as a WordPress developer or consultant, you have more staying power in comparison to a lot of these other jobs. However, if you compare the person who has one set of skills and one key area, let’s say it’s WordPress. And they have another area that has maybe nothing to do with WordPress. Let’s say music or, let’s say, horticulture. I’m looking at your plant in the background. I don’t know what horticulture is. Right. And you can compare these and say, well, there’s not a lot of overlap here. Let’s figure out a way to merge these two disciplines together.

Do something really creative. You could be the WordPress consultant for horticulturists, big agriculture, or whatever, right? So you can find these separate disciplines. Like for me, programming, being able to code this technology that I described, Gravity Stream for doing a reverse proxy and fixing all these issues with your SEO without having to get into all the underlying platforms and having the creativity to come up with crazy, brilliant, marketing campaigns that will get lots of links, even though these are still both part of SEO, they’re so completely different. One is more like an ad agency creative director, and the other is like a coder or a CTL. Having those disciplines being able to co-mingle in one brain keeps the robots at bay for a little longer.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my close friends, and I consider him a business mentor, Nikhil Thukral, who’s been on the podcast. He gave a presentation once in which he said, use robots to scale your business and employ humans to find creative solutions and add creativity to your business because one thing that robots will always struggle with is, is how to make a judgment call on what is best for the customer.

In fact, on the weekend, I was reading an interesting article about the algorithm and how Facebook recommends, every day in your news feed on Facebook, there’s a post that says on this day, a year ago, this is what you were doing, and it got a lot of engagement. Maybe you want to promote this to your friends again and share this memory from a year ago. There was a story about a guy whose news feed said on this day a year ago. You know, there’s this lovely music that the Facebook robot video, you know, robots put together and encouraging him to promote this post.

I think I know where this is going.

He was in a really bad car accident. It was pictures of him being carted off to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, and it was quite traumatic for him to revisit that. It’s because no human beings are checking on the content. It’s the robot just saying, “Hey, this got lots of likes and comments. Maybe you want to share this again?” So, you know, becoming a robot may, and this is the conversation we have on a daily basis in our Facebook group is, WordPress consultants are saying, well, with things like the grid and AI, developing a website from a Photoshop file into a website is going to be completely automated and there’ll be no human beings involved.

My argument is that may be the case, but you still need to know what text to put on the page. You still need to know how to craft a message to get your audience to take the action that you want them to take, whether it’s buying a book, whether it’s buying something at your e-commerce store, booking you for a speaking gig, whatever it is. Robots are millennia away from being able to do that because the one thing that is really difficult to automate and to robotize is the conversation that you have between two people and how you understand each other.

Well, let’s agree to disagree on this one.

Oh really?

Yes. Here’s the problem. Most people have a linear time horizon. So, when you look at the actual horizon, you don’t think, “Wow, this is pretty cool. We’re sitting on a globe.” You look into the distance, and you see, your brain thinks flat. This is how we think about time as well. But it’s not how things are progressing. The law of Accelerating Returns is all about how technological change is exponential because of Moore’s law and Metcalfe’s law. Moore’s law being that every 18 months, the technology, the processing power either doubles or the price of that same processing power halves or both. Then, Metcalfe’s law states that the network and the value of the network grow exponentially with the size of the network. So that’s why the first couple of fax machines were worthless. But then 100 people having fax machines more valuable and then a thousand fax machines and quickly it became massively valuable because enough people had fax machines and then the internet and you know, then the next thing whatever the next thing is. So with all this exponential advance of technology happening, according to rakers. Do you know who Ray Kurzweil is?

I know the name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know Ray Kurzweil from Singularity University. Is that right?

Singularity University, he wrote, The Singularity is Near. The Age of Intelligent Machines was another one of his earlier books in The Age of Spiritual Machines. So, he’s very good at predicting the future, and a lot of his predictions have come to pass. And he’s also an incredible technologist and inventor who invented speech synthesizers, music synthesizers, all these.

