The Agency Hour
The Agency Hour is for digital agency owners like you who want to start, grow and scale their businesses. It’s like hanging out with friends while getting a masterclass in how to tackle the most significant obstacles you’re facing as an entrepreneur.
The Agency Hour
A Masterclass in SEO Strategy
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
It's not just some magical thing that you have to do. You have to prove that you deserve that position to be able to unroot that listing. And that means better content, better user experience, cross browser. We're talking privacy, accessibility, security, and then visibility off the website by showing a pattern of new links and mentions and curation. And then eventually it's all about how the users interact with that listing. And that doesn't happen overnight. So you know, setting a year expectation is the best thing I think you can do as an agency.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the agency hour. This week we have an absolute epic masterclass in SEO strategy for you. Take note, we have Steve Wiedemann in the building all the way from California, and we tackle everything from gathering organic and authentic referrals, outreach for linked partners, and how you can create an SEO strategy in one day for free. I'm Troy D. Stay with us. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Agency Hour Podcast brought to you by Agency Mavericks, and my special guest this week is Steve Wiedemann all the way from California, I believe. Is that right, Steve?
SPEAKER_02Los Angeles, you got it.
SPEAKER_00Los Angeles. Whereabouts in LA are you based?
SPEAKER_02Uh right on the border of Orange County, LA, and La Morada. If you're at Disneyland and you head 10 minutes north, you're right there.
SPEAKER_00Perfect. Love it. I love Orange County. I was out there a few weeks ago for one of our events in San Diego, and I spent a night in Orange County because some customers of mine, uh Musos, and they organized a rehearsal session, and it happened to be down in Irvine. And uh it's super pretty down there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's really nice. People are great. It's uh we we have something called the Orange Curtain here, right? Between LA and Orange County. You've got LA really hyper focused on fashion and celebrity news and um you know, and and it's just uh it's a completely different uh way of life. You go to Orange County, it's a little bit more around style than fashion, right? It's you know um uh a little more um personal space required in Orange County than you get in LA. So it's it's a little bit of a different culture, but uh being right in the middle makes it kind of weird.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. There is a lot of personal space in Orange County, actually. That's the one of the things I enjoyed about it. I'd spent I'd spent a couple of nights in Los Angeles with friends, and it was refreshing to get to Orange County and have some room to think and some room to breathe. Uh now, for those that don't know, who are you and what are you doing here on our podcast?
SPEAKER_02I am just another digital marketing nerd. Uh been in the in the digital space about 25 years. Um I had the opportunity to go back to school after my time in the military here and get a degree in e-business management. And I basically just fell in love with everything digital. One of my my jobs at IBM Global Services was to move what was print output to the web. And one day I had this epiphany that, hey, maybe every every business at some point might actually have one of these website things, you know, and uh it turned out I was right, and I picked the right uh you know path to go down and uh ended up with some really exciting jobs at at Disney and uh working for ticketing companies that are similar to Ticketmaster, and um eventually kind of went off on my own and decided, hey, I'm gonna be close to home and and uh you know and and uh really explore my passion for what I do in search. So 2010 I started a little agency and um uh evolved into a consultancy and now 12 years later, you know, we consult for uh quite a few multi-location restaurant chains and um some fun e-commerce websites, a few attorneys and some HVAC companies. Um we get to really explore the depths of you know what we can do from uh an organic search marketing perspective and how we can marry that to all the other disciplines in digital to try to see the best results across the board. So as a as an agency, it's a consultancy, it's been it's been really exciting to kind of watch that growth and to work with some really, really fun clients and um and just be nerds. That's the best part.
SPEAKER_00Awesome, love it. Um I want to talk about uh we'll come to the agency. Uh talking about Disney, what was your role at Disney?
SPEAKER_02I was the um SEM account manager for Disneyland.com and Adventures by Disney. So on the Disneyland side, I had commerce and marketing, different departments, one based out of Burbank, one based out of Anaheim. So my my role there, of course, was to try to maximize the visibility and search um for the marketing team and sell as many damn tickets as I could for the for the commerce team. And um and sometimes working with both groups to see how we can allocate budget and say, you know, our paid search budget runs out on tickets around noon. Perhaps we can reallocate some of this marketing budget that you're just throwing away on search impressions to see if we can get a little bit more ticket sales. Um and also to protect keywords like um you know, the the keyword Disneyland, for example, was one of the top performing keywords for pay-per-click. And when Disney Parks came in, they said we're gonna do DisneyParks.com and um all this amazing thing, things that we we want to do for marketing. And I said, Well, hopefully you're not gonna take these really high converting, you know, conversion terms. And they're like, Yeah, we want to use the word Disneyland and poach that from your campaign for marketing purposes. And I'm like, So you're looking at, I don't know, two, four million dollars a month of lost revenue? Are you sure you want to do that? You know, and so my job, part of that was to protect, you know, the the important keywords from being thrown around into marketing when they really work well for commerce because Disney Parks wasn't a site you could buy tickets on. Um, the other part was Adventures by Disney, which was this new brand that Disney had for family travel. So family travel to um, you know, to Ireland, family travel to China, all sorts of really um uh travel-related keywords that were meant to uh hopefully give them to uh give them more customers. And what the challenge was at the time was that it was a flash-based website. And so I said, hey, hey boss, can I can I please can I please work with the dev folks and make this page crawlable so that search engines can actually read the words that are on the page and not just see a Swift file from from Flash and make it an actual website, not just a flash thing. And I had to prove to him that that I could do it, and and part of that process uh was showing him that I could rank organically for something, and he challenged me to rank for SEO expert. And so, you know, I went out, build a little five-page website and did all the things titles, descriptions, headings, image names, video, um, got some links from the school that I went to and um you know, some other uh really strong, trustworthy sources, and sure enough, I get to the first page and I walk up to my boss and I'm like, now I can take this to uh to HTML from Flash because I'm on page one for SEO expert. And he goes, No, you're you're not number one. I'm like, Are you kidding me? So I go back, I do some talks, I ask people to search for where I am, I ask for a show of hands of people who who actually clicked on my listing. I thank them uh because they played a role in helping to show the search engines that I was the best result by their search behavior actions. So between the, you know, the the relevancy side of creating an SEO expert page, the um off-page side to get Google to find links to crawl to those pages and rank them, and the user behavior signals of users actually clicking on them, um I got to that number one spot. And I held it for 12 years before the the industry finally told me the reason we're blacklisting you from speaking at all of our events is because we think you're a braggart for being number one for SEO expert. I'm like, well, would you gonna wait this long to tell me? So I finally got rid of the page, and now I'm I'm a big part of the community, and I'm just embracing the friendships and the relationships and the experiences that I get to have. But um Adventures by Disney did go HTML and we did get the the traffic we needed. We augmented paid with organic and it worked like a champ there. Excellent.
