This podcast interview is originally published under Primed Mind

Those who live a high-performance life have figured out how to consistently bring their best, their A-game, to the most important areas of life. On the A-Game Advantage podcast, you'll get to peek inside the minds of the world's highest-performing individuals so you can learn and model the mindsets and systems that allow them to bring their A-Game every day. With your host, Elliot Roe.

Welcome to another episode of the A-Game Advantage. I'm your host, Elliot Roe. This episode is brought to you by Primed Mind, my mindset app designed to prime your mind to perform at its best when it matters most. To download and try it for free, visit agameadvantage.com/primed. In this episode, I talk to Stephan Spencer. Stephan is a leading expert in search engine optimization, having published many highly regarded books on the subject. 

He's also the host of the Get Yourself Optimized podcast, a popular podcast that focuses on biohacking mindset and improving performance. In this episode, Stephan gives and shares some of his best advice on how you can optimize your life, both personally and professionally. Let's jump into our chat with Stephan now. So Stephan, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me, Elliot.

One of the things I found so interesting about your story was the length of time you've been involved in computers and the Internet. So, tell us a bit about how you came to find this world and what it was like in those early days.

Well, yes, I've been online for a very long time. In fact, even before the Internet, I was "Online." I was on CompuServe and these other networks prior to the Internet. I had my Commodore 64 as a little kid. I was programming. I wrote my own BBS (bulletin board system) from scratch and basic. Back when I was a little kid, I did all-nighters during the summer when I wasn't in school and coded this BBS. And then I had it on my only home phone line. My mother would get really mad when she picked up the phone, and she'd hear a modem sound and yell up to stairs, "Get that thing off." 

And then, you know, I found out that I was becoming quite the Uber nerd, and that's not good for social skills, getting a girlfriend, or anything like that. So sophomore year of high school, I just went cold turkey. I sold my Commodore and gave away all my software and everything, and then joined the track team, cross-country team, and cycling club. And, yeah, ended up not really getting back into computers in a very big way until I was in a PhD program in biochemistry. I was like all set to go down this route of becoming this biochem professor and researcher.

And then I met a couple of the guys from Netscape. I met the founder of the inventor of the worldwide web, Tim Berners-Lee. And this was in 1994. And I realized like, wow, I really need to jump onto this gravy train and start my own internet company. And I did a few months later, I dropped out of my PhD. I stuck it out long enough to get a master's. So, I have a master's in biochemistry.

Which serves me absolutely no good at all. But I have it. I started this Internet company without having any business classes, marketing classes, even really computing classes other than I had one Fortran class as an undergrad student. I just figured it all out on my own. Actually, a couple of months into this business where I just had no clients, and I was not sure if this was going to even work. I didn't have any funding sources or anything. I was up to my eyeballs in student loan debt from all those years in college. 

My wife, at the time, also had gone through her own master's program. So I was a little nervous. Then, I talked my way into this conference called the How to Market on the Internet conference run by IQPC. And so I was a volunteer. They gave me the mic to be a mic runner during Q&A. Being the cheeky 23 24-year-old, I decided, well, I've got the mic, and these guys clearly up on stage don't know what they're talking about. So, I'm going to start chiming in and helping answer the questions. And I did. And yeah, I ended up getting a stack of business cards from different people. So like, you know more than the people on the stage. I'm really impressed. We got to talk. I ended up getting two major accounts for my agency by the end of that conference, by the end of that day.

So they were both worth a half million dollars in customer lifetime value each. So I didn't have to go get angel funding or anything like that. That saved me. But it also was a hugely embarrassing situation because, for me, even though it was such a game changer, I also got de-invited from volunteering on day two by the conference organizer. Like she was pissed. And apparently, she was pissed because I pissed off some of the big-name speakers at that event who I was kind of upstaging.

But I'm sure for a million dollars, I think it's probably worthwhile.

Oh, totally, totally worth it. I wouldn't change a thing. And for years and years, I was too embarrassed to share the story. And then I realized like, wow, this is actually a powerful story.