His prediction is that, or his analysis is that in the last hundred years, we had X amount of technological growth. And at today’s rate of change, because things have sped up so much, the last 100 years would fit into the next ten years. Or no, 20 years, 20 years, the next 20 years. But because it’s continuing to speed up.

See, that’s if today’s rate of change held up for the next 20 years, but that’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna continue to speed up. So, it’ll actually fit in the next 12 years. The last 100 years, think about 100 years ago, telling somebody that, yeah, we’re gonna have these boxes where you’re gonna put TV dinners in, where people will be walking down the street, and they’ll have a little wire going into their pocket and that’s so they can talk on the phone to somebody in China. It’s like, “What sounds like fantasy.”

Yeah. Well, television, you know.

So, imagine what life is going to be like in 12 more years; that’s essentially like a hundred years ago, fast-forwarding into today. So, 12 years ago, I mean, 12 years from now will be like, uh, the last hundred years. So, wrap your head around that. And you think, okay, computers today are not very good at emotional intelligence. They’re not very creative. They can’t create a symphony. For example, they can’t create or compose a symphony. They can’t paint a masterpiece. But how long do you think? You said it was a millennium. It’s not gonna be a millennium; it’s gonna be the singularity point is actually, according to Ray Kurzweil, around 2055 to 2065.

Wow.

That’s where all known laws of the universe break down in terms of evolution. And so there are different kinds of singularities. Quantum singularity is a black hole. The known laws of physics break down inside of a black hole inside of a quantum singularity. Evolutionary singularity, which we’re going to hit in, you know, 2055, 2065, somewhere in that ballpark, all the known laws of evolution break down. But well before then, like 2045 or 2035, somewhere around there, computers will be smarter than us.

That’s a scary thought.

So, we will augment our brains with computers, or we will upload our consciousness into the cloud. There will be very significant changes. So if you think about it well, ten years from now, it’s gonna be a lot like what ten years ago was, but maybe with more cool tech. Oh no. So, we gotta think about like what’s two years down the pike gonna look like, what’s five years, what’s ten years, and you have to think exponentially instead of thinking linearly like we’re looking at the horizon and we got to train our brains like to remember we’re on a globe. We’re on a sphere.

So, as consultants, our value really is in the relationships that we have with our clients and the problems that we solve for our clients. How does that impact what our job looks like in 10 years’ time?

Well, you always have to be ahead of the curve in terms of knowing that your client needs to rely on you, not just to be proactive, but to be preemptive. If you’re waiting for the client to call you asking for help with a particular issue like, “Hey, what’s this thing about AMP (Accelerated mobile pages)? I just heard about that. Tell me about it.” Never, ever, ever should that be happening. The client should be relying on you to say, “Hey, there’s this thing that you should know about. It’s AMP (Accelerated mobile pages). Let me tell you about it, and you can tell me if you think this is a fit for you, and then we can design a roadmap for getting this implemented.”

So they rely on you to be preemptive. And if you have this long view of the future, like, okay, I understand that the law of accelerating returns means stuff that we think is science fiction will be science fact a lot sooner than we anticipate. So, I need to be ahead of the curve here. I need to keep my client informed and think bigger picture and outside the box and more into this fantastic future. I think that makes you a lot more valuable and strategic instead of just a vendor who is a service provider at the moment.

Yeah, I agree 100%. Uber just invested $1.4 billion and ordered 24,000 driverless Volvo XC90s to be delivered in the next five or six years. If you’d said to me when I was a kid that we’d be getting in driverless cars and to go to work or to go out to the theater at night, I would have thought you were a lunatic, and I would have thought that you would have been reading too many Isaac Asimov books but turns out driverless cars are gonna be here in our lifetime, which is a very exciting thing.

It’s not just in our lifetime; it’s in the next few years. Yeah. I’d say, anticipate that you’ll be stepping into driverless cars and sitting down in them and going for rides in the next three to four, maybe five years max. Yeah, that’s that’s the reality. And so if you are Like the equivalent of an Uber driver today, like, oh, yeah, I’m doing low-level stuff. I know it’s it’s got a limited shelf life, but you know, it’s making good money right now. Yeah, I’m in the ecosystem doing WordPress stuff. That’s a commodity.