SPEAKER_00Oh, what a what a great story. What a great story. I I'm one of the first websites I built was for a cinematographer friend of mine here in Melbourne, and of course it was in Flash, and it was fabulous. And he came back to me about 12 months later and he said, and of course I didn't charge him for it because we were buddies back then and I didn't know what I was doing. And he came back about 12 months later and he said, Hey, listen, I want you to build me a proper website. And I was offended. I was like, what do you mean? I did build you a proper website. And he said, No, no, no, one that people can actually find. I'm like, oh, and so I had discovered the hot that you know back then it was, I don't know, 2008.
SPEAKER_02Use the data operator, and you're like, there's one URL on the search results. We need to have like a hundred pages in the search results, not just one. That's SWF in the description.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So I had to learn how to build how to take a how to take all my websites out of Flash and put them into HTML and CSS and realize that I had to kind of give up on the dream of having the you know being a web animator because nobody cares. They were the good old days, weren't they?
SPEAKER_02But it's still fun. It was still fun to play with Flash, though.
SPEAKER_00So much fun. I remember the first time I I I viewed the source code in a browser. This I'm talking Netscape Navigator a long time ago. I viewed the source code in the browser. I'm like, what? I can view the source code that built this website. This is not I felt like I was I was sure the police were gonna knock on the door any minute and go, hey, what are you doing? Like this is this has got to be this has got to be illegal. Um But you mentioned something about the community. That's the one thing that I've really enjoyed over the years being heavily involved in the WordPress space, is the the the community of nerds is pretty cool, isn't it? And they've and they've we've I find mo for m for the most part a very sharing community, just wanting to help each other out and um you know relatively relatively egoless, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And and when we all want to see each other grow. And there's enough there's enough business out there. Every business needs a website and needs SEO. So there's there's plenty of work for all of us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And the more we learn from each other, the better we all get. So I'm I'm all about that.
SPEAKER_00That's a great mindset. Um at what point did you have the confidence to start your own agency and to leave corporate life and go out on your own?
SPEAKER_02That's a good question. I I'd kind of been taken advantage of a bit because of that ranking position, that SEO expert position. Agencies wanted that. Um, uh, you know, other other businesses that we're working with at the time, they they all just I don't know. Um it got to the point where one of the agencies I was working with was was taking advantage of me really, really bad. And I'm like, this this sucks for the drive I have to do and the hours I have to work. I've got two little kids at home that I want to spend time with. And um I just said, you know what? I'm frustrated enough. I've got enough freelance work that I can survive for a few weeks while I go drum up some more business. And um and I took a chance and I I literally walked the neighborhood, the same block that we lived on in in Buena Park at the time. And I went to a photography shop, I went to a few car dealerships, and I just said, you know, hey, I'm you know, I'm I'm Steve. I I live a block away. Um I just you know got done with the tour of working with Disney and IBM and some other really fun brands. And I'm just kind of looking to see if there's any businesses that are doing digital marketing that I could, you know, provide some support to. And what do you what are you doing at the moment? And can you show me your website? Is your website driving traffic from Google? You're not sure? Do you want to sit down and look at it? And so we just sat down and for some of them for as many as two or three hours, just talking digital marketing. And by the time you're done, you know, looking at their account and giving them suggestions, they're like, I need to hire this guy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. What a great strategy. What a great the there's a couple of things there's a couple of things. I want to park here for a second. There's a couple of things here. You had social, you had social proof because you had experience with Disney and IBM, right? So like excuse me while I pick those names up off the floor, because there, I mean, that's well done. You've leveraged that credibility. But you also are pounding the pavement, walking the street, introducing yourself as a local part of the community. I'm Steve, I live a few blocks away, so all of a sudden we're part of the same tribe. You have credibility because of the IBM Disney experience, uh, and then just offering to give them some some free advice, knowing that the law of reciprocity, they will say, Well, first of all, you know what you're talking about. I've I could really do with some help, and you're obviously the right person. That's super interesting. How long did it take you to drum up enough business to go, okay, this is a thing. I'm I'm gonna start this full time and go pro.
