This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about The New Art Of SEO For Small Business Growth on the Growth to Freedom.

Have you heard the idea that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is dead? What’s the point? Why even try? Have you tried a dozen or twenty or different tactics and hacks that flat-out haven’t worked for you? What if I told you that those lies, rumors, and myths could be nothing but further from the truth? The truth is if done right, even the little guy can use SEO to transform their business, their business rankings and even their personal life. We’re going to talk about that with our guest expert. His name is Stephan Spencer. He’s an internationally recognized SEO expert. He’s an adviser, consultant and bestselling author.

We got a chance to get connected through a mutual organization called the JVMM run by a great guy named Dov. He’s also a bestselling author. He’s the co-author of The Art Of SEO, now in its third edition, author of Google Power Search, and co-author of Social eCommerce. He founded a company called Netconcepts. He isn’t a dinosaur, but he founded this company back in 1995, which in internet years is like fourteen lifetimes. He grew it into a multinational agency, and then he sold it in 2010. He’s built and sold companies. He invented a pay-for-performance SEO platform called GravityStream and it was also acquired by another company. Stephan’s model and clients have included companies like Zappos, Sony and Chanel. He also hosts his own popular podcast show. Stephan, welcome to the show. How are you?

I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.

You have such a fascinating background. Before we dive into some of the strategies of applying SEO for the small business owners and entrepreneurs out in the marketplace, why are you doing what you’re doing?

I want to help people. I want to reveal light in the world, and that makes me happy. I want to make a difference for people. It’s helping them get their message out there through SEO. If it’s helping them to find their voice or to find a perspective shift or a mindset shift that will allow them to be more powerful in the world and have more impact, then I love doing that, too.

Speaking of more powerful, in all these years of building and growing companies, building a SaaS company, selling it, exiting and getting acquired, things haven’t always been perfect for you and for all of us. I like to put that in context because someone might have a tendency to go, “Of course, he’s successful. Look at how smart he is. Look at how sharp he is. He’s a tech genius. Who wouldn’t be successful?” You had some things that happened some years ago. What has been your biggest failure in your career? What did you learn from it that maybe our audience could learn from, too?

I wouldn’t say, in retrospect, that it was a failure, but it was a learning opportunity. I tried to sell my business in 1998, ‘99. I’ve gotten this crazy idea to live in New Zealand and I’d been running the business by that time for four years. I thought, “If I could live anywhere in the world, where could I go? Where would I want to go?” I thought of New Zealand. I’d never been there. It was a harebrained idea, but I see it as intuition or more being guided there. I applied for permanent residency. I got in, and I started making plans. I also tried to sell the business and I found that I couldn’t sell it. Nobody wanted a business that wasn’t going to come with me, and I didn’t build the business as a separate asset.

That was a big mistake. In retrospect, it was an amazing gift because it was an opportunity for me to grow a business from New Zealand that was a US-based business. At the time, I had Birds Eye as a client and some other brand names. I thought it was a 50/50 shot that this would continue to go with the founder of the company moving halfway around the world. Lo and behold, it worked. I was able to hire a big team in New Zealand. We had an office a block from the beach. As soon as I landed, I hired a general manager within a month. Within two or three months, we had eight staff in that Auckland office. 

We were able to grow that side of the business more than the team in the US. We ended up having 35 staff at our peak in New Zealand, servicing a US-based clientele. That was amazing. When I was getting ready to sell again in 2008, 2009 prior to that, I moved back to the States so that I could be more involved in the process of selling rather than halfway around the world. It worked out well, but there were some other hiccups, like going through a divorce in 2008 and 2009 that I wasn’t anticipating when we moved back to the US. It was quite a wild ride.

Let’s face it, as an entrepreneur, as you’re reading, have you ever found yourself where you were in the ups and downs, on a roller coaster of your business and relationship with your spouse, your partner or the ups and downs of the economy and having to deal with it? Can you take yourself back to that lowest point when you were going through the divorce? What did you think before you decided to take this chance and go to Tony Robbins’ seminar? I’m curious if you can remember what state you were in. What was that voice that got you to go, “Let me take this step?” It sounds like that was a huge breakthrough.

