SEO Techniques to Boost Organic Traffic

- Maybe if you're on page three,
you're going to get some clicks.
But it's really page one and page two
that are going to gobble up all the traffic, mainly page one.
So now you're talking about there's over a billion results
and 30 pages that get the majority of the traffic.
(upbeat music)
- Hey Neil, so here's a loaded question for you.
What's the biggest thing someone can do
to improve their SEO?
(bells chime)
Neil's thinking. - So.
- Yeah, a camera goes to who's talking.
I just want people to know you were thinking.
Okay, go ahead.
- So what I would do if I was trying to improve my SEO,
a lot of people say links, and links have a big impact.
And I'm going to give you two answers.
I'm going to give you the answer, the first one is going to be
for the majority of the websites out there,
and the second one is the little bit creative
that most people don't do.
So the first one would be update your content.
You can do a search on Google for anything.
So I'm here in the United States.
"Auto insurance."
I'm just going to actually do a search right now, okay?
I can probably even share my screen too. Why not?
I'm going to share my screen because it lets me.
So check this out.
This is the term "auto insurance", all right?
You can see here there's 301,000 people in the United States
that searched auto insurance in the last 30 days.
You guys can see my screen?
- Yep. - Yeah.
- Check this out.
1.18 billion results.
All right, so basic math 1180,
one, two, three, one, two, three divided by 301.
That means for every person they're searching,
there's 3,920 unique results, right?
And with ChatGPT and AI and all this kind of stuff,
you're going to get people creating more content at mass scale.
It's never ending.
But where do most people go?
Page one.
All right.
And my team always makes a joke.
People hide dead bodies on page two
because no one clicks there.
That's page three.
So maybe, maybe if you're on page three,
you're going to get some clicks.
But it's really page one and page two
that are going to gobble up all the traffic, mainly page one.
So now you're talking about there's over a billion results
and 30 pages that get the majority of the traffic.
And the reason I say updating content
is if you search for anything on the internet,
most keywords have a Wikipedia ranking.
The reason Wikipedia does so well
is because the content is fresh.
And none of you guys on the screen here today
or anyone listening wants to search on Google
and be like, "Yeah, I want to read about digital marketing.
"Yeah, this article from three years ago was amazing."
Like, no, you want something that's up to date and fresh
so you know it's relevant and practical for you.
So the biggest thing that companies should be doing
that they're not doing is updating their content
on a quarterly basis for all their money pages.
And when I mean money pages,
the pages that are driving conversions,
getting the majority of the traffic,
that have the relevant audience.
So that's the big thing that I think most companies
make a mistake on.
And we see this at our ad agency all day long.
That has a massive impact.
The second thing, if I had to list the second thing,
and this is creative,
links still have a massive impact on rankings.
With people creating content mass scale with ChatGPT
or Bard or Ubersuggest, AI-Writer or whatever, Jas,
whatever tool people want to use,
content is getting more commoditized
and it's really cheap to create anyways
in the first place, even before ChatGPT.
But the big thing is how do you get more links?
And most people believe that the best way to get links
is through content and infographics
and a great product and service.
What we found the best way to get links
is you take a tool in your industry.
Whatever industry you are, there's tools for it.
Even in fitness, there's calculators
and all that kind of stuff.
You take tools that people are used to paying for
and you create them for free
and you just release them out in the wild,
and over time they just build a lot of back links,
which makes your overall site have a higher authority
which causes you to get higher rankings.
- All right. - I like the tool strategy.
I think that's really great.
- And with ChatGPT,
you don't even have to build the tools as much.
And when I say "as much",
I'm meaning you don't have to pay people as much.
(interviewer laughs)
- The software engineering
on ChatGPT is still pretty shitty.
It'll get there, but-
- It built a game of "Pong" in 60 seconds.
It can do a lot for you.
You'll still need some engineers to help you out,
but you can do a lot more with less money these days
because of AI versus before.
- Yeah, I really love that.
We were actually talking about open sourcing
and releasing one of our product lines for free at Ringba-
- We were talking about it literally last night, yeah.
- Yeah, literally last night at dinner
we were talking about, like, we were looking
at how much money we make in revenue,
how much the team's making in commission on it.
And we hit our sales team this morning
and just said to them, "You know what, guys?
"I think it would be really interesting
"to release this product absolutely free for the industry."
It'll be a great lead generator,
it'll be a great loss leader, you know?
And the cost on it is fixed
and the infrastructure to support it is extremely cheap
and we have to have it anyway,
so it's like the perfect storm of a tool,
almost like a calculator or something.
It has real cost to it,
but then you can kind of force the people who want it
to go through a questionnaire with a salesperson.
Like, what do you do? What are you using?