SPEAKER_02It took a whole month and and it was 17,000 was what I what I was able to drive that very first month, and it it blew my mind what I was able to do, and it got addicting. By the end of the third week, I was out just just selling. I was like a full time, I was like, oh my god, I'm this is working, you know, and um and then I had this dilemma. I just drummed up uh a month's worth of of business and I haven't even started it yet. I had to do all the work that that uh fifth week in, the first week of the second month, and I was exhausted. I was doing like 20 hours a day just playing ketchup from that whole month of sales. Wow.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Were you uh were you were you ever nervous at all that you wouldn't be able to get results for clients? Or is this Yeah. So how did you manage that? I mean, I I'm sure that you know everyone's experienced imposter syndrome at some point and and continues to do so throughout their life, and I'm sure that was probably one of those moments where you were like, well, I've bitten off more than I can chew now. I I really have to deliver on the promise. Did you I mean were these back in the good old SEO days where it was relatively easy to get rankings, or were you still kind of did you take on any cli I guess the question is, did you did you say no to some clients because you just knew that you couldn't get them results, or were you just like I'm gonna take everyone on and then figure it out?
SPEAKER_02That was pretty much it. Took everyone on. It was 2010, so it was pre, you know, some of the the big updates that Google made and like spam filters like panda and penguin and so forth. So um, so we had we had a little bit more of a wild west to play with and practices that definitely wouldn't work today, that that were part of the the mix of things that we would do. But um, I wasn't as worried about it. I I I had to keep reminding myself I ranked number one for a CEO expert, you know. Um I I know what I'm doing. I've I've been doing this for some some really exciting brands, I've written ebooks. Um I I host the largest Orange County meetup group with over 750 members of it. I got this, I can do this, you know? And and so I just went in with that attitude. And um, and yeah, there were times where where I wasn't able to be successful, but most of those times were because the clients wouldn't engage with you when you said, Okay, I figured it all out. Here's the content we're gonna need to help you to get the results you want. Yeah, I need you to help give me this content, right? And they're like, Yeah, that's that's not my job. Your job is to make the phone ring, and my job is to is to pay you. And I'm like, Well, I don't know anything about plumbing, I don't know the first thing about um car sales, right? So I need you to give me this content. I'll put the pages up, I'll optimize them, I'll get the keywords in for you. Those content sheets, I I must have handed out, I don't know, hundreds of them over the years. But those first couple years, getting clients to give you back content was virtually impossible. And there wasn't really like text brokers back then. And there were some agencies that got in trouble for the way that they were brokering text for SEO that um that charge $2,000 a page or whatever, or at least lease the pages but don't sell them to. Uh but there wasn't really like a a network of writers, so I always depended on the clients to provide the content. So that was that was probably one of the challenging parts. And and there were times I found myself a content writer for a car salesman, or I found myself a content writer for a plumber. Um, you know, because you do what you have to do sometimes if you're not getting the results you want. And plenty of of 2 a.m. in the morning, and now I'm I'm I'm pretty well versed in so many industries, not because I wanted to, but because the clients just will never give you content.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll tell you. I mean, there's a whole industry that's grown up around that. There's SAS SAS platforms like Gather Content and Content Snare that are designed to help make it easier to get content from clients. But at the end of the day, how do you solve that problem now? In in having no knowing what you know now, how do you solve that problem for clients in today's Sure.
SPEAKER_02Um, well, in our agreements now, we have three blocks that we make them initial. Like I agree that this program requires a web developer, right? And and that web developer needs to give us at least, you know, two to five hours a week of their support. Um, I agree that this program needs a content writer. Uh Wiedemann is gonna you know give you the list of search terms, how to organize them on the page, um, you know, what what markup to use for that page, um, all the the different clues of what could help to make sure that that page appears for the widest array of keywords that it can. And um and we just make sure that they um they fill in the blanks. That's all they have to do. And so there's been times though, even even though they initial it were we'll still provision a writer for them. So we do have, you know, several writers now on our team if if we need to um, you know, to to fill that gap for them. But we we definitely charge a premium for it, and it's to their advantage, you know, to bring somebody in who can get some training and knowledge transfer from us to do the actual writing work.
SPEAKER_00Now, I on your website, I was doing some research before this call and doing some stalking. Um, I want to understand I was actually on a boat in Tasmania the weekend just gone, which is a whole other story I won't bore you with. But uh one of my uh one of my best clients who's in our mastermind was there, and he's an SEO agency, and there's a lot of other guys there who have who have basically grown up in the digital marketing space and are now entrepreneurs in different types of business. So there was a guy there who sells biodegradable doggy bags called OCrap. It's got a great e-commerce business. Um there were, you know, there's service-based businesses there, there are authors and coaches there. And we're a- and we were talking a lot about search, and we were talking about the the difference between SEO and ads. And I just wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you know, the the challenge that I think a lot of us have is that SEO takes a while, it takes a minute to get results, right? How do you do you use paid to get the client quick results and get them a quick win while the SEO kicks in? How do you manage the client's expectations through that, that the fact that SEO is going to take some time, and how do you see paid fitting into the overall search strategy? I know that's a big question, but um I just kind of wanted to unpack that for a bit.
