Search Engine Optimization can be a real headache for most of us.
While it can be free, it often seems frighteningly complicated and takes way too long to see the fruits of our hard work - if there's going to be any. Who on Earth has time for this while building a business?!
We are about to change your mind.
In today's podcast episode, we talked with Matt Diggity, founder of the SEO Conference in Chiang Mai and many SEO agencies, who revealed his best advice and strategies to get more and better traffic on your website: visitors that are ready to purchase.
With his step-by-step instructions, you can boost your website's SEO without wasting time on guesswork and unimportant nuances, doing what really matters and what your competition often fails to do right. Follow his guide and let your website work for you in the long run!
We recommend listening to this episode with a pen and paper - you will definitely learn a lot.
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Episode Transcript
Shane Melaugh:
Hello, and welcome to the Active Growth podcast. Today we are continuing the topic that we have been talking about in the last few episodes, which is how to get free traffic to your website. Once you're in a position where you have your online course, you have a product, you've picked your market and you have something to sell, now you need to scale it up, and you need to get people to actually come to your website, and sell whatever your product is on a regular basis.
Shane Melaugh:
So how do we do that without having to spend lots of money on traffic? Without having to spend money on ads? And to help us answer this question, for today's episode Hanne is sat together with Matt Diggity. Matt Diggity is one of the leading experts in the SEO space. As you'll hear, Matt has a variety of different businesses and projects related to search engine optimization, and he's been doing this for a long time. And that gives him a really wide overview, and he has a lot of breadth of experience in the SEO space. So, listen in to get basically a crash course in SEO from one of the leading experts in the space, in this episode.
Shane Melaugh:
Matt will tell us exactly how he will go about starting SEO, so basically from scratch, how do you even start to do the things on your website you need to do, to start getting search traffic. He'll reveal exactly what to do, and in what order. He'll also share his favorite tools to use, and he'll share some of the mistakes that he made when he was starting out, so we can hopefully skip past them and get right to the good stuff, and start ranking for some good keywords.
Shane Melaugh:
If you've been thinking of trying out SEO as your main traffic strategy, and if you're unsure if this is the right thing to do for you and your business, or you're unsure of how to get started, this episode will really help you out. And if you want to leave a comment or leave a voice message for future podcast episodes, you can go and find the show notes at activegrowth.com/SEOMatt, all one word. So activegrowth.com/S-E-O-M-A-T-T. That is for show notes, comments, and much more. And with that, I'll hand it over to Hanne.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Hey Matt, welcome to the Active Growth podcast, thank you for coming on.
Matt Diggity:
Thank you very much for having me.
Hanne Vervaeck:
So for those who don't know Matt, Matt Diggity, he's the founder and organizer of the SEO Conference. He's also blogging or writing about everything SEO related on DiggityMarketing.com, and he has a couple of agencies, I guess by now?
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, I've got my hands in a whole bunch of things related to SEO. Like, as you mentioned the Chiang Mai SEO Conference, and I blog at DiggityMarketing.com. I have an affiliate marketing agency, LeadSpring, a client agency, The Search Initiative, and I have a service called Authority Builders for building back links. So as you can see, I got my fingers in all the little pawns related to SEO.
Hanne Vervaeck:
So, as you can see we're in really good hands to talk about SEO. Now, Matt, the people listening to this podcast are people who follow the Active Growth System, which basically means that they are solopreneurs and they started with either a coaching project, or maybe an online product, or an e-course or something like that. They have something to sell, they've found their audience, and my question for you now is, is SEO valuable for this type of people?
Matt Diggity:
I would say very much so, I mean, thinking back to about eight to 10 years ago, I was in these exact same shoes, so I was a solopreneur as well, and just trying to figure out how to make some money online, and I didn't have a team. I didn't have a budget or anything like that, so I think the value out of SEO is you're not spending money to get traffic. You can use your own sweat and blood to try to get organic rankings, which will come for free. So I think it's very, very applicable for the solopreneur.
Hanne Vervaeck:
All right. That's good to hear, because I think online we often hear these growth hacks, and that kind of stuff, and SEO is often disregarded as too complicated, or maybe it takes too long. What would you say about that?
