Andrew: Hey guys, it’s Andrew with masters in e-commerce and entrepreneurs. I’m your host, I guess cause, I told you today we got a really special guest we got, Damon Burton on today and this guy is an awesome SEO person, he runs, I got you know he’s got a firm called SEO national. Damon basically started off, it’s really interesting, he turned from on air DJ talent to Seo king, right who’s interesting, he runs a company called SEO national that helps businesses around the world get better rankings in Google, very ROI driven focused it helps his clients bring in you know, millions of dollars in revenue through organic traffic. He’s also, a been seen, or helped, I guess, I’m gonna figure out this name and when we talk about this, but, the shark tank helping speak full of comfort on their it’s done stuff with the Utah Jazz which is really cool I hope you got tickets uh-huh do y and flirty April so, and you know dude if I fixed missed anything let me know
Damon: Yeah you know it’s funny as you talking about the DJ thing I had somebody come over the other day an entrepreneur and I was talked to them and they said the same thing that I Kate how did you go I know I know DJ Damon and, then I’ll sudden there’s internet marketing Damon like what happened in between so, the abbreviated version is when you work on air in between all the songs, you’re just kind of sitting there right so, the whole time. I was working on sites while, I was on there so, that was my thing guys. I was doing a side hustle, just was a very apparent everybody else
Andrew: That’s good, the sets must have been really, really awesome, it’s fine in between there
Damon: Yeah, it’s like all smoke and mirrors, it’s way different than right than the public things.
Andrew: Than the public things, cool awesome so, yeah, what I thought we would talk today is, like how to rank content, cause content everybody needs content to get maximum SEO value and you know I guess, that’s content is king, right it’s always been king but, how you do it? How you get it? How you figure out the right SEO? You know all that kinda stuff maybe we can go into that kind of stuff and chat about that, it’ll be awesome. And also, by the way if anybody has questions you know drop them in the comments there and we’ll get to them at the sort of and of our art gig.
Damon: Yeah so,, content is interesting because it’s such a core part of SEO and, you know a face value a lot of people think it’s just you know it’s just content it’s just words and it should be easy and then you actually get down to it it’s super hard well what do you write about and how do you come up with a process where you write a lot and, you know how do you make sure it’s structured well so, you know, what I did a couple of years ago and, what I’ve learned throughout do something to an SEO you know 11 years and, I’ve been in the web design world for almost 20 years and so, really in the last five or six years, I’ve just had to drive everything to be processed driven and so,, when it comes to content the problem we used to run into and probably what a lot of listeners run, into is when we work with our clients, we’d say ok you know we need to do content and we’ve nudge our clients and say write about something this week and, then I go. We’re busy doing our day to day stuff so, they’re out of time so, then we said, okay, well, we’ll write it you tell you tell us what’s right about, we’ll write it and then they’re like but, I don’t have time to think about it so,, then we said all right we need to come up with a process for this whole thing and so,, what I’ve done and what is valuable for listeners is some of the way. I approach content to come up with a 52-week content calendar, you know after this, goes live I’ll drop a comment and, I’ll post a template, I’ll give you guys a template that I can use or that I use and you guys can use it and, what I do is I map out the whole year because what happens whether you’re doing SEO or for a client, is every week girls around and you go what do I write about so, what, I do when I bought a new client is I front load all the research so, for the first two to four weeks we dive in we look at the client we look at their industry their competitors and, we say you know what do we want to write out you know what a people what do our potential leads and buyers want answered and how can we be the answers for that and we map it out into a 52-week content calendar and, what’s cool about that is once you’ve done all that research then you don’t have to reinvent the wheel so, then you can take and use that for your blog then you can repurpose that same topic for an infographic you can use your blog you know text as a script for a video so, if you just front load it then you can spin it into all sorts of content.
Andrew: Yeah because that, is the I mean I face with that today is getting content like ok, all right you got the week you try and set two weeks you’re like. okay you know I got a guest and all this kind of stuff so, it’s really, really hard I mean and. having something where you can kind of front-load that thing especially if you’re not doing a daily thing if you’re just doing once a week, it’s a lot easier but if you’re doing on a daily thing, that there’s just a ton a ton. It’s on the content that you need to do right, so, that’s I find that’s a struggle I sort have on a daily basis.
