M: What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Floatchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier. Wicky, wicky! What up?

J: Yo, we're back.

M: We are back and ready to attack with my iMac.

J: Your iMac attacks?

M: My iMac has attacked.

J: Who? And how?

M: The Zerg.

J: Oh wow.

M: Battle, Star Trek?

J: Starcraft.

M: Jesus, It's been a while.

J: Really? Wow 

M: Dude, I haven't played a video game in like 8 years but if I did, who are the other ones?

J: You got the Zergs. You had the there was like the human looking people they were called, started with a T.

M: Terrans.

J: Terrans. Yeah. And it started with a T.

M: And then there was one that started with a P, right?

J: Cyclone. No nos. 

M: That's a lot. Star Wars.

J: What are they called?

M: Protons.

J: Not protons. Some close pro-Zer. Yeah, it's pro-something. Yeah. That was like a good 15, 20 years ago.

M: Yeah.

J: Or maybe for Matt. It was like last night.

M: I know they built Pilon. Yes, that might be where the P is coming from.

J: Well, Matt did play this like, you know, last.

M: Oh, dude, I totally nerd out on Starcraft when I was a kid, but yeah, I haven't played it in years and years anyway. 

J: We're not some podcast stuff. Let's talk about that. We got Stephan Spencer 

M: We do, and this dude is like, basically, I would call him the professor. He is the practitioner, from what I understand, is all around fucking badass from what I understand Invented SEO.

J: It seems that way.

M: No, he didn't, but he's been. He's one of the OGs of SEO. He's sort of pioneered the SEO industry and wrote the book on SEO. 

J: Multiple. Yeah. Over what? 

M: Over a thousand-page book on SEO principles. And nobody on the planet that I've ever talked to knows as much about SEO as this guy. 

J: Yeah, it's crazy. So in this. Episode we dig in. I mean, we just go all over the place with SEO, the Do’s and the Don’ts and the history and what you should do now, even how to leverage YouTube, because let's be honest, it's a search engine number two. So you got to be on there and optimize that stuff. He lays out some details there, too. 

M: Yeah, we'll talk about on-page optimizations, off-page optimizations, and how to set up your website for success. If you're just building a brand new website, you know earned media and how to handle earned media. How to get backlinks.

J: Why you shouldn't pay big publications or people that are wanting to take your money to be on a big publication.

M: Yeah. There's some all the common wisdom that people think is true about SEO. That's complete crap. We're going to, you know, go down some SEO rabbit holes. 

J: We also go down to travel hack and how to get into the giant pyramids of Egypt for just a couple hundred bucks.

M: That is true. We did talk about that.  

J: Good stuff all around. This guy is just fascinating. I met him, I don't know, almost 10 years ago. Maybe he's a little less at Think Tank in San Diego with mutual buddy DK (David Klein) Ryan. Dan Ryan. I know you're listening. 

M: Oh shit. We didn't give Dan Ryan a shout-out in our last intro. I'm giving him a shout-out.

J: Oh, yeah. He wants. He's a very finicky kind of guy. 

M: Yeah. We hear about it if we don't mention his name in an episode. 

J: You should all find him on Facebook and go friend him. Just send a message. You can see all of his workout pics. 

M: Alright, I'm getting off-topic here. You know what, though, but I'm not.

J: Alright, get him. Go ahead.

M: So we dive into a lot of technical details around SEO on-page, off-page, and all that kind of stuff. There are some moments where we kind of get into the weeds and really talk about some of these topics, and you're going to have the urge. You're just going to feel compelled to want to take a ton of notes on this episode, 

J: But you don't have to.

M: but you don't have to because we're providing the notes for you.

J: What does that feel like? That feels like freedom.

M: I don't know what Joe has been drinking today. 

J: This is called the end of the day. I'm losing my mind time. I told you this already, and we've said this many times on intros.

M: Anyway, if you're losing your mind, like Joe, and you don't feel like taking notes right now, we've got you covered. Go to evergreenprofits.com. Look up the Stephan Spencer episode where the show notes page, and there's going to be an opt-in form with emails. And I'm very animated right now. You can't see me, but I'm just like waving my hands around. There's going to be an opt-in form, and you're going to get in. Click on the opt-in form and put your email in, and we're just going to send you the notes, and you're going to get all the like tactics and step-by-step details that Stephan shared with us on this episode, and you got to go quick though, because what we're going to start doing is these notes, they're only going to be available for a limited time. So when the episode goes live, they'll probably be, you know, available for like a week or so. And, then, you're not gonna be able to get them anymore. So, if there's an episode that you want the notes for, make sure you grab them soon. Especially this one, the notes will be available for a little while.

J: Why wouldn't you? 

M: Yeah, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you? So go to evergreenprofits.com. It's easy. Do a quick search for Stephan Spencer. It should be one of the top ones, depending on when you're hearing this. Give us your email address. We'll send you the notes. 

J: We got your back and this i'm like scared of Matt now because he was very animated so I'm hiding in the corner. So let's go over to Stephan really quick and madness.

M: Poor guy. He looks so scared. You look quite old up like a little poor puppy. Who's about to get kicked  

J: Alright, let's go talk to step for the Stephan Spencer. How you doing, man? Thanks for doing great. 

Yeah. Thanks for having me 

J: Yeah, so we've been on your show recently and Deep Dive. Oh, I mean, you're just a beast when it comes to SEO. So it's like, I know we touched on that on your show. And, I think we're a little giddy right now because SEO is one of the things that we're actually finally bullish on and taking, like taking a good focus on, all the content that we create now.

M: Didn't, don't you guys go back a little bit? Didn't you meet it? Like one of the Think Tanks or something tank in San Diego. 

J: Yeah. 

Yes. That was 2010. I think. 

J: Yeah. Sounds about right. I went to a couple of them, and both of them are just amazing,  amazing experience people and all that, but it's such an interesting gathering of brilliant people. And at that time, I was like, I'm just learning so much, but I'm in the right place. 

Yeah. That was a good springboard for the elite retreat. And have you been to that? 

J: No, I don't know anything about it. 

Well, Jeremy Schoemaker is the guy behind it. Shoemoney is his nickname.  But I don't think he's doing it anymore. I think he's taken some time off from it for the last few years, but it was a really good event. Small, very high-level people. He'd have some great speakers, people like Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Gary Vee. Yeah, it's really cool. 

J: Yeah, I didn't meet shoe money. He was, I think, the year before I came to the think tank, but yeah, DK, David, Shoe Money, just not a think tank. Just not a think tank. Awesome. Anyway, it's a good time. So what is your story without getting too, you know, too crazy in the weeds, but just, we're curious, we're always curious to hear how you came to where you're at now and kind of the ups and downs. 

It's quite a crazy story. 

J: Yeah. 

Yeah. 

J: Let's start with something crazy. That's good. 

Where do we want to start? Okay. So I was studying for a PhD in biochemistry at the university of Wisconsin, Madison. I dropped out to start an agency that was in 1995. And then four years into, I got this crazy idea to start or to, be living anywhere cause you can, cause it's the internet. So, I applied for a residency in New Zealand. I'd never been. I got in, and then I convinced my wife at the time and my kids to move halfway around the world, and then I started hiring staff there, got an office block from the beach, lived there for almost eight years, and started doing heavy-duty SEO.