SPEAKER_02No, it's a great question. And and it's important. Yeah, I I think I think it's it's always best when you can do both. If you can do paid and organic, start building out those super competitive um uh keyword rich pages in the beginning and then build helpful, supportive, longer tail content underneath them while you're waiting. The paid is great because it gives you the data. If you can get into paid right away and you need so setting the expectation with the client, you say, Here's here's what we're gonna do. And then we don't do paid anymore, but if we did, um other than just provide advice and strategy and audits, um, if we did, we would say, let's let's focus on a 90-day sprint um with um with whatever budget you can afford to to really build out a strong paid search campaign, and then let's take the data from that campaign to help augment our organic SEO strategy. That way, when someone asks the question, why are you optimizing for this keyword? We can say because the data show that that keyword generated revenue for us. You can't do the same thing on organic to paid because Google hides that keyword behind a not provided. It's it's not something that you can do. So being able to look at that, and then so that's on the content side, on the link building side, if you're doing display advertising in paid search, you can you can actually see which display sites, uh the the placement reports, uh what what actual links are sending good qualified referral traffic um or revenue, and then put that as part of your link building strategy. Why did you go? Why did you try to build links on these sites? Because these sites showed through our display advertising that they're top converting placements and will actually send business. So that way you're you're really using your paid strategy to your paid results to build your organic strategy in many ways, or at least augment it. In terms of setting expectations with with clients on the organic side of things, the way that we've always tried to articulate it is that the the content, the first thing that we do to create that that um uh those initial pages of content take probably about two to three months to show up somewhere on the top of three to four pages of the search results. If we did a good job, excuse me, the links can take somewhere between that that three month to nine month period, you know, before Google recognizes that those links, those votes, you know, are are credible and um and should count toward our rankings to move us to maybe the the end of page one or the top of page two of the search results. And then in the last you know, three months of the year, it's really about how users are interacting with that listing, like we were talking about before, the how to rank our SEO expert. Um so when when that user behavior activity kicks in and Google says, okay, I've got a year now of watching this URL, I watched as as it became more and more relevant to different keywords. I tried it from based on the words I found on the page. I saw more and more other external websites linking to the page, and there was a pattern of growth, not just a spike because I paid someone for a link and then it went away, but a pattern of organic growth and visibility. And I've been watching how users interact with the listing. And maybe it's because you've got a really rich result with a thumbnail next to it, or star ratings, or questions and answers that are getting people to click. But boy, people are clicking on your listing. And because your developers paid attention to our page experience requirements, your pages are loading really well, and people are staying there, and the final destination of their query is your page. So a year later, you have this like this little flat line growth, and then all of a sudden you get the hockey stick at the end. So I always set the expectation that a reasonably competitive page could take you a year to get into the top search results for a keyword. Um for something like Rolex watches, it took about two. And a half years to get our client into the top position for that one. It was a tough one and it's a lot of work. But um, but it is the long run, and as long as you set the expectation with the client that you're really gonna feel this beginning a year from the day that you start, but up until that year, you're gonna be a little bit frustrated. And and I actually remember in one of the agencies, one of the reasons I I quit the agency world was a client came in and literally yelled at me four months in, spent four months, we're paying twenty thousand dollars a month. This is crazy, this is never gonna work. You're supposed to be this big expert, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and then, you know, we get into, I think it was somewhere around month six or seven, and he comes in with a gift basket and he's like, like, dude, I was a total jerk. And and we're already, we're already poised to make $110,000 a month now that we weren't getting before we started with you. And we're now our online is like now a million-dollar business. And that was a total douchebag to you. And so I said, I get it. It's not advertising, it's marketing. It takes time. It takes to unroot a listing that Google's had at the top of the search results for sometimes a decade. You know, it's it's not just some magical thing that you have to do. You have to prove that you deserve that position to be able to unroot that listing. And that means better content, better user experience, cross browser. We're talking privacy, accessibility, security, um, and then visibility off the website by showing a pattern of new links and mentions and curation. And then eventually it's all about how the users interact with that listing. And that doesn't happen overnight. So, you know, setting a year expectation is the best thing I think you can do as an agency.
SPEAKER_00So you so you just clarify, you're no longer in the agency game?
SPEAKER_02No, we still we still support a few of our clients that that need an extra set of hands, but uh we we really enjoy being the guides and the strategists. And if we get too much into the trenches, we can't be as innovative. You know, we can't be exploring all the different new things that we want to do. And you know, when when one of our our restaurant chains says, how do we get our location pages to appear for specials and catering and delivery and and takeout? We say, Hey, let's let's run a study and look at 300 different location pages across the biggest restaurant chains. Your client's not gonna pay you to do that if you're an agency, but if you're a consultancy, you know they're more than happy to because now you're gonna do the research that no one else is gonna take the time to do.
SPEAKER_00So you do the consulting and the strategy, and then the client implements or you partner with other agencies.
SPEAKER_02Sometimes the client, sometimes an agency, sometimes it's a freelancer, sometimes it's even been interns from some of the students I teach at the university. So interesting. It varies.
