Category Archives: Backlinko

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Weekend Favs November 13

Weekend Favs November 13 written by Karen Cutler read more at Duct Tape Marketing

This post is brought to you by Start Page by Buffer

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Backlinko – a complete guide to video marketing in 2021
  • Markaaz – a simple and trusted way to find suppliers, connect with new business partners and providers of services in the United States
  • Canva – create videos on the go using Canva’s free video editor, no software installation required

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

Transcript of Creating a Winning SEO Strategy

Transcript of Creating a Winning SEO Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Hey, this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by rev.com. We do all of our transcriptions here on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast using rev.com and I’m going to give you a special offer in just a bit.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Brian Dean. He is the founder of Backlinko.com a place where you can get actionable SEO advice. In fact, I so highly endorse it and his work, that you can find my picture on the homepage saying so.

John Jantsch: And he’s coming to us today from the little country of Genovia, somewhere in Eastern Europe. So, Brian, thanks for joining me.

Brian Dean: Hey, good to be here John.

John Jantsch: You missed the joke. Where are you really calling from?

Brian Dean: I’m in Lisbon.

John Jantsch: In Lisbon.

Brian Dean: I was just going to let it slide. I was like…

John Jantsch: Genovia is a fictitious country, surely you know this, in Princess Diaries with Anne Hathaway. Great movie.

Brian Dean: And Andre the Giant.

John Jantsch: So no pop culture reference. Just went right by you.

Brian Dean: I would keep those out of the rest of the interview.

John Jantsch: I did actually have a question, this is my own curiosity, a lot of SEO folks do… you have a lot of clients in the U.S. I’m assuming.

Brian Dean: I actually don’t do client work.

John Jantsch: Oh, right. You have gotten out of that.

Brian Dean: Just courses.

John Jantsch: So if somebody was in your shoes or just even somebody like myself. I live in Kansas City, Missouri. I have clients in Canada and different places. What’s the best way to localize results? In other words, if you’re trying to check on results and track results, sometimes it’s a little challenging if your IP address is in Kansas City, Missouri. I was just curious if you were doing work for U.S. companies, are there tools out there that would or hacks that would allow you to kind of see what people in Kansas City, Missouri would see or people in Canada would see?

Brian Dean: Yep. Yeah, there’s a couple ways to do it. If you just want to get U.S. results and you’re not that concerned with the very geographic area like a state or a city, you can use a site I use all the time. It’s like if you open your browser and it suggests the top sites you go to, this is how much of an SEO nerd I am, it’s called proxysite.com. I wouldn’t even link to them in show notes, John. It’s kind of a shady site, but what it is basically is it’s like a web proxy so you can go to Google, use an IP address that’s in the States and search through it, and the cool thing is is that it’s not a VPN so it doesn’t have your browser history or any of that stuff implementing it. It’s almost like a virtual machine, like you’re using some other computer so the results are really good. They’re just totally unaltered by anything else. When I think of where do you rank, that’s for me the gold standard.

John Jantsch: Yeah, because a lot of times people don’t realize your browser history. I search all my favorite sites all the time and so in my view of search, they’re going to probably rise to the top, aren’t they?

Brian Dean: Oh definitely. That’s a big part of it, especially a page that you’ve visited before, Google will bump that up big time. You definitely want to go… that’s the easiest way because you can just check. If you want to get really into the nitty gritty, like someone searching in Kansas City, you can use a VPN, like… I don’t want to endorse any, but there’s tons of them. You can just find the city and state that you’re in or near and then search through an incognito window in Chrome or a private window in Firefox, and that’s basically what that person would see if they search for that.

Brian Dean: Rankings fluctuate all the time and all that stuff, but you’re getting a really good idea of what it looks like.

John Jantsch: I’m bummed out sometimes because I see pages of my own. I think, oh look, that’s ranked really high and then I do an incognito and it’s like not on page one anymore. I’m like dang it.

Brian Dean: Yeah, that happens to me. That’s why I go to ProxySite because it’s really fast and I only check through there because then I don’t have that… I’ve had that happen to me a million times.