In the late 90s, we started as a web agency. Net concepts were really all about building websites and then optimizing was something we came into over the course of the next few years as SEO started really taking off in the 90s and the 2000s. Yeah. So, we started doing SEO as a standalone service. If you didn't have a website built by my company, we'd still do SEO for you. And we started bringing on big brands as clients.

The little secret here that was super ninja in retrospect was to offer a free SEO audit. It's like Target, in exchange for doing, for them providing a testimonial and using their logo. That was, the best, free piece of work we'd ever done. I was so, it was so ninja. And once we had Target as a brand on our client list, everybody else fell in line. And so we, I've worked with Chanel, Sony, Zappos, CNBC, Volvo, like. So I'm going to be talking about a wishlist of all the best brands in the world that I could have possibly have imagined.

And you have to start somewhere. So, to get the domino effect going, you might want to consider doing a free thing for a big brand or a big industry veteran or something that you want to, you know, have, built a relationship with or have on your client list. 

J: I want to dig in there just one second. That's super intriguing; as you know, I've been imagining SEO back in the day, back in the 90’s, for one. No one knows what the hell SEO is. I'm sure back then the big brands, especially, I'm sure some of the techie guys were aware. How did you break in and actually get their attention and see, like, okay, this is valuable? Other than obviously, you made it free. That's pretty sexy.

Well, just that one time. But, what really put us on the map in the SEO space, not as a standalone service, but as a search engine optimized website, was we developed our own e-commerce platform. We based it on what was then called the Exchange Project, which then eventually became OS Commerce. It was open source, so it gave us the ability to go in and rejig things as long as we abided by the open-source licensing.

We were able to do whatever we wanted to the code base, and we baked in all of these SEO elements. And so we became known as a search engine optimized e-commerce platform and agency that built e-commerce sites that performed well and search, and then we were able to start offering the standalone consultancy around SEO, the audits, link-building strategies, keyword strategies, and all that. 

J: Gotcha. So you had some cred already. You had some experience.

Yeah. I mean, we had like, for example, a big brand. Back in the 90s, what we had before we were really knee-deep in SEO was Birdseye. So that was pretty cool. Once you land one big brand, it's like a domino effect. You can land pretty much anybody you want. You just need to focus on getting the one big fish first. And the same thing goes with anything that you're trying to do in the marketing space. Like when I landed Jay Abraham as a guest on my marketing speak podcast. Then, just amazing people like yourselves, I could land as a future guests, right?

J: Yeah, that's true. 

Yeah. It's like anybody will sign up to be a guest on a show where Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, and Seth Godin have been guests on. I mean, it's a no-brainer. 

J: That's so true. I mean, yeah, we've, actually, we're talking about revamping kind of our website slightly to show some of the larger names on top, you know, because,  just for that reason alone. It's like, hey, you show some of these big names and why not? I'll give it a shot. 

M: I mean, I'm sure we'll get more into podcasting later in our discussion. But yeah, that's one thing that we figured out is that we can sort of time when we do our outreach to people based on which guests we recently had on the show. So if we're kind of going after some sort of more, you know, sought-after guests, we're going to try to chase them up when we've recently had kind of sought-after guests that's gone live. 

Yep. Oh, and here's a ninja hack is: get somebody who has been a hero to you to interview you on your subject matter expertise. So, the second interview that I did with Jay Abraham, he interviewed me about SEO. And that was an amazing opportunity. So let's say that, I don't know, Brian Tracy is a hero to you. Imagine having him interview you about your area of expertise. 

J: Yeah. And that's on your own show, right?

Yeah. Well, although Jay did use that episode on his show too, on the Ultimate Entrepreneur. So if you can get a double hit like that's even better.

J: Yeah. The simulcast approach. We've done that with James Schramko before. That was his idea. It was like, Oh, that's a great idea. Just double dip on, you know, the effort that we just put in on this interview. 

M: Yeah.

Heck yeah.

J: That's cool. I love it.

M: So, what does the business look like today? What, you know, what sort of services do you offer? Are you more focused on the education side of it? What does the business look like?

Yes. Well, I sold my agency net concepts in 2010. So this is my second go round and I have to admit it's a bit of a lifestyle business because I travel the world a lot. I spent six of the last 12 months in Israel, for example, and,  traveled to like 10 different countries in those last 12 months, like. Egypt and, let's see, Romania went through all through Transylvania and everything. Jordan, Finland.

J: All over the place.

Yeah, it was pretty fun.

J: Did one really quick. Did one stand out? That's like a must. Let's go. We don't have to go deep on this at all. 

Oh my God. That's so hard to say. Okay, so Egypt. Egypt was incredible. We did ten days there. Four days of that were on the Nile. We did a Nile cruise to the Valley of the Kings. We went inside The Great Pyramid to the burial chamber, going inside tombs that only Egyptologists get to go into was pretty amazing because the Egyptian economy is not doing so hot right now. So you just pay a couple hundred dollars per ticket. You can get into tombs that almost nobody gets into.  

J: Money goes a long way.  That's awesome. Cool, man. That's a good way to hack your way into an amazing experience.

Oh my God. Yeah, it was incredible.

J: All right. So, you travel a lot. You have this badass lifestyle business, which I commend you for. That is, don't feel bad about it. It's not like you kind of were like, yeah, lifestyle, but no, it's amazing. That's exactly what what we have, but I'm growing more of. Yeah. 

Yeah, it has its limitations. It means I can only take on a small, number of clients at a time. I only work with seven or eight clients max at a time. It's, you know, not a, big company. I've got fewer than 10 staff, like I think eight. Eight and a half people and it allows me to do what I want to do and focus on the things I want to focus on. Work with just the clients that are the most fun and interesting and nimble. I hate working with clients that are stodgy and conservative and tough to work with. Life's too short for that.

J: Yep. Is there a reason why you still do the work with clients thing and not for your own? I mean, it sounds like you haven't 

Oh, yes. Oh, heck yeah. So I'm glad you asked that. Back in 2003, I had a very frustrating client. I won't name it. But it's a big department store chain that begins with a K and ends with an L apostrophe S. And, they just, it was very frustrating because they didn't believe that we were going to do good things with SEO. They thought it would destroy their brand and the look of their site and everything. And they wouldn't give us access to do anything. So what we had to do is kind of improvise. I created a proxy-based, platform just to show off the SEO goodness that we were going to inject into their site if they would let us. 

And that technology ended up being a production level technology I used a few months later with another client that was going to hit a code freeze deadline for the holidays in September and we were like three weeks away. We weren't going to be able to implement all the URL rewrites and everything in time because there were some issues with the technology. They were on an old version of ibm http server  So I'm like, Oh, what if I use that proxy that I was,  playing with for that other client and use it in a production environment, fix the URLs and add all this SEO goodness through a proxy. And then we'll charge on a cost per click basis. So it's just pay for performance and they loved it We went live with it.