Damon: Yeah you know one cool thing one cool site that’s free is answerthepublic.com and answer the public is you can go there and you can type in you know let’s say your well I’ll tell you about the Utah Jazz, you mentioned Utah Jazz so, yeah when we started building out their content calendar we would go one of the resources, we went to is answer the public and so, we type in you know different players names so, Donovan Mitchell, is a really popular jazz player and so, we go there you type in Donovan Mitchell, and it spits out this this hub of words and phrases so, you got Donovan Mitchell in the middle and then it goes you know who, what, when, where and why and then that splinters out even why does he wear number 45, who’s his girlfriend what’s his Instagram and so, like these are the things that your clients, like already want to know and so, then you can build it your content calendar around that and so, when they search those things you build out that content and you’re the one that shows up to give them those answers.
Andrew: Right! Right! Right!, that’s awesome well that’s it that’s a huge thing answer the public I had no idea that it’s kind of like almost like a word mind map in a sense but it’s just more on what’s going on in a thing that’s awesome and so, when so, that as you are creating this content right and you’re building this stuff and you know do you sort of fill it in with kind of key words yeah you do keyword research on the content that you’re kind of creating or like what’s or do you just write it and it just naturally filters up through Google.
Damon: Kind of kind of a little bit about so, yeah all your content calendar before so, it’s so, a great question before you dive into building out your content calendar you got to know what you’re going to build that content around because it should serve a purpose you know your end goal is money right you want sales and rights and so, you build that content around the keywords that you can monetize so, first you have to figure that out so, where I start is a similar process you know do your research and go see what your competitors are targeting and the reason why I like to look at competitors is because the phrase, I always uses follow the money like if your competitors are throwing money at these keywords then they probably already you know you can learn from their mistakes where they burned and wasted money and look at what they’re at now that should be driving a return for them so, if it’s driving a return for them and you’re in the same industry then it should drive a return for you too though good tool is spyfu.com S-P-Y-F-U and that website you can go there and it’ll look at or organic you type in a domain it’ll give you some of the keywords that show up on their radar for organic and also, pay-per-click now even though we’re talking about the world of SEO, it’s still good to look at pay-per-click, where it’s just because of that follow the money you know they are directly throwing money at those words so,, I’m looking right that’s one resource and, then you can go and look at another website is open link profile.org, you can type in a website and, it’ll tell you once the site loads, there’s a tap it’ll say anchor text, and if you click on anchor text what that is you can look for the keywords that that other websites are placing in their content and, so, you can get a feel for what the industry is talking about so, anyways what you do is you kind of get a collection, of those potential keywords then you can go run them through a tool like Google Keyword planner you can just google that and it’ll come up and it’ll tell you the search volume you know are people actually searching for these because you don’t want to target something that doesn’t have an audience so, first you qualify its relevancy and then you qualify its search volume to make sure there’s an audience and then from there you kind of finalize your list and build your content around that list.
Andrew: Mm-hmm okay so, you go around that list, okay cool um so, that’s how you kind of build that so, and then and then brainstorming I guess is what you were talking about on that so, so, then on the SEO side of things then so, what do you just put that out you and trying and put that onto you like guest posts or blogs like how do you sort of filter that to get more you know I guess juice with your with your content like what strategy do you kind of use on that side of things?
Damon: Yeah you know it depends on the industry there’s a lot of options some you know if you’re more of a mom-and-pop and you’re in a very specific industry or in a small demographic area maybe you’re a dentist in a small town and don’t have a lot of competition usually the content is good enough you’re not battling as many people and as many variables to outrank but then when you get into a competitive space then it becomes a popularity contest so, the more times you have other websites referencing yours or linking to yours or what’s called citations when another website sites or mentions you but then it builds buzz around your brand and your website so, you can go out on other websites and depending on the website you know if it’s a blog then you can drop a comment and say you know this is a great article I wrote something similar but for that particular tactic I’ll put a little asterisks you know if you’re gonna go out and start your blog commenting don’t be the spammy guy that everybody hates and you’re just like right dropping your link everywhere you know be courteous and read first find a blog that’s relevant or whatever you’re about to promote and then breathe lead that block and contribute to the conversation and be credible in your follow-up comment as well so, that’s one option a big tactic we’ve been pushing on our clients too lately it’s called outreach where it’s just like it sounds you reach out to other websites and there’s a lot of you know you can just Google outreach software and there’s these tools that allow you to identify influencers or high-profile websites in your industry so, you know overall with the dentist example again you can type in dentist and it will return a list of websites with different metrics you can look at so, they have a lot of Facebook followers but they have a high value website with all these SEO terminology metrics and from there you can you can initiate an email exchange and a follow-up sequence and in that exchange you say hey I noticed that you’re a great resource for dentistry topics or whatever your industry is I wrote this great resource article you know what do you think or would your audience find value in it but you’ve got to do the content first you just can’t do the shotgun approach and spam your stuff out there so, you got you got to deliver the value first
Andrew: Right so, on the content side of things so, say you’re not a great content writer like what do you do you’ve done the research you’ve done a thing do you do you go to like Fiverr and find people and you go to up work or like how do you find good content writers that can write good SEO content for Earth these are good articles for you that are peppered with that with the with this research that you’ve already found?