John Jantsch: We’re in the middle of 2019 when we’re recording this show and you have a new course, or you’ve relaunched your course on SEO training. I guess the question, just because there is some evolution going on all the time, what’s kind of new big news in the world of SEO in general?

Brian Dean: I’d say the big shift that’s happening right now is user intent and Google’s ability to measure that and the importance of creating your site with user intent in mind. Basically what that means is the better your site can match what someone wants when they search for something, the higher it’s going to rank. All the traditional stuff like including your keyword on the page and getting links and having a brand and all that stuff will still help you, but at the end of the day, Google is getting really good at figuring out what people want from a search and making sure those results get bubbled to the top and those that don’t drop.

Brian Dean: Actually, over the last year we increased our organic traffic by like 80% just by going back to old content and totally changing it for user intent. To give you an example, we had a page that was optimized around the keyword SEO campaign, so John when you think of someone searching for SEO campaign, what do you think they are looking for?

John Jantsch: I would say that they are probably… they could be looking for somebody to run the campaign for them, they could be looking for an example of a campaign maybe, they could be looking for tips.

Brian Dean: Exactly, yeah. It’s good that you said that because there’s no one user intent usually for a keyword, there’s multiple. If I’m searching for keto desserts and you’re searching for keto desserts, we might want two different things, you know what I mean? There’s always going to be multiple user intents, but the point is what I had on the page didn’t really satisfy any, so it was… what it was was one example of one link building strategy, not even SEO. Just one guy how he did a link building strategy that I had taught and how it worked for him. I kind of shoe horned that keyword in there because I knew that people search for it and all the other traditional stuff, and it ranked for a while.

Brian Dean: Then about two years ago, it looked like the page got penalized. It went from top five to nowhere and it’s been hanging out in the third page ever since. I was like man, what’s happening? It has the keywords, it has links, it has all the traditional stuff, but it didn’t match user intent. People searching for SEO campaign were landing on it and they wanted what you said. They want an example, they want some sort of template, they don’t want a link building case study. It doesn’t make any sense. So I went back and totally reconfigured the page where now it’s a step by step how to create an SEO campaign.

Brian Dean: I included some of the stuff in the old post in there, just so I didn’t have to delete it all, but it’s literally 90% different and now it ranks number one for that keyword. Literally the next week it was number one. Google was able to measure, people reacted to it differently, it had the updated date which helped it get a temporary boost, and it stuck because it satisfied user intent.

John Jantsch: And you just said a whole bunch of things there that I think come under the category of going back and repurposing your content, because there are a lot of people that listen to folks like you and me and they started blogging a long time ago and they’ve got 100 blog posts that they wrote 10 for the last eight, ten years that they haven’t really gone back and looked at. They haven’t seen ways to sort of internally link them and so I think for a lot of folks, they could get a huge boost just by going back and refreshing old content, couldn’t they?

Brian Dean: Definitely. I would even put that under the category of what’s big right now in SEO, because I just came across an agency that’s all they do. They’re an SEO digital marketing agency. At the end of the day, it comes back to SEO as you know. They’re basically an SEO agency and all they do is update your old content. They position it a little differently. They do X, Y, and Z because there is kind of a lot to it, but the point is that when you sign up as a client they don’t create any new content for you, they don’t set up your social media, they don’t optimize your site.

Brian Dean: All they do is go back to your old stuff and reoptimize it and make it a better fit for user intent, and they’re getting awesome results because it’s so much faster to do that than to start from scratch and okay, let’s come up with 100 keywords. Let’s hire freelance writers. Let’s make sure we have screen shots and then publish it slowly over the course of weeks and months. You can do it in days and you’ll get a huge lift on some important pages.

Brian Dean: I would even put that in the category of what’s working right now at the top, and if you combine it with updating it but also saying how can I make this better and better match the keyword what someone wants, it’s a winning combo.

John Jantsch: I would add to that restructuring too, because I tell you where we’ve gotten huge, huge mileage is by taking that content, updating it, but then linking it all together, I mean in a logical way. So creating what I’ve been calling hub pages that are like the ultimate guide to local marketing and I basically create it as an outline or a course table of contents almost and then link all that content back together so that it becomes a little separate hub on the site and I think that that restructuring, we aren’t even doing as much as we should be doing to refresh the content, but just that restructuring immediately sends it through the roof.