We hit the code freeze deadline. No problem and that ended up becoming the majority Revenue source for that agency. That was a big reason why we got acquired. In fact It generated millions and millions of dollars. We had clients that were paying us seven figures a year for that Like Zappos and Nordstrom,  and it was just all on a cost per click basis. So, if you were paying 15 cents a click for SEO through this platform and your average cost per click was 50 cents through Google AdWords. Of course, you're going to buy as much traffic from us as possible, and that was just a money machine for us. 

J: That's cool. 

It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't worked with clients and had frustrating situations. Not that I'm asking for frustrating clients now, but it's the.  I don't know; it just gets my creative juices going, having real-world client problems to solve. So that's why I still do it.

J: That's awesome. And Billy Jean, we had him on the show, and he does a lot of stuff himself, and we asked him the same thing, and he's like, I just, I'm always going to have a client work agency. So, I learned I always stay on top of my game and stay fresh. And, of course, you're getting paid. So there's a big benefit there. So you're kind of getting paid to learn, in a way.

But it's like, trial by fire. It's not like, Oh, I'm going to  play around and, invent some sort of. Thing for, you know, for WordPress, I have created plugins for WordPress, like an SEO plugin called SEO title tag, just for fun, just to scratch my own itch and it, you did really well. In fact, it was the most successful link bait campaign that my previous agency had ever done and we did it for ourselves. 

So we got a ton of juice out of that, but that wasn't motivated by a client problem. So it wasn't front and center. It wasn't like, you know, we have a hard deadline we have to meet and we're super motivated. The client work still took precedence and we fit in the work on the plugin when we could.  It's just not as motivating as a client problem, you know, where there's a lot of money on the line for everybody. 

M: Yeah. So, what are you looking for in clients these days? What kind of ideal company do you want to work with? 

Main thing is they got to be nimble and willing to work outside their comfort zone because as Tony Robbins says, all growth happens outside your comfort zone. And I think that applies to your marketing as well. If you're willing to kind of push the envelope a bit and be a little bit edgy, not super off-brand, but a little off-brand, if  you're willing to tolerate that, then you're going to get more rewards. You're going to have more success with your link building and with your just general PR and promotion strategies, so that is way more fun and gets way better results than being all stodgy and unwilling to try new things 

M: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is that just there's a lot of brands out there. They're just super protective of their brand that they don't want anybody else touching the messaging, and those are just kind of pains in the butt to deal with. 

Oh yeah. Like, Chanel was especially, challenging going to be diplomatic here about it, because their brand guidelines prevented them from adding textual content to a whole bunch of pages on their website. And I'm like, how are we going to rank this page in Google when you can't add words to the page?  

J: That's a good point. I never thought about that with very visual brands.

M: Are there ways to do it with SEO? If it's, I mean, obviously, you got Google image search and stuff, but can you rank pages without words? 

Well, with links and the anchor text and stuff, but then you have to be careful about over-optimization and looking spammy. So it's difficult. It's possible, but it's very difficult. It's a lot easier if you're trying to rank for brand keywords, like a lot of popular keywords relating to Chanel or Chanel-related keywords. So then you're in a much better position. To compete when you don't have words on the page. But I do never recommend having wordless pages. I think that's a bad strategy.

J: I would agree. Unless you really like to work a lot and possibly look spammy. Yeah.

Yeah.

J: Interesting. Okay. That's really cool.

But it's all been a fun ride. I wouldn't trade the work that I put into clients that were challenging for a minute because I learned something every time. And they learned something, too. They get ROI, even if it's less than what they could have gotten if they were more nimble or open,  but you know,  the legal department, or the brand's police,  in both cases, are usually the business prevention department. So that's frustrating. I remember working with Westpac, which is a big brand,  which is a big bank in Australasia. 

And that was very frustrating because their legal department prevented them from using the term mortgage anywhere on their website.  That was not clever. Yeah. That costs them a lot of traffic, and whatever, you know, it's like you can lead a horse to water in a sort of situation. But in that case, their argument was that the mortgage is a legal instrument. They don't offer the legal instrument. They offer a home loan, and then nobody searches for a home loan as a keyword. They're always searching for a mortgage. Screaming in a forest that nobody is occupying and nobody hears you.

J: Well, I think, should we just dive into some SEO stuff?

M: Let's chat about SEO for sure.

Not that we weren't talking about SEO, just a good point.

M: I want to kind of dive into some like nice kind of tactical stuff. Cause it sounds like you've just got like an arsenal, like a tool bout of like all sorts of cool shit that you do.

But I got a few things. Yeah.

M: Before we do, how does SEO today compare to SEO 10 years ago? Cause I know it's quite different. I know you're constantly seeing people saying like, Oh, SEO is dead. You've just got to, you know, just create good content. And that is what SEO is these days, you know?

So that's so ridiculous.

M: What have you seen? Has that sort of evolution over the last, you know, 10 years or so?

Okay. So, first of all, anybody who tells you SEO is dead, run from them. Don't do business with them. They're just baiting you. They're being controversial just to get them clicks, links, and so forth. It's not helpful, and it's not true. They're spreading disinformation and misinformation. So I hate that. SEO. As long as search engines exist, SEO will exist. Now, you might say, well, I can't outsmart an AI. And increasingly more and more Google is becoming more reliant on machine learning and AI. So how do I out-compete that? Well, you're not gonna use your brain to do it. How do you outsmart an AI? What do you think? Outsmart? 

J: I don't know if you should outsmart the AI. Be a human?

Well, compete with or maneuver around in an ethical way. How do you do that if it's an AI on the other end? What do you think?

J: I think it would be interesting to discover what they're looking for. So, what are these triggers?  Because I doubt they're looking for everything. There's probably a certain hot points.

Well, sure. But even the engineers who develop the machine learning algorithms don't know what those hot points are because they just feed the algorithm a bunch of data.

The more true, the better, and then it figures it out on its own, and you don't get visibility into what those hot points, the triggers or elements. The factors are sure. This the short answer to how you outsmart an AI is with another AI. If you're not playing with machine learning, at least learning about it, you're going to be a dinosaur in very short order. 

SEO is all about understanding AI, machine learning, and so forth. 

And, one of the best ways to see the big picture and not just get caught in the weeds, like, Oh, I'm going to play around with TensorFlow and do all this,  you know, whatever coding, et cetera, is to go to conferences where they show you where things are heading over the next three, five, 10 years. And I was just at Abundance 360 a few months ago. It's not an inexpensive conference, but it's so well worth it because you get to see the future before everybody else does. They're like 300 entrepreneurs, business owners, billionaires even that are in attendance and it's 15 grand for a ticket for this three day event totally worth it.

So that's how you get that view of where should I be focusing? I did not know how big eSports is. I thought, it was ridiculous. Like  how are you even going to get a workout  if you're sitting on a couch, doing “eSports” and people are outside running around on a field or something and you're not, but then I got. A much better understanding of esports, where it's heading and, how big it is and how big it's going to become.  There was this concert that was done completely almost completely virtually the vast majority of the attendees. This concert was like a halftime show sort of thing with this girl band; it was huge.

