Transcription
Happy Thursday, friends! It's Brady from Carrot, and after months of working very hard on the summit, myself, Trevor, and the whole team, we are taking a little bit of time off. So, at the time you are watching or listening to this, Trevor and I are out on vacation. So, instead of doing our normal Thursday live in the Facebook community and then putting that to YouTube and the podcast, I wanted to give you one of my favorite sessions from the summit. I think this one was super actionable. It was a really awesome session, and I think you're going to enjoy it. So, tune in! Hope you enjoy this free summit session in case you didn't get the recordings, uh, from last week. And, uh, yeah, we will see you next Thursday for our regularly scheduled programming. Can't wait to see you guys soon. Thanks!
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Bye!
What's up, y'all? Welcome back. Toss over to my co-host, Mr. Brady Wer. Brady, how's it going?
Nathan, how are you doing?
Great, thank you so much for having me on. Appreciate it.
Thanks for coming to the summit, man. I'm really happy you're here. I'm super excited to get to talk to you. Um, we spent a lot of time talking about SEO all the time on our podcast, newsletter, blog, everything. Uh, but it's pretty rare for us that we get to bring in someone outside of the, uh, real estate investing industry. So, uh, it's an honor for us to have you, man.
I appreciate it. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure.
Yeah, we actually, I think, um, according to our team, I think probably about eight years ago or so, our team actually used you to, uh, I don't know, get some intel on our own SEO for Carrot.com. I think so. Yeah, I think maybe an audit or a strategy or something like that.
Yeah, I think so. There was some strategy session a long time ago, but it's good to reconnect.
Yeah, you guys have grown a lot since then.
So we have, man. Well, let me give you a little bit of a context for our audience, just so you can get familiar with it. Um, so we're on live right now. Everybody, if you have any questions on SEO, put them through the chat. Um, let us know what you want to hear about. Um, but Nathan, just some context for our audience. Um, all local search. So, a lot of real estate investors, uh, searching for motivated house sellers online. Agents as well, but really after, uh, motivated seller leads in the real estate industry. Um, and we're also branching into home services. So, we have HVAC, we have contractors, other people using Carrot. But, uh, a lot of people searching for, um, a lot of people wanting to rank for terms like "how to sell my house fast," um, you know, "home buyers near me," "contractors near me," etc. Things like that. And so, a lot of people competed for local SEO, and they're wanting to know what I, obviously, what everyone wants to know, what can I do to rank? And so, uh, when I hit you up, my original idea was like, "Hey, what, like, what are the magic hacks? What's working?" And you replied with what I think was an awesome reply. It's, um, uh, "Let's talk about it holistically. Like, how can you build the systems and process?" Which is something that we don't spend a lot of time talking about because I think, um, SEO is really overwhelming for a lot of people. There's, there can be a million things to do, and it's like, "What do I tackle first? On-page? Off-page? Like, where do I go?" We do our best to guide people. But anyways, um, I want to kick it over to you to talk about systems and process. But also, Trevor, you had, you mentioned there's something you want to talk about first, either AI or the Google leak, or something you want to talk about before we get into systems and process.
Yeah, dude. So, I, I want to, I want to kind of start here for a few minutes because I know there's people thinking about it, and it's kind of the, the conversation of the moment with SEO. But, um, there was the, the Google leak doc, which you, we've all had a chance to dig into and kind of take our inferences from it. Um, and then, and then one of the biggies, too, is just how AI is changing or going to change search. You, we've seen AI search summaries, which, at least for now, um, you know, isn't hitting industries like, like ours where someone's looking for a solution versus information on something. But let's kind of start there for a second. Um, number one, AI, where, where do you see it really impacting search? Do you see people legitimately moving to a tool like ChatGPT to do their searches? Or, you know, is Google still going to be relevant in, in a decade?
That's a, that's a loaded question, huh? Because, you know, I just, it's, it's since ChatGPT came out, I've been very careful not to make any predictions, right? Just because it's so, it's just so difficult to try to predict what's going to happen. Yeah.