Brian Dean: Nice, yeah. That’s another thing is the internal linking. I’m not… I usually don’t… I would say I don’t recommend internal linking but I don’t say you don’t need to internal link, because most sites don’t have the authority to make it worthwhile. Duct Tape Marketing does because it’s a huge, respected site with tons of links and it’s been around a long time. So when you internal link from page A to page B, it’s sending a lot of link authority to page B, but with most people they just internal link and nothing’s really going around. You know what I mean? It’s like a pipe with nothing in it.

John Jantsch: I was going to say the further part of that though is the structure. It’s not just an internal link. I mean, you’re right, those are nice, but we’re setting these up almost as table of contents for a topic that makes sense. I mean there’s probably 2000 words on that page, but then links off to in a very logical way. I think what a lot of times people, we get so fixated on the SEO value and we forget sometimes about the utility of that for the person who actually comes to that page who then clicks on 10 pages, bookmarks it, shares it, dwells on it for an hour, and I think that to me that’s the part that sometimes people miss when we start talking about SEO is that when you get actual users what they do on the page is so important as well.

Brian Dean: Yeah, that’s a really good point. It’s almost like a resource page 2.0 that you’re creating. The page itself has content to help you but it’s an intro to something greater, your other resources that you already have. Yeah, I’m looking to do more of that myself. I did a little bit of that, I have a guide called how to learn SEO, and it does link out to some other sites but it’s mostly my own stuff and it’s for that exact reason.

Brian Dean: If someone wants to learn SEO, I didn’t have a page to send them to be like here is the stuff you need to read. There wasn’t one place to send them, so now there is. So yeah, it’s a really good idea. I plan on actually doing more of that for these different topics, because that worked really well, kind of similar to what you saw when we approached it with this is a valuable resource, but more importantly it links to all this other stuff so it’s like one stop shopping.

John Jantsch: And then as you pointed out, we do link to some external resources and then we’ll reach out to those external resources and say, “Look at this amazing page that ranks really highly and we linked you. You ought to link to it,” and amazingly some of them do.

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by rev.com. There are so many ridiculously valuable reasons to order transcriptions. You can write entire blog posts, heck, you could write an entire book by just speaking it and having Rev put together a transcript that you can then just bring on home. I mean, if you want to record a meeting so that you have notes, again, over and over, there are so many good reasons. If you just want to take notes when you’re listening to something and you just want to record those notes and get it. It’s amazing what the reasons you could find for doing this.

Rev gets those transcripts, as I said, they do our podcast. They get those transcripts back to you lightning fast and I’m going to give you a free trial offer. If you go to rev.com/blog/dtm and that will be in the show notes too, but you’re going to get a $100 coupon to try them out and I suggest you do it.

John Jantsch: Let’s debunk some myths. Are there any myths still hanging around from kind of first version of SEO that people are still propagating?

Brian Dean: That’s a good question. I mean, there are so many the issue is choosing one. I mean there’s 100. The thing is SEO, it got people kind of crazy. You were kind of getting there before when you’re saying you’ve got to remember users at the end of the day, but it’s easy with SEO stuff to completely forget users and just kind of act crazy. I was there. I’m not coming from a judgmental place because when I started in SEO, I launched my first site in 2008. I lived in a little apartment in New York. My favorite marketing book was Duct Tape Marketing. I had it in my bedroom believe it or not back then. And I was SEO, you need to do SEO. I didn’t even think about creating an awesome site, creating awesome content. It was all about tricking the algorithm and I didn’t really break that bad habit until 2012.

Brian Dean:  To answer your question, I would say the number one myth that people have is that Google likes a site that has a lot of content coming out all the time, this kind of big site, fresh content, need a lot of content myth that Google somehow has this preference for these big sites. It’s really not true. I’ve worked with sites that pump out 10 articles a day. I’ve worked with some that publish once a week or once every two weeks and there’s no correlation. It’s all about creating stuff that Google users want.

