A smart and sustainable SEO strategy remains one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic and build an engaged audience.
This week’s guest is Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko. Brian gives us a deep dive into some of the biggest takeaways from his epic article The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2020.
He begins by giving us a few of the most important high-level things that everyone needs to realize about SEO — including the enduring power of keyword optimization and some smart tips for how to discover search intent.
Then we cover a wide range of topics after that, including how AI will impact SEO moving forward, how to think about SEO when you’re focusing on a curated email newsletter, tactical advice on how to structure content in WordPress, and much more.
Now there’s just one catch with this episode: we didn’t record it specifically for the podcast. What you’re about to hear is actually the audio from a webinar that we did inside of the Unemployable Initiative, our private, paid community for solo business owners. And as you’ll hear, the questions Brian answers are directly from community members.
With the doors to the community now open for ongoing registration, Brian Clark and I wanted to give you a little taste of the content you’ll find when you join. To find out everything that is included in your membership, go to unemployable.com/community.
Note: the original presentation was on video, and Brian does share his screen a few times. If you want to see the video replay, you will find down the page below the links.
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What’s Working Right Now in SEO
Jerod Morris: Welcome to 7-Figure Small, the podcast that brings you the stories and strategies that are driving the growing number of solo businesses achieving 7-figures in revenue, without investors or employees.
If you want to discover what’s behind the rise in these 7-figure businesses, then you need to get our free Next Level 7 audio course. In this enlightening course from Unemployable founder, Brian Clark, you’ll hear what’s working right now for attracting an audience, discovering what they want to buy, and building your perfect business.
To sign up for free, go to nextlevelseven.com. That’s nextlevelseven.com.
And now, here’s your host for this edition of 7-Figure Small — me, Jerod Morris.
Jerod Morris: Hello there, it is me again, taking over the podcast this week. But just because Brian Clark isn’t here does not mean that you will be deprived of a really smart guy named Brian giving you deep insight that will help you build an engaged audience and a profitable business.
Our guest this week on 7-Figure Small is Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko. If you are a student of search engine optimization best practices, then you are surely familiar with Brian’s work because he has become one of the most respected names in SEO.
This week, Brian shares some of the biggest takeaways from his epic article The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2020, which has been shared over 21,000 times.
He begins by giving us a few of the most important high-level things that everyone needs to realize about SEO right now — including the enduring power of keyword optimization and some smart tips for how to discover search intent.
Then we cover a wide range of topics after that, including how AI will impact SEO moving forward, how to think about SEO when you’re focusing on a curated email newsletter, tactical advice on how to structure content in WordPress, and much more.
Now there’s just one catch with this episode: which is that we didn’t record it specifically for the podcast. What you’re about to hear is actually the audio from a webinar that we did inside of the Unemployable Initiative, our private paid community for freelancers and solopreneurs. And as you’ll hear, the questions I ask Brian, and that he answers, are directly from community members.
Now with the doors to the community open for ongoing registration at Unemployable.com/community, Brian Clark and I just wanted to give you a little taste of the content that you will find when you join.
To find out everything that is included in your membership, go to Unemployable.com/community.
One final note, the original presentation was on video and Brian does share his screen a few times. So, if you want to see the video replay, instead of listening to the audio here on the podcast, that’s fine. You can find the lesson page for this episode at Unemployable.com. I will embed the video on there so you can watch it there.
All right, without further ado, here is my conversation with Brian Dean about what’s working right now in SEO.
Brian, thanks a lot for coming on and joining us here inside the Unemployable Initiative.
Brian Dean: My pleasure, it’s good to be here.
What is Your Background?
Jerod Morris: I guess to start, can you give just a quick rundown of your background and how you got into SEO? Because I know on your About page, it talks about how you failed with your first five businesses and then kind of struggled with personal finance.
Did you essentially learn a bunch of stuff on your own from SEO from doing that and then got into it? Or was there some other path?
Brian Dean: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I had built my first website in 2009 and I was, like most people, naive about how it was going to work. Thought I would just create a website, put a Buy button on it, have a product and then sales would start coming in. And the first thing I realized, I created this site and I’m like, “Where is everybody? How do you get people to actually come here?”
At the time I was broke, living in my parents’ basement, trying to figure out this whole online marketing thing. And I looked at the options. It was ads — out. Social media was just getting started, so I didn’t really know — out.
But SEO was seen like this magical traffic source that was free on Google Ads, and it was like this unlimited source. You almost could get an unlimited amount of traffic, and the traffic tended to be targeted.
Over the years of building sites, having them penalized, building them up, building different sites, I eventually kind of figured out what worked. I had success with one site in the personal finance space that blew up. And then I was like, “Okay, I want to learn more about this white hat approach to SEO where you’re not going to be penalized all the time.”
I couldn’t really find anything that I liked, so I created the blog that I wanted to read. And that’s how I started Backlinko.
Jerod Morris: How did you come up with that name? Backlinko? Whenever I hear it, I think it’s kind of like the superhero of SEO. Just the way that it sounds — Backlinko, you put on a cap and you optimize search results.
Brian Dean: That’s cool.
Jerod Morris: That’s just how I hear it.
Brian Dean: If that’s what happens when people hear it, that’s great.
How it actually came about was basically I wanted something related to backlinks, because I knew that was important for SEO and it was something that I knew a lot about. And it was the number one thing that people struggle with with SEO, even today. I was like, “Obviously backlinks are taken, dot com backlink.” And I really wanted a dot com. I realized this site Politico.com, which is like a huge politics blog, and I was like, “Oh, I’ll just do Backlinko.” So that’s where I came up with it.
Jerod Morris: Very cool. I’m going to keep hearing it as the superhero of SEO.
Brian Dean: Me too from now on. That’s great.
What are the Most Important Things to Know about SEO?
Jerod Morris: Okay, so let’s dive in. You wrote The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2020. Brian Clark posted that inside of our community. A lot of people have read it, it is chock full of good stuff. I highly recommend that everybody go look at that because we obviously won’t be able to dive into all of it today.
As a way to jump into this, what would you say are maybe two or three things that everyone really needs to realize about SEO? If you only had five minutes to tell somebody the most important stuff about SEO, what’s the highest-level stuff?
Brian Dean: The first thing would be, still even today, it’s still all about keywords. You need every page to have one keyword that you’re optimizing it around. I hear a lot of advice like, “You don’t have to worry about keywords anymore. Just publish stuff about topics and Google will figure out the rest.”
I haven’t really seen that do well in the real world. It sounds good in theory that Google can just figure out what your page is about and rank it for stuff. But, in reality, people do search for things in particular ways. And the better your content can be optimized around that particular wording, the better.