It was a crazy number of people. It was like, set records all over the world, and I had no idea. I didn't even know that thing happened. I had never heard of this band. I had never heard of this song. But it was made famous by the eSports movement. And I'm like, “Wow, if somebody can be as big as the Beatles through e-sports, what's possible in two years.” So you need to know where things are heading and SEO that is just focused on things like,  quality content and keyword research and link building is really old school. Not that I'm dissuading you from still doing that stuff. You still need to do keyword research and understand what words your target market is using and not using.

Like home loans is not a keyword that you want to target. Mortgage is that sort of thing. But also on top of creating that high-quality, remarkable content, I'm using remarkable, very deliberately, because it has to be worthy of remark. Otherwise, you're dead on arrival. It can't just be good quality content like everybody else has because  we're awash in a sea of good quality content. Who cares, right? It's just nobody's going to see you any differently. You're not differentiated at all. You need to be remarkable. And what are the hooks? What are the angles? What are the tricks and techniques that will get you to rise above all the noise? Cause if you aren't doing that, you're just wasting your time with all that great content that you're creating.

J: So how do we have our own AI that syncs up with Google's AI, then? So what should we be focusing on outside of the titles, link building, and all that stuff?

Yeah, so there are different tools out there that incorporate machine learning elements or AI like, Market Muse, for example, has some AI capabilities in it. So you just want to find tools that have that capability for the off-the-shelf stuff. You also want to be following what Google's putting out there, like that  there's a Google cloud, has a natural language, and processor. So it's at cloud.google.com/natura-language.  And what that allows you to do, if you just scroll down a bit, there's a natural language API demo where you can paste into the box a bunch of text. 

You do that with, let's say, your homepage copy or your about page copy, and you see what the salient scores are, according to the AI over the machine learning algorithm. 

It'll tell you how salient you are to these different entities and the different topics that it identifies. And a topic or entity is different from a keyword because there are multiple keywords that will be part of a topic or in Google speak, it's entities. So, that's how Google refers to topics as entities.

So if you are trying to target an entity of,  let's say I don't know. SEO and your salience score is really low. That was a misfire, and you might, get lots of great links pointing to your homepage, and because of the poor salience score, you don't seem nearly as relevant as you might think. Just looking at the number of occurrences of the word, SEO, and the placement on the page. There's more to it than that. And, the AI is figuring this out based on your use of language. 

And so spinning articles, creating, fake content using article spinners is not going to work. Anymore ev,en if it had in the past, and i've never been a fan of trying to spam google, I'm, i've always been a white hat because google's keeping a rap sheet on all of us. It's not just the websites. They're keeping a rap sheet on It's us as the content creators So it knows that you have 10 or 20 different websites because you've connected them all up to each other but you're not through; your who is information through your Google search console, your Google, analytics and, various other, things that tell Google like, “Hey, you own 10 or 20 sites. You're the guy behind the curtain or the gal behind the curtain. 

So when you're doing spammy stuff on one side, I'm going to figure you I need to be very much on alert for you spamming these other sites too, that you own.” And once you start doing on-page spamming, then the off-page spamming, things like low-quality link building. Or other off page factors that you might say, well, that was negative SEO. Somebody was targeting me who didn't want me to rank as well like a competitor. And Google's looking at that saying, yeah, cause you were on page spamming. No competitor hacked your site and over-optimized your title tags to have a big laundry list of keywords on there. So if you're doing that kind of nonsense, you're certainly doing this off page nonsense too. 

So we're going to hit the big red button on you. And it's all algorithmic. yeah, there's this army of manual raters working at Google. They're human reviewers, but that's further feeding the AI with tons of data so that the AI can get even better than all those humans.

The many, thousands of humans currently working at Google doing this, manual rating. If you're curious of what kind of criteria they're using when they're looking at your site and hovering over the big red button, you know, they're basically rating your site. They're not hitting. Yeah.

They're not hitting the button on you. That's the Engineer's job, but not the manual raters job.  So, if you're curious and you want to know what these criteria are, things like EAT expertise, Authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. That's a term from the Google quality raters guidelines YMYL, that's another term from the quality raters guidelines that refer to (your money or your life). Those are the kinds of sites that are on in financial services or health that, if the information is false or misleading, Then your health, your life, and your financial health could be at risk, and Google wants to be extra careful about that. So, it especially applies to YMYL sites.

I have a new search engine land article all about that. You should check out, but that quality raters guidelines are a pdf document. You can download just Google for it. Quality Raider guidelines used to be that it was confidential, and it would eventually get leaked. Then, a new version would come out, and that would not be visible to anybody except for the Quality Raiders for a while. And then that get leaked and Google finally gave up and said, All right, we're done. Information wants to be free. Here you go. You can have it. That's like 160 pages of goodness. You should probably read it. That my thousand page book, The Art of SEO.  

J: Yeah. The Art of SEO. It's no joke, man. I remember seeing that at a think tank, I think, for the very first time, I was like, Holy moly.

Okay. That was a  small version. That was like  400 and some pages or something. Now it's a thousand almost 184  pages.

M: Now, do you put any focus on, on,  search engines other than Google? you know, most of what you hear when people talk about SEO is purely Google.  Do you, put any effort into Bing or Yahoo or I don't even know the other search engines?

The short answer is no, but there is another search engine that you should pay attention to. And it's not Bing. It's not Yahoo. It's YouTube, the number two search engine by query volume. That's number two, not Bing, not Yahoo. And of course google owns youtube. So you're still focusing in the google universe But the youtube algorithm is very different and youtube user search behavior is very different They're searching for different keywords and in different ways. So you need to understand that And there's a little bit of that in  in the book, but yeah, it's not, it's such a different animal because you have to have YouTube videos in order to rank in YouTube, obviously. 

M: Right.

So that means you got to have a channel, and you got to be considered, considering things like what sort of storytelling am I doing? Do I have a director-producer for these shows? Are they episodic? Are they Evergreen or ephemeral? There are so many different things to consider that you don't normally consider with just regular SEO, so it's a different beast, and then you're trying to maximize watch time with YouTube. That's the king of all metrics in terms of the YouTube algorithm. 

If somebody is watching, let's say, a 20-minute-long video of yours all the way through, that is gold. If they're watching two minutes of your 20-minute video, that looks really bad for you, And you might have a two-minute video instead that people watch 100 of where you take the highlights, the best bits, and then you don't worry about that 20-minute video anymore. 

You focus on the two-minute video, and that gets the watch time. Then you're in a much better position, and it's not just watch time for the video, But watch time for the entire session. So if they're using that video as a jumping-off point to watch a whole bunch of other videos, like binging on everything, SEO, and you provided an awesome playlist of all the great stuff. And that isn't just your channel. It's a whole bunch of other great content providers. You're going to get rewarded by the YouTube algorithm.

J: Oh yeah. I heard that. I was talking to a guy that does a lot on YouTube in the music space. He has something like 30 million views and grows by tens of thousands a day, just organically. And he said that about 80% of his traffic comes from recommended videos, not the search box.  and just, yeah, and he has a whole process. I didn't totally dig into it, but of tags and leveraging exactly what you said, which is to figure out who has that momentum, the really high watch time, and really kind of hone in on what they're doing well. Maybe there are some tags involved, channel tags, playlists, and things like that. 