Yep. Yeah.

You are like the Uber driver, and there are Uber drivers who have their heads in the sand, and that’s the worst case. They don’t believe that they’re going to be replaced by robots. There are ones who say, well, I’m just going to make hay while.

The sun shines. Yeah.

Well, while it’s, you know, good to do that while that works, and then there were those who were just like, okay, I’m in a dead-end industry, and I need to get out now. I think all of your audience needs to be in that last category. If you’re doing something that’s a commodity that doesn’t have a future, get out now because if you go in later, you’re behind the curve. Other people are blazing the trail, are making the innovations, and you’re trying to play catch up.

So, what does an SEO consultant’s job look like in five years’ time? I mean, won’t the algorithm just make all the recommendations and do all the work and effectively replace you as an SEO consultant?

Well, that’s a great question. And that applies to what we were just talking about. So you can be the kind of SEO consultant or the kind of WordPress consultant who is doing the old school stuff, the commodity type stuff. Well, I’m doing keyword research, figuring out which keywords are better than other ones in terms of being more popular or more attainable to achieve a top 10 ranking for or having higher relevance to what my industry is about or whatever. So that’s really basic fundamental SEO. I’m not saying to neglect it, but I’m saying that it has a limited shelf life. Going in and optimizing your content to incorporate those keywords that you identify as more popular than others using better synonyms than the ones that nobody is searching for. 

That’s really basic blocking and tackling. Yeah. That’s all you do. You’re gonna be dead. In terms of the industry, you’re gonna be left behind. So that’s in terms of SEO. The same thing applies in terms of WordPress. If you’re doing the low-level stuff, it’s like, oh yeah, well, you know, I need to go in and optimize the various things with the WordPress theme, like I’m using such and such framework, and then child theme optimization work I got to do and go into the settings and that sort of stuff. If that’s all you’re doing, you will be replaced by a robot. So if you see that, all right, I’m doing something that’s going to be replaced by robots, like I’m essentially an Uber driver, then jump out of that as soon as you possibly can, even if it pays well because it’s not sustainable and that will put you on the back foot.

And what should we be jumping into if we’re jumping out of doing that kind of low-level work?

Yeah. So, let’s say it’s an SEO. You’d be looking for stuff that is the cutting-edge part of SEO. So you start digging into the rank brain and really understanding that Google algorithm is all about machine learning. It’s machine learning right now. It’s not full AI artificial intelligence. It will be. Everything will be running off of artificial intelligence at Google, only a matter of time. So the way that you can kind of go to battle against an AI is with what? Another AI. So, you get to become an expert on artificial intelligence if you want to survive and thrive in this new age of SEO.

It’s interesting. One of the most successful campaigns that Facebook campaigns that we have run ourselves internally, I’ve got some advice from a Facebook ad consultant who said, “Don’t do any targeting. Just run an experiment for a couple of weeks. Don’t do any targeting. Just throw your ad up, target, you know, everyone on Facebook and see what happens.” Because the theory is, and Facebook has actually been saying this, is that we have enough data to target your ads for you. Don’t worry about the targeting. We’ll figure that out. Let the algorithm decide who to show your ads to. You just write good copy and make a good offer.

That’s a terrible idea.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. That’s what I thought as well.

That’s a terrible idea.

That’s what I thought as well. But it worked. So we ran this.

The thing is, it worked okay, but you don’t know what you could have gotten if you’d done something completely different.

That is true. But what was interesting for me was the experiment was, let’s not do any targeting and let’s just let Facebook figure out the targeting for us. And it was a very limited experiment. We were just experimenting with cost per lead. That was the metric that we were measuring. And we did really well over about a three-week period. We were spending good money. You can’t do this at $20 a day because there’s just not enough volume there for Facebook to decide. So I think we were spending a couple of hundred bucks a day, which was enough for Facebook to say, okay, yep, this is where we’re going to show the ads. I figure it’s just linked to our Facebook page and they just on the fly build like a lookalike audience and know who to show the ads to. 