Questions that they're just going to be obligated to answer
instead of that you have to fish out
because they're getting something of high value for free.
So I really, really like that strategy.
And I'm curious, since we're on that topic
of unique strategies, you know,
you grew up in the performance marketing industry.
Harrison did, Josh did, I did.
I'm curious, what are your some of your favorite
super unique strategies that you've used over the years
that are like non-typical asymmetric,
most people would would've never thought to use it?
But like, what are some of the cool strategies you've used?
- Yeah, so the strategy that you just talked about,
we use that heavily, give away stuff for free
and sell them into something more.
Our agency is decent at scale, right?
We're a nine-plus figure revenue a year company,
and 40-plus percent of our leads
used to come from our free tools.
Now at our size and scale, a lot of our business
comes from word of mouth, referrals, RFP
because we're five-plus years old
and people know we're in the space now.
So that strategy has been really amazing for us.
Another strategy that's been amazing is buy.
So instead of build, we look for companies
with web properties or tools that get a lot of traffic
but don't monetize other than through AdSense
or no monetization.
Buy them, pop on Legion on there and then sell them.
We did that again last year.
In February we bought another tool
called Answer the Public for 8.6.
It was doing, they said it was doing 100 a month in profit,
but they had very little to no employees on it.
So when you add employees,
it really wasn't doing 100 a month in profit.
We started capturing leads as well,
and so far starting to play out well for us.
Another strategy, and going to stay on the buy topic,
one of my old startups was called Kissmetrics.
They struggled a little bit for fundraising.
The company ended up pretty much just going belly under.
And what ended up happening is, is they needed money
but the website got a lot of visits,
like a million-plus a month.
So I offered them a half a million bucks
to just buy the domain.
They can still keep the word Kissmetrics.
I can use it as much as I want,
but I have access to the domain and whatever I want to do,
and that worked out really well.
It caused our agency to get way more leads
because they had our ideal traffic base.
Another strategy that I like doing,
and this one's boring and ugly and I don't know why
a lot of people don't do it.
If you're selling toothbrushes
and someone else is selling toothpaste,
you should upsell it or down sell,
whatever you want to call it,
their product upon checkout and vice versa.
And we consider that partnerships.
Not really like affiliate marketing,
but just straight up partnerships.
(bell chimes)
That drives a ton of revenue for us,
and people take those like boring channels for granted,
and we find them to produce tons of revenue
if you can just find people
who don't sell the same product or service as you
but they have similar audiences.
Another strategy that we've been doing for years
that's like just been fishing with dynamite
is globalization.
So at our ad agency we've announced, I think,
I don't know how many regions we have announced,
but we're in 16 countries where we've hired leaders.
We'll be in 20 countries, and then pause for a little bit
and then work on getting a lot of them up and running.
To keep in mind, last year we're only in six regions.
So we've added a lot of countries that we're in,
which means you have leaders and headcounts
and they build teams.
So what we've been doing is translating our website
and transcribing it to other languages
and adapting it to the local regions, collecting leads.
Most of these regions aren't competitive,
and that's been driving a lot of business for us.
And then speaking at local events
and building up relationships locally and yeah.
- So are you building sales teams
in these other countries then too or-
- We are.
Every country. - That's awesome.
- Is it a brand pack- - When I was an affiliate-
- or is it wholly owned? - that's kind of what I did.
I just took stuff out to other countries,
so I love that you're doing that in the agency model.
That's super cool.
- Yeah, majority of people are not in the United States.
We tend not to do a franchise model.
We want to own it all.
We do have partners in two regions in Brazil and India.
We had some locals that own a fraction of those businesses
early on that help us out.
Eventually, we'll probably just buy out their stake
and we'll own 100 percent of everything.
But yeah, this model has been working out really well for us
and we've been having fun doing it.
- I'm really curious,
how do you source the leadership talent
in a foreign market like that?
- Oh, we have recruiters that work for us full-time.
We have a big recruiting team.
So all we do is, or big is relative.
Compared to Microsoft, we're actually very, very tiny.
They probably have more recruiters
than our overall employee count.
I'm making a guess there,
but you guys get this-
- You're probably right.
- Yeah, so for us, what we'll do is we'll look at people
who work for competing agencies, okay?
But like WPP, Omnicom, and we'll look for the leaders
who have ran their agencies.
And we look (bell chimes)
for those leaders who have been at multiple agencies,
have continually gotten promoted at multiple agencies
and been there for a while,
because that means they were valuable
to the agency if they got promoted.
So if you're at two competitors
and you continually got promoted,
that means they all both saw you as very valuable
and they're happy with you.
So the moment you hire them,
they usually are able to replicate
the same type of growth and the same kind of outcome.
It just takes a lot of time,
but we found it to work really, really well.