Now, obviously, it’s not like the old days where you had to put in your keyword a million times or in certain places. That stuff probably still helps a little bit. But, in general, you do want your page to be optimized around one keyword. Whenever you sit down to write a blog post, or an article, or a services page, you want to have one keyword in mind and really zero in on that.
Now that’s not to say you’ll only rank for that one. If it’s good and worthy, Google will automatically rank it for other stuff. But that’s still the foundation all these years later.
Jerod Morris: Okay, so that has not changed.
Brian Dean: Yeah. Do you mind if I share my screen? I can go over and…
Jerod Morris: No, please do.
Brian Dean: So let me do that.
Jerod Morris: We love sharing screens here on these lunch and learns.
Master Search Intent
Brian Dean: Okay, cool. This is the guide we haven’t talked about. I’m not going to go over it because you can obviously read it. But I wanted to highlight one thing that I think is really important for ranking today.
One of them, the main one, is actually six. I wanted to do this one first, even though it’s not in order — master search intent. Once you have a keyword that you’ve optimized around, the next step with your content is to make sure that it matches what that person wants. That’s called search intent.
Search intent is basically, if you’re searching something, what do you want? If you’re searching for “lunch webinars,” you probably want a webinar that happens at lunch. And if you have a page that has all the keywords in the right places, but it’s not about that, it’s not going to rank because Google can measure all that stuff.
So, the way to go about it is basically to look at the rankings for that keyword and use that as a way to figure out what the search intent is. Those pages probably wouldn’t be ranking there if they didn’t match the search intent. So it gives you a clue.
For example, “Buy Beats by Dre headphones,” Google will show shopping results because they know that someone is ready to buy. But if someone’s searching for “Beats by Dre headphone reviews,” they’re going to show articles that compare those with like Bose headphones or other types of headphones.
That’s something that’s really important, because even if you do everything else right, if your page doesn’t match search intent, it’s not going to rank. And if it does rank, it’ll only be temporary because then it’ll start to drop. The rankings will start to drop.
This is something that I learned the hard way because I had a page a couple of years ago that was optimized around the keywords: “how to get high quality backlinks.” And all of a sudden, I noticed traffic to that page starts to spike up. I think, “That’s weird. Not that many people search for this keyword, it’s kind of a long tail keyword.”
When I looked at SEMrush, which is an SEO tool to see all the keywords you rank for, I noticed one of the keywords I was ranking for was “how to get high.” I was number five in Google for “how to get high.” It’s because I had “how to get high quality backlinks.” I had that phrase in the title and the post and it was getting links and traffic and Google was like, “Oh, this must be good for this keyword” and they put it up there.
I was laughing, “Google’s algorithm is supposed to be so advanced, it’s so stupid. It’s ranking this page that has nothing to do with that topic.” But they actually weren’t so stupid. Because a few days later, it started to drop to the bottom of the first page and off the second page and into oblivion.
I realized when I looked at my Google Analytics that once I started to rank for that keyword, my bounce rate went up, time on site went down. All those user experience metrics were horrible because all these kids were searching for how to get high. They’re 14 and they’re landing on this page like, “Backlinks, what is this crap? What are they even talking about? Backlinko?” And they would just click away and Google measured that and they started to drop me from the rankings.
That’s an extreme example, but it happens to every page.
Jerod Morris: But this is what we need to do for the youth of America: let them know that optimized keywords are the way to feel good. It would make everybody much better.
Brian Dean: I mean, it feels good. I don’t know if it gets you high, but as an SEO nerd, I do enjoy it.
Deciding to Follow a Search Trend or Try Something New
Jerod Morris: That’s really funny. That’s a great anecdote.
Okay, on this topic, one question that I had, because we were talking about your YouTube channel before we went live. I’ll put a link to that on the page for this for this event, because your YouTube videos are outstanding.
One of the things that you talked about in your most recent one is you try to find an opportunity keyword and figure out what this keyword is that you’re going to optimize for. And you do this research for: what are the results right now that are ranking?
You gave some different examples of times when you want to basically just parody the results that are there and do something, basically kind of copy the structure that’s there, or other times when you want to do something different or better.
Do you have a litmus test for when you want to basically do the same thing that’s there and when you want to try to do something different?
Brian Dean: A lot of people ask that from the video and it’s a good question. It’s something I probably should have done differently in the video because it is confusing. On one hand I’m saying, “Just improve what’s there,” and on the other hand I’m saying, “Do something different.” So, it is confusing. It was one of those examples where I didn’t think about it, because I just naturally will look at it and be like, “Oh…” because I do SEO all day and this is the kind of stuff I think about.
Basically, the rule of thumb that I would go with is: if you see the first page results and you could easily improve what’s there, just improve it and make it better. Use the same proven structure that’s already proven to work.
If you search for something and everything is a list post, nine out of ten results are list posts, you probably want to create a list post. But, on the other hand, if all the list posts are like, “150 ways to do this, 200 ways to do that, 178 ways to do this,” it’s going to be hard to improve on that. It’s going to be hard to expand on what’s out there. In that case, you might want to do something totally different.
Another example is if it doesn’t make sense to just expand and improve what’s there. For example, a couple of years ago, I wanted to rank for the keyword “mobile SEO.” When I looked at the front page, it was a lot of list posts like, “Seven ways to improve your site for mobile. Eight ways to mobile optimize your site.” And I could create 50 ways to do it, but it doesn’t really make sense.
In that case, I went with a different format and I did a guide and that did really well. That ranks in the top three for that keyword. Part of it is that I’m sure I could have created a list post and cracked the first page with it if I created something that’s slightly better. But, in that case, just creating 15 items instead of eight doesn’t really even make sense. It shouldn’t be that complicated to optimize your site.
So, in that case, I went with a guide and that did better. It’s kind of like half art, half science on whether to do something different or better.
Increasing the Click Through Rate
Jerod Morris: Okay, that makes sense. Before we dive into some of the other questions that were submitted, are there any other elements of The Guide — again, we’ll link to The Guide, something that everybody should dive into. Are there any other elements of The Guide that we should go over right now or that you’d like to go over right now?
Brian Dean: Yeah, I think one that’s important for 2020 especially is increasing your click through rate. So let’s just jump to that.
This didn’t use to be as big of a deal because if you rank number one, you’ve got a certain click through rate. If you’re ranked number two, you’ve got a certain click through rate. That’s how it was, that was life in SEO. But Google has been adding a lot more stuff to the search results that are distracting people from the regular organic results.
Ranking number one isn’t what it used to be. It used to be you are at the top of the page. And if you look at the actual, like where you physically are on the page, a lot of times number one is below the fold. It was four ads, a featured snippet, “people also ask” box, Google image results. And then you’re literally way further down. You are where number 10 used to be.