Brian Dean: Sometimes if you can swing it, like if you have a staff and you have a writing staff and you have an editorial process, you can put out multiple pieces of content a day that all check those boxes, but for most small businesses, including mine, it’s better to stay small.

Brian Dean: I’ll give you a good example. Like you mentioned, John, we just had a launch in my course and to do that we sent a lot of emails so we didn’t publish anything on the blog for about a month now, or three weeks, almost a month, and organic traffic has actually stayed remarkably consistent across the month. It’s like 0.5% higher than it was before without publishing anything. So Google doesn’t care that we didn’t publish anything because everything we already have is satisfying users and it continues to rank and that’s where most site’s traffic come from. I’m not saying don’t publish anything ever again, but the idea that you need to have this pedal to the metal publishing philosophy, I think it does a lot more harm than good.

John Jantsch: It actually taught people to publish crap.

Brian Dean: Yep, exactly. That’s what it came… exactly. Because it was Thursday and you’ve got to publish on Thursday and you don’t have anything good to say so it’s five reasons why X is important type of stuff. Yeah, and because it did actually work for a while. There was an update called Google Caffeine back in the day, it was probably 2006, that did give a preference to not just fresh content but sites that were putting out stuff, but then blogs blew up and it didn’t make any sense because every site was doing that. It didn’t need to be in the algorithm anymore.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and it really became important for them to start focusing on quality, them being the search engines, to focus on quality and I think that that probably goes more towards this idea of less but better.

Brian Dean: Yeah, exactly. Because you think Google 2006, 2007, if you searched for a really niche keyword, like how to write a press release or something, there were some results but there weren’t that many. They didn’t have 10 awesome results to put on the front page. Now they have plenty. It’s all about curating the best 10 and if you just put out the 50th best, you’re going to be in 50th place in Google, but if you work the extra mile to make the best, you have a shot of hitting number one.

John Jantsch: Okay, Brian. Not of course in the last 10 years or so, but did you ever put any words on pages and make them the same color as the background?

Brian Dean: No. That was one thing I… I’ve done black hat stuff, but I never did that.

John Jantsch: That was always my favorite. You’d go look at a website and you’d look at the source code and you’d go what is all this stuff?

Brian Dean: They just had the same keyword like 100 times.

John Jantsch: But you couldn’t see it.

Brian Dean: No, I never did that. I’ve done blog networks and whatever. But if it worked, I would have done it but by the time I got into SEO that was already kind of old hat.

John Jantsch: Since you mentioned blog networks, Google has explicitly said they’re a no-no, particularly… there are some ideas that it’s good content that’s curated but there certainly are people that are doing it just as an SEO play and Google is saying no, no, but it challenges… they can’t police it that well and it works. So how… I run across small business owners all the time that have been sold stuff like that that Google is saying we don’t approve of that, but it’s hard to sell them off of it because they’re like, “Well, look at the results it’s getting.” How does one sort of handle the fine line between what works and guidelines?

Brian Dean: It’s a tough one and the funny thing… good rule of thumb that I like to keep in mind is when Google says not to do something it’s because it works. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t have to warn you, right.

John Jantsch: But I guess it would also eventually signal that they’re going to spank you eventually, right?

Brian Dean: Yeah, it’s kind of a shot across the bow. They warned people for years before 2012. They had an update called Penguin that just destroyed websites, including my own from back in the day. But at the same time they wouldn’t warn against it. So if they’re saying don’t do this, it means it’s working. If it is, they know it and they’re like, “Hmm, well we can’t really stop it with the algorithm so we’ll warn people until we figure something out that the algorithm can do.”

Brian Dean: What I would say to people is just the risk usually isn’t worth it. What I like to do, I usually say, “You know what? It’s up to you.” I don’t want to get on my high horse and start telling people what’s right and wrong. I say, “Look, it’s your business, it’s your site, it’s your call. If I were you, I wouldn’t risk it because what you’re doing is you’re getting a tiny boost in organic traffic and a lot of times compared to what you would do if you put in the same effort with white hat stuff, but you have this sort of Damocles above your head that one day you could wake up and it goes to zero and as someone that’s been through that, I can tell you it’s devastating.” That usually at least plants a seed where they’re like, “Hmm, maybe there’s something to not doing this.”