SPEAKER_00Um I want to talk about link building for a second. Or actually, specifically, I want to talk about link buying for a second, because um this still feels to me like I'm back in 2009, 2010, and it's a bit of the Wild West. It's against Google's terms, everyone does it. Like, can you just straighten me out here? Like, isn't this whole thing still a popularity contest where I can just buy my way to the top?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, unfortunately, uh, the a lot of the filters have have lost their power right now. I hope I hope they bring them back. I was just at an event a few weeks ago with some of my peers, and they were talking about how remember all those old school things we used to do? Private blog networks and link wheels, and they're all working right now for some reason. And I'm like, but what's gonna happen when they fix it again? They're gonna look back and they're gonna say, Whoa, you've got uh you've got some some explaining to do, and it's gonna go on your permanent record for that URL. Are you sure you want to do that? Are you gonna take the risks? Um, for us, you know, we we don't like to. We we like to you know focus around strategy. But I remember what you meant back in the in the heydays of of link building. We would do the one of the first ones was something called Internet Business Promoter or IBP. And I'm gonna create a directory on our website of all the um, you know, the businesses that are in different industries. And then I'm gonna go to these other websites that have directories and we're gonna cross-link to each other and have these reciprocal links. And oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna pay $200 a month and be part of a three-way link network, and we're all gonna link to them, who's gonna link to him, who's gonna link to him, and we're all gonna just create all these links to see what we can do. And the problem with that is that that it doesn't satisfy the the three basic requirements of a of a quality link. And that that is, you know, is this link likely to to send qualified referral traffic to our site? Um is this link on a page that's likely to earn links of its own? And that's where the directory failed, because who would link to a directory listing page? That's silly, right? Um, and then three, is it likely to be seen by you know thousands of people? Is it is it something where I'm gonna be in a Yahoo finance article or something and get some brand awareness out of it? So those are kind of the three criteria. And if you look at as you're earning links, um, does it fit into that? Is it is it something that's gonna be seen by a lot of people and build brand awareness? Is it something that's going to um uh to earn links of its own so it jet passes genuine page rank, not just you know, uh an orphan page linking to us? Um and is it likely to actually send business our way? Um the way we approach a link strategy, and and we have um we have this kind of simplified process for it now, is we start with quick wins and then we go into longer term um strategy. And the the quick wins are something you could do today, right, is first go into your Google Analytics and uh drill into your content reports and look for anything with a title that says not found, right? And take all those in the last 90 days or so, uh, map them out in a Google sheet and figure out where they need to go, where it makes the most sense. Fix those broken links, right? Um look at the links from uh third-party tools like AAHREFs and SCM Rush. Figure out which links that are going to you are are being 404 that can redirect and go somewhere else, or you can do some outreach and get them to fix that. Uh the next one's something like unlinked mentions. You know, anywhere that that someone's mentioning your name, because I'm sure everybody is getting a Google alert for their business name in quotes. That's what we do, right? We pay attention. So when they mention us and say, hey, thank you so much for mentioning us, uh, you know what would be amazing is if if if someone were to click on our name, if they could come visit our website and learn more about us, could you make our name clickable? So just a thought. So getting those unlinked mentions is another really quick win for links. Um the next thing that we do is we jump out of the quick wins, is we jump into um your really strong strategy. Think about the the internet being a spider web, and if the center of that spider web is uh is the the center of the topic or the industry that you happen to be in. And if all of your competitors have links that are pretty close to the center of that web, and you're getting links from way off in the you know the far horizon, from a semantic standpoint, Google might not think that you're categorized correctly for the keywords that you want to appear for. So maybe we start where all the competitors have earned links. So we we like to do the the link intersect. And there's there's a tool in um AH refs where you can do this and you can do 10 at a time, and it'll tell you exactly, you know, of those 10 competitors minus us, here are the uh the most frequent links that the industry tends to earn. But 10 is not enough for me. I like to do somewhere between 30 to 100 in an industry because then I get a really strong industry um analysis of where the top links are gonna be for that industry. Um and there's gonna be a lot of garbage in there because for whatever reason, these tools, after some of them, more than a decade of being online, haven't parsed out the scrapers and the useless websites that that don't benefit us. I don't know why, but you gotta go through and one by one, delete, delete, delete, delete, do a little bit of filtering based on some of the scores they give you. They have their own score and then domain authority scores and so forth. And having that link intersect gives you competitive opportunities to get links that are driving traffic to your competition. And that's a double win because you're in the link, but you also get traffic from sites that are normally industry related because now you've got the overlap from what the competition has. Um then we get into things like link bait, right? One of the best link bait campaigns that Applebee's does every year is Veterans Day. And so for Veterans Day, they give free meals away to veterans. And um, sites like va.gov and military.com are all now linking to share the save free meals thing. Give something back to your your community, your industry, to the to the things that you believe in. And um, you know, the the reciprocal benefit of it is people are gonna share that and you're gonna get links from it organically. But um anyway, so those are those are kind of the two approaches, the quick win and then kind of that long-term planning.