So, click through rate is down a lot. Rand Fishkin at SparkToro found that organic CTR and mobile devices is down 40% since 2015. Pretty scary actually. And that’s insane, that’s crazy. Part of it is just because Google is getting better on mobile, answering people’s questions instead of giving them results.
And that’s the direction they’re going in. There still are results and there always will be. But the click through rate problem is a legitimate issue. There’s not much you can do about it, like, “That’s Google. It sucks.” But if they’re a company, their websites, how they’re going to do it.
The best way to combat it is to increase your click through rate. So then, if you rank number three, and number three used to get like 15% of the clicks and now it gets 8, you can increase your click through rate, so then it goes up to 15. So, it’s kind of like where it used to be.
I can show you, there are some tactical ways to do it. Basically, we analyzed 5 million Google search results earlier this year to figure out why certain results get clicked on, not clicked on. The biggest thing to keep in mind basically is that you’ve got to create a result that’s enticing for a searcher. It’s kind of like search intent before they even click on it, like pre-search intent.
Someone searches something and they see a result. How they decide on one, two, three — part of them just automatically clicks on the first result, it’s what a lot of people do.
But for some keywords, they scan. If you can catch their attention with an eye catching title tag, a custom description tag that really highlights (using good copyright techniques) why they should click on your result and using your keywords that people just search for, so they know this is a good match (another reason to use exact keywords in your stuff or a new URL) — all those little signals can increase your click through rate a lot and they can really add up.
How Will AI Bots that Write Content Impact SEO?
Jerod Morris: That’s good stuff right there.
Let’s dive into some of these questions that we got. Obviously, for those of you who are here live, if you have questions as well, put them in the Q&A, put them in the chat. Let’s go through a few of these. Some of these are the ones that I sent you ahead of time, Brian.
From Todd, he asked the question about AI — how will AI, especially AI bots that write content, impact SEO moving forward?
Brian Dean: Well, AI in general, that’s… I’m glad he drilled down because the AI thing is in our webinar. In terms of writing content, I think that a couple of things are going to happen with that. In the near future, I don’t think it’s going to affect anything. Because if you’ve read AI content, it’s hilarious because it’s so ridiculous and nonsensical.
So there’s still a ways to go before AI writes something that makes any sense, but I don’t think it’s that far off. It’s one of those things that, in my opinion, all of us will be laughing like, “Oh, look at this. AI wrote something about something.” And then the next month, someone’s going to write something really good and AI. It’s going to be, “Oh my God…”
I think there’s something to it, but there are a couple of things. One is that I think Google is going to be one of the players that’s going to start writing the most AI content, because what they can do is use that as a featured snippet content and not have to have anyone click on results. So I think in maybe three or four years, Google is going to start doing it.
They already kind of do it. They have something called the Knowledge Graph. It’s basically like if you put in something, they know the answer. It’s not a source from anywhere, they just know. These are like birthdays and stats sometimes. They don’t have a source, it’s just their knowledge.
If that can expand to the written word, I see featured snippets being like an unsourced box that describes something. But it’s going to be a long way off because they don’t want to have AI start writing stuff and having nonsensical things or inaccurate, especially all the heat they’re getting over fake news. So, I feel like that’s kind of down the road, but I think they’d like to do it.
In the near term, I think you shouldn’t really be threatened by it if you’re writing good stuff that is from your firsthand experience. If you’re writing generic content that just regurgitates what other people are saying, you’re kind of an AI already. Your content is basically AI. It’s just like, “Here’s to distilling what’s already out there and just rewriting it,” which is what most online content unfortunately is. But if you’re running case studies that’s like, “Here’s how I did something. Here’s how a client does something. Here’s how a customer did something,” no AI can ever write that.
Or this study that I was just talking about (the 5 million), no AI could come up with the idea for a study, execute it, analyze the results, write commentary. All they’re going to be able to do is regurgitate what’s already out there. They can’t come up with original anything. That’s one of the limitations of AI.
So I think it’s going to be something in like five years, but I don’t even know how big that will be. The best way to future-proof yourself from that is to write stuff that’s original content in the real sense. Not original that it passes Copyscape, original in that it contains original ideas, original examples, original concepts that you came up with that people can’t find anywhere else.
How Powerful is the Impact of SEO Currently?
Jerod Morris: To play devil’s advocate for just a minute, you talk about the impact that AI is going to have, even if it’s four or five years off (that’ll obviously be here quicker than we think it will now). And you already talked about the click through rate is falling and Google is doing some of this stuff on their own and not even showing results.
How powerful is the impact of SEO still? For people who are really maybe on a budget in terms of time and money for what they can put in, how much should people be investing in their SEO? Is it still powerful enough to make that big of a difference?
Brian Dean: Yeah, it’s definitely still powerful enough. It’s worth the investment, let’s put it that way. It’s a good question and it’s a legitimate point, because there’s no question that the click through rates are down, featured snippets and other kind of features like that are stealing clicks. Google’s doing more of it.
On the other hand, if you look around, what else is there? You have Facebook — come on, seriously — Twitter, Instagram, these platforms… even YouTube. YouTube is cool, I like it, I use it, but it’s like 5% of my business. You know what I mean? Most people, unless you’re a professional YouTuber, these platforms are way worse. They’re worse already.
A lot of people look at the direction Google is going and say, “Oh, I want to get out of it.” But these platforms that people are on suck already. So Google is still good. There was a study that came out last year. They looked at where website traffic originates, and 68% came from Google. So Google is still the main driver of traffic for most people, and the traffic’s really good.
That’s the other thing to keep in mind. Even if click through rates go down, the traffic you get from Google is so good, because they’re literally searching for what you’re writing about, what you’re selling, as opposed to social media, which is just distraction, marketing, interruption marketing.
I feel like in the big picture, it’s not getting better as a channel, but it’s still number one by a lot. And the other platforms aren’t really getting any better either, so I think it’s definitely worth it.
SEO for a List-Building Website Focused on Curation
Jerod Morris: I figured that’s what the answer was. One of the things that we talk about a lot inside of the Unemployable Initiative is curation. We have an entire course on using curation as a way to build a minimum viable audience, learn about that audience and figure out what you want to sell them. So we’ve got a couple of questions along those lines.
The first one is from Jody and she wants to know how the approach to SEO might be different for an upside-down website designed for list building with the main focus on providing curated content via email versus a more traditional site with more content. Is that something that you have some experience with and some tips on for how to maximize?
Brian Dean: Yeah, if you’re curating stuff in a newsletter, I would consider that just a separate thing than what you’re doing as a way to drive traffic and awareness to your site for SEO purposes. If your newsletter is The Hustle and people are sharing it and forwarding it to each other, it can grow like that. And that’s a great way to grow. I have a newsletter myself that’s very active and it’s huge for me.