Yeah, so there are two main places and two main ways that you would get traffic on YouTube. One is the recommended videos and the other is search. And just because he's crushing it with recommended videos doesn't mean that he couldn't also crush it with search too. And then there are other people who are crushing it with YouTube search, but they're not doing well with the recommended videos for whatever reason. And so they're the both opportunities should be maximized and optimized. So there's one particular, expert in this space that I think he should be studied, at infinitum.

And that's Jamie Salvatori. He's the founder of VAT19. They have billions of views, like back when I checked,  maybe a year ago or two. They had over 3 billion views. I'm sure they're way higher than that by now. So, 19 has billions and billions of views of product videos. And I think, what the heck are product videos? Yep. They started as a video production company or some sort of like video company and then they decided to create an e commerce company and they sell curiously awesome products So check out the Jamie Salvatori interview on my Marketing Speak podcast, it'll be eye opening. It's really, cool.

Cause they do stuff that will make you want to binge-watch all other product videos.  They're all so different from each other. They're not all just like crazy, weird music videos. There are some like that, but then there are others that are just really ridiculously funny. And then there are ones that are just tongue in cheek, and it's just awesome what they're doing. 

J: Cool. We'll link that, that, that episode. Now you're marketing speak episode with Jamie and the show notes for sure. So it's easy to find. 

M: So with SEO, if I was kind of starting a brand new site, I was just kind of starting up something new from scratch. What sort of considerations for SEO do I need to kind of take into account when I'm getting started with a new site?

Yeah, well if you start with a new site, and you don't have a promotion strategy or a link building strategy at the beginning  you're going down a really hard road because nobody's going to can take you seriously including Google if nobody links to you. So you're going to start with really awesome, remarkable stuff. And I want one, some industry friends of mine who started Cat Five Commerce, that told me what their strategy was. And I'll just, share it briefly here. Let's say that they buy a new, domain that's an aftermarket domain like runningshoes.com, hikingboots.com or tacticalgear.com. Those are all domains that they bought and they built e-commerce sites on them.

They source products, they, you know, put up a heavy duty e-commerce platform on it and so forth, but it takes time. Might take eight, 10 months from the point where they bought the domain and within days though, they will have a site up, which is a blog with a  funny, interesting,  remarkable link bait campaigns on them. Like there was one that, I remember him sharing with me. That was, on runningshoes.com. It was a spoof or parody of a Groupon offer. 

But it was the Groupon IPO. So this was a while ago, obviously, back when Groupon was IPO ing. But it was really tongue in cheek and funny and clever.  It wasn't an actual Groupon page, but it looked like one. Looked like you could buy into their IPO off of a Groupon offer. It's really well done. And it got a lot of links. And they put that out there even before they had the e-commerce site up. It was just part of the Starter blog; it was a launching pad for the main site. 

So you don't ever just sit there waiting to launch the site with nothing or with a coming soon page. Put something up that is remarkable to start the clock running with Google and start attracting links. High quality links, authoritative, high trust links. Because otherwise you're just going to be dead in the water.

J: Yeah. That's actually really smart because that's the hardest thing. I mean, luckily, all of our domains, I feel like the main ones that Matt and I have, are pretty well seasoned in terms of age,  but starting from scratch is just like, Oh my God, it's like you're climbing a mountain, but it's very possible sounds like. So, for existing sites, what would you recommend to someone who might not have thought about SEO or some good optimizations that you can do?

Yeah, the best thing to start with is an SEO audit if you have an existing site because, Undoubtedly, some bad SEO juju was baked into the end of the platform, even if it's a search engine quote unquote friendly platform that you're working off of like, WordPress very search engine friendly, but it's not Search Engine Optimized. Nothing is search engine optimized out of the box So you're Probably doing stupid stuff. You didn't know you were doing. It's just a case of not knowing what you didn't know and that's why you got to bring in an expert an SEO expert to kind of deconstruct what you've been doing, diagnose all the potential Issues that you didn't even know you had.

I've found so many crazy weird things that  Were challenging to figure out were not straightforward and somebody who wasn't an expert wouldn't have figured out  and like for example a client numerologist comm was using Clickbank as a service provider and it went through a redirect just temporary, like, I know it was a 301 redirect, but it was a redirect that led to another redirect back to their site. So it's just instantaneous. It was to, I don't know, set some sort of tracking or something. And because Clickbank had a disallow in the robots.txt file on that particular, sub site on that sub domain. 

It stopped the flow of page rank. It stopped Google bot from being able to index the page, even though it was just a temporary hop before landed back on the numerologist site.

So there was a message that said, no information known about this page and in the snippet portion of the search listing, you know, learn why you see those occasionally. And that's because usually a disallowed directive. Disallow does not mean no index. If you want a page dropped out of Google search results, do you need to use a no index, not a disallow?

And in fact, a disallow will stop Googlebot from discovering the no index. So I know this is all geeky and technical, but these nuances are really important. And so anyways, a client didn't even know that This was an issue and there was no disallow or anything on their side. And I'm like, I don't know why this is happening. And I figured out because of this little hop that was happening in between to ClickBank that was the problem. And so we re rejigged that stopped doing that hop, and then,  everything came. Right. And they went from the bottom of page one for numerology to top of page one. I think they're currently number three or two for their primary keyword, which is pretty awesome.

M: That's interesting. We actually worked on numerology.com for a little while, like five or six years ago, I'm like, I'm pretty sure they were a client and they were.

J: Blair over there. 

Yeah. Blair's awesome.  

M: so when you do these, kinds of audits, what are some, of the more common things that you see? What are some of the more like the, what are some mistakes that you just kind of see almost every website make?  

Gosh, there's so many.  it depends on what area we're talking about. If it's kind of the content marketing link-building side of things.

J: Like on page or you want to start with like on page, Matt. 

M: Yeah, we can just start there. 

Okay. So, let's talk about, mistakes in, the content.  they won't do the keyword research. They won't identify which keywords are being used to by, searchers to find the kind of stuff that offers the problems that you solve etc. So that's a big mistake or they're using the wrong tools to  do the keyword research like for example Google has this keyword planner tool, which is not a great tool. It's not very believable  once you understand the limitations and the shortcuts that tool takes. There's a great article on Moz.com, called Google keyword planners, dirty secrets. Might want to link to that in the, show notes, because it talks about things like traffic buckets and,  grouping keywords together that it really shouldn't group.

A keyword might look super popular, but it's not because it was grouped with the popular keyword, so you're getting all this bad data out of Google's keyword planner. You might think oh, well, this is a good keyword I should be targeting. But no, it's a terrible keyword. So you need to get corroboration across multiple tools that something is actually popular a good keyword is popular with searchers relevant to your business and attainable. In other words, you have a shot at ranking on page one for it. So, that's a big mistake that's made. Another one from a content perspective Is creating content solely for your customer base and not for the link karate. 