I was in a very unresourceful place. I don’t know if depressed is the right word, but I was not helping myself. When three different people in my network who didn’t know each other within a two-week time period told me to go to some Tony Robbins seminar, I’m like, “Who is this guy?” He’s the infomercial guy, and I didn’t know anything about him. I thought, “This is probably a sign or something. I should probably go.” I did, and what an amazing thing that was because all it took was the firewalk on 2,000-degree hot coals at the end of the first night.  By doing that in my bare feet not getting burned, not even getting a blister, I was able to have this perspective shift that if I can do that, then I can go and get LASIK and get a hair transplant.

All these different things that I had thought about doing but was too paralyzed by fear to ever entertain. Within two weeks, I had gotten LASIK, and three months later, I had gotten a hair transplant. I changed my diet, and I started exercising. Within ten months, I became unrecognizable from the previous version of myself. You can see the before and after on the About page of GetYourselfOptimized.com, which is my personal development podcast that I was inspired to create because I went through this amazing journey myself. I’d go to conferences, and people wouldn’t know who I was until I introduced myself. That was fun.

What were the transformation and the breakthroughs for your business going through that journey? There’s this idea that success comes from the inside out. It sounds like you’ve experienced that yourself. For the business side of things, what did you notice started to shift or transform as a result of this reboot?

I knew that my happiness and my fulfillment were way more important than any business. I was further motivated to leave Netconcepts and to sell it, and move on because I became a minority shareholder in my own business through the divorce. I want to create something that’s mine, not something I have an ownership interest in that isn’t the majority. I was further motivated to move on and create something new. I created a business that I still have now that allows me to travel the world and spend months overseas doing amazing things. 

I spent six months in Israel. I visited Egypt, Transylvania, inside of Romania. That was amazing. I visited Finland and Denmark. It’s been fun but I wouldn’t be able to do that if I had been in my previous business where I was more beholden to it. I was able to shape my own destiny much more from stepping into a more resourceful version of myself, which started with that Tony Robbins event but then continued. I had a spiritual awakening in India and all these other things that were very transformational too.

As you’re reading right now, how would you like to create a vehicle, method or model that would give you the power to reshape your personal and business life, to be able to go out there and move away from being the chief cook and bottle washer in your business, to move away from it being reliant on you? What would that be worth to you? We’re going to dive deeper into the strategies of how you can be using things like SEO to remove yourself from the business side of things and have things working for you even when you’re not. Stephan, as far as being able to look at SEO, this idea that SEO is dead and SEO doesn’t work, your backlinking is an outdated strategy. What’s the biggest myth and misunderstanding as far as being able to use SEO in leveraging our business?

It’s funny that you had asked for myths because I have a list of 72 of them in a white paper on my website. It’s hard to choose which is the most egregious and damaging. There are plenty out there. SEO is not dead and will never be. You always want to optimize your website to be friendlier to the search engines and to present your content in the best light. If you were to look at some of these myths in three different areas, the three pillars of SEO are content, architecture and links. There are plenty of myths around content, but one of the biggest is that you should only be creating content for your target audience. 

It might make sense that you’d create content for your target audience, but what if you created content that is targeted for Linkerati and set aside your customer base, your target audience, for a little bit and create something so amazing and so irresistible to the Linkerati to those online influencers that are important to Google? It’s great to target Instagram influencers and so forth, but that’s a separate thing. For SEO, you want to target those who are considered authoritative and important as far as Google is concerned.

What is Linkerati?

It’s like the Illuminati. They control everything as far as Google is concerned. It’s not a democracy online. It’s a meritocracy. A site like CNN.com has way more importance, authority, and trust as far as Google is concerned than Jim Bob’s personal homepage. You don’t want to be Jim Bob. You want to be CNN. If you are working your way up from being Jim Bob, you want to target the sites that are much more authoritative and trusted, like CNN and get links from those sites. Links matter, they’re the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm still to this day. It will continue to be so for years to come. You don’t want to be chasing after low-quality links that will hurt your Google rankings. You want to be chasing after high-quality links from high-quality sites. You have to have remarkable content that’s worth remarking about, that’s worthy of remark like Seth Godin writes about in the Purple Cow.