But, on the other hand, if you’re only doing that, you’re not going to be able to rank for anything because you do need content at some level. So what I would do is just focus on what you’re doing now. Focus on your curation, focus on your newsletter, and then add SEO as another thing when you’re ready.
Because if you don’t have a site that’s going to be amazing when people visit it, and there’s nothing in the backend, no newsletter, no members’ area — everything’s up front and amazing to start with, that’s the first step to getting traffic from SEO.
It’s like Copyblogger. Imagine if the entire site was behind a newsletter, it only serves newsletter people. It wouldn’t rank for anything. The reason that it ranks for a bunch of stuff is that it’s all public facing in the form of articles.
My recommendation, I don’t know where you’re at with this process, but in general, I would just focus on what you’re being taught and execute that. Then if you feel like you can do SEO to bring more traffic to your site, I would do that.
In general, stuff that’s behind a paywall or behind a newsletter, it’s usually tough to create content out of that. You can reuse some stuff and use it as public facing content if you’re curating the best stuff and there’s a place for that in content for keywords like, “Best Whatever, Best This, Best That.” You can do some of that, but, again, that would have to be public facing.
Jerod Morris: I would say typically the way that we teach it is to make those posts public facing, to send them out via email, but also have them there so that you can share them via social media so they can generate search traffic where possible.
And the way that we teach it also is you have links to content, but you’re also providing your own commentary, a summary of maybe the big idea of that post in the beginning. So it’s one of those, it’s like you’re writing it for your newsletter audience and it’s maybe not a real long post that is there for SEO, but maybe you can pick up some SEO from it.
Would the better strategy be to do that? You’re kind of focused on your newsletter audience, you’re focused on sharing those posts via social media, but every curated newsletter topic should have some kind of content pillars, some big ideas that you’re talking about.
Would you recommend finding opportunity keywords around those big pillar topics, writing big kind of posts geared toward driving traffic, and then use that to get people to the newsletter? Would that be the best way to do it?
Brian Dean: Exactly. Yeah, that would be 100% of my strategy. I think what you could also do is maybe combine. Instead of having those individual posts, or after you have the individual posts, after you have a couple of those, you can combine them into a huge post.
If you’re doing like health and fitness, or if you’re doing just keto stuff, you could then do something else. You could combine them into one big curation list. Because there’s definitely a place for curation value there 100%, and those can rank well. Because people search for those like “Best whatever, Best this,” there are keywords that people are using to find them. So there’s a place for them.
It’s just tricky to get 10 links that you like which work well in a newsletter because I’ve used them. They don’t tend to rank that well. So you’d have to transform them. I would go with the pillar post approach instead. Create something awesome, amazing that people are going to share a link to and use that as a way to drop traffic to your newsletter. That’s, in fact, my entire business. So I know that model really well. That’s what I do every day.
What Impact Did the BERT Update Have?
Jerod Morris: Yeah, okay. Let’s see, I want to go down here to these questions from Joanna, because she talks about the impact from the BERT update. That was the recent update that Google did.
Can you just give a quick description about what that is and kind of what the general impacts have been that people have seen?
Brian Dean: So, that update was a little different than most. Most updates are quality updates where they look at the search results and they say, “Okay, for whatever reason what’s number one right now? Is it making people happy?” And they figure out why.
Part of this is assisted with AI called RankBrain. And they say, “Okay, number one, it’s slow.” Let’s say the pages are slow. So what we need to do is increase page speed as an important ranking factor, so then three jumps up to one and one goes to three where it belongs. And that’s where you see the fluctuations in rankings a lot of times.
BERT was a little bit different because it wasn’t anything to do with the quality of a website, it was an interpretation of what people want with their keywords. So it’s kind of like a search intent update. What it did was when someone searches for “best marketing webinars,” they’re better able to figure out exactly what they want on a deeper level than they would before.
Part of it is back in the day, they already got rid of synonyms, like people searched “best marketing webinars” and “top marketing webinars.” Those were different results back in the day, and then they obviously combined them. But they go deeper now. It’s kind of like the meaning behind it, “What do you actually want?” And some of the keywords that they’re able to figure out are crazy.
If you’ve ever tried searching for, “What is the tallest building in Africa,” a lot of times they’ll give you a result that doesn’t even have that phrasing in the page at all. They just know what you want.
So that update affected a lot of people. A lot of people lost a lot of traffic from that update, and they were scrambling to improve their site. But there’s not so much you can do there because it has nothing to do with the quality of your site. It’s their interpretation of queries basically.
Are Posts or Pages More Effective for SEO?
Jerod Morris: Joanna had a few questions coming off of that and this one’s really tactical. By the way, when I recommended your YouTube channel, that’s one of the things I really like about the videos, and you promise it right up front, is they are really tactical. You get down into the, “How do you actually do this stuff? What should you actually do?” I feel like those are most of the questions people really have with SEO, so it’s really helpful.
So she says that she’s been building authority pages and directing traffic to those, but she’s been hearing that these should be posts instead. And by republishing them with updates periodically, that’ll be better for SEO purposes.
So what do you think about that? Does it make a difference, especially for most people who are using WordPress, should they be using posts for SEO, their SEO content and not pages? Does it make a difference?
Brian Dean: It doesn’t really make a difference. Posts can be a little bit better for SEO because when you post them, they show up in your blog feed. And because of that, it gets a little bit of link authority from your homepage to your blog feed to that post.
If it’s a page, a lot of times what happens is, it’s an orphan page. Like if you just publish a page on WordPress and don’t link to it from anywhere, it’s called an orphaned page, which means there are no links to it. So it’s hard for Google to index it. And then you need external links for Google to find it and consider it authority and whatnot.
I’ve hacked WordPress with our developer — pages, posts, they all show up as a post anyway. So as long as your page shows up in your blog feed, people can link to it, people can see it, you can update it the same as a post anyway. You can go in and just change it.
I wouldn’t really worry about that. But if for some reason, you don’t want a post to show up in your feed, you can publish it as a page. As long as you link to it from other pages on your site, Google will be able to index it.
How Can You Improve SEO for Old Podcast Episodes?
Jerod Morris: The next question that Joanna has is one that’s near and dear to my heart, and I was going to ask you if she didn’t. But she said she has over 460 podcast episodes. Those obviously have associated show notes, and some of them are over a decade old. But it’s still relevant, it’s evergreen stuff.
She doesn’t want to delete those episodes or redirect them because people are still going back, downloading the stuff that’s on there. What is the recommendation for making old podcast episodes have better SEO and not bring the site ranking down?
Because that’s one of the things that Jonny talked about: maintaining the overall quality of your site and maybe even pruning some links, removing some links that aren’t high-quality. What do you do about that?
Brian Dean: There are a couple of things you can do. One is if you’re badass and you’re ready for a lot of work, you can go back and turn every podcast episode into a blog post. And Jon, I know he does that, because I was on his podcast and he turned our podcast into a high-quality blog post.