Matt Diggity:
Well, there's no doubt about it that SEO is complicated, and it's gonna continue to be more complicated. I mean if you think about things, when you're trying to get SEO traffic, you're up against pretty much the brightest minds that are trying to game the company with the most Ph.D.'s on the planet, namely, Google.
Matt Diggity:
So, that's the game that you're trying to play in, but if you do know the rules, and you can dedicate yourself to figuring out an SEO, and experimenting around, the rewards are incredible. I mean as you probably know already, like click through rate and getting clicks from organic results is much, much better than paid results anyways.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, just imagine like, you're searching for ... I don't know, what's the best washing machine for my house, or something like that. And you're gonna see a lot of results on Google, and you're gonna see results that are clearly marked as ads, they got the little green AD marker on that. And then you have organic ads, or organic listings, that are just gonna list out, okay, this is the best washing machine of 2019, something like that. Which one are you more likely to click on? The one that paid to get that result, or the one that earned their way there?
Hanne Vervaeck:
Yeah, no, the organic one for sure. That makes total sense. So if I created this online product, let's say I have a public speaking course, how would you go about starting this whole SEO game?
Matt Diggity:
Ah, okay. Well, first things first, if you have a course or something, and you wanna get it listed in Google and ranked in Google, you need to have a website, so to speak. You need to have it hosted somewhere. Let me ask you, where are most of your ... you know, the people that are following the course that you're running ... where are they mostly putting their courses online? Is it like a you-to-me type thing, or are they hosting their own websites?
Hanne Vervaeck:
They're hosting their own websites, so we really advocate to have everything self hosted so that people have the complete control over their content.
Matt Diggity:
Excellent. Yeah, I would definitely recommend that 100%. You also get access to all the levers that you would need to optimize your website for Google. So everything starts off with onsite optimization, so going into your website, and making sure that your keywords that you're targeting are in the right places, and not overly optimized in the right places. So like, some examples of that would be the title, and then after that would be the headings, and the sub-headings, and making sure it's in your content in the right amounts.
Matt Diggity:
So it can be quite complex, so what I do recommend for anybody first getting into SEO, is everyone says you can learn anything online, and that should get you to where you wanna be eventually. And that's true, if you go the route of watching YouTube videos, and stuff like that, you're gonna be picking through different places, and trying to piece things together to find all the correct rules. What I'd recommend doing instead is trying to find a single on-site SEO definitive guide or something like that, or perhaps even getting a course that will walk you through the steps, 'cause the learning curve can be quite steep, and you just need to know what actually to optimize in terms of the on-site SEO.
Matt Diggity:
Then, past on-site, there's technical SEO, making sure your website's very fast. Make sure you got a HTPS installed, make sure you're telling Google what are the right pages for them to index, and telling them to ignore the pages that are maybe quite thin that don't add value to your site. So Google's not wasting their time on assets that you don't want them to see. And then lastly, I mean we're skipping around a lot right here, but lastly the third part of the pie would be off-site SEO, where you're sending in, building back links to your course website.
Hanne Vervaeck:
So at this point, you didn't talk about creating blog posts, or that type of stuff. Do you think that comes later on, that the things you're saying now is what people should be focused on in the beginning?
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, well you called me out on that one. So you definitely need a bit of baseline to start with. Google's not gonna rank anything without content, and we see this come up a lot with, for example, we have a lot of clients in the photography niche, and they wanna build websites that are 100% photos of their work, and I totally get that, but Google won't rank just photo sites. You need content.
Matt Diggity:
So I'd recommend starting with at least five to 10 pages of solid content on your site. And let's say, we'll go with this photography example as well, let's say you have a course on how to take wedding photos, or something like that. And so probably your home page, or maybe some inner page is gonna be completely targeted around how to take wedding photos, and you have a how to guide, and there's examples, step by step, lot of content, lot of great content on how to take wedding photos.
Matt Diggity:
So that's your base piece of content that you would try to rank in Google for this specific term, but that's not enough. Google won't rank a one page website about a certain topic, so you're gonna need some supporting articles about it. So maybe you go into supporting articles that are like, how to take wedding photos in tropical islands, and then another might be, the best makeup for wedding photos, and stuff like that. So starting to roll out at least five to 10 supporting pieces of content that are related to that specific term that you're trying to rank, and starting with the baseline right there. Like you're not even gonna come close to ranking unless you have this kind of setup with the main pillar article, and then supporting articles around it.