SPEAKER_00It's I want to talk about how to get links without buying them, but it's it's before we do that, it's it's like just like old school, be a good community citizen, and people will talk fondly about you, right? That and in in today's day and age, that is the it manifests as a hyperlink, right? Hey, Steve Wiedemann's a good guy, go and talk to him about search strategy. He was on my podcast. We're gonna put a link on our site to you because you've given some value to our audience. It's like it's basic banana stuff, isn't it? But everybody wants the cheap. Everybody wants the fast way and the hack. How do you, if once you do your link link intersect thing, how do you you then say, okay, well, here are 10 links that we really want that are working for our competitors. How do we get those links? How do we reach out and get those links without buying them and all and also without just being an annoying person in inbox begging for a link?
SPEAKER_02That's a great question. So so we use a tool called BuzzStream, B-U-Z-Z stream. And it's basically just a CRM, but it's designed to really help you organize and manage your your um your outreach, right? And excuse me, what we'll do is we'll set up uh we'll set up work queues using filters so that we start when we log in, uh we start with those that have already agreed to to link to us and mention us, and we follow up with them, and then we go into the third outreach and second outreach and then initial outreach and then qualifying a link that we found through their their system or through ours. Um there's four different approach types that we like to use. We like to use reference first. If we can if we can get the link partner to reference us, then that's it's a double, double win again, because now not only are we getting a great link, but when Google's reading that page and it says, if you want to learn more about this topic or further reading or additional resources, go to this site. It it sends it sends a message to the search engine that that we've got really helpful content. Um so reference number one. Number two is cross-promotion. If we can if they won't reference you, you can say, hey, can we do something together? Um we noticed that you're really weak on the content side for this particular topic. Um, so we wrote something for you. It's attached to this email. Let us know if if you'd like to use it. If not, no big deal. We can probably just give it to so and so, your competitor. Um, but we really want you to use it because we love your site, right? And and vice versa. And there's something that we can promote for you. And so um that cross-promotion is usually number two. And if they won't cross-promote, then you contribute. And that's where you you know, again, you send that email and you say, Here's here's where um we can help with something that you're missing. One of the things that um that we do a lot is we collaborate with other brands and and platforms in our industry. And we'll say, Hey, could I do uh a webinar with you? Could we do an event together? Could we figure out some way to to contribute our knowledge, expertise, or time to support you? And then the last one is sponsorship, and that's one you gotta be careful on because it almost looks like you're buying links, but what you're doing is contributing to something that's important to you, sponsoring something where you think you're gonna get referral traffic. I mean, even if you don't get the link, you go back later and you say, Hey, I've been advertising with you and sponsoring this page for three months. We've love the traffic we're getting, we'd love to do something organic with you. And they're gonna go, well, crap, if I say no, maybe they'll stop advertising and I don't want them to stop advertising. Sure, you've been advertising with us for a few months. What do you want to do? Oh, could we do a blog post together and and you know, share some data and some insights and some diagrams and study stuff that we did? And um and that works. We've we've done that a few times. So reference, cross-promotion, contribution, and sponsorship, um, all in that order and how we work through that um outreach approach.
SPEAKER_00What was the second one? Reference?
SPEAKER_02Cross promotion.
SPEAKER_00Cross promotion, contribution, sponsorship. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, I think we just got the Wiedemann masterclass on uh strategic link building. That's fantastic. I hope someone on our team's making notes because I'm gonna ask uh ask someone on our team to start implementing that. It's great. The sponsorship thing never really occurred to me. The the contribution thing is is obvious. We get emails every day of the week from people wanting to contribute to our blog. Most of the time we say no. Tell me, am I being foolish? Should I be accepting more of those more of those articles?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, those those guest blog posts are really um they're they're it's kind of a faux pas. Right. So we don't we don't that's why I didn't mention guest blog posting. Um but if you want to contribute content and contribute something that you you wrote that will help benefit their website and in the author area get a link, great, but um guest posting as a SEO is it just doesn't work. And so here's here's what's gonna happen when you do go to a link building company is they're they're just gonna run a simple query for um uh submit a post, right? Or guest post, and they'll put that in quotes into a query, and then they'll put in your industry and they're gonna find all those industry blogs that accept guest posts, and then they're gonna charge you you know five hundred dollars for a link that um that they got on a site that you know would have probably done it for free. Um, but they just simply ran a search to find those and and most of them aren't really gonna benefit you. In fact, if you just you know do a a search for guest posting and and SEO and just look at the last week or so of of conversations that are happening, um, there's still a lot of Googlers that are saying, don't do this. And there's people that are saying we just spoke with you know multiple Google reps, and they say do don't use guest blog posting as an SEO effort. Now I still would use it though as a way to get my featured answer. That would be a cool thing to do, but I wouldn't do it for links.
SPEAKER_00Right. A way to get your featured answer. Can you walk me through that?
SPEAKER_02The featured result in Google. Like uh if you want to be position zero there at the top, got it. Um, by getting your your specific answer to a problem or question or um something that somebody would query, if you get that syndicated across enough websites with you know a subheading of um how to do X, and then there's a paragraph about it, that gets shared and syndicated through multiple sites. Um Google could award you that uh position zero, which I believe accounts for 70% of the voice answers on your Google Assistant. And I heard some good news that Alexa is kind of dying a bit, and Google Assistant might be taken over soon.