And he’s actually a great — if you want to see a good example of how this is done… it’s also a little intimidating because you’ll realize quickly it’s a ton of work.
Jerod Morris: I felt like angels were coming in as you were giving that advice. The light was over your head.
Brian Dean: Yeah, Lisbon sun, when it comes, it comes out.
So, he does a great job. But the problem is if you have a hundred of those, it’s not really practical, even if you’re the world’s most prolific writer to turn a hundred of them into blog posts.
Jerod Morris: I feel like Joanna’s going to take that as a challenge and just go do it.
Brian Dean: Please do. I’m not saying you can’t do it, Joanna. I’m just saying, I’m not even you and I’m worried about doing it. Like I’m stressed about it and I’m not even the person that’s going to be doing it.
So, that’s one option, is to take some of the big ones that you really want to highlight, you want more people to find, and turn them into blog posts.
Another option is you can always add the no index tag to those pages, which will prevent Google from indexing them. And they basically won’t count as in your site from Google’s point of view. That way, users can find them. If someone’s listening to a podcast, it’s like podcast.com/brian, they can still go there, the page exists, but Google won’t index it. You can do that maybe to some of the older ones. And also, just that people aren’t finding them in Google, like they’re getting zero traffic, then there’s really no harm in it, you have nothing to lose.
I usually prefer to delete pages that aren’t adding value anymore because it’s just easier to have them gone, but they are adding value in this case. So, it’s a little bit different. In that case, I’ll recommend adding a new index tag with care because it’s surprisingly easy to automatically add it to every page on your site. But I think there are WordPress plugins that can make it pretty easy.
Jerod Morris: Yeah. That’s an interesting point because you can get so focused on SEO and in the weeds with “What I should do?” And you forget that you’ve got to manage several different audiences at once. Yes, you want to do what’s best for the search engines, but if you have people that are still going to these old posts, you don’t want to just delete them. So, I think that’s great advice on the no index tag.
Does Google reliably follow the no index — like pay attention and respect to no index tag? They do?
Brian Dean: Oh yeah, 100%. It may take a while because they have to find it. The mistake that some people make is they add the no index and no follow or they block it and robots… Basically, if you just add the no index tag and do nothing else, you’re good. Google will crawl it, they’ll say, “Okay, we’ll index it” and they’ll remove it. They respect it 100% of the time.
Is Guest Posting Essentially Dead?
Jerod Morris: Given the focus on the authority of the writer, does it mean that guest posting is essentially dead? That’s Joanna’s other question.
Brian Dean: It’s a tricky one. I mean, I definitely get the question totally. No, I think guest posting is kind of like SEO. It’s not as good as it used to be, but what else is there when it comes to you have a blog, you want to get the word out? It’s a good first thing to add to the mix, in my opinion, if you’re just starting a new website.
Not just for SEO, just for getting eyeballs on your content, getting targeted traffic, things like that. But it’s good for SEO too in small doses. I think there’s still a place for it, but it’s not as good as it used to be, like a lot of things in life. It’s just how it is.
I wouldn’t rely on it anymore. If it’s maybe like 10% of your links, 10% of your effort for promoting your site, I would say that’s probably what you want to do. And maybe a little bit more if you’re really into doing a campaign or you want to get the word out about your site.
But I don’t think it’s dead. It’s a little bit harder to find legit sites to guest post on. There isn’t that whole blogging community that there used to be back in the day. I launched Backlinko in 2013, and that was already kind of dying, like it was becoming more of a business. It wasn’t like this hippie hold hands and sing kumbaya blogging community anymore, back in Brian Clark’s days when he first started out. It’s a little bit hard…
Jerod Morris: He speaks wistfully of those days.
Brian Dean: I’m sure they were great. But I wasn’t around then. For me, guest posting was you had to pitch, you had to really show that you’re going to provide something amazing. So I think there’s still a place for it if you focus on sites that are relevant and are going to bring you traffic.
What are Creative Strategies to Get Backlinks?
Jerod Morris: What are a few of the more creative strategies that you have found that have worked for getting backlinks? I know on one of the videos that I watched, you talked about an example. I think it was trying to get a page rank for voice search, I think. And you noticed that a lot of voice search articles had stats in them, so you created this big mega post that had a bunch of stats and basically did some outreach and people ended up linking to it because that’s what they were looking for.
What are some of those kind of creative, just not scalable, but you’ve just got to go out there and do the hard work that have really helped you build some backlinks?
Brian Dean: Besides that, which is a good one, the number one that’s working for me right now is broken link building. It’s similar to that strategy, but the difference is you start by finding a broken link online on a page you want to get a link from. Then you either fortunately have something on your site that’s a good replacement for that link or you can even create something that replaces it.
That works well because if someone has a curated post like “100 Best Marketing Posts of All Time,” and you just reach out to them, “Hey, will you add mine to the list?” They’re probably not going to do it, because they don’t know who you are and they already have 100. They don’t want to make it 101 and add you and renumber everything.
But if something’s broken or multiple links have broken, that’s where you can swoop in and be like, “Okay, this thing’s broken. I have something still on my site. Here’s a replacement.” You’re doing them a favor at the same time, especially if you’re not pushy about it and you just offer it as a suggestion. And you’d be surprised how many broken links are out there. It’s crazy. You can find them easily.
There’s a Chrome extension called Check My Links that’s free. If you go to any page, you just click on it and it scans the page for broken links and makes them red. From there, you can just look at them. And a lot of times, you’ll find one broken link was a popular page and a lot of people linked to it.
So you can find like 50 people, 100, 200 that had linked to that page. And then that’s maybe worth creating a replacement on your site that’s similar. You can go to archive.org, see what it used to be and be like, “Okay, now I see why they linked to it. I’ll do something similar.” Then when you reach out, your conversion rate is going to be a lot higher than if you just were like, “Hey, will you link to me?”
Jerod Morris: What was the Chrome extension that you just said for the broken links?
Brian Dean: Check My Links.
Jerod Morris: Check My Links. I just kind of envisioned you sitting there, opening a link in new tab, just over and over again until you found one. That makes it a lot easier.
Brian Dean: Oh yeah, this is a lifesaver.
Jerod Morris: It’s a great point because I get emails all the time from people who want to get a link on the site or share this or that. And, I mean, I ignore all of them and there probably are some good ones there, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention to those.
But if someone puts, “Hey, there’s a broken link” or they’re pointing out an error, I will open that and take action on it immediately. So it’s a great idea that maybe when you first hear it, it sounds like it would work, but it obviously does. And I can see from the other side of it why it would be so popular and why it would really be helpful for folks.