Damon: A good website is iwriter just the letter i’ and, then write or calm okay, so, I usually answer that two ways and so, it depends on the volume of content you’re going to produce if you’re doing it to yell for yourself and you’re doing an article here and there use iwriter it’s all a cart you know, it’s on demand when you need an article you go there the nice thing about Iwriter is it’s almost like an auction system so, you say, I need an article and then it needs to be approximately 500 words or seven hundred or a thousand and then you can say I want this to go to you know average writers or, I want to pay more for it I think calls elite writers and so, you kind of pay for the quality, and then when they write it I mean some of the you’re going to get the it’s not going to be perfect you know even if you pay for to talk to you you’re gonna have to polish it up a little bit but you know if it comes back and it’s too far off then you can either request a revision or you can decline it and it goes back into the rider pool and somebody else can take a stab at it so, there’s quality control measures in there so, you’re not just burning money now if you end up writing a lot of content or meeting a lot of content and it’s just not your thing then then I’d hire VA a virtual assistant you know you can the same kind of thing it’s going to take a little trial and error finding the right VA to help you write you know you can get somebody that old little cranked out articles for you for a couple hundred bucks a month and the nice thing about that is if you have a lot of content then you have this person that starts to acclimate and get familiar with you and what you’re presenting and then the content continually improves over time.
Andrew: Right yeah I think that’s I think that’s the key to any of these contractors like the hardest part is once you find that person is then once they start to do enough of that they start to learn your brand right I mean and that’s really the key to I think especially for SEO kind of stuff is that kind of stuff what’s your feeling on PB ends and stuff like that where you’re building those blog I know you’ve heard those blog networks and things like that is that that mask
Damon: So, I’ve never used them and I never will and so, for the listeners don’t know what a PB n a private blog network it’s where you basically create a network of lots of different websites to try and all Google into saying wow there’s lots of websites to talk about you and the trick the reason why I’ve never got into them is it you know so, I will give them credit and say that if done correctly can work now the reason why I never got into him is just the logistics of it you have to have a you know a hundred different domains at different registrar’s so, register want to go Daddy register one at you know network solutions and then all you so, you got a hundred domains and then you got to go get a hundred house and say because you want them all on different servers so, you don’t create because if you have anything identifiable or in common between those Google’s gonna see that pattern and then just nail you and that’s a huge amount of time to run best to just get punished.
Andrew: Right! Right! yeah for sure and is Google always continually updating with like I know they you know they’ve had they always have different updates do they constantly keep updating their algorithms towards you know people that might be ranking well one day all sudden the algorithms come through and crush?
Damon: You yeah there I mean there’s two there’s two kind of a algorithm update so, if you just kind of summarize it there’s daily ones and you know they say that they run multiple algorithm updates a day and then it seems like maybe every six weeks to six months just a massive update comes out and they used to be really transparent well kind of transparent about it and they’d say hey this algorithm update came out and here’s kind of where the path and what its targeting or even if they didn’t announce it one of the big SEO media guys would say hey it looks like this is what that was targeting can you confirm and then they usually say yes you know but now you know that they’re the face of SEO through Google used to be Matt Cutts and you know I want to select you two years ago he left and now it’s danny sullivan which interestingly enough used to be a big SEO face like he was on the SEO guy’s side and now works for google and he’s a super smart guy but a lot of people are jaded about that and so, now they’ll say Danny can you confirm this this algorithm update he’s like no and so, transparency is not as there as much as it used to be but yeah algorithm sir I mean it’s a daily thing
Andrew: Right! so, when you do content and you do publish it and everything like what how do you know that that piece of content is you know working and it’s working its way through the system and you’re starting to see some value from the content that you created?