Matt Diggity:
Then after that ... this falls into the second part of your question ... I would definitely start rolling out and keeping a schedule of new content coming out over the coming months. At least once per month, the more the better, and just the same kind of thing. Related content, it's gotta be good content, don't repeat yourself in different articles, Google doesn't like that at all. And just make sure you stick to a schedule and get that thing rolling out month after month.
Hanne Vervaeck:
When you say related content, do you have some kind of strategy to come up with those ideas?
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, for sure. So everything in SEO starts with keyword research, and there's many different ways to do it, but I recommend using a tool called Ahrefs.
Hanne Vervaeck:
We had him on the podcast just a little while ago, so yeah, people should know about Ahrefs by now.
Matt Diggity:
Okay, yeah, he always beats me to the punch on everything. So Ahrefs is great, because it allows you to plugin your competition. So, looking at identifying who would be your competition, and saying, okay this guy is ranking for a lot of good stuff, let me throw him into Ahrefs and reverse engineer all the keywords that he's ranking for. And when you toss them in there, you'll be able to see okay, he's definitely ranking for the keywords I wanna rank for. Wedding photography, how to guide, and that kind of stuff. But he's also got all these different keywords that are related to it.
Matt Diggity:
So you reverse engineer this guy, and then maybe you reverse engineer three or four other people, and you're gonna find all these little subtopics that are gonna be great ideas to talk about on your blog.
Hanne Vervaeck:
From there, then you would suggest have some kind of constant calendar to roll out that content on a consistent basis?
Matt Diggity:
Yeah.
Hanne Vervaeck:
And then we now have our pieces of content, we know that we start posting at least once a month, what's the next step?
Matt Diggity:
And then we rewind back to all these different steps I skipped a long time ago and we get back to that on-site optimization. So, taking that content and making sure that it's optimized in the correct way. So again, looking at the titles and the headings, and making sure your main keywords are introduced in the title. Some tips regarding to that is, let's say your main keyword is how to take wedding photos, so you would take the title, like your SEO title, it's an HTML code, and you would put those exact words, how to take wedding photos, towards the front of the title.
Matt Diggity:
So keep them together in the string, and then if you're gonna add some fluff onto the end of it, like in 2018, or 2018 ultimate guide, you do that at the end of your title.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Okay.
Matt Diggity:
So that's gonna completely optimize your page for how to rank for wedding photos, by putting it in the front and keeping it together in the string. After that, I would say the next most important place to put keywords would be the headings, so your H1, and same kind of rules there. Just keep them towards the front of the H1, but I like to scramble 'em up. Don't use the same exact phrase you used for your title as the H1, so scramble 'em up a little bit.
Matt Diggity:
So basically you, after that I would say it's the H2s, H3s, and H4s. These are your subheadings, and I also like to think of them as subtopics, so that would break down your main topic, which is the H1, how to take wedding photos, into its smaller parts. So you might get into how to take wedding photos in low light, or in bright light, for example, and that's where you break down the main topics. Now Google has a very easy to read structure of what your article's about. They see that main topic right there in the H1, you've laid it out really nice and easy for their crawler, and their parser to be able to understand it, and you've broken it down into subtopics.
Matt Diggity:
Now that all that's nice and dandy, there's other bells and whistles that you wanna throw into your content as well. So keyword density, so this is a highly debated aspect of SEO, but you probably don't want to write the word photography every 10th word or every fifth word, and just make it seem like your content is spammed for that word photography. So I recommend maximum, one to 2% keyword density for any part of your keyword phrase. So the words how ... how to wouldn't really count, but wedding, and then photography, or photos, so I would make sure wedding, and photos, and photography don't exceed one to 2% density in the content.
Matt Diggity:
After that, you can insert what we like to call authority links, or links out to other sites that are authorities in the niche. So maybe like a wikiHow article on how to take photos, or maybe a very interesting article from New York Times about wedding photos, something like that. At the end of the day, Google wants to make sure that you're serving up content that's gonna answer the query, and it's gonna help people, so it's ironic to think that you have the confidence to say you wrote the best article on the topic, and you don't need to reference anything else in that article. So Google likes when you link out to other credible sources.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Which is a bit contradictory, I think, for a lot of people, to have that feeling of like, "Oh, I'm sending people away from my website to another website."