How to Optimize for Voice Search
Jerod Morris: Speaking of voice search, Lisa said that she wants to learn more about optimizing for voice search. What are some easy ways to get started with this? Obviously, we could do a whole course on optimizing for voice search probably, but what are some first steps?
Brian Dean: Well, the first step — I have a voice search guide, shameless plug, but honestly, that is the best way. I have basically everything you need to know about it. I will put it in the chat if I can do that, if I can figure that out.
But the best, actionable thing you can do in my opinion is to create FAQ pages or add FAQ sections to your post, because most voice searches are questions. When people type with a keyboard, a lot of times it’s like a sentence like “dog bathing” or something. And then voice search is like, “How do I bathe my dog?” Weird example, but that’s what happens when you don’t have any example.
They tend to be more conversational, longer, more question-oriented. FAQ pages are perfect for that, because those are usually like a question, a short answer. It’s like crack for voice search devices, because it’s exactly what they want. It’s like a question and then a short, succinct, little answer that is what they can use in the voice search response.
Jerod Morris: Would you do a big FAQ page that has like 20 questions and answers, or would it be more effective to do an individual page for each question and answer?
Brian Dean: Oh, definitely do either a FAQ page or add FAQ section to an existing page. We also did a voice search study last year and we found that the page authority didn’t matter that much. So it was more about the domain authority of the site.
For example, if you had a question that was buried in the bottom of a page, had nothing to do with the question, and then all of a sudden there was a question and answer, at least Google Home would pull that as the answer. The page doesn’t have to be all about that topic, but as long as they have that little snippet that they like.
What Tools Do You Recommend for Beginners?
Jerod Morris: That’s helpful, okay. Very cool.
Anil says that he’s a neophyte when it comes to SEO and he wants to understand, “What are great ways to determine what people are looking for?” Maybe one angle that you can take here, if possible, is what tools you use. I mean, you mentioned Ahrefs. In your video earlier today, you mentioned SEMrush. Are there any tools that you actually recommend specifically for folks, especially who are maybe in the beginner stage?
Brian Dean: Yeah, I’m sorry, the audio cut out in the beginning. I didn’t hear the beginning. What exactly…?
Jerod Morris: Anil just said he’s a neophyte when it comes to SEO, but he wants to understand great ways to determine what people are looking for.
Brian Dean: What people are looking for. Oh, okay, yeah. Basically, a keyword research tool is what you want.
If you’re new to SEO, Ahrefs is maybe not the best, because it’s a complicated tool that’s designed for professionals like marketing pros. It’s somewhat easy to use, but it’s kind of like overkill if you only want that. There are a million features like backlink analysis and site audits. If you just want keyword research, it might be a little bit of an overkill. And SEMrush is the same story.
One tool I recommend that’s free is called answerthepublic.com and what that tool is, it’s like a question generator. So, if you type in “paleo diet,” it’ll come up with questions. They’ll scan CoRA Forum, Reddit, and come up with questions related to that, which are great ideas for what people are searching for in terms of questions.
Now, not all of them will be popular if you want to know popular keywords. But it’s good for brainstorming content ideas, content angles.
Another tool that’s more focused on keyword research is a little bit cheaper than Ahrefs, and only does that. It’s called kwfinder.com. It’s a paid tool. I don’t know exactly how much it is, but it’s worth looking into if you’re really only interested in the keyword research part. It’s very solid, easy to use, and it doesn’t have all those bells and whistles that you don’t need.
How Do You Determine Opportunity Keywords?
Jerod Morris: And then you talk about this term “opportunity keywords.” So, you do some research, you see what people are looking for. And then I suppose you have a hypothesis for what you think might be good keywords that match what people are looking for and what you’re doing.
Are there a couple of rules of thumb that you have for how to actually say like, “All right, I’m going for this one?” What do you look for to know that?
Brian Dean: It’s a lot of things. It’s definitely something that’s art and science combined, choosing keywords. Coming up with keyword ideas is easy. If you put it into Answer The Public, KWFinder, Ahrefs, you’re going to get that list. So, it’s a good question. You’d be like, “What do I do with this thing? How do I figure out which one to pick?”
One thing to look at, obviously, is search volume, how many people search for it. Not to say you need to have millions of people or thousands of people searching for every keyword. There’s nothing wrong with going after a keyword that a hundred people search for.
If you feel like it’s a good fit for what you write about, your people search for it, whoever that is (your audience), and you have a good chance of ranking for it. A lot of tools also have keyword difficulty and they show you how hard it will be to rank. It’s not perfect, but it gives you an idea.
If you see a keyword that 200 people search for a month, you might turn your nose up at it and say, “That’s not really worth it.” But if it has a keyword difficulty of one, you can kind of automatically rank for it without doing a lot of work. So, kind of a free ranking. It might be one to consider.
Another thing I look at is the cost per click. How much are people who are bidding on the keyword AdWords spending? The higher, the better for you because it shows that that person is not just a tire kicker, they’re someone that’s ready to spend money or will spend money a little bit down the road.
To give you an example, I ranked for the keyword “link building,” which you think, “Oh, it’s a great keyword. It gets tons of people searching for it.” But the cost per click is only a few dollars because people searching for link building are just looking for information. They’re looking at what it is, maybe how to get started.
They’re not really people who are going to buy anything right now, as opposed to “link building services” that has a cost per click of $25 because that person is ready to hire someone or at least looking for someone that’s going to work with them for link building services. So, the cost per click is higher. Even though the searches aren’t as good, in some ways link building services is a better keyword. It’s also less competitive too.
The last factor I look at is how well you could crush a piece of content on that keyword. Like your unique value, what could you bring to the table? A good example is I don’t know anything about social media marketing. There are a lot of keywords I find like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I don’t know anything about that stuff.
So, even though on the surface the keyword’s good, I don’t go for it because I know that if I create something, it’s going to be regurgitated and it probably won’t rank in the first place. As opposed to on-page SEO, backlinks, link building, these keywords I’m like, “This is what I do all day long.” So I know I can bring something unique to the table there.
Paid Search or Organic?
Jerod Morris: Good advice. On the subject of paid search, do you do paid search or do you stick mostly with organic? And is there any type of synergy to be found between the two?
Brian Dean: I don’t do any paid search because I want to focus on organic. And I’d rather spend that money on staff to help me create studies and infographics and things like that. But there isn’t a lot…
Jerod Morris: About that decision, I’m curious, is that a decision because you don’t think you would get the results or just from a branding perspective, you think it’s better for you to be an organic search guy?
Brian Dean: I think I might be able to get some results, but I also know that it’s good as a company to focus on one thing and do it well. It’s more of that. And AdWords is like a huge thing. It seems easy, “Oh, we’ll start an ad,” but you need people on it. And I don’t really want to go down that road.