It might help somebody get past their fears of looking good and not looking bad because that puts us in this horrible little box, and we're not out there to change the world in a meaningful way because we know we're getting judged. And yeah, so I just kind of let go of that, and I realized I needed to tell this story. The irony of this whole situation, as I remember, is that it was IQPC, the conference organization, that ran this event. They ran many, many events. Another one that they ran that was like six months later was called How to Market Educational Programs on the Internet. Another conference organizer called me; I don't know from where or who called me and invited me to speak, chair, and do a post-conference workshop on this conference. 

And, of course, I said yes, and I was terrible at it. At the time, I was not a good speaker. I did not know how to keep people on time as a conference chair and keep things light and entertaining in between sessions or any of that. I mean, I was terrible. But I was committed that I'm going to get good at this. I'm just going to keep going these different conference organizations, they all poach each other's speakers. So I started getting calls from all these other organizations, IIR and so forth. And I said yes to everything. And so I was just out on the speaking circuit constantly. And I finally got really good at speaking. But it took a lot. And I did a fair amount of training and stuff, too. So yeah, that's been a fun ride. Speaking has generated for me eight figures in revenue easily.

Amazing how powerful it is. If you go and give a talk, you know you are the expert in the room. And it's one thing if you're the mic handler getting a couple of cards, but if you're the speaker on stage, it's unbelievable the amount of business that can generate.

That's right. And if you structure it in a way that, like, all right, I'm going to go with the intention to get these powerful conversations or get these business cards or get people to opt in or whatever. The more powerful the intention you have and the outcome you have in mind when you go in. I mean, this is all mindset, right? So, like, I used to get very few cards at many of my speaking engagements because I just didn't know how to position it. So, it was an irresistible offer without it sounding too much like a pitch because you'd get in trouble with the conference.

Selling on stage, yeah.

Yeah, selling from the stage is a big no-no for most of the kinds of conferences that I speak at, SEO conferences, internet marketing conferences, and so forth. So you just have to play within the rules, but I'll bring copies of my book. Well, I have three books, but I bring the big one, The Art of SEO is a thousand pages, and it's really heavy. It kind of intimidates people when they see me pull it out on stage. And I say, "Who's willing to read this thing?" And there are a bunch of people who surprise me every time to raise their hand in the audience and say, "I wanna read that, I wanna read that." And so I'll give it away and I'll say," well, who wants it enough to come and get it?" And then they'll look at each other.

I learned this from Dave VanHoose, Speaking Empire. You have people to run up on stage to get one little thumb drive. And then he'd like, who wants another one? I was like, oh, there's another one? By that time, people realized they could storm the stage to get that thing. It was the first time people looked at each other and were like, "What? What? Oh, go on. Oh, we go up on stage. We go to you and we get it." Yeah. And then by the end of it, of course, everybody would get a thumb drive because he had a huge box in the back of the room, kind of do the same thing. But these books are really heavy and I bring them on the plane with me. You know, I check them in the luggage. So I'll bring maybe 150 pounds of books, but surprisingly, that's not very many books.

So I'll have maybe 30 to give away in the back of the room. But I saved that for the end. I give away a couple of copies. And I say this was a key little distinction. All these little distinctions make the difference. I say, well, I've got an opt-in, so you get a free copy of Google Power Search digitally, which is my 120-page book. You all get a copy of that digitally. So here's the opt-in. And I use a shortcode text thing called lead digits for that.

Then if you've opted in, you also may get a book, like a physical copy to walk away with. So that was a big difference maker, getting people to make sure they opted in and showed me with their cell phone that they had opted in before they get a book. And a lot of them won't get a book because I'm speaking to big audiences, I only got 30 copies. Those sort of little distinctions, you gotta treat everything like it's an experiment.

And how to like have a hypothesis, I have a hypothesis for example, that getting them to text opt-in versus email opt-in or go to a webpage and opt-in will get me a higher response rate, it'll give me a higher opt-in rate. So that was a hypothesis experiment turned out, that hypothesis turned out to be true. So you treat SEO in the same way. Everything is a set of experiments, you can't be afraid to change a title tag or change the focus, the keyword focus of your homepage because you might lose all your traffic, you can switch it back, right? You got to be able to be okay. You have to be comfortable with uncertainty. And the more you are comfortable with uncertainty, the more you're going to win, not just in SEO but in life.