Damon: You kind of got a pivot I mean you got to look at your analytics over time you’re going to have some pieces that are homeruns and other pieces they’re just kind of there all and so, you kind of go through and look at your statistics and if, a particular piece is getting more traction then you can kind of dial it in a little more or if one historically once it gets a couple months behind it if there’s no traction then you can just rewrite the whole thing so, you got to kind of keep a pulse on it there’s not a specific I mean you can create a process for producing the content but there’s not really a process or making homeruns you know some work some don’t and you just write modify it and wash it away
Andrew: Right so, you go back so if you created say 52 pieces of content you might go back and redo 20% or 30% of it rewrite it or something like that to get more value out of that kind of out what happens with what you do
Damon: Yeah! exactly either it all I mean there’s a couple different ways to measure and the success is going to vary by industry some you know some industries it just boils down the hits other industries you can tie a piece of content to a visitor filling out a form and so, you can type your conversion you know others it might just be comments and interaction and engagement so, it’s gonna vary but you know kind of long this is the same topic what we’re heavily considering now is even reducing the 52-week content calendar so, 52 weeks is you know once then one content piece a week we’re considering you know quality is way more important than quantity so, one once a week is kind of a happy medium where if you come up with a Content calendar you can produce a lot of content for quality but as long as you front-load the research you can also, have you know quality quantity but what we’re considering doing pushing even heavier onto the quality side and just doing one or two pieces a month and just really heavy research data-driven long-form content because you know if you think about all the stuff that gets shared or the stuff you actually sit down to read or makes an impact or you remember is that long stuff
Andrew: Right! Right! so, the long and the long copy is still good these days uh what-what I want to ask is like so, what is long is that like 1200 words, 1500 words, 2500 word I mean what is considered you know where you’re seeing better results these days.
Damon: Yeah I get into the thousands you know I’d say averages is we always try to shoot for I don’t our copywriters and editors I don’t give them a word count because I’d rather focus on quality but it seems like they all average around you know 500-1000 words so, when you get into doubling and tripling that to the 3,000 words that’s where you start seeing what the industry will refer to is evergreen content or the content that has more traction long-term so, you got to start getting the 2000-3000 word mark
Andrew: Okay, let’s good to know yeah and then and then ranking what, I mean does it take like when you write something like everybody’s like oh it takes six months eight months ten months like where do you start to see you know some sort of traction is it a three month period when you write something four months six months.
Damon: It’ll vary by industry on that too so, you know what’s interesting is we have a new client that that does wholesale hats like baseball caps, and they have a brand new website I just rebranded change company names so, no historical SEO value to work with and we’re only six weeks in and they already got four page one rankings no once in a while it’s I mean it’s gonna the level of competition kind of kind of the amount of time SEO takes kind of boils down to three things so, the first thing is what is the industry and what are you selling or what’s your product or service is it really nitch widget or isn’t it hyper-competitive like weight loss right then the second thing is what’s your target demographic or geographical area are you optimizing for a city date the country international then obviously the bigger you get the more you’re competing against and then the third thing is what back-end is your website run on you know some backgrounds are much more search engine friendly than others so, you know based on those three things I tell my clients you know mentally commit to a year and it’s not like a year later I’ll send this switch flips and your ranking everywhere but usually a year and it’ll vary by industry is where the majority of your keywords start to tip and towards top rankings so, you know some will be six months some will be 18 months but out of years can already start an average out with some reasonable rankings.
Andrew: Okay cool and then um I do want to ask you so, there don’t so, for example like you had this hat company right well let me think is one step back you know where people say SEO is kind of dead everybody’s using social media you see that I mean it’s still very important and I guess SEO for free traffic I’m assuming right I mean you don’t see any sort of people still are still looking to do SEO even though you hear the components saying SEO is dead
Damon: Yeah, you know we had here so, I’m in Utah and we had what’s called the Utah EMC digital marketing conference about a week ago and Rand Fishkin came out who’s like arguably the most recognizable face in SEO and he had an interesting statistic and you know I’ll probably off a little bit but he had a chart where he done some research and it was even though you know 80% or 90% of ads online ad spent that is directly for paid advertising goes to you know PPC you know the budget goes to paid forms of advertising not SEO right even though 80 to 90 percent goes there it only drives 2% of search engine clips and so, then you have on the flipside organic drives 60% and you know there’s like forty percent was nothing and what that means if somebody goes to search engine finds our answer does it click on anything right so, as yeah I still drives by far the majority and then another interesting test statistic he had was something like you know social media drives only 5% of conversions or you know commerce and actions where somebody goes to Google Amazon or Facebook with an intent to complete an action and social media was only 5% so, now social media is awesome and it’s got a huge space and it’s growing exponentially but you know if we’re just doing blocking like comparisons and yeah it’s different levels
Andrew: Right! Right! Yeah, I guess you’ve got much more intent I mean I guess it’s a buyer intent where they’re looking and they’re reading about something they want to investigate they’re gonna buy a hat or they’re gonna buy a new crescent wrench or whatever they’re gonna want to find a little deeper content and so, it would so, on you know you see a Facebook ad it might not be that kind of a that kind of a thing so, on budget-wise if you are having a budget and you you’ve got you know your social and you’ve got your paid search and you want to do your SEO kind of stuff like how would you know split your budget up for SEO first paid versus content everything like that like and out of a hundred how would you where would you say it’s a with your clients what should be sort of put its side.