If you have remarkable content, you can’t sit back and hope that your targeted influencers will come and see that content on your site. You have to outreach to them. It’s not about reaching out to your customer base because your customers are not that important as far as Google sees them. It’s a fact of the matter. We need to target specifically the Linkerati, the influencers that Google considers important and authoritative and then we have a compelling offer or ask or opportunity for them. It’s not like, “I’ve got a guest post that your audience would love to see, can you publish it on your site?” Those get deleted. In fact, that’s spam. Don’t do that. Instead, look for opportunities to collaborate with those influencers, the Linkerati. Look for ways that you can add value to their lives and businesses and on their websites beyond providing some free content that is probably not even that good.

It becomes commoditized because everybody is coming to them with the idea, “I can provide you content.” What are some creative ways that you have found that you’ve used and your clients have used to be able to create collaboration with Linkerati, these authority sites that maybe most people haven’t thought of before?

One opportunity or idea is to involve that influencer, that power user, the Linkerati in the campaign as a spokesperson or as an emcee. For example, I was working with a client OvernightPrints.com that print business cards, letterhead and stationary overnight and ship it next day by air. I came up with this idea for a contest. It was the Overnight Prints Free Business Cards For Life contest. What made that remarkable was the emcee that I recruited to be the head spokesperson of this particular contest. It so happened to be Jeremy Schoemaker, aka ShoeMoney. At the time, he was a huge internet celebrity already. He was famous for holding up that six-figure check from Google for a month of AdSense revenue. He had a big following, and he normally charged a fair amount of money to run a contest with him. He didn’t charge me or my client anything. He did it as a favor to me.

It was an opportunity where it scratched his own itch. I knew that he didn’t love his business card. He loved his logo with the Superman dollar sign in the middle of it, and he had it at the bottom of his pool. He loved it that much, and yet his business card, which had the logo on it, didn’t look that cool. I went to him with this idea like, “Let’s have a contest worldwide, have people from everywhere create designs that will compete against each other for the winning entry of your next business card.” He loved the idea. The winning entry ended up looking like this super cool credit card chip card that, at the time, chip cards weren’t as prevalent. It was a great ending for Jeremy and my client. 

They got from nowhere in Google for business cards all the way to number two, which is a huge win for them because that was their money term. That was the primary keyword they were targeting, and they stayed there for years. It wasn’t the contest entry page or any page related to the contest. It was the homepage. It was exactly the page they wanted to rank. It’s the concept that the rising tide lifts all boats. When you have a very successful linkbait content marketing campaign that flows a lot of link equity into your site, into a particular blog post or content piece, the entire site is going to benefit. The homepage, all your key landing pages, and all your primary categories will all benefit and rank better.

As you’re reading right now, what would happen for you if you thought about creating a creative, collaborative model, a contest, and brought in an outside spokesperson that would also have some benefit from the engagement or the arrangement of the collaboration? You leverage that together to drive up your search engine ranking. It’s not as hard as you’ve been led to believe. You might be thinking to yourself, “It sounded like Stephan had a relationship with Jeremy Schoemaker or Jeremy ShoeMoney a little bit. What if I’m new? What if I don’t know a lot of people? What if I’m getting started and I don’t know a lot of these types, too?” What would you say to that?

You’ve got to start somewhere. If you have a budget, you can simply go to a celebrity clearinghouse. There are these things out there. Essentially, the celebrity clearinghouse is you pay for the tier that you can afford, like A, B and C tiers. Let’s say you can only afford the cheapest tier, and maybe it’s $3,000 or $4,000 a month, and now you’ve got a spokesperson that you can use in your marketing. Maybe they hit it big in that timeframe. You sign a year’s contract, and there is a minor player in the NFL or whatever, and then their team wins the Super Bowl. For the rest of that contract period, you’ve got them locked in, and now you’ve got a Super Bowl winner.