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, totally. It goes against like, all thought about conversion and stuff like that. If you're giving people an exit from your website, that's a bad thing, right? But I've done a lot of testing on this, and the benefit of linking out to an authority site, and keep it do follow instead of no follow, which is another SEO jargon type thing, is quite substantial compared to the opposite of not linking out to an authority site. And I have some interesting articles that have tested this as well that I can refer your audience to.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Okay, perfect, we'll make sure that we link that up in the show notes of this episodes. All right, so at this point we have our content, we made sure that it's optimized, that we have those H1s and keyword density, that we have links to authority sites ... next step. What should we be doing that?
Matt Diggity:
Okay, so now we've just optimized the main page. The main pillar page, whatever you like to call it. So now it's time to go in and rinse and repeat on the supporting content. So your blog posts, your other subtopic pages that you're using to support that main piece of content, the same rules apply. You optimize the headings, the titles, the keyword density, you link out to authority sites, and again, there's a lot of nitty gritty that we're skipping over. I have an on-site SEO guide that can walk people through this, as well.
Matt Diggity:
But at this point we continue to optimize the supporting articles, and now we get into inter-page on-site SEO. So every single article itself has been optimized with regards to itself, but now we need to interlink these pages together. So in general, a very, very easy rule of thumb to kind of simplify this whole idea of interlinking pages together, is to basically link from one page to another if you want to rank that target page, and if it's relevant to the current piece of content. If it's not both of those, don't bother linking it.
Matt Diggity:
So what that will do is, when you link from one page to another, it's like a vote from Google, seeing that this page that I'm linking from, is similar to the page I'm linking to. So if they're relevant to each other, that boosts the relevance of the receiving page. In addition to that, it spreads around a concept called link juice. So whenever any page on a website is getting back links, those are links from external sites, that's a good indicator to Google that this page is trustworthy, that it should rank. So when you're interlinking your pages on your site, you're passing around that juice, and you're spreading the love. So make sure you're only interlinking to pages that you wanna rank, and the ones that are relevant as well.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Okay. Interesting. So all right, we have our website, we have our content, we have our optimized content, we have the interlinks. This is everything that we can do on our side. At this point, is there any chance that we'll already get Google traffic?
Matt Diggity:
There is a slight chance. So definitely back in the day, when the Google landscape was less competitive, you could just build a site and you might have some pages ranked on page one depending on the ... I don't know, the competition for these particular keywords. And it still does happen, so in some foreign niches, like for example we're doing some stuff here in Thailand, and we've built the page from scratch, and we started off on page one. It's a matter of competition, and if you choose the right niche ... Should I say right niche? Let's rewind back and say, if you choose a noncompetitive niche, it's definitely possible you could end up getting on page one right off the bat, and pulling some traffic.
Matt Diggity:
Is that the right niche? That might just mean that it's just not competitive enough to be worth it, so that's why I wanted to retract on saying that it's right, and say it's noncompetitive instead.
Hanne Vervaeck:
All right, that's a very affiliate way of approaching things, right? Where you pick your niche, and then you look at the competition and you hope that you'll be able to rank, and that it will be profitable. Most of our listeners will probably have chosen their product based on their own expertise, and the market research that they did to actually find a problem that they could solve for people. So unfortunately, it might be in some more competitive niches, which at that point, probably just building out their own website is not gonna be sufficient. Or am I getting that wrong?
Matt Diggity:
No, it could be. I mean I would say most cases, this is not enough. Like, after you've built the website, that's probably not enough to start making money, at least from organic SEO, simply because of the competition levels these days. So, after that point you're gonna have to start building back links, and that's the off-site SEO stage of SEO, and this is where it gets a little bit more convoluted.
Hanne Vervaeck:
All right, that sounds scary.
Matt Diggity:
So, with the back link situation. So, why back links are interesting, at least with regards to Google, is back in the days when there were multiple search engines competing for our attention, we had Yahoo, and AOL had a search engine, HotBot, like all these different guys, and it was kind of a neck and neck race for a while, and then the founders Google went with their hypothesis of what would be the most easy way to rank search results, or most effective way to rank search results, and they came up with this page rank algorithm, which is based on back links.