Damon: So, you can do all of them you know as long as all of them are running or driving a return then you can do it so, it’s not it’s not like zero somewhere it’s either SEO and pay-per-click or social but you know some clients one of those channels don’t make sense it I think the from my position one of the biggest considerations is what’s your profit margin so, with you know pay-per-click you know if you’re selling a widget and you know retail can be hard on pay-per-click because you don’t have a lot of profit margin the same with SEO you know we have I tend to not do a lot of retail clients unless they have a higher ticket item because you know if our SEO is you know two thousand bucks a month they gotta sell a lot of stuff a lot of those units even to break just to break even so, right vary based on is it a product or service and you know what are your profit margins is a high ticket but yeah so, there’s not really an answer I guess yeah.
Andrew: All right cool awesome, well even I you know I don’t want to keep you much longer this has been really killer stuff I do have a couple questions that you want to ask you before you go I know you dropped some of the tools that you kind of use are there any other type of tools that you would say for guys people who are looking to you some of the SEO themselves that you would say to kind of use in their arsenal?
Damon: Another good free one is a website gtmetrics, just the letter GT and then matrix.com, I like that one for Page Speed it’ll check your page speed and it’ll tell you know what’s slowing down your website and the reason why that’s important as Google says treat us like a visitor and visitors don’t like so, website so, neither do we so, improving your page speed can contribute to better rankings I actually prefer GT metrics over Google’s PageSpeed tool because it’s a little more specific as to what your problems are so, that’s a good one as far as an auditing suite to track your rankings or to check the structure of your website there’s a program that I use called linkassistant and it has three or four different tools that you can buy individually or as a group those linked assistants kind of my go-to as an auditor.
Andrew: Okay cool awesome that that’s great I did there is one question in the group that once somebody wants to ask and that’s basically and is it a waste of money to boost your post on Instagram where you have higher value by right by selling products by writing one article a little week
Damon: So, you know social media advertising isn’t my area of expertise but basically you know I dabble and I dabble in all the different forms of online marketing but SEO is by far you know my thing but so, way taking my advice for the grain of salt you know kind of the common trend is it depends there’s all right what are you pushing is it a product or service and what is your profit margins no the thing with social media advertising right quitting Facebook you know I’ve got a lot into Facebook advertising lately you have to know who you’re targeting so, usually just boosting not necessarily because you don’t I mean just kind of generally promotes the content so, your paid ads where you go in and specify your target demographic and their interests you’re gonna get a much better return than just a general boost now comparing that to one article per week with SEO if you’re going to get into SEO it’s like all or nothing because it’s such a slow long process if you’re just going to do an article here and there then don’t even bother starting so, unless you’re going to do an article every week repurpose into other content do press releases and make the effort then don’t even start
Andrew: Cool! awesome so, alright well so, when you’re not dominating the world where can people bump into you that
Damon: So, SEOnational.com is my agency and you know I’ve started to experiment with podcasting worlds as well so, just last week I launched learning from others calm that’s been really fun because I’ve had I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of high-profile entrepreneurs over the years and so, it’s really cool to bring those guys in and be real candid and talk to those guys and waystorank.com/Facebook is a Facebook group, I started recently where I share these kind of tips really with other entrepreneurs.
Andrew: Awesome well oh the great well I really appreciate the time it was killer stuff I mean you guys I mean there was so, much knowledge dropped on this thing it’s it was awesome so, you know where to find it I’ll put it in the show notes as well and then yeah Damon you’re gonna put that link of that
Damon: The template, yeah.
Andrew: the content can do your thing as well yeah I’ll go grab what I’ll do.
Damon: Although two things one is the template to kind of organize your topics and then we have ETF that we’ve created that’ll kind of help get your wheels turning on working right about
Andrew: Awesome cool, well great I appreciate the time and let’s do this again
Damon: Yeah thanks Andrew, thanks family.