And it worked really well for a very limited period of time. So, that was interesting to me that I think, potentially, in five years’ time or maybe even three years’ time your Facebook ads will all just be completely automated. You just say, “Hey, I want to spend this much on Facebook ads over the next three months,” and you just hit a button, and the algorithm and the AI do the whole lot for you is it I mean, is that am I off track here or is that gonna be is that a possibility?

Well, I would say that you’re in a much better position if you are in control of an algorithm rather than the algorithm controlling you. So, in that position, I would say I wouldn’t rely on the Facebook algorithm to do the best job possible because their incentives are not aligned with your incentives. Right, have you ever read the book Freakonomics?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great book, great, great book. And it’s all about the incentives that are baked into the system and they are aligned or misaligned. That’s why teachers cheat in public school systems in America, that’s why sumo wrestlers will throw fights and all these fascinating stories that were in that book all boil down to the incentives in the system did not align well with our incentives and or the incentives you just didn’t see them. What would happen is counterintuitive stuff because of these incentives. So, if you think about it, I want to advertise at the best cost per lead with Facebook. That’s not what Facebook cares about. Facebook cares about getting the most money possible out of every single person. 

So, if you have your own algorithm that tries to tune things to maximize your objective, then Facebook will do its thing. So, yeah, you got to find the right tools and you have to have the right strategies. If you do, you don’t just throw up an ad and say, I want to buy likes. You can do that. You can do a brain-dead ad. That’s terrible. Just try to get likes, and you’ll get all these likes from Bangladesh and places that will, and nobody will ever click again. And they’re just basically being paid to like stuff, and they’re liking everything, so it doesn’t leave a footprint.

Yeah, not just the stuff that is their client stuff, right? So they’re liking everything, including your stuff. And then they’ll never have any further engagement with your brand. And you’ve just destroyed your Facebook account with all that garbage. So that’s a bad way to do it. If you, um, rely solely on Facebook, you have to have some sort of strategy. And I’m guessing that you had maybe a custom audience that you started with, and then you created a lookalike audience from that. And you let the lookalike audience algorithm do its magic.

Well, in our situation, we targeted, I can tell you, we targeted 18 to 65 year old men and women in the United States. That was the only targeting we did. My theory is that Facebook looked at our page, the algorithm looked at our page and said, “Okay, I’m just gonna show this ad to people, to basically a custom audience of similar fans to this page.” We had about 10,000 fans on our page. So, I’m guessing that’s how Facebook did it. Now, I can tell you that we had, and it was for one of our free templates that we were giving away. I can tell you that we had some emails from people who downloaded our free templates saying, hey, this is very useful, but I’m a plumber. 

I’m not really sure this is beneficial for me. And I said, well, no, you’re right. It’s not beneficial for you at all. But hey, it only cost me 70 cents to get you in my database. You know, now I’ll try to sell you something from AppSumo. So, it was an interesting experiment. This is a Facebook rep who told my Facebook consultant that she’ll remain nameless, but she spends a lot of money on Facebook ads. And the Facebook rep said to her, “Stop targeting, let the algorithm do the targeting for you.” Yeah.

Interesting.

Hey, let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk about, I want to talk about a couple of things. I want to look back to the SEO conversation. Given what we’ve been talking about, how does our audience start the conversation about selling SEO packages to their customers? And how do we? What are the hot buttons for our audience to go and push with their clients to get them because SEO is something that our clients and customers don’t understand.

You build a website for a plumber, for example, or a landscape gardener and their expectation is that they’ll just be on page one of Google within a few days. And when they’re not, and you start to have a conversation around SEO, they don’t understand it. So it’s a very difficult conversation to have because there’s this whole education piece that needs to go along with it. Do you have any insights into how you can have that conversation in a more strategic way?