For me, SEO is doubly important. For most people, it’s important because it brings them traffic. And if you lose 20% of your organic traffic and your rankings, you’re like, “Oh shucks, that’s too bad.” For me, it’s like, “Oh my God, my street cred is out the window.” You know what I mean? So, I’ve got to have my eye on the SEO all day long because my entire street cred depends on it.
There isn’t much synergy though. It’s a little bit on branding, if you can bet on your own brand, which a lot of people do because otherwise competitors will. And I’m sure that some agencies will convince you it works together. Not really, especially for the information type of keywords we’re all targeting, it doesn’t really make sense to bid on them.
Jerod Morris: But there isn’t like anything nefarious going on where Google is favoring an organic search, sites that are paying more in AdWords. Those are totally separate?
Brian Dean: Well, they claim — I mean, I don’t think they do. I don’t think it has anything to do with the algorithms to be honest, because it doesn’t even serve them. Because you could make the opposite argument, if you’re not spending, they want to get you to see the value of SEO, get you to rank. And then you’re like, “Oh this is great, I want to pay for more stuff.” So, I don’t know about that.
I think that also it doesn’t serve them for the long-term because they want to show the best results. You know what I mean? They don’t want that to be a factor. And in the long-term of being, for example, or someone else, actually includes the best results, they’re all of a sudden in trouble. So, I don’t think they do that.
Trust me, there are a lot of people who are in SEO who are legit experts who have done it for years who will swear on a Bible that there’s a correlation. So, that’s just one man’s opinion, yeah.
How to Phrase the Headline
Jerod Morris: From Patrick, here’s a really good tactical question, and I have faced this myself. Is it better for SEO to actually phrase the headline as a question if you’re optimizing for voice, or should you phrase the headline as a declarative statement answering the question?
Brian Dean: You don’t even have to use it in your headline. That’s the beautiful part about optimizing for voice search. As long as the question-answer appears on your page, you’re good. So, you can just write a normal post.
Okay, taking a step back with voice search stuff, I think it’s an important thing. It’s a technology that’s growing, but I think it’s a little too early to be thinking too much about optimizing for voice search, especially devices.
The biggest disruption that voice search is having is on how people are searching for stuff, not the results. The voice search is changing the search more than the results. What I’m saying is you’ve seen the stats and I’ve published the stats from other places like, “Voice search is going to be blah, blah, a million, billion searches by 20 whatever.” And there’s validity to that. There are a lot of searches, but most of these voice searches that happen on home devices are weather, sports scores, traffic. They’re not stuff that we’re writing about. They have nothing to do with us. They’re totally irrelevant.
That’s why a lot of people are saying voice search is overrated and overhyped. But what they’re missing is that the way people search is changing because of voice. Google published that 20% of all mobile searches are voice. So, the results are the same. It’s on a screen on your phone like normal. But the difference is the keyword that you’re using is different because it’s longer. It’s more conversational and a lot of times it’s a question.
So, I wouldn’t start optimizing your pages around voice search, try to rank on the off chance someone searches for like, “What is a keto diet?” And then you show up in the home device and answer — who cares if you even ranked for that. For me, the disruptive change is the search itself. As long as you’re writing conversationally in your content and it’s organized in a way Google can pull results up and understand it, you’re going to be good.
I didn’t want to not answer your question, but I also want to say, I think it’s a mistake if you start optimizing your pages for voice search first, instead of traditional SEO.
Is There a Rule of Thumb for Tagging Text on the Page?
Jerod Morris: If you are going to do an FAQ page or try to do something like that on a page, is there a rule of thumb for like, “It should be in H2 tags. It should be H3 tags”? I know that’s highly tactical, but how much does that matter?
Brian Dean: Yeah, I think that probably helps a little bit. It depends because you want to also keep in mind your page hierarchy. If you have your H1 at the top as your blog post headline, and then you have H2 as subheaders for each section, like “Step One, Step Two, Step Three” — and then you have an FAQ section at the bottom, and then you’re using an H2 for every question, your hierarchy is all messed up, because the questions fall under the FAQ section.
You just want to make sure if you do that, you want to make them each… like whatever is smaller than the actual subheadings and that origins paragraph bold. That’s what I tend to do. And Google can easily figure that out.
Is There a Reason to Have a Different SEO Title than Your Page Title?
Jerod Morris: Is there ever a reason anymore to have a different SEO title than your actual on-page title?
Brian Dean: Not really. I do that sometimes and the only reason is that you have more room with your page post-title than you do with the title tag. Your title tag can get cut off. So, sometimes you might want to use a more succinct version for that and then use the longer one when people land on your page. And they don’t have to match.
As long as you have your keyword on both and they’re more or less the same, you’re good. But usually nine times out of ten, I just use the same exact thing.
What Are Some Tips for Images?
Jerod Morris: Okay. Let’s see, a few more questions here. Man, we’ve got about 10 minutes left. This has been chock full of information here. Brian, this has been great.
From Tamra, she’s interested in optimizing images for a site that curates local events and she always includes text from any promotional images that she’s created in the alt tag, but she wants to know what she should do beyond that.
Is there any wisdom in including images of people or should images not be solely text-based? What are some tips for images?
Brian Dean: Yeah, it sounds like what you’re doing is spot on. The only other thing I would keep in mind is some old school stuff like the file name still helps if you use the keyword to describe what it is. And then the alt texts which you’re already doing is good.
Also, they use the text around the image to help get context about what that image is. So, if a page is just an image with no text, Google can like — they’re getting good if you use the visual search. It’s pretty good. They’re getting good at being able to recognize images, but it’s not perfect yet, so they need that help.
Other than that, I wouldn’t worry about having people in it. I would just worry about having a really clear picture of whatever it is so that Google’s image recognition can see it and understand what it is.
In a couple of years, I don’t think they’re going to rely on the tech stuff as much. They can kind of look at anything. If you ever use Google Lens, just download the Google app and use Google Lens on there, it’ll blow your mind. Like you can recognize almost anything in your room.
But they’re not perfect, like if you do a weird angle or it’s far away or too close. The more clear it is, the better, because Google can actually go beyond your alt text and look at the image and try to figure out what it is from that.
What Are Rules of Thumb for Domain Names?
Jerod Morris: Another question, in your most recent YouTube video, you talked about URLs and why it’s important to keep your URL short. Focus on the keyword that you’re focusing on, maybe like one other word at the beginning or end of it, but keep it short.
We had a question in here about domains. What are some rules of thumb for actual domains? I mean, do you want to make that keyword-focused? Do you want to keep it short? What are some rules of thumb there?
Brian Dean: Yeah, there’s no real rule. Domains don’t really matter that much for SEO in terms of including your keyword. It probably helps a little bit because if you’re on voicesearch.com, it helps because people are linking to your site, your homepage, with a voice search.