SPEAKER_00So go Google with the link buying thing, right? I mean, is it just the recommendation that you just don't buy links that you because everything that's what I was gonna say, everything that you've described to me feels authentic. It feels like the same approach as if the internet didn't exist, right? You go to a networking event, you have a conversation with someone, they have a conversation with someone else, and they mention, hey, I was talking to this Steve Wiedemann guy who knows a lot about this SEO thing, and then all of a sudden you get a call from the local mayor who's like, hey, the you know, the principal of the local school said I should talk to you about the thing, and it's it's it's it's organic, authentic referral because people are doing good work and adding value. We're just using the hyperlink to accelerate that. So it kind of feels to me that if you were buying referrals offline, that that's not sustainable, and it kind of feels the same about the hyperlink, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and worse, if if somebody takes a screenshot of an email or communication, you know, where there's talks of links involved at all, um, you know, what what happens if if the person that you were um coordinating with later on finds out that what you were doing was to try to build a link to help your your SEO. When they learn that and maybe learn digital marketing, they might go, oh crap, I just got taken advantage of. Or they just really wanted the link, they didn't care about the the relationship. Uh they could put you on blast and submit, you know, um, you know, a form to Google and say, these people are buying links. Here's my proof. Upload the email and you're done. So, or or worse, you know, um, you could be on the New York Times like uh JCPenney and Overstock did when they were incentivizing college students to um you know to add a link to one of their college pages and and get 10% off a vacuum cleaner or something. You know, they did all sorts of shady stuff to uh to get in trouble. And and you know, the industry found out and they got hit and they lost millions of dollars in organic traffic for the period of you know um you know what what they're having to deal with. It was awful.
SPEAKER_00Curve ball for you. What happens when a client comes to you and they have a great product that nobody's searching for?
SPEAKER_02Depends on the industry. You you build brand awareness by by becoming an expert um at the industry. So um if you were selling, I don't know, let's just say purple widgets or something, right? And nobody's searching for purple widgets, but but uh you know that there's a high interest in purple and a high interest in widgets, you can build a lot of supportive content for people who have have those kind of needs. If if uh let me give a better example, let's just say you have a pet product. Remember when the the pet chips came out and and people were were putting the chips together and you could track your dog anywhere they went? No one was searching for that, right? No one even knew that kind of thing existed. But if I had um a thousand pages of supportive help training help uh dog training product or uh dog training videos and tutorials and um uh dog diets and a whole section, and I bought in a pet nutritionalist who came in and just wrote a ton of content. Now all of a sudden I'm getting 50,000 visits a month to my website around content that's perfect for my target audience, and I can introduce them in the sidebar or otherwise, um, or through remarketing, you know, back to our brand. So I I think there's a lot of ways that you can you can build brand awareness by you know becoming an expert at the industry, even if people don't know who the what the product is yet.
SPEAKER_00So I'm on your website there's a whole uh section called Learn SEO S E M, and there's lots of there's lots of content there uh where you basically teach what it is you know. Now um this is is is this this play like do you have product that you sell like courses that you sell or is this just a content play to bring people in?
SPEAKER_02So so yes. Our um our our new website's supposed to launch in February. The one you're looking at has been around since 2015. Uh cobbler story, right? You're so taking care of your clients for so long that your own site gets neglected. But um, but we do. We actually have um uh if you go to academyofsearch.com, it's a teachable course. You can take the uh the mastermind class, which is like three hours uh for free. Um we also have a six uh excuse me, a six hundred dollar search optimization class. Um if your listeners want free access to that, just use code SEO Steve, S-E-O-S-T-E-B-E, and you get the the course. Now the course emulates what I I teach at Cal State Fullerton, and it walks you through how to create a search strategy, gives you a little bit of history and on how search works and crawling and indexing, and and then we get into technical SEO and then content strategy off-page and then how to track and manage you know a search campaign, what what tools to use and um and the templates to be able to do it. So you can actually create your own SEO strategy after this this course. It's uh normally it was like an eight-week course at Cal State Fullerton, but I had a I had a student uh do the entire thing in a day from like 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and they got their certificate at the end, which was like, dang, you did the whole thing in a day. So I know if if uh one student can do it, anyone can do it. But um feel free if you want to share that to your listeners and thank you.
SPEAKER_00Appreciate it. Uh so SEO Steve, right, is the coupon.
SPEAKER_02You got it. Academyofsearch.com is our little landing page we created. It'll basically just take you to courses.weederman.com and then choose the STO course.
SPEAKER_00Got it. And it's also available in Portuguese.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Yeah, one of our business partners is uh runs the office in Brazil in Florinopolis.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic. We will definitely drop some links in the show notes about that. Awesome. Hey, this has been amazingly I could do this again. In fact, I think we're probably going to reach out to you and ask you to come back for part two because I just want to unpack more of your brain around uh search. Um parting thought, we have a lot of people here in our world who are who come from the web design history, right? They come from building WordPress websites for small business owners and they know they need to do SEO at some point because their clients are asking for it, and they're terrified of getting into this rabbit hole because they don't know if they're gonna be able to get results. They're riddled with imposter syndrome, but they know it's a great opportunity for recurring revenue. What what advice would you give to someone starting out to say, hey, if you're gonna get into the SEO world, do this first, and this is gonna be a good foundation that's gonna set you up for long-term success?