And you know, with SEO, a lot of the people listening to this, they are business owners. I'm sure many of them have been pitched as search engine optimization, it will change your business. Can you explain to people why they should be looking at SEO?

Yeah, it's more like the operating system of the Internet.? So when you hop onto your computer, and you want something, and you don't know what it is yet, unless it's like a physical product that you just normally are trained to go to Amazon to search for, you're probably searching on Google. So Google is the operating system of the Internet. It's the shortest, most direct path from A to B. A being, I don't know what the answer is to this question, or I don't know how to solve this problem. I need the solution. Then you hop onto Google, and if you don't show up there, you're outside of the consideration set. 

You're invisible. So even if somebody was given your name as a referral, and you might think, well, I don't need the Internet. I don't need SEO. I don't need Google. I mean, heck, we probably don't even need a website, but we have one, just in case. Why would you even bother having a website if you don't care about getting the traffic there? If you don't care that anybody sees your website, why would you even bother building a website? So you have a website, you need SEO. Even if all of your traffic comes from referrals because they're just doing their due diligence before they sign a contract with you, right, or before they buy your product. Even then, you need to control the narrative. And that narrative is whatever shows up in the first set of search results because they're checking you out. 

You don't have a knowledge panel over on the right-hand side. Well, hello. You don't look super legit then. Or if your knowledge panel is unclaimed and there's a bunch of pieces missing, right, so an unclaimed knowledge panel, so that panel over on the right-hand side if there's a little button underneath that says, claim this knowledge panel, it means that you haven't claimed it. So, if it's your company, your brand, or your own personal name, you need to claim that. And then you have some more influence over what shows up there. So we search for my name, Stephan Spencer, and you'll see over on the right hand, the knowledge panel. 

There you'll see pictures of me. You'll see the covers of my books. You'll see links to icons on my different social platforms, a little Bio about me, and a little snippet of a bio pulled from my Wikipedia page. So, all of that is curated. And I have some control or some influence over it. I don't really have control, but I have influence over it because I've claimed my knowledge panel. I also am very careful about what shows up in the search results for my name. They're all things that I control or greatly influence. You know, it might be a speaker bio on a conference website or a column at a different, you know, these different magazines that I contribute to.

Adweek, for example, might be, you know, one of my social profiles, Facebook or Twitter, or whatever you have. So this is all under my influence. I won't say control because you can't control Google. You can only influence the algorithms. But if you're just leaving it to chance, you're just leaving the door wide open. You certainly don't have an alarm system on your property, and you're just leaving the door open, not just unlocked, but open. Like, oh, come on in competitors, take whatever you want. So don't do that. Play the game.

As an understatement, and a lot of people now, when you talk about advertising and marketing on the Internet, their first thought goes to paid advertising, sort of Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, et cetera. How does SEO differ from that?

SEO, you are building an asset. So this is really, really important to Grok. Every part of your business that is not an asset, you're just basically being a self-employed person. Right? So your own business is your self-employment. Now, if you have assets that are worth money, if you didn't go with the business, now you have something that's got tangible value. These assets can take the form of things like your email list, your retargeting list with Facebook or Google, or what you have. It could be a customer list or an email list for email newsletter signups. It could be your link-building profile that you've built up, your authority, and your trust in the eyes of Google. 

All these are things that are part of the asset value of your company. Whereas, if you're just doing paid searches or Facebook ads, you stop spending money on those ads. You stop receiving any benefits, right? Other than the little bit of value that you might have built up in terms of having a retargeting list on Facebook or what you have, you really don't have anything there. It's just, it's trading money for more money, which, you know, that's not a bad thing, but it's not as strategic as creating an asset that will continue to pay you dividends month after month, year after year, even if you stop doing SEO, right? So you do some link building, you build up a powerful presence in terms of your authority and your trust in the eyes of Google, and then you stop. Say, all right, well, I'm done going out hunting for links, trying to build a powerful presence for Google. I'm just going to take the next six months off. 