You need to create content for the link karate, and I mean like the Illuminati, but those who are authoritative and powerful as far as Google sees high-authority, high-trust websites. That's who you're targeting. If you're creating this amazing ultimate guide to whatever, or this, really fun personality test or quiz or an infographic or viral video or whatever, and you're not targeting the, those that are considered influential, from Google's perspective, you're completely missing the boat so that's critical.

And, sometimes you're going to alienate your customer base. At the but to the benefit of the link karate and in that case you might just want to not feature that piece of content to your customer base don't put it in your Weekly newsletter as like this is the blog post of the week or sort of thing or don't maybe even link to it from  your blog home page.

Just kind of bury it a bit. That's not ideal, but if it's something that's so awesome that everybody's going to love that when they see it on the front page of Reddit or whatever, and they're going to link to it from their blogs,  do it because you're going to get amazing benefits from that.

Just a quick example. This is a client, for example, from what I did, but a friend of mine in the industry who's actually very well known. And I think you might've interviewed him, but he loves taking shortcuts like he paid a family member to go to college for him and get the degree because he didn't have time. So that's what he loves: shortcuts. And his shortcut for this was he found an article online for his client, lifeinsure.com. It was 20 things he didn't know about death. 

And so he lopped off one of the items, making it 19 things, and then he paraphrased the rest of the 19 and boom, he had an article for his client, and then he submitted it to the Reddit of the day, which was Digg. But now that's a completely irrelevant site. So that got on the front page of Digg, got lots of links, and it got the client to page one in Google, Bing and Yahoo for life insurance, right up there with State Farm, GEICO and MetLife. And they stayed there for a very long time, for years, until they did a site redesign and screwed everything up. They didn't know what they were doing with the site redesign, and then all the rankings dropped. 

But, for that period of time, they were crushing it just because of that one article that was not meant for anybody other than Linkarati. See, they didn't even link to it from anywhere on their site. It wasn't anywhere on their blog. It was an orphan page because they didn't want any other customers to see it. Which was smart because nobody's going to buy life insurance after reading a creepy article that has things like after 15 seconds, after decapitation, you're still conscious, like who's going to want to buy life insurance after that.

Right. So they knew not to serve that up to their customers. But the 13 year old alpha geeks on Digg, they ate that up and tons of links ensued and so forth. So they got a huge benefit from that. So that's an extreme example. That's a little too edgy for my taste and it's too much of a  shortcut using other people's content. I am all about unique, remarkable content, not stealing other people's stuff, but  it worked for the client and got them a huge result. So you need to think outside the box is the bottom line and not just target your traditional customers.

M: That's good. And then, so as far as an external linking standpoint, like off-page SEO, what are some of the mistakes that you see there that people aren't putting enough attention on?

Well they don't look at it as collaboration with the influencer. They look at as, you know, I just want to get my. Stuff on your site so I can get a link All right, so you get all these guest post inquiries. If you're a blogger you get inundated with these it's really annoying because the content isn't that great and I don't I've never posted somebody's guest post ever, right? And if they offer money, then that leaves a footprint that Google can easily spot. 

Even though there's no financial transaction visible to Google that leaves a footprint as far as the kinds of quality and what you are willing to take and publish and which links appear where and so forth, it definitely leaves a footprint. So, if you're going to do this guest posting thing, don't ever pay for the opportunity to get your post published there. I'm not a fan of guest posting if you are instead a contributor or, better yet, a columnist somewhere. I'm all for that. I'm a columnist, for example, at Search Engine Land, Adweek and Read Write. I've been a contributor to Practically Commerce, Multi-Channel Merchants, DM News and so forth. Lots of different places. Oh, and I contributed to Harvard Business Review. So I was a big feather in my cap, landed that article and got a link, pagering passing link. It's not no followed, from Harvard Business Review back in January. Pretty amazing. So, high-trust links are, right?

The king, if you can, just spend two, 10, 20 times more effort and time on getting a super high quality, high trust link. It is worth its weight in gold. You're going to get a hundred or a thousand times the benefit of a bunch of mediocre links. Yeah, which I think is totally obvious to me. But a lot of people are focusing on low quality because they believe in quantity over quality. And it's not that they're specifically going after spam links, although some people are. I just got I did a webinar yesterday, and somebody asked like, the SEO experts are touting the value of PBNs. Should I be doing that?

I'm like, are you serious? No, like the words SEO expert and PBN should never go in the same sentence like Like they're not SEO experts. They're charlatans if they're touting PBNs. That's really bad, for everybody, bad for business, bad for your longevity online to mess around with private blog networks, which are basically spammy, fake networks that seem to be legit. But they're not, and Google can totally spot those. You might think you're outsmarting Google, but good luck with that. You're not going to outsmart an AI to circle back to that original topic.

M: I mean, I've heard people when I've heard about PBNs and sort of the lower quality backlinks. I hear almost more about it nowadays about driving those kinds of links to high-authority sites that also link to you. So, like let's say you get an article on Forbes or something. A lot of people are saying that Forbes articles link to your site, and then you do all this PBN and private blog network stuff on the Forbes site. But I don't totally understand why that matters because Forbes has authority anyway. Why? Point junk traffic at it, but I've heard it more sort of in that context than pointing all these junk links at your own website.

Yeah, that's all stupid. I mean, well, there's so many myths, I'll have to debunk in that whole, little, piece there. One is Forbes is no following their external links now because there's so many contributors who have gotten busted for taking money like several thousand dollars per link to drop links into their articles and that's so unethical and  Forbes caught wind of it and decided they would handle it. Just carte blanche, you know, follow everybody's links.

If you're contributing articles to Forbes, none of those links are passing juice, and secondly, if you are building low-quality links to an authority site in order to get juice passed to a link on that page. That's a stupid idea that leaves a footprint that Google's be able to very easily figure out. Also, what I hear sometimes is Just linking to a high authority site without the intention of trying to get juice passing to your site, but just to get that particular page to rank, kind of like a presale page.

If you remember that back from the day,  try to get that page to rank, like for example, a YouTube video, YouTube has a lot of authority, obviously. So if you, send some spammy links to a YouTube URL, it's not likely you're going to penalize, the YouTube website  that, what I've heard is that can actually benefit, the rankings for that YouTube video on Google.

I would never do that again would leave a footprint then and you would get a black mark in your on your rap sheet And google also don't do that.  But if it did work because you're trying to get that video to rank in the top 10 I've heard people doing that and that's not for the juice. That's just for getting that particular page to rank. So, just take the high road, do stuff for the long term, and build real value. Don't try to outsmart or out-trick Google. You're not gonna win that game. Everything you do has to be underpinned by value creation.

J: I love that. And you actually took the words out of my mouth, and I was like nodding the mat about the Forbes thing that you actually brought up. Because, you know, we've been on Huffington Post. That was another no-follow, at least at the time. I'm sure maybe it's, you know, for the contributors at least.

Yeah. I don't even take contributors now.

J: Not anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. We got kicked us all off.