SPEAKER_02Sure. I I do think building a strategy is a perfect way to do that. You know, do it for a small local client for fun, for practice. That um that course I was telling you about does go through everything from beginning to end, and it is an end-to-end course for you know, mastering the basics of SEO. It's not um it's not the 15 chapters, you know, in the in the textbook that you know my my co author, Scott Cowley and I wrote, but it's still um it's very video rich and it's very um uh example um heavy. So you know, we share examples of of exactly what we're talking about. So it's not it's not theory, it's not um textbook, it's it's It's really kind of hands-on. Um, so I would say do that. Take take a course and and just really acclimate yourself to it. Um I I can also tell you that there are pet peeves that web designers and SEOs sometimes don't jive well. Sometimes I wonder if web designers are out to get us. Like, did you really just wrap the logo in an H1 tag? Now Google thinks the topic of every single page on our website is the word logo, you know, and and I I think they just do it for a laugh or to mess with us. Um, or they're doing single page applications, like the the Disney challenge I mentioned earlier. They'll create a single page application instead of a a dedicated URL for every um you know, way that someone's searching for our product or service. So I would I would definitely talk to some SEO experts and just kind of get their feedback on it. I do have a guide too. Um I have two actually of an e-commerce guide and a WordPress guide. Um if it's helpful, I can show the links after the show. Yeah, that would be cool. And there's no advertising or anything in it, but it's got a cool little basics of like a prerequisite. If you're putting a project brief together for a website, here are the SEO prerequisites on the e-commerce side for categories and product detail pages and for WordPress on WordPress theme setup, uh plug-in use, and so on and so forth. So happy to share those with with web designers that are really interested in kind of building a good foundation for SEO.
SPEAKER_00Excellent. Now, final question, which is going to divide the room, which I always love to do. Uh, favorite WordPress plugin. Favorite WordPress plugin for SEO?
SPEAKER_02It's still Joast. I I got to hang out with with Joost in um in Austria a few weeks ago. And he's just he's just as brilliant as ever and always working hard and being innovative. There are some other uh plugins that have come out recently that um that have some of which have stolen his code. Um so for me, I'm I'm I'm very loyal to the the guys who you know were the first ones to really crush it in WordPress plugins. So I would say the Yoast SEO premium for sure is is the way to go. Add on an extension for video SEO so that you know we can make our pages a little bit more rich and and have a better experience and feed that straight to Google. So yeah, I would say the Yoast SEO plugin is my favorite. You definitely want to get an HTML sitemap uh plugin as well. I think those have been really helpful for Google to be able to crawl to pages that might be orphaned. So having that HTML sitemap can be really helpful and you know, keyword-rich links where an XML file doesn't really have that. So um I would say between those two, um, and maybe a Cloudflare, you know, add-on, um, I think I think you'd be in great shape. So Cloudflare, Yoast SEO, and then choose an HTML site map that allows you to list both pages and posts.
SPEAKER_00Great. Very familiar. We've been Yoast Premium customers for a long, long time. And I've also had the pleasure of hanging out with you several times at WordCamps and the man's.
SPEAKER_02We actually got to drink beer Octoberfest. It was so funny.
SPEAKER_00He's a legend. He's a legend. I love him. Uh tech stack uh must have tech stack tools for brand new someone getting an SEO. Is it AHREFs? Is it SEMrush? What do I absolutely need to get started?
SPEAKER_02Well, if you have zero budget, you're gonna be using Google Search Console and Webmaster tools. If you have a little bit of budget, you might download something like Sightbulb and Screaming Frog. Um, if you've got more to work with and you're kind of mid-range and maybe you've got a few hundred bucks a month to throw around, um, SEM rush, still my favorite. Um Hrefs is great for for uh deeper link building. If you want to get into some of the more link intersects and so forth, I think their link database is a little bit bigger. When we get into enterprise, if you're a larger brand and you've got some budget to play with, um, conductor searchlight is huge. It's super awesome. It's got so many great dashboards and and gauges and KPIs and forecasting tools that you could use that are incredible. Um, and then we're using something called Wright, R Y-T-E, which is by far the best crawler on the market. We've compared all of them from what used to be Deep Crawl, I don't know what their new name is, um, and um and Botify and um on crawl. We've tested all of them, and Wright uh by far has the best filtering to be able to get the data that you need and the actionables um that you can take out of it to give to developers to get stuff done. So and and you can give them all access so that developers can log in, you know, just to that one profile and explore the crawl issues and and indexing problems themselves, and then you can just be the guide and let the dev guy do their job. So write R Y T E is just this incredible crawl tool.
SPEAKER_00How do you spell it?
SPEAKER_02R R Y T E.
SPEAKER_00R-Y-T-E. Perfect.
SPEAKER_02I guess it's the right tool for the job, right?
SPEAKER_00Great. We will drop all those links in the show notes. I'll also grab the links to Steve's guides after the show and put those in the show notes as well. This has been epic. I have to tell you, this has been an absolute masterclass. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate your generosity, and I'm definitely going to reach out to you and we should do this again sometime because I've had a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_02My pleasure. Anytime.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Thanks, Steve. All right, gang. That's another episode of the Agency Hour. You know what to do. Subscribe, like, share, share this podcast with someone who you might think would benefit from it. You never know, you might just change their life. There's lots of gold nuggets here. I hope you made some notes. I look forward to seeing you all again next week on the Agency Hour. Until then, I'm Troy Dean. Have a great day.