John Jantsch: Yeah, and it’s a shortcut that is probably zero benefit for your customer and there are a lot of businesses out there, the SEO folks, they’re trying to get their folks to rank, that turns into customers, but that’s the way I always view it is like is this something that would make my site more useful to customers and if the answer is just flat out no, I think that’s a pretty good rule of thumb too.

Brian Dean: I agree. Another one I sometimes… I don’t know where I heard this but it was basically like white hat SEO is when, which is a legit way to go about ranking, is where you could show Google everything you’re doing and they’d be fine with it. Anything that’s not that is probably a black hat. Like you’re getting away with it, but if Google did some sort of audit that shows everything you do with SEO and there was something you couldn’t show them, that’s probably something you should get away from, in my opinion.

John Jantsch: I wonder if we could take about five minutes, and I’m going to put you a little bit on the spot for a case study type of idea, because you can read a book how to do SEO, but the fact of the matter is what your business does, what your business objectives are is going to dictate maybe what your priorities should be in SEO. So for example, a B2B national company that sells say like software as opposed to a B2C local company that does I don’t know, basement waterproofing. Their SEO needs, challenges, priorities are probably different. Given that example, could you kind of say, “Yeah, that national software company needs to focus on X, Y, Z, whereas that local company probably needs to make sure they focus from an SEO standpoint on A, B, C.” Is that enough for you to kind of give us some guidance?

Brian Dean: Plenty. Yeah, the B2B software company I would 100% focus on creating content that your customers, around keywords that your customers search for. You’re a SaaS company, you hopefully [inaudible] and customers all the time. It’s a matter of figuring out what they’re searching for when they’re not searching for your software.

Brian Dean: So HubSpot is a great example. Very few people are searching for CRM software or CMSs, the stuff that they actually sell. Most people that are HubSpot’s customers are small business owners that are searching for stuff like how to get leads, how to blog, how to run Google ad words campaigns, how to run Facebook ads, all that stuff and HubSpot has completely crushed by almost ignoring these buyer keywords, which are only a tiny [inaudible] focusing instead on these information [inaudible] in front of their customers as a lead and then closing them on the phone. That’s the whole business model and it works really well. That’s what I would focus on as a B2B sales company, just tons have grown this way but HubSpot to me is the best example because they’re just absolutely crushing it.

John Jantsch: I think the key there is they focus not… because nobody wants what we sell. They want their problem solved and so they focus on what all the problems are, particularly problems early in the journey that can sort of endear them and get them [inaudible] who are these HubSpot? That’s a real key. Most websites are optimized for that person who’s got their credit card out ready to buy because they think your product or service solves their problem and I think they miss the entire journey up to that point.

Brian Dean: Those people, and you should have pages on your site dedicated to them, but it’s a slice… it’s a tiny drop in the ocean. If you look at the number of people who search for CRM software versus how to get customers, it’s like 10,000 to one. So for every one customer you’re going to get from this direct credit card in hand type of person, you can get hundreds from the how to get leads and how to get customers. It will take a little longer, you’ll have to nurture them, but that’s where the real money is.

John Jantsch: HubSpot is a great example. So on this B2C, this basement waterproofing company that just does business in their town, what do they need to focus on?

Brian Dean: They should focus 100% on local SEO, so Google Local, not… creating content makes no sense for them. For people searching for how to finish a basement or how to prevent leaks and all that stuff, a lot of companies do that because they’ll take the HubSpot approach and apply it to their local business and it just makes no sense. They just put out…

Brian Dean: I had a guy email me last week. It was a locksmith and he emailed me with this article, oh, I’m a locksmith and I just created this awesome post that I know people will share if only I could get the word out. What should I do to promote it? I don’t know, I was kind of bored, so I checked out. I looked at the post and it was like five ways to not get locked out of your house. Like the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Something like don’t forget your keys and just nonsense. First of all, no one would ever read that, but even if it was good, it wouldn’t really help him. You know what I mean? He’s in a local area and the odds of that person in that area searching for him, needing a locksmith, it just doesn’t… the stars just don’t align.