Matt Diggity:
So they put their faith in this back link as a high value metric for assessing whether a website should rank or not, and the results you can see are they won. They won the race, right? So back links are still very much so baked into their algorithm. They use them quite heavily even to this day to determine whether a website should rank or not. So even though we might have the best piece of content that answers the question, how to take wedding photos, it still would not rank number one unless it has some votes from other websites saying it should be there.
Matt Diggity:
So this is where it gets quite interesting, because the entire internet knows the value of a back link now. They know what it can do for other people, so getting back links for free can be quite challenging, but it's still possible. I'm assuming most of your listeners are interested in white hat sustainable ways for ranking, so.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Yes, please.
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, so we'll stick to that. But one very simple way to get back links is just to do your outreach, so reaching out and emailing other websites in your niche related to photography in this particular example, reaching out to these guys and offering them something in exchange. So the most typical form of exchange for a back link is content, and this is most likely interpreted as a guest post. So you would reach out to people, you'd email 'em and say, "Hey, how's it going, I really like your website. I've been writing a lot in this field, and here's some samples of my work," and you would link out to some samples, and say, "I would like to see if I could write for you, and contribute to your already awesome blog, let me know and I can get started sending you an example."
Matt Diggity:
And if your reach out enough to these people, some of 'em are gonna say yes, and then when you write that article for them, you make sure to insert a back link to one of your very, very good resources on the same topic, to make their article more strong. And it's an understood thing in the industry these days, people know that they're getting free content, and you're probably gonna have a link in there, and that's just how this whole environment kind of works these days. And it's still very effective for getting back links, and back links get you ranked.
Hanne Vervaeck:
All right. We love giving people one of those 30 day challenges, things that they can do to get started with this. What would be your suggestion for one of these 30 day challenges? What should they be doing?
Matt Diggity:
Okay, this one's interesting, because I just got my little cousin into SEO about ... I don't know, it's about a month, actually a year ago to this day actually. Last Thanksgiving I was at a Thanksgiving dinner with my family in the United States, and my cousin was talking about, "Oh, my goodness, I'm just so completely over going and working in a cubicle, and working 60 hour weeks making someone else a lot of money, so I'm just looking for other avenues of making money." And I was like, "Oh, well, very interesting that you should come talk to me about that."
Matt Diggity:
So what I decided to do, I bought him an affiliate website that was making a certain amount of money, and I said, "Okay, here, I'm gonna buy you this website. You take care of this website, you're gonna work on this website, until I'm paid back, and then we'll split the money 50/50. And this'll be your training ground, and this will be how you start learning SEO and ranking websites, and stuff like that." And he's doing great, he's doing awesome with it.
Matt Diggity:
So rewinding this back to a 30 day challenge, basically he came up with this one himself. He's gonna send 10 emails a day every single day for 30 days, and with a 10% conversion rate, he should get one link per day. How's he doing with that, we're gonna have to check up on him, but I was proud of him for coming up with that one, I think it's quite aggressive. If you want to start dabbling into it, and easing your way in, I might ease that down to five emails a day, or three emails per day, but I think that's pretty good, especially for someone just starting out that wants to hit the ground running hungry.
Hanne Vervaeck:
I actually think that's amazing, because one of the things that people are often so afraid about is rejection, and in the case that you're afraid about rejection, you basically give the power to someone else, right, whereas if your goal for this 30 day challenge is to send a certain amount of emails a day, you can actually feel good about already sending those 10 emails, and then well if nine reject you, and maybe one says yes, that's still a win, and you actually did what you set out to do during those 30 days. So, I think that's a really good challenge.
Matt Diggity:
Well said. And yeah, you're gonna have to get over rejection very, very quickly if you're doing manual outreach, which is how a lot of people do their SEO these days. Like, if you have a website, just think about how many of these emails you already get, and how many of them have you answered so far.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Don't get me started.
Matt Diggity:
Exactly, exactly.
Hanne Vervaeck:
No, yeah, definitely, it is one of those scary things, I think. It's so much easier to write an article on your own blog, and to dabble around with that, rather than actually reaching out to the world and asking them if you can contribute. And that's also why I believe that many solopreneurs never do it, and they don't get those back links to actually rank their websites.