Yeah, yeah. So stop educating the customer or the client and start poking at their pain point. Because your job is not to educate them. Your job is to solve the problem. Some people are problem-aware, some people are solution-aware, and some people are solution-aware. Most people are not your solution where you go in, and you try to sell your solution because you assume that there’s your solution aware, but they’re still problem aware.

That’s right. Well, problem ignorant.

Or exactly. They haven’t gotten to problem aware.

But blissfully ignorant.

They don’t even know that they are nowhere to be found on Google. So, first off, you have to realize that this is about stretching the gap for that prospect or that client. Like, okay, here’s where you’re at now. Here’s where you would like to be. Let’s make it really painful and obvious how big that gap is between where you are now and where you would like to be.

I love it.

Right, this is not about it. Let me tell you about how SEO works. Let me tell you about how Google works. Let me tell you about the three pillars of SEO: content, architecture, and links. Let me tell you about off-page and on-page SEO. Let me, like, you just make their brains hurt. That’s wrong. And you get this paradox of choice happening because there are so many things they could opt to do within that realm of SEO. Like, oh, should we do link building? Should we do keyword research? Should we do some on-page tweaking, like going into our Yoast settings and changing a bunch of stuff? Is this ongoing work, like maintenance we need to do every month, or is this stuff that is just a one-time fix? 

Yeah, it’s a rabbit hole. Just avoid that entirely and just say, look, here’s where you’re at, and it’s not pretty. And you really make them aware that they’re in a problem. And what would you like to have happen? And what do you think that’s worth to you? Give me some numbers, and give me some estimates of what you think would be worth it to you. Now you can say, “Well, I’m only a fraction of what that worth is, that number you just gave me.” I think this is a no-brainer. Let’s do it.

And so is your approach to keeping the client hands-off in terms of what you’re actually delivering. You basically say, look, “I wrote the book on this. Trust me, I’m an expert. I know what I’m doing. I’ll get you the result. You don’t need to know the details.”

I would, well, most people aren’t going to be able to say I wrote the book on it.

That’s right.

So I can say that, but that only works for a very, very small. I would say it’s on a need-to-know basis. Right. If you’re in the weeds telling them that I did this little thing, I changed your Yoast setting from disallowed and no index and here’s why that’s important. Yeah. It just is that’s a road to nowhere. You’d gotta show the result.

That’s right.

So, you track their rankings using a rankings tracker, like Rank Ranger, Authority Labs or Stat Search Analytics. And you give them reports and say, here’s where you were and here’s where you are now. And these are some of the things that we did that I think are moving the needle for you. 

Yeah.

And you don’t have to go into explanations. I’m like, you don’t wanna be in the position of providing as a consultant a report that is for your every invoice. You have to list all your hours and what you did. Right. I don’t even track my time.

That’s right.

I charge based on results. I charge based on what I deliver for my clients, not on how many hours I put in. Because I could solve a problem that could make them millions, and it only took me an hour, but it actually took me 20-some years of knowledge and expertise and, and, you know, building my career up to where I am now to be able to put that hour in and solve that million dollar problem. They shouldn’t pay for an hour of my time.

No, because, you know, and you’ve written a few books on the topic.

But this is true for everybody who’s listening to this. You have a value that far exceeds your hourly rate. So, if you think in terms of what I can earn per hour, you’re getting the game wrong. Cause it’s all about results. That’s what the client cares about. They care about the result. What is it worth to them? So now you can understand the value to them by asking them those pointed questions like, well, here’s where you are now. And here’s where you’d like to be. What do you think that’s worth? What do you think that’s costing you on a monthly basis or on a yearly basis? Wow, that’s a lot of money. Shouldn’t we fix that immediately? And I’m only a fraction of what that’s going to cost.

And yeah, that might be 10 or 100 times what I would have charged you on an hourly basis, but I’m not gonna talk about that. I’m gonna tell you this is the cost because this is the project, and this is the value that we expect to get based on our discussions and understanding of the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be.