You can take that route, which is spending some money, or you can work your way up like the domino effect of getting bigger and bigger names. That’s how I got my two podcasts, Get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak, off the ground with big-name guests, landing that first big-name guest. One thing that worked for me was to offer a quid pro quo. I will help with SEO. I will give you some SEO advice, and it will be worth six figures easily to you. In exchange, I just want an hour of your time. That’s how I got Dave Asprey on, who’s the Founder of Bulletproof. He created Bulletproof Coffee. I got him on to Get Yourself Optimized. I created an hour call that I’m sure was seven figures in value. That was good. It was a win-win for both sides. Now you’ve got one big name, and then you can continue to add more because you would say, “A guest like Dave Asprey has been on, and I’d love to have you on, too.” You connect them. 

This works not only with guests, spokespeople, power users, influencers, etc., but it also works with clients. I was able to get a lot of big-name clients like Chanel, Zappos, Sony and Volvo. How did I get these? I started somewhere, and when I started with the SEO side of the business, we started originally as a web marketing agency, building websites and so forth in 1995. When we started providing SEO services as a stand-alone offering, my first big-name client was one who didn’t even pay for their SEO audit, it was Target. I got the use of their logo and a testimonial from them in exchange for a comprehensive SEO audit. That was the best use of our time that we could have possibly spent instead of working on PR initiatives and all that. To have that name on our client list was a game-changer.

There are many different ways to be thinking about if you run a podcast. How could you go out and leverage a strategy like that for your podcast? If you’re looking to generate clients, how you could go do that. You might be sitting there wondering, “I can see I’ve got to be creative in being able to create collaborative opportunities, be creative in how I might offer my services as an expert to bring on an expert in exchange for that hour of time because time is money.” Maybe you’re thinking, “How do I get myself ranked on Google?” Are you wondering that as you’re reading right now? Stephan, if someone’s wondering like the small business owner, the entrepreneur, the coach, the consultant, the candlestick maker, how do they go out and start the process to get themselves ranked higher if not on the first page or in the first couple of pages on Google?

The first step is to know where you’re at. Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” You need to know where you’re at, benchmark and then measure over time. I would recommend to not just look at your Google Analytics and Google Search Console but get a third-party tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs or something that has multiple capabilities. It’s not just a link analysis tool. It’s not just a content analysis tool or a keyword research tool. It’s all-in-one. You’re going to look at things like your authority scores. Let’s say it’s Ahrefs, then you have DR (Domain Rating), that you’re going to measure over time. You’re going to know how important you are in the eyes of Google approximately. It’s an approximation because it’s a third-party tool. It’s not Google telling you your score.

You’re going to measure these different things, your rankings, the number of keywords that you’re ranking on page one for all these different things, and then you’re going to start making adjustments. You’re going to start outreaching for links in a non-spammy, collaborative way. It could be as simple as starting with easy stuff like asking for experts to provide quotes, data points and so forth that you incorporate into your original research or the studies that you’re writing. I like what Orbit Media did with their annual bloggers’ survey and all the expert insights that they sprinkle throughout the document from all these major influencers.

You can do an infographic where it’s not already finished, but you have an opportunity for that blogger or that influencer to participate in the creation of that. You come to them with a draft and you say, “Would you like to collaborate with me on this? It will be ours together.” It will still have your brand on it but maybe you will add their branding on it too. You get data points, stats, trends and stuff from them. You have this collaborative piece that they’re going to be so much more inclined to share on social media and more importantly to post onto their blog and to attribute you and link to you as the major creator of it. Those are some opportunities that abound. You just need to think outside the box.

If people want to go deeper with your tools and resources, you talked about this white paper, 72 different myths. How do they get in touch with you? Where do they go?

There’s a great landing page that my team has created for your audience. It’s on MarketingSpeak.com/freedom. That has the SEO myths white paper. It has the content marketing chapter of The Art of SEO, which is all about how to get great links. We didn’t talk about the technical aspects of SEO. We didn’t talk about the content side and the keyword research. That’s all part of it, too. It’s a little overwhelming but there are a bunch of great resources on that landing page, including how to hire an SEO and not get snookered in the process.