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, you kinda gotta get over that. I mean, there's other ways to get back links that are less rejection riddled, for the people that wanna ease into it without having to deal with this rejection concept. I mean you can do stuff like this right now, go on a podcast, and I'm thinking I'll probably get a back link out of it. But there's also stuff like, you can do round-ups, where you'll reach out to big influencers in the niche. So you'd reach out to major photographers, and find their email addresses, and say, "Hey, I'm creating a super big post about 30 experts and their best tips about how to take wedding photos in tropical islands. I'd really love your feedback on that."
Matt Diggity:
So what happens here is, you get these experts to help write your content. They're gonna come back, and they're gonna say, one or two, or maybe a paragraph long of their best tips, and so you put together this big post, and then you reach out to these guys after it, and say, "Hey, I have your post up and I have your contribution, thanks so much for this. I was wondering if you could share it on your Facebook or your Twitter." So now you've got all these influencers sharing around your article, and you're very, very likely to get back links. Maybe even back links from them, themselves, from their authoritative websites. And that's a very ... the rejection rate on that one is much, much lower, because have egos, and they wanna be on websites.
Hanne Vervaeck:
That's a really interesting point. People love to talk about themselves, and feel as an authority, so the moment that you actually put them in those spotlights, and ask them a question that they feel that they can answer, then definitely they are more likely to do that.
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, for sure.
Hanne Vervaeck:
All right, so do social links, or sharing on social, is that helping with SEO?
Matt Diggity:
Sharing on social can help in some ways, but it's not directly tied into the algorithm. So there's a few different ways that it can help, is first if you share in social and there's a lot of people taking a look at it, and reading it, it's gonna send traffic to your website. What that traffic does, especially if someone has Google analytics installed, or someone's using the Chrome browser, it's gonna allow Google to be able to figure out how people interact with your content.
Matt Diggity:
So if people come from a social link, like a Facebook share, and go to your website, and they click around on your website for, you know, 40 minutes, and they read multiple pages, that's a great indicator to Google that your content is good, and you'll get a bonus for that. So that's one way that social can help. And another way social can help, is I've run a high amount of tests, I'm an engineer background and I'm super geeky with this SEO stuff, so I ran a lot of tests and found that it seems as if Google is using social shares as an indicator of the possibility that a bunch of back links could have happened. So they're using it as justification for an influx of back links.
Matt Diggity:
If you think about it like this, if a website just receives 30 back links in a week, but it's completely crickets on Facebook, and Twitter, and anything social, that's pretty weird. Back links are a pretty rare situation in the real world, like for any of you website owners, just think about this, how often do you link out to other websites? It's pretty dang rare. But how often do you share something on Facebook? It could be every day, right? So there has to be a decent balance between social activity and a heavy back link campaign.
Matt Diggity:
If you have a little back link campaign, if there's just a few dripping in every week, then you don't need to worry about that stuff.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Okay. Cool, that makes sense. Is there anything else that we should cover, something that you think people should definitely know about, or some mistakes that they should absolutely avoid?
Matt Diggity:
The first time I get into affiliate SEO was in about 2008, 2009, and I went with something that's my passion, I really like yoga, and that's what I did for my first niche. And I was using some software to help me figure out what is a very low competition keyword in the niche, and I figured out the keyword was yoga travel. So like yoga and travel together, it had a nice chunk of search volume and low competition, so that's what I did, I went for something I was interested in, and I started blogging about it, made a website, started building back links, and I started to rank number one for yoga travel, which was cool. I had a win under my belt, that felt good.
Matt Diggity:
But one problem about it is, I quickly learned that people like yogis don't necessarily like to spend a lot of money. So when they research something, like, to do yoga, all you really need is a $20 yoga mat, and that's pretty much it. So first off I've just learned that the niche ... I should've done some more niche research to see what kind of monetization I could have made out of it. I know it's cool to get into something that you're passionate about, but you also have to think about the value of your time, and to make sure that the niche you get into is monetizable. So that was one lesson I learned.
Matt Diggity:
Another lesson I learned is that the course that kind of taught me SEO told us to focus on one keyword, which was fine and dandy. You know, I rank for yoga travel, but the rest of my website wasn't really optimized for anything, it was all focused on ranking in one single keyword, and so I pretty much lost out on a whole bunch of different opportunities I could have ranked for. Yoga retreats, and stuff like that.