Well, you'll still get SEO value because you've built up those links, and people aren't just removing those links because they haven't heard from you. No, they mentioned you in a blog post, and that's it there. I'll never go back to a previous episode of either of my two shows, right? So, I'm a podcaster as well. I've got Marketing Speak and Get Yourself Optimized. I've had you on Get Yourself Optimized. Great episode. Every episode has show notes and links with the different resources. And with those resources, some of them are on their websites. Those are like votes. I'm never going to go back into an episode that I published in the past and remove a link. So you've got these links, most of them. I mean, some will drop off over time. So that's a game changer.

And then obviously, you know, people are looking at SEO. What should people look out for? If there are bad actors in the space or mistakes that people make as they go into it, what should people be aware of?

One thing they should be aware of is that there are bad actors and folks who don't wish them well and want to knock them down to the bottom of the search results. And you know the old joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two in the Google search results. So, if you're off of page one, you're invisible. SEO is kind of like a chess game where you can move your opponent's pieces as well as your own. So that's pretty wild, an idea that you can move your opponent's pieces. Well, you can have your pieces moved right off the board. That can be done by taking other listings that are lower than yours and promoting them above you. 

And it can also be done by making your reputation look bad to Google. So there are different ways of doing this. This whole idea of selling somebody's reputation in Google is called negative SEO. And I never want any of your listeners to ever do this. You need to be aware that it happens, and it could happen to you. So, you could be the victim of a negative SEO attack. And what happens is they will either buy low-quality links that will point to your site and it looks like you've been doing some link spamming, and Google assumes, and they're oftentimes right, that it was you doing some dodgy link buys, and they don't first of all want you to buy links at all. 

Secondly, if they're low quality, that's just because you're associating with a bad neighborhood online. And so the whole thing is just really bad. And so that's one way another way, which is even more clever and evil is that they will pretend to be you and contact legitimate website owners who have linked to you in the past and demand that the link is removed because your site is spammy because their site is, you're accusing them of being a link spammer saying, remove this link, or I'm going to report you to Google. And it's not even you. It's somebody pretending to be you.

I mean, and they're very effective because a lot of people are just saying, oh, all right, screw you. I'm going to remove my link remove that link. And they do without even thinking that it could be somebody other than the person who's, you know, claiming to be the owner of the business or the marketing person or whatever. Crazy stuff.

And that happens to people frequently?

Frequently enough, and especially in highly competitive industries. If you're in an industry where there are a lot of affiliates, some of those affiliates are going to play dirty like this. And so that's some of the dirty stuff that happens. But there are just silly mistakes that happen where you just don't know what you don't know. You set things up wrong; your web developer set it up wrong. For example, you can have a setting in your robots.txt. Right, so that's normally the place where you're gonna put disallows. And a disallow that says, okay, don't go into my admin area, my website. Don't go into it; these are directives to Googlebot. Don't crawl these types of pages or this directory or what have you.

In most cases, this is a bad idea. Instead, you want to use what's called a no-index. And a no-index is a meta robots tag. So, it's a meta tag that you add to the webpage. But if you've got a disallow in your robots.txt file, you're telling Googlebot not to go in and spider the page. And this might sound like technical geekery, like "I don't even want to know this stuff. Can I just pay Stephan or somebody to do this stuff for me and fix it all?" Well, yes, you can. And you should know that there's this sort of stuff that makes a lot of difference in terms of your crawl budget and your index budget and what happens with pages where the crawling stops, but they're still in the index. You'll still find these pages on Google but with no information about them. 

You see this little cryptic message that something about this page has very little information is known about this page or something like this, and read why. You know, like you just disregard what that listing says because you just don't know what that means. What happened typically was that Google was told not to visit these pages anymore, but it could keep the page in the search results. So there's a lot of technical stuff that can be misconfigured. It's really the three pillars of SEO. You got the technical stuff; that's one pillar. You got the links, which we talked about, and you know, the negative side of that, too.

But you also need to get high-quality, virtuous links to build up your authority and your trust levels in the eyes of Google, and not just be on the lookout for really low-quality links that might've been built for you. So that's the linking side of things. And then, finally, you have content. So those are the three pillars: technical, links, and content. The content includes picking good keywords that are relevant, popular, and attainable. You can achieve a page one ranking for the keyword selection and leaving those keywords in the right places and so your content in a way that doesn't look keyword stuffed and thinking actually, you know these aren't just keywords, but they're topics, and so what are some of the related words some SEO folks call LSI keywords. These are related keywords that, if you don't include any of them, make your article your piece of content look very surface-level.