With Unemployable, they’re linking with the anchor text “unemployable,” which is a brand. People aren’t searching for it, except when they’re searching for that, searching for your brand. Same thing with Backlinko — it doesn’t show up for anything but Backlinko.
But if you were able to get like voicesearch.com, and everyone’s linking to it with anchor text voice search, that probably helps. Plus it probably helps your click through rate because people that are searching for voice search stuff, they see the voicesearch.com result, they go, “That’s the authoritative resource.” We’re still programmed to think that dot com is the authoritative resource on that topic.
That said, it’s not that big of a deal because for years creditcards.com was number one for credit cards, which is one of the most lucrative keywords in the world. It’s like $25, $30 cost per click and millions of people search for it every month. And they ranked for years. Part of it was that they had that awesome domain, creditcards.com. People were linked to them with the anchor text, their click through rate was probably amazing, because there’s creditcards.com, that’s the best place to learn.
Then a couple of years ago, NerdWallet came along and just ate their lunch and killed them. They rank for everything now. And that was partially because they had that branding that people would click on it. But it goes to show that the cure is — I mean, your domain isn’t that important for SEO, because it’s more important to create an awesome domain that people like in my opinion. And if you can get it, I’ll go with the dot com.
To give an example, I just launched a tool last week called explodingtopics.com and the tool bubbles up different topics that are becoming more popular right now. It’s actually good to check out if you are interested in SEO to find these keywords before they blow up.
But, anyway, I acquired it from someone who ran it and one of the first things we did was change the domain name, because it was trennd.co. The domain name was terrible. It had nothing to do with SEO. It was just very difficult to share. At a cocktail party, you could never tell someone what it is, because it’s like, “It’s trend, but with two Ns,” like I had to do right now, in pain. So we changed it to Exploding Topics and people like the name, it’s memorable, whatever — and it’s a dot com as opposed to a dot co.
If possible, I recommend getting the dot com, but there’s no inherent SEO benefit, it’s just my personal preference. There are tons of dot ios that are killing it. There is Notion, which is a huge SaaS company right now. There’s dot so (I don’t even know what that is).
It’s not that big of a deal, but there’s no doubt that the dot com is just better to have in your pocket.
What Will Get the Most SEO Bang for the Buck?
Jerod Morris: Last question for you here. This is from Lindsey and I think it’s a good question to end on. If we don’t have too much time to focus on SEO, is there an order of suggestions that will give the most bang for our buck in terms of what gets the most clicks for the least amount of time invested? So basically, distill SEO down into those few things.
Brian Dean: Actually that’s a good question because I think even if you have a lot of time, it’s still good to really just focus on those things anyway. The number one would be kind of what we talked about, but the missing link that we didn’t talk about is how to do it.
You want to focus on keywords first. So, even though you don’t have a lot of time, that’s time well-spent to figure out what people are searching for, how they’re searching for it, what phrases they’re using, what’s the search volume, what’s the cost per click, what’s the difficulty.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed with all that stuff. But at some point, you could just pick a keyword and be like, “This is one that I can crush. All the metrics are fine.” At some point, you’ve just got to start writing honestly. But that’s still an important step and it’s worth going through that process, even though it’s a little harder than just picking keywords out of thin air. I think it’s worth it.
The next is the search intent. Figuring out this is good for each individual keyword, but you get more of a sense of how hard it is to rank in the top 10. When you look at search intent, you’re like, “Damn, they really are good at figuring out that people want this exact type of blog post with this formatting.” And it makes you think in that way, like, “Okay, how can I create something that’s similar to that, but better or different or whatever, but has a lot of characteristics and still gives people what they want?”
The missing link are those authority, pillar posts, authority pages, whatever you want to call them. We all know what it is. It’s that ridiculously amazing type post that’ll get people sharing and linking and talking about it.
The SEO 22 guide, that’s why I’m on this webinar. If I just posted Five Trends for 2020, we would never be doing this. It’s because I put the effort into that authority post; it took 20 hours to write.
It’s not just for SEO. Obviously, you get all these benefits, like I was able to connect with you guys. It’s not just for SEO, but that’s the main thing. At some level you’ve got to put in the work and publish something amazing. And the cool thing is you don’t have to put out a lot of content. It’s really quality over quantity.
When I started Backlinko, we grew to 100,000 visitors a month with 17 blog posts. It doesn’t require a lot. As long as each one is really mind-blowing, amazing — you don’t need to publish all the time or stick to some schedule. You can publish whenever you’re ready, whenever it’s good enough. And that’s what I recommend spending most of your time on.
Jerod Morris: I still remember how excited Jonny Nastor was when he found that out. It was like he had discovered this treasure chest that no one else found about the power of quality over quantity. And it’s basically totally transformed his business and what he’s doing. But you see it and it really does work, so I agree with you.
What Resources Do You Recommend?
Jerod Morris: A final question for you. I’m just going to assume that everybody who’s here watching live and that is listening is subscribing to your newsletter and subscribing to your YouTube channel because they absolutely should be if they’re not.
For folks who are maybe ready to take the next step, they’re even maybe ready to invest in getting some advice or having someone help them, what resources do you have and what would you recommend for those people?
Brian Dean: I mean, I’m biased, but I have an online course called SEO That Works. It’s exactly what we talked about, except it shows you step by step how to do it. It’s kind of an SEO course for people that aren’t SEO people. It’s exactly what you need to do, and not necessarily even know, just what to do. It’s a highly actionable, tactical course. We open it about once a year. So you sign up to our newsletter, you get notified.
If you don’t want to wait that long, you want to try a different approach like get a consultant or something, I would do that over hiring an agency. There are SEO agencies that do good work, but it’s really hard to find one. I think your best bet is usually to get a consultant who can help you with some of the nuts and bolts of things.
In general, if you’re running a blog on WordPress, you’re going to rank based on the quality of your content and how well it matches search intent, how many links you get at the end of the day. There’s no magical on-page thing that’s wrong, that’s probably (there are exceptions), but for the most part, those are the two options that I would take.
But honestly, in most cases, it’s all about execution. The course is really helpful. You just need help with the tactical, how to do it. But what I laid out here is like the high level of what you need to do. And there’s really nothing we didn’t cover that’s like, “Oh, you need this.”
Jerod Morris: Awesome. He is the superhero of SEO, he is Backlinko.
Brian Dean: I love that. That’s the first.
Jerod Morris: We appreciate you being here, Brian. Thanks. This was extremely helpful. Subscribe to the newsletter and subscribe to him on YouTube and check out that course. It’s all great stuff. Thank you, man.
Brian Dean: Great, thanks for having me.
Jerod Morris: Appreciate it, yep. Thanks, everybody. See you inside the community. Thanks, Brian.
Brian Dean: Bye. Cheers.