100%, I couldn’t agree more. We’re singing from the same hymn book, as they say. And I hope you’re paying attention, people, listening and making notes. Exactly, Stephan is exactly spot on here. Couple of things I want to talk about before we wrap up. One is, uh, and this is something that people may not know about you, but I know about this because I did some research before the episode. First of all, how do you get a Wikipedia entry? How did that happen? I’m sure there’ll be. I’m sure Stephan will release a course in the coming months on how to get your own Wikipedia entry.

It’s very tricky because you can’t go in and create your own article.

No, I know. I tried once.

Yeah, that’s against the conflict of interest. Yeah. You have to be very aware of the constraints within the Wikipedia ecosystem. So yeah, that’s a whole other episode.

That’s a whole other episode. Exactly. But there are two, there are just two things that I wanted to touch on just to give people a little bit more of an understanding about Stephan the man rather than the SEO author. A couple of things that I discovered. One is, and you’ve blogged quite publicly about this, that you’re a foster child, right?

Yeah. For a few years during my teenage years, I was a foster child.

How do you think that in terms of your resilience as a business person and as an adult? How do you think that played into that?

Definitely added to, some people would say, well, I don’t know how you survived your childhood because it was people who know what I went through. This was even before I became a foster child. How did you even survive that? You know, it’s a gift. It was a huge, huge gift. And my wife, Orion, likes to say it’s, you know, it might be a gift with the bow on the bottom. It’s a gift with a bow on the bottom. You don’t see that it’s an actual gift until you really examine it and say, “Oh, wait a second, that really was a gift.” 

So, for example, I have three beautiful daughters, all grown now. And I wouldn’t have them if I hadn’t had that experience as a foster child and as a child who, like my grandfather, was really abusive, and I was living with him for several years. It was really, it was a tough time. But I matured a lot because of that. And I was able to get married at 19 years old. In fact, I was completely ready for it. Most people, like my kids, are now 26, 25 and 21, and they’re not ready to get married, not even close, because they didn’t have to grow up fast. And what would happen if I had an easy childhood? Not only would I not be as resilient and as good at business and whatever else, but I wouldn’t have them because I got married at 19. I had my first kid at 20.

Wow.

The whole, that’s how my life evolved as an early adult, as a young adult. And none of that would have transpired if I hadn’t that kind of maturity and depth at such a young age. So, it’s a gift with the bow on the bottom, but now I can see the full benefits of it. Why I went on TV to talk about being a foster kid recently, and it wasn’t public before. It was about a year and a half ago that I started being public about it. It’s not that I was hiding it. It’s just I didn’t show the relevance. But then learning about how to get on TV and pitching TV, producers on segments. I’m like, well, May is National Foster Care Month, and I was a foster child, and that’s a compelling story.

And I can make a difference and let people know like what they can do. Even if they don’t want to take in a foster child, they could donate and they could volunteer. There are things they could do to make these foster kids’ lives better. So I can make a difference. I can provide a really compelling segment proposal to the producers. And here’s the key thing for people, for listeners, is that when you’re on TV, you’re the authority and you’re a celebrity. People will pay twice as much money for you because you’re the person on TV. 

You could be talking about plumbing, you could be talking about being a foster child, you could talk about WordPress, it doesn’t matter. Your sizzle reel and your media clips and everything. As seen on logos, all that could be about you being a foster child or your involvement with a nonprofit. Like I’m on the board of a nonprofit that builds schools in Africa. And I could be talking about this on TV, and that’s gonna help my personal brand back to that.

Yeah, yeah.

Early on in the segment and in this episode, we talked about the power of your personal brand and how you have to nurture it. So, getting these TV segments talking about being a foster child, I thought, okay, this is going to be helpful for a whole lot of different reasons. And the more open and vulnerable I’m willing to be, the more karma, you know, and some more light I’ll reveal into the universe. That’s why I did it. And yeah, I’ve gotten some really good anecdotal feedback that that was the right thing to do.

Yeah, well, kudos to you because being vulnerable like that and telling your story takes a lot of courage. And I think it empowers others to feel a little safer in telling their story and feeling a little more connected to each other.

Yeah, you know what they say is facts tell, stories sell.

Yeah.