J: We were on there, and then it was, like, maybe a couple of months later. All right. Everybody's gone. We're like, Oh, I love a short-lived, but it's interesting. You brought up the Forbes thing, just because in the last handful of months, we had a couple of opportunities, people saying, “Hey, pay us X thousand dollars to, to basically get you into the, you know, possibly becoming a contributor and kind of harping on the SEO benefits.” And obviously that, you just, pretty much said, like, we have a bad taste in our mouth. Like, that doesn't seem quite right. I don't think that's above board.

Well, that bad taste is called snake oil.

J: Yeah. Yeah. And you just nailed it. And I wanted to bring that up very clearly to everybody listening because I know folks have this kind of starry eye vision, even just paying a contributor or pitching a can. I mean, pitching is probably different because that's giving value. Yeah, you know if it's relevant and whatnot, but the whole paying factor and especially no follow links. It's like, okay, just know what you're doing. So you just pretty much answered everything. So, thanks for that.

M: Other than like the sort of on-page content stuff and then the off-page, like linking stuff, you know, what other factors that kind of fall outside of those two should people be thinking about? 

Well, there's all that architectural stuff, the technical, geekery, and I alluded to some of that with, like the redirects and the robust. txt disallows and no indexing and things like that.  there's a lot.  to that. There are things like hreflang tags and canonical tags and rel alternate tags and just like, it just, the rabbit hole goes very deep and I don't want our listeners to have their eyes roll back in the sockets, more glaze over.

So, I'll just say that duplicate content is the bane of the SEO. Practitioner's existence. We don't want to have duplicate content on our site. We don't want to have duplicate content  appearing on other sites either. So we don't want to compete with ourselves and we don't want to compete with our same content published elsewhere. So, one strategy you can use: I got this one from Andy Crestodina; he calls it the evil twin strategy where, let's say, you do all this research and create a really Killer article about the top seven best practices for whatever. 

Right. And you publish that on, let's say, I dunno, what's, other than Forbes or the Huffington Post would be, oh, let's say Readwrite.com. Let's say you have a column on read, right? You publish there. So that's great. And now you want to publish. You want to repurpose what you've done for ReadWrite without creating a duplicate of that original article. You want to leverage all that research and everything. So what you do is you take essentially the opposite. So what's, the evil twin or the opposite of the seven best practices for. I don't know, YouTube optimization or whatever, right?

J: The seven worst.

Yeah. Seven biggest mistakes that YouTubers make with their SEO on YouTube.

J: Yeah, I like that. And it's an easy rewrite.

Yeah, that's, how you leverage the content and you avoid duplicate content,  cause there's a filter, it's not a penalty. It's a, filter. It might feel like a penalty, but, yeah. Duplicate content gets filtered out of the search results because Google wants diversity in the search results. That's what users want They don't want to see what appears to be the same title and snippet over and over again and if you're competing with yourself by syndicating the same article on multiple sites or on a third party site and on your site  that's just going to create a lot of pain unnecessarily. Use the evil twin strategy instead and make those two articles unique.  

J: Oh, I love that because that is so easily done. If you create the content yourself, you probably have someone on your team, you know, kind of, they don't even have to be super knowledgeable. You did all the research. Like you said, you leverage your time and your research time. Now you just pretty much swap it, you know, make the reverse with the same content.

But you also, there'll be technical issues that will cause duplicate content to appear like within your own site. You might have multiple versions of your homepage because of tracking parameters. It's crazy. Like if you do a search on Google for in Earl colon. Maybe some sort of session ID or user ID parameter. Even the Google Analytics, UTM medium, UTM source and all that you put those sorts of parameters into a Google query, and you'll find tons of search results that have. Those tracking parameters in them, even ones that aren't supposed to be there because it's on Google's own product.

It's Google analytics and the tracking parameter is let's say UTM underscore medium.  You'll find tons and tons of Search results in Google with UTM underscore medium in the URL and it's like that's duplicate content because also undoubtedly the version without that tracking parameter is indexed in Google as well. So now you're competing with yourself, or you have a WWW version of your site and a non-WWW version of your site that's not redirecting one to the other. And you don't have a canonical tag in place, a canonical link element.

So you're not saying, “Hey, Google, the WWW version is the canonical, the definitive source version. Use that one and collapse all the page rank and all the link equity to that version.” No, you have two competing versions, or you have HTTPS and HTTP, and they're both competing with each other. So make sure you've got your ducks in a row. And that goes back to this. The concept of paying for an SEO audit is to have somebody really good do it. You know, it doesn't have to be me. I'm not inexpensive. Yeah, you can find cheaper, but you get what you pay for it, too.

J: Yeah. So obviously, you are there. You don't take on a lot of clients but for folks wondering, like, what are some good places they could find someone who is good at this SEO audit and then not some, you know, the person that's doing old school stuff that is probably gonna hurt you in the long run.

Yeah, there's so many SEO providers out there. I'm not going to point to like  one or two of them because, then they'll get overwhelmed.

J: General qualities are maybe where to find these folks. 

Yeah, so there's the Moz recommended list as a great source. I'm on that list, of course, because not only am I good at this, but I'm co-authored with Rand Fishkin, who's the founder of Moz. I think that had something to do with it, but actually, I think it's like a committee that does the selection process for who ends up on that list and who doesn't, but that's a great starting point if you talk with somebody. And you want to ascertain whether they know their stuff or they're selling you snake oil, and you don't know it.

You can ask them to download my white paper, or it's kind of like a checklist sort of document. I call it the SEO BS Detector, and it has a bunch of trick questions that don't sound like trick questions, and then there's only one right answer to them, and I give you that right answer. Don't tip your hat and let them know that, like, okay, here's the trick question now. Just nonchalantly work this into the interview process, and you will be able to know if they're charlatans or not. 

One example of a question is "Tell me your process for optimizing meta keywords. How do you do it?" Now, there's only one right answer to that question because meta keywords are never counted in Google. A good SEO knows that if they say anything other than that, like what meta keywords are, those never count in Google. Why would you ask about that? If they say, well, meta keywords don't count for as much as they used to, I probably wouldn't bother with it anymore. Like what they counted at some point, and then they count less. No, I'll tell you more about that. Actually, don't bother telling me more about that. Here's the door.

J: That's awesome. Okay. How do you find that? That's a white paper. Is there a link to it, or is it an opt-in? Oh, you know what? I created a nice special page for your listeners. It's at MarketingSpeak.com/hustle.

M: Marketingspeak.com/hustle. Again, that'll be in the show notes, too. Thanks for doing that. It's super cool.

You're welcome. Yeah. It's not only got the BS Detector on there. It has an SEO Hiring Blueprint, which is my seven-step process for hiring a really good SEO, and trick questions in the interview process are part of it. But another part, I'll share from that. And this is so ninja. Incorporate a riddle in the job advert. If you're going to post to job boards or whatever or to freelancer communities, have them solve a riddle. In order to apply this signal to noise ratio is just sky high. Then you'd get a lot fewer entries or submissions or inquiries, but there's so much higher quality, and I don't even care if they get the answer right. 