And so if you're talking about lawn mowers and you never talk about grass or yards or yard care, lawns, grass clippings, any of that, weed whackers, none of those other keywords, it's just lawn mower, lawn mower, lawn mower. That looks very surface-level. It looks like, you know, low-value content. So, you need to think about the topics, the LSI keywords, or the related keywords. And that's all part of the content pillar. So yeah, there's a lot to think about, but you don't have to do all this heavy lifting yourself. You just hire an SEO expert and get them to do an audit, followed by the keyword strategy and link-building strategy.

And what sort of shifts do you see in people's businesses when they've gone through this process?

Oh, so, so many. I've got a bunch of case studies on my website, StephanSpencer.com. Of people with 500 and some percent increase in their organic Google traffic. It really does change their business. What you know now and how you've grown your business over the last, let's say, several years, just pretend that you had a time machine and you go back in time, let's say, three or five years, and all the stuff that you've learned, all the distinctions you've made and the relationships you've built. 

If you went back in time and could just give all that juice, all those gold nuggets to the previous version of you and just leapfrog ahead those five years in an instant. That's basically what you get with really good SEO is: you get to leapfrog. You could do the years of hard slog, or you could just crank up the volume and go after the right keywords and have the curated search results that put you in the best light and not leave things to chance, and yeah, it will change the course of your business.

Incredible stuff, and you can understand the impact. As I said, I think we're gonna be having a chat after this. And if other people are thinking that as well, where can they find you?

Yeah, so StephanSpencer.com is my main website, and like I said, case studies, there are a lot of online training programs there. And videos of past presentations, keynotes and things. But there are also those two podcasts that I mentioned, MarketingSpeak. So that's at MarketingSpeak.com and Get Yourself Optimized, which is not an SEO podcast, even though it sounds like it. It's a podcast on mindset, biohacking, productivity, and spirituality. So GetYourselfoptimized.com. That's that. I'll also make available to your listeners an offer that I'm very, not stingy about, but I'm very particular about who I offer this to. So I will offer this to your listeners. 

So that is a 15-minute consult with me, completely free of charge. And it's not a sales call. I mean, if you want to have a sales call, we can certainly do that too. But I will find at least three things that you don't know are problems with your SEO in that 15 minutes. And I'll screen share it with you, and I'll show you. What those are, whatever tools I need. I've got all the cool tools. And so I'll do that for any of your listeners. Time permitting, of course, I don't have unlimited time, but I'll make an opt-in or scheduling resource available. And I'll put that at marketingspeak.com/Elliot.

Perfect, well, really appreciate it. And if you have a business and you're listening to this. Please take advantage of that offer. That's it.

Yeah, everybody should take advantage of that.

Use that with Stephan's time. Well, man, thank you so much for sharing that. We'll put those links on the page as well if anyone's looking for those. Really appreciate you coming on and giving us this insight into something that we all hear a lot about, but it can be a little bit difficult to understand.

Yeah. And, of course, we only scratch the surface, but the thing that's most important to know is that you don't have to learn all this yourself. Just know that you need to focus on it as a business because otherwise, it's like you're leaving the door wide open, and it's just, it's more of a who, not how, sort of problem. Right? I learned that from Strategic Coach from Dan Sullivan. It's a who, not a how problem. Everything is a who, not a how problem.

I was gonna say that that's most things in business.

Yeah.

Well, once again, Stephan, thank you so much for coming on, and everyone, go and check out the link and check out his podcasts. Stephan brought up some very interesting topics regarding the mindset he developed to become successful in business and how to have more control over our presence on the Internet. If you want to learn more, make sure to take him up on his offer for a free 15-minute consultation at MarketingSpeak.com/Elliott and check out his podcast, Get Yourself Optimized.

If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to hit subscribe so you get access to each new episode automatically before it's available anywhere else. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another great episode. I'll talk to you then.