Brian Dean: I’d focus on Google Local and getting awesome reviews. At the end of the day, [inaudible] sorry. Google My Business, they change their name every week, but yeah, the one they’ve stuck with lately Google My Business, so local SEO. So people searching for your business in city. The reviews are a big part of that and [inaudible] are part of it but you don’t need [inaudible] nearly as many to rank. Instead of like HubSpot creating a blog about this and that or about basements and man caves and all this stuff I’ve seen people do for basement companies.

Brian Dean: All you really need is like one or two pages that people will want to link to. It could be a list of places to visit in your town. It could be… it’s just link bait. Customers will never probably even see this. If they do, they’ll be like, “Oh, this is great. This is helpful.” Things to do in your town or other vendors or have a partnership or go to an event or speak at your chamber of commerce. These are all things that aren’t really content as we usually see it. They’re just pages to get some links that can help your overall website rank higher. That should be the goal for that company.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Unfortunately for a lot of businesses, particularly the consumer businesses, if you’re not showing up in that maps listing, which is kind of small these days.

Brian Dean: It’s a three pack now. It used to be seven. It was called a seven pack and now it’s a three pack. There are instances where you can do, like if people search in Google Maps, you can somehow, it depends on what they’re searching for, you can see more than three, but you’re right, John, for most keywords that are directly in Google if you’re not in the top three, you’re kind of invisible.

John Jantsch: And the 70% of people that are visiting those sites on a mobile device today, that’s the whole screen. It makes it even tougher. I think you’re absolutely right. I’ve been saying it for years and Google now… I do think they’re set on this one because they’re actually investing in it and adding to it and tweaking it so I think… in fact, here’s my prediction. I think they’re going to start rolling out features to make that a social network. In a community, I think your clients are going to be able to actually talk to each other at some aspect through your Google My Business page. That’s just sort of my prediction.

Brian Dean: That would be interesting. So more than just reviews, they’d actually be able to say, “I had this problem. Did they help?” Things like that.

John Jantsch: Exactly. They’ll have the question and answer feature, they’ll have the upload your finished your basement to it. I think they’re going to make it… I don’t know if it will ever be a social network, but I think that’s going to be their approach to network small businesses together.

Brian Dean: Cool. Yeah. I could see it.

John Jantsch: One… this is unfair because this is my last question I’m going to ask you and we could have done a whole show on this, you’ve invested a lot recently in video and so again, thinking of those two… let’s just use those two B2B, that SaaS company and that waterproofing company, how would video help them in telling their story and their SEO play?

Brian Dean: The B2B company, it would be really similar to the content strategy. The only difference would be what are your customers watching on YouTube, instead of what are they searching for on Google. But it’s the same idea. There’s a huge difference, in some cases, between those two things. Because YouTube is a big search engine, yes, but most of the views on YouTube come from people browsing around, come from suggested videos, the home page, so it’s important to create videos around what people tend to watch and not just what they search for, so both.

Brian Dean: With the B2B company, it’s a SaaS company, I mean it depends on what it is, but you basically take those same topics you found for your blog content and see if people are watching that stuff on YouTube. If so, great. If not, it’s time to get back to the users and kind of figure out what they’re watching on YouTube. As long as it’s somewhat related to your business, you can do well.

John Jantsch: Can you do keyword research while just using YouTube for that type of thing or are there some tools that somebody needs to employ to kind of get that discovery made?

Brian Dean: You mean to find search volume, people searching or people browsing?

John Jantsch: Yeah, what people are actually looking at.

Brian Dean: So for the search volume stuff, there are some tools that can do it. Google doesn’t really provide YouTube search volume really so they do impressions and things like that. It’s tricky to know how many people have searched for something on YouTube. It’s not like the Google keyword planner where they tell you a range. It’s really… there are some tools that can guesstimate but none are super accurate.

Brian Dean: What I like to do is just look at how many views those videos have on that topic. If you search for how to write a press release and the number one video has 3800 views and it was from five years ago, it’s probably not… no one’s watching that stuff. But if it has 200,000, it’s like oh, well there’s something here. That’s usually how I determine whether to make a video. If there’s already a video on that topic that’s done well, that’s a good sign.