People buy from people. They don’t buy from companies. You don’t buy from vendors. So, if they can relate to you, you’ve built relatability. You’ve climbed that wall of context between you and the prospect. So they know not only that you get them, but you get their world. So it’s not enough if you get their world. It only counts if they feel gotten by you. They don’t feel that. If they didn’t receive that, it doesn’t matter how much you get their world and what they’re experiencing, it doesn’t count.

Yep. Yeah, great, great advice. The other story that I just wanted to touch on is your relationship with your daughter, who started a blog, and how encouraging you were. And am I right in saying that you helped her get her own piece in the Huffington Post? Is that right?

Yeah. So what happened with my daughter is I encouraged her to start a blog and do SEO back when she was 14 years old. And, yeah, it went really well for her. It’s she has a passion for Neopets, the virtual pet site. She created a blog around that and went like gangbusters, and she started to get rankings for it. Then, she got to speak on a panel at BlogHer, the women bloggers conference for 16-year-olds. So that’s launched her speaking career. Then, she started speaking at all these other conferences as a teenager. Then, she got her own column with the Huffington Post when she was 17 years old. So, she was a blogger with the Huffington Post. And she got written up in newspapers. Yeah, there’s just really, it exploded from there. In fact, she just recently, this summer, was on MSNBC.

Wow.

TV appearance. Like this is, I’ve had 11 TV appearances, uh, so far, but I went through a whole training program and pitch TV producers as part of this, this thing. She didn’t do any of that. She has the biggest TV appearance, like is all my other TV appearances like MSNBC. She can drop a link in an email to a prospect, say You should watch this TV appearance of me. And it’s a Dateline NBC URL. It’s like, wow. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. And she had the desire to take the ball and run with it. I didn’t do all the work for her. It’s the thing, too, that you can’t create the desire for your child or your spouse or whoever, you know, you can’t create the desire for them. 

You just have to hope and pray that they have the desire to see it through because that’s their engine. That’s fuel to make sure that that thing actually comes to fruition, whatever that dream they have. Because if you do it for them, then that doesn’t count. It actually creates side effects.

Yeah.

Winning the lottery. You’re going to lose all that money or whatever because you didn’t earn it. It didn’t come through your efforts. So they got to put that effort in, and then they get the reward, and you’re kind of the guide, and you’re the Sherpa.

Yeah, totally.

Guide them up the mountain.

Yeah, totally agree. Stefan Spencer, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. Where can people reach out and say hi to you online?

Yeah, so I’m on Twitter, SSpencer. They can email me at stephan@stephanspencer.com. My website, stephanspencer.com. I also have my two podcast shows, which are amazing, and I am biased, but trust me, they are amazing. Get Yourself Optimized is one of them, and MarketingSpeak is the other. MarketingSpeak.com is the website, and GetYourselfOptimized.com is the other website. And Troy is one of my guests on MarketingSpeak. It was a great episode. So yeah, you should drop a link in the show notes to that. It was a really good one.

Will do that for sure. Awesome. Well, thank you for returning the favor and being on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch. Thanks for all the stories, all the advice, and the philosophical chat about AI. I really enjoyed this episode. It was great.

Me too.

Thanks, Stephan. Cheers. Take care.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode of the podcast as much as I did. I could have waxed lyrical with Stephan for hours, and I probably will at some point in the future. I’ll have him back on another call. Please subscribe to the podcast at wpelevation.com/iTunes and leave us an honest rating and a review. If you don’t use Apple products, then head on over to Stitcher Radio and just search for the WP Elevation podcast. And, of course, everything about this particular episode, all the links and all the show notes you can get at wpelevation.com/StephanSpencer.

WPelevation.com slash Stephan Spencer. Leave us a comment, and enjoy the conversation. Also, come and check us out on our Facebook page, Facebook.com slash WPelevation is our Facebook page where we are publishing a weekly live show called Silence is Golden, where we are helping you start and grow your own business as a WordPress freelancer/consultant. So come and check us out over at Facebook. I look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of the podcast.

Go Elevate.