Most people don’t know what to ask and what not to ask when they’re talking to an SEO, then they end up getting sold, and there’s no delivery. There are no goods there. It’s just smoke and mirrors. I’ve got an SEO BS Detector with some trick questions. You can slip into the interview process and then there’s only one right answer to each of those. I give you the answer. As long as you’re not broadcasting that, “I’ve got this trick question. If you get it wrong, you’re out the door.” Be nonchalant about it. You’ve got the cheat sheet right there, and it’s all available on the website.

I want to encourage you to go access Stephan’s resources. Don’t wait. Don’t hesitate. I like to pivot the conversation more into the personal side. I love working and having conversations with husbands and parents specifically because I am one. There are a lot of experts, a lot of coaching programs and a lot of masterminds out in the world where it’s run by people who have no perspective of operating a business without kids or a spouse. It’s fascinating if you start looking at how few and far between it is, where it’s husband, dad, then business owner, entrepreneur, CEO.

In my early years, I’ve run eleven companies, crashed a few and then built a few decent ones, and like you, I exited and sold and such. The first part of my career was twisted and backward and out of alignment where it was a business owner, husband, dad and then I had a health crisis. It got me to reshape and reboot my way of operating and living. I sold some companies and then became more husband, dad, health and then businesses. What would you say to a husband or a parent looking to build a great business while also having a great family life at the same time?

It comes from a place of wisdom and not just knowledge. Here’s the trap that most people get into. They think of work-life balance as if it’s a balancing act, as if there are compartments that you live in. That’s a fallacy. If you do it right, you can involve your wife or your partner in your exploits and your fun journey to build your business. For example, my wife Orion is also a podcaster and has some of the same guests that I do. She’s had Dave Asprey on her show too. She comes with me to a lot of the seminars and masterminds that we mutually want to be a part of like Genius Network, Strategic Coach and Heroic Public Speaking. We’re in those together. We’re growing together, and that’s an amazing experience. It was engineered that way from the beginning because we met at Tony Robbins seminar at Date with Destiny in 2012. Because we were on a similar trajectory of personal growth and contribution to humanity, we’re well-aligned to do these different seminars and masterminds together. That’s one piece as a husband.

Another as a parent is to inspire your kids. Model the things that you want to convey to them and not just teach it to them. I tried to get them all three to go to Tony Robbins seminars. They’re grown now. When they were teenagers, I got them to come with me to Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within. They did the firewalk and it didn’t stick. As soon as they went home to their mom, my ex-wife, she was like, “Tony Robbins, don’t trust anything that he says,” etc. They soured on him. Only my oldest went to another seminar, at Date with Destiny, one year. It didn’t stick because I was dragging them. It wasn’t from their own volition and desire that they wanted to transform. If you model the behaviors and they model that, you tell them one thing, and you do another thing, that’s completely messed up. You’ve got to be the change in the world that you want to see with your kids, and you give them opportunities to grow and evolve. Especially in the business world, you’ve got these special skills and opportunities and so forth that people would do anything for.

You’ve got your kids who you want to want this opportunity. You can’t just hand it to them. There’s this concept in Kabbalah called Bread of Shame. If you’re giving them the car at sixteen, you’re giving them all these opportunities without them earning it. It comes with side effects. You win the lottery. You end up losing it all within a short period of time because of the side effects. You didn’t earn it. Let them earn it. My oldest daughter wanted to build a website and do SEO because she saw that I have passive income-generating websites. She’s like, “I want that.”

She was, at the time, an expert at Neopets because she was on that site all the time. I suggested that she create a fan site for Neopets, and she ended up ranking on page one for Neopets. She generated thousands of dollars of income passively. She started speaking at conferences because she saw that I spoke at a lot of conferences. She spoke at YPulse, SMX West, DMA Annual and everything. What I’m most amazed with was she was on MSNBC. She had a whole little segment talking about SEO. She’s incredible. She got the State of South Carolina as a client because of that. The state treasurer was watching her on TV and decided to contact her.