Matt Diggity:
So it really, really falls back to what ... and I talked about keyword research and making sure you really, really plan out your main keyword for your pillar articles, and then your supporting content, which have keyword volume for them, and making sure that you really have a lot of breadth to cover a ton of different keywords. So those are the two lessons I learned. Stick to a niche that can make you money, and in addition to that, do really, really good keyword research. Instead of finding one keyword to rank for like I did 10 years ago, find 200 or 300 variations of different keywords that are related to the niche, and shoot for that.
Matt Diggity:
So second time around, all right, I took my lessons, and I was like, what I'll start doing, I'll just start ranking for reviews of a particular product. Of course, this is gonna make money, 'cause I know people are buying the product, and I started to rank for ergonomic chairs. So, ergonomic chair reviews, and after that I did the keyword research properly, so I started to rank for basic ergonomic chairs, yoga ball chairs, kneeling chairs, other variations. Even started to get into inversion tables, 'cause those are to help people with bad backs. Massage tables, stuff like that, and did really, really solid keyword research, and also this was directly monetizable.
Matt Diggity:
People searching for yoga travel might just be searching for where to go on their vacation to learn yoga. But people searching for, what's the best ergonomic chair are definitely looking to buy ergonomic chairs. This was the first game changer for me, and this, ranking for these type of terms was the indicator to me that it was time to quit my job as an engineer and go into this full time. That's the difference, finding a monetizable keyword set, and really, really doing awesome keyword research.
Hanne Vervaeck:
So one of the things that we really focus on is to have people validate their idea, and the product that they are selling, really, really early on, with just one landing page, and immediately start talking to people and start selling their product. So hopefully at that point, if they have a yoga website, they actually have a product that they've validated that people were ready to buy for. But I still think it's very valuable what you said between keywords where people are just looking for information, and basically buyer keywords.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Can you tell a little bit more about how we can find the difference between those two?
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, so there's a concept called the sales cycle, and I talked about this very recently at the Chiang Mai SEO Conference. The sales cycle is basically a model that salespeople have used for quite some time, decades now, to try to figure out where people are in the process of buying something. So on the far right of the sales cycle, that means they're ready to convert. On the far left, that means they're not even close, and the different states are, they start with latent pain, meaning that someone doesn't even know that there's an issue, and then they moved on to acknowledged paid, and they then move onto a stage called searching for a solution, and then searching for the best solution, and then ready to convert.
Matt Diggity:
Or, no, one more stage. Searching for the best place to buy the best solution, and then conversion. So if we sort of work our way backwards for the converting keywords, so the converting keywords, the most easy to convert keywords, would be ones that say like, buy photography course, or best photography course. So these are people that are ready to buy, they have their wallets out, they're just looking to see where to buy the dang thing, or where the best place is to buy the dang thing, or what is the best photography course, for example. So these are the ones that are really, really close.
Matt Diggity:
The ones on the far end might be looking for stuff like, where to learn about photography, or photography tricks, or cool cameras for novice photographers, stuff like that. So those people aren't very close to buying, but look out for keywords like buy, best, and reviews, and these are ones that are very, very close.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Okay. On your own website, how would you balance between those information and probably higher traffic posts, versus those buying keywords and those really close to the conversion.
Matt Diggity:
Now we're getting geeky. Okay, so-
Hanne Vervaeck:
Sorry.
Matt Diggity:
No, no, it's great, because this is really, really new with the algorithm as well. So the thing is, what I used to do before is I would just make websites that are completely gigantic, and I would try to get just all of 'em. If there's any keyword related to my topic, I'm just gonna write about it, whether it's monetizable or information, or not. So now, what we've seen Google is able to do is kind of figure out, what's the theme of your website.
Matt Diggity:
So if you have a very, very high balance of informational type keywords, with relation to your monetizable or review-type keywords, or best keywords, or buy keywords, then Google's gonna start to think, "Oh, okay, they're an information website about photography, they should start ranking for how to take black and white photos and stuff like that." But you've started to put yourself in a bucket where you're not the review website anymore if you get too far on that end. Likewise, it goes the other way. If you're writing too many review-type keywords, and best camera for blah, blah, blah, and best tripod for blah, blah, blah, and you start to push it too far that way, then you're gonna have a hard time ranking for the informational type stuff.