So there's a policeman and a convict and a child and they're on one side of the river and they have to get to the other and the boat only holds two people and you can't leave the  convict alone, you can't leave him with the child, and  da and get them all three across. I don't even care if they get it right. They just have to  follow directions and send in their answer to the riddle and show their work. 

J: Interesting how they explain themselves. I like that. I've never heard of anybody putting that in an advert for a job. 

I do that for everything. Now, if I'm hiring for a VA, if I'm hiring for an operations manager or whatever, I put riddles in all the time. Yes.

J: That just makes it fun, too. 

M: Now, how does the—I know we're kind of running tight on time here—but a couple of last quick questions. How does the podcast that you run, Marketing Speak, fit into the overall mix of your business? Is that? Are there some SEO implications with podcasts as well?

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a great way to get lots of high quality links. It's just a link magnet. So you want to put some real effort into your podcast website. Because I wanted to establish the brand marketing speak, and I think it looks more legit and, link worthy as a separate site. That's why I put it on marketingspeak.com instead of just as a sub-directory on stuff and StephanSpencer.com. 

And lo and behold, it did get a lot more links that way. I have each episode transcribed, and it's not just the raw transcription. It's turned into a long blog post broken up with images that we sourced from sites like Pexels.com. So they're royalty-free. And we add captions underneath those photos. We had click-to-tweets and nice, attractive boxes, and it just breaks up the text and makes it really more readable and engaging. But it's a long-form blog post, and Google loves that stuff. It's so much better than a bunch of bullets for your show notes, you know, a little mini-outline.

And having the transcript, like all the back-and-forth banter, is a good question. Yeah, I know, wasn't it? You know, nobody wants to read any of that. So you cut all that stuff out, and you make this not look like a transcript but an actual article. So that's a great little tip. And, I've been able to get the attention of some really big-name people that I wouldn't have, I wouldn't be able to normally spend an hour with them, except I'm a podcaster who's had people like Seth Godin and Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham on. And so they're like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. I'll be on your show.” 

Then, I can ask them anything and potentially collaborate with them. And, oh, that leads me back to that. When you're outreaching and you have an offer to collaborate with them, you're going to get a lot more traction than if it's like, Hey, I got a guest post. So I wanted to close that loop by looking for collaboration opportunities. Don't just send them an already completed.  And, polished infographics say, you know, here's my rough draft of my infographic and props to Brian Dean for this idea. He calls it guestographics. It's like a guest post infographic: look for an opportunity to collaborate with that website owner, that blogger and say, Hey, you're the subject matter expert.

I need some data points, some stats, some trends, some tips and tricks or whatever for this, infographic. I would love to cite you and as a source and give you lots of props and credit in the infographic and then they're more invested in that infographic because it's kind of theirs too.They're much more inclined to share it, to post it to their blog, to link to you and attribute you, etc. So look for collaboration opportunities. 

J: I love that. That's such a great way to attract higher level people too. And it's  you know, it's a little ego Beatty a little bit. Cause, you know, it gets them invested, and they're going to probably see something that you made about them. So I'm like, oh, what are they writing about me? And then I love it. That's perfect.

M: So, last couple of questions here, as far as tools go, are there any, like SEO tools that you, do you just live by?

Oh, my God. There are so many, Okay. I'm just going to start rattling them off. I'll go by categories and link building. There's LinkResearchTools.com. In particular, in that tool set, link detox is a must. So, LinkResearchTools.com, Ahrefs.com, SEMrush. Let's see, what are some others? Majestic, Moz Link Explorer. So those are good starting points in Link Analysis. And then, with keyword research, there's Moz Keyword Explorer. 

There's Rank Ranger Keyword Finder and Google Trends; believe it or not, it is kind of cool because there's this YouTube search feature where you can, where it says web search, you click on that, choose under the pull down list, YouTube search, and then you can start seeing,  what's popular and not in terms of YouTube searches. Yeah, that's pretty ninja, and it's free. So, keyword research, let's see what else. 

AnswerThePublic.com. That's a free tool. That's really cool. Soovle.com. That's like an auto-complete tool that pulls in auto-complete suggestions from not just Google, but also, you know, Yahoo, YouTube, Answers.com, Wikipedia, Amazon, all simultaneously, so you start typing in keystrokes and it auto completes from all those services and you can click on any of those popular keywords that are being recommended and then it goes straight to the search results on that particular engine and that's a free tool, so that's great for brainstorming. There's Ubersuggest, which is, owned by Neil Patel now. Gosh, there's so many tools. There's whole tool sets or suites of tools. I mean, SEMrush is a suite of tools. Searchmetrics is one that I'm a big fan of as well. I love their topic explorer and their content editor.  

M: Yeah, we spend a lot of time in Ahrefs. That one seems to have most of what we do with SEO. Yeah.

Yeah. It's kind of a weird name and people are like, is it Ahrefs.com or no, it's AHREFS.com.

M: Yeah. That's true. The only reason I call it Ahrefs is because that's how they pronounce it in the videos, but I've always been confused by it. Ahrefs. Ahrefs. I don't know.  They always drop the A when they talk about it in their videos and stuff.

Yeah. Well, that's a great way to get people to end up on a different website. 

J: Well link all this stuff too, in the show notes. Cause this is just, these are amazing  tools. All right, man. I know we kept you a little longer than we promised already. I appreciate you sticking around. 

You bet. 

J: Where's the best place? So you have stephanspencer.com and marketingspeak.com. 

Yeah. Oh, but also, I've got another show that I want to send your listeners to that has nothing to do with SEO, even though it sounds like it. Okay. It's called Get Yourself Optimized, and that show is at getyourselfoptimized.com. Just search for those words, get yourself optimized and your favorite podcast player. And that one's all about biohacking, life hacking, productivity,  personal development, and self-help stuff. It's really inspirational and awesome. 

And I've had some of the biggest names you could imagine and in the personal development, a world like Byron Katie on. I've had, some of the top biohackers in the world, like Dave Asprey on, I've had some real luminaries in the business world as well. Like the author of the E-myth, Michael Gerber has been on there. Yeah, it's, a really cool show. It's, I'm really passionate about that and I'm using that as fodder for an upcoming personal development book.

J: I'm going to check that out because Matt and I both love nerding out on that kind of stuff. And we had a George, Jonathan Levy on our show. I know he has a becoming,

I love Jonathan. Yeah. He's been on that on my get yourself off my show. He's become a really good friend of mine. 

J: Okay, good. Cause I was like, if you don't know him, I will introduce you for sure because it seems perfect for it, but very already there.

M: And then also a marketingspeak.com/hustle. That's where you can get the white paper with the kind of give you how to find the right SEO expert for your business and how to, pose your interview questions and all that kind of good stuff. And it looks like, you know, you're doing the right person.

J: Awesome. Stephan. Well, thanks for your time so much and all the knowledge here. And, yeah, this is going to be great.

You're welcome. It was a lot of fun. 

J: Yeah. All right, man. Well, have a great one, and we'll chat soon. 

M: Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Before taking the time to listen, we want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a CliffsNotes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out all of the resources that they laid out, and all the good stuff from this episode.

We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening. Go get it. Wiki.