You’re lighting up speaking about your journey with your wife and your kids. You have a lot of joy and in many ways, you’re like a mentor to your kids it seems.

I endeavored to be that exactly, especially with the stuff that’s more esoterical knowledge like the Kabbalah stuff I’m learning. I’m doing Kabbalah classes. I also learned a lot from Oneness going to India. That was something I could also thank Tony Robbins for, that whole Oneness experience and my spiritual awakening that happened in India on a Platinum Partner trip that Tony and his team organized. It’s a life-changing and destiny-changing stuff.

If you were to turn to your wife, Orion, you are going to look at her in her eyes, and you were going to thank her for how she has shown up to support you, to be you, to be able to pursue your vision and to live in your genius, what would you thank Orion for?

I would thank her for being my biggest support and love of my life, for being my soulmate, and for being open to this crazy journey. Everything from telling her I love her eighteen hours after we met to proposing to her nine days later. It’s been a crazy and incredible journey. She’s been such an incredible trooper the whole way. She’s everything to me.

Thank you for giving us a glimpse of you, not just the business side, but the personal side, your family, your kids. We believe that Growth To Freedom is about the 360-degree view. It’s about being that better you as a partner, a spouse, a husband, a dad or a mom if that’s you. Being able to then also make that massive contribution at the highest level in whatever it is that you pursue. 

That starts with you being able to make that deep contribution to you to feel what you want to, then be able to make that contribution at home. I believe that you cannot make the biggest contribution and impact unless you’ve got your home life straight first.

It’s apparent that you have created a life transformed. If you’re inspired by what Stephan has shared with you, not just the business but also the personal. If there’s something here that resonates with you and that you connected to, imagine what you will get by going deeper with his resources to learn The Art of SEO, business, as well as life. You can do that by taking the first step. Go to MarketingSpeak.com/freedom. Stephan, what is something I should have asked you that I didn’t?

What would be the thing where the rubber meets the road, where on a day-to-day basis, you make these incremental gains or make these huge transformational shifts? How does that show up? The short answer I learned from Tony Robbins is if you schedule it, you make it real. You could have these dreams, these goals and ideas and so forth. Another way to structure this or to think of it is by creating Atomic Habits if you’re familiar with that book. It’s a great book. I’m in the middle of reading it or listening to it. You’ve got to create structure in your life to support these things that you want to create for yourself and others. If you have some ideas and you don’t write down your goals, you don’t create structures, habits, processes or systems, it’s going to be a pipe dream.

We want to help you avoid just a pipe dream. We want to help you transform and turn it into reality. Take action with what Stephan has shared with you. What are one to three action steps you hope that our audience takes as a result of our time sharing?

Find something that appeals to you from what you’ve learned in terms of learning more. If you are interested in Kabbalah but you’re not sure what that’s about, go to Kabbalah.org website and read up on it. Listen to an episode on my podcast about Kabbalah. I’ve got three episodes on Get Yourself Optimized with three different amazing Kabbalah teachers. If it’s Atomic Habits, you want to learn more about that, or you want to learn how to do the Oneness thing like give Oneness blessings and receive them and stuff. Find something that you want to learn about and then find an opportunity that you can do, not just learn but apply.

For example, if you want to have a mentoring meeting with your kids or your spouse or ask for their mentoring of you or whatever, do something. If there is something that you could do to access a feeling of gratitude, abundance, love or forgiveness, find an opportunity there where you’re like, “I haven’t thanked my spouse enough for all the stuff she puts up with or he puts up with.” Go do that and feel that. Get in that place of gratitude and abundance or what Abraham Hicks refers to as the vortex. Get in the vortex.

Get in the vortex, and ideally, you’re in a vortex and with that vortex, take action. I challenge you to take action with what Stephan has shared with you. If you never want to miss an episode, over 200 hours of insights, wisdom and strategies to help you grow and scale your business with less stress and do it in a fun and cool way. Stephan, it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to have you with us. Seize the day and take action with this. Go check out his website. Grab the resources. Apply what Stephan has been sharing with you. We look forward to working with you. We will see you next time.