Matt Diggity:
And is this a good product of Google? Probably, I mean they're successfully putting websites in their own buckets, and having specialists based on the intent of the website. So for us, for people like you and I, and the listeners here, most likely we're building these websites with at least some intention of making money, so we have to keep a good chunk of it on the monetizable side, and right now I'm finding the sweet spot to be about 70/30, monetizable versus informational.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Okay, that's very interesting, I did not know that.
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, it's brand new.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Okay, Matt, thank you very much, I think we covered a lot of different ground. We know that we have to create our website, five to 10 content pieces minimum, have them interlinked and optimized with on-page SEO and then start doing our 30 day challenge to outreach to other blogs, and to get those back links and those guest posts, and then hopefully we will be able to get that traffic from Google, and to get those conversions to our product.
Hanne Vervaeck:
Is there anything you want to add, or was this a good summary?
Matt Diggity:
Yeah, I think just one more thing I would add is, SEO is getting more complicated these days, and it's always gonna get more complicated. I would recommend picking up some kind of guide, or picking up some kind of course related to SEO to just jump you past the very, very painful learning curve in SEO, as the learning curve does push out, and the barrier to entry does push out day after day.
Matt Diggity:
So make sure you find the right resources to start with, and you should be good.
Hanne Vervaeck:
All right, thank you very much Matt for your time.
Matt Diggity:
Thank you very much, take care.
Shane Melaugh:
So there we go, that was Matt's, basically, SEO crash course for our listeners. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to see links to everything that we mentioned during this episode, if you want to leave a comment or a voice message, you can do so by going to the show notes. That's at activegrowth.com/SEOMatt, S-E-O-M-A-T-T. As always, we love to hear from you, so if there are questions about this, if there are things you'd like us to cover on future episodes, or if you simply want to leave a voice message, you can go to activegrowth.com/SEOMatt, and you can push a button there and leave your message. And we'd love to hear from you, we'd like to answer comments, any comments that come in on the blog, we always try to answer, and we love to hear back from you.
Shane Melaugh:
So, thank you for your participation, thank you for listening in, and I'll catch you on the next one.
What You'll Discover in this Episode:
- An effective SEO strategy for bootstrapper solopreneurs that anyone can apply to their websites while staying on the legal side.
- Why SEO is beneficial for any business, regardless of the product you're selling.
- What you should pay attention to and in what order when you're setting up a new website.
- How to get the right keywords that will not only get you bored readers but potential customers as well.
- On-site SEO optimization: how to place keywords in your headlines, subheadings and texts without coming across fake and risk getting banned by Google.
- Off-site SEO optimization: why your website benefits from multiple shares and backlinks, and how to reach out to other websites to get backlinks the "whitehat" way.
- How many blog posts do you need on your website and how to find the topic for them.
- How often should you post new content on your website and why posting images is not enough.
- How to analyze and reverse-engineer your competition.
- What are authority links, why you should send people to other websites and how to do it so that it's best both for Google and your visitors.
- How to do internal linking and when you shouldn't do it.
- Alternative ways to get shares and backlinks if you'd rather avoid cold outreach.
- What should you have more of on your website: information or monetizable content? What's the right ratio?
Resources:
- Learn more about Matt's affiliate agency, LeadSpring.
- Check out Authority Builders and get backlinks the whitehat way.
- The Search Initiative helps clients increase their website traffic.
- Matt Diggity's blog is a great place to spend your time on if you want to learn more about SEO.
- Analyze your competition and find the right keywords and topics with Ahrefs.
- Interested in the yearly SEO conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand? Learn more about it here.
Start Today!
The more you wait before optimizing your website, the more advantage you give your competition. What is one thing you can do right now? What's your strategy for on-site SEO and outreach?
Let us know in the comments below!
We'd love your feedback, questions, tips and stories! You can leave them in the comments section or leave us a voice message by hitting the "Start recording" button below:
See you soon with another episode!
Free traffic is always plus, although I always recommend for companies to develop an automated lead system they can buy traffic through and eventually scale. But a very good podcast episode!
Thank you, Jonathan!