Brian Dean: So for the basement company, what I would actually recommend is looking to see if there are any keywords that people search for in your local area that have videos that show up. This is an old trick that used to work and it still does in a lot of local areas. I see lawyers use it a lot where what they’ll do is they’ll basically create a keyword optimized video about their service or maybe more helpful, like how to help with the situation, and then the YouTube video will rank in Google results. Then you have two results in Google, you have your three pack or regular organic and then you have YouTube.

Brian Dean: So what people would do for example with a basement company, a lot of times they would create this fluff two minute video about how great they are, show the guys go into the house, hey, how’s it going, go downstairs, they’re fixing the basement, it’s amazing, they fixed it, blah, blah, blah, and you can have some of that stuff but it shouldn’t really be a commercial. It should be some content that is helpful and will keep people engaged. That way YouTube and Google see that people are engaging with the video and they’re more likely to put it on the first page.

Brian Dean: That’s more of a play to get on Google. It’s not really like you’re trying to get in front of your target customer while they’re watching videos. They’ll only need you if something’s wrong with their basement and they’re not going to remember your video from two years ago. It doesn’t work like that, but if you could show up on Google, it’s another spot, more real estate for your business which is important at that point of purchase time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and then of course that person probably should be buying some ads, too. But that’s a topic for a whole other day.

Brian Dean: Oh yeah. That’s true.

John Jantsch: Well Brian, thanks so much for joining us. You can find everything about Brian Dean at Backlinko. It’s like link with an O dot com. Anywhere else or any other resources you want to share today, Brian?

Brian Dean:  No, that’s a good one. I would head over there and hop on the newsletter. That’s the only thing I’d recommend.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and take a look at how Brian structures his site and focuses on his site because you learn a lot just from paying attention to that. So Brian, great to catch up with you and hopefully all is well and the weather is good in Genovia.

Brian Dean: Thanks, John. I’ll remember that for our next podcast.

John Jantsch: Take care.

Creating a Winning SEO Strategy

Creating a Winning SEO Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Brian Dean
Podcast Transcript

Brian DeanToday’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, is Brian Dean. He is an SEO expert and the founder of Backlinko.

Dean started five internet businesses early in his career, but he didn’t experience success until 2012. He now uses Backlinko to teach other business owners the lessons he learned along the way. Between his blog, newsletter, and courses, he has established himself as one of the leading authorities on SEO.

Today, Dean and I talk everything SEO, and he shares valuable tips and case studies that can help any business to create a winning SEO strategy.

 

Questions I ask Brian Dean:

  • What’s the best way to localize results and check how you’re performing in other areas?
  • How do you incorporate user intent into your SEO strategy?
  • Are there any SEO myths you’d like to debunk?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • What the biggest news is currently in SEO.
  • Why you should go back and refresh and repurpose old content.
  • How to incorporate video into your SEO strategy.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Brian Dean:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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Why Nobody is Finding Your Content

Why Nobody is Finding Your Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Brian Dean

Brian Dean

I believe that elements of SEO are now elevated to the strategic level. In other words, as you plan your message, website structure, and content for your marketing, you better include some research commonly seen as a technical aspect of SEO.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Brian Dean. He is a digital marketing expert and founder of Backlinko, an SEO training blog. He and I discuss on-page ranking factors and the simple steps you need to apply to every piece of content to get found online.

Since launching Backlinko, Brian quickly made a name for himself by publishing practical strategies that marketers can use to grow their online business. Backlinko is now one of the most popular marketing blogs online. Did we mention that he’s built this growing business while traveling in countries like Thailand, Japan, Spain, and Turkey? It’s true. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

Questions I ask Brian Dean:

  • What are some of the most important things to know about SEO?
  • What is LSI?
  • Are internal and external links still valuable?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • Why keyword research is so important
  • Which on-page ranking factors are still important
  • Why your page title shouldn’t necessarily be your URL

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Brian Dean:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Are you an independent marketing consultant or an agency owner? If so, you may want to check out the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. It is a growing group of independent marketing consultants and agencies that are partnering and collaborating using the Duct Tape Marketing tools, and really scaling their businesses. Check it out at ducttapemarketingconsultant.com.

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