Um, but what I can tell you is from being in the trend, is, you know, doing SEO and seeing things that are changing in the search results, um, that's where I get a lot of my intel, right? So, I don't, I don't really pay attention to the headlines and, you know, stuff like that in the SEO industry. Like, I just look at the work that we're doing, and I, and I'm studying the SERPs, and I'm looking at our results, and I'm, I'm gathering my intel through, uh, you know, having boots on the ground, okay?
Um, and so, one of the things, like, just today, actually, uh, we're looking at a campaign, and this, this particular client, and this won't affect, obviously, a lot of the people that are going to be listening to this, but, uh, they target keywords on the national level. So, a lot of informational content. Let's just use an example like, um, "Can you go to Disney Epcot in one day?" Okay? Something very, you know, very simple question. Well, guess what happens when you, when you enter that keyword into Google? Well, AI gives you a very, very good answer because, uh, and I'm speaking specifically to SGE, which is a Search Generative Experience, which is what everyone's been afraid of. Yeah.
And it gives a very good answer because, of course, it's taking the content from the people who are ranking. Right? So, so the thing with that is, it's pretty scary if you're going to go after informational keywords on the national level, especially if it can be answered very easily. That's a very dangerous situation as far as, um, CTR, click-through rate. Um, and that's something you have to consider when you're, when you're trying to prioritize your keywords. Like, you actually need to consider, "What's the likelihood that if we invest our time and our money into building out content for this particular keyword, what's the likelihood that we're actually going to get any clicks from this, even if we rank number one?" Right? Because the days of just ranking in the top 10, those are long gone. Like, yeah.
Um, like your true, your true ranking these days, and we'll talk, this is, this actually does affect the local SERP as well, but just in a different way, uh, as far as CTR. But on the national level, you know, dealing with a lot now, you're dealing with the AI, uh, snippet right above the fold. Now, featured snippets were already a thing, so it's not like this is completely new. Like, there were already featured snippets, but, you know, it, it allows the person to expand the answer now as well. So, they can see the full answer with the AI, you know, serving it up to you. Um, the AI does cite its sources. However, you know, I've already seen, even with my, my wife, she's done a couple searches recently, and she's like, "You know, we, we have a new, uh, a new baby, and there's always questions, right? There's always questions about things. Are they gaining weight fast enough? Are they, you're always freaking out." But she goes in, she asks a question in Google, and then it answers the question. She tells, she's like, "Hey, it just answered my question really easily." And I'm like, "Uh oh, it's not good." The same thing is like, "How long could I leave the milk sit in the bottle in the car for?" I'm like, "I'm like, babe, did you read the article? Let's get the full context." Yeah.
Yeah. And, like, you know, I, I don't, um, I don't like to be pessimistic about, uh, mankind. Um, but when we look at human behavior, the path of least resistance is the thing that we tend to take. Um, and even if there's this underlying idea that the AI could make things up, it could be wrong, all of these things, I still think that people will trust it because it's easier than having to click through websites and read through a bunch of articles. You're just kind of like, "Ah, that's right," you move on, right? And so, the reason I'm saying all this is because informational keywords are the most dangerous. Like, if it's a simple answer, those are the most dangerous keywords to go after. Yeah. And it's going to create this weird catch-22 situation for Google because if people like me stop creating content for keywords, yeah, that doesn't have any content to train its AI. So, it creates a very awkward situation. Um, because at the end of the day, like, I don't, unless you're a nonprofit, um, most people doing SEO are doing it to make money. Yep. So, you have to think about, it's not just as simple as like, "Let's just target all these keywords." It's also like, "How much is that going to cost us? Are we gonna get an ROI from targeting that keyword?" Like, we need to think about these things. And, um, this is thrown, you know, a curveball into the situation. So, that's on the national level. This does not really affect the local level very much. Um, there, there could be some situations like, uh, like an HVAC or even plumbing. You know, let's say that, you know, "How many pipes burst in Chesterfield, Missouri every year?" Yep. Okay, that's a situation where maybe the AI could, could potentially answer that question if there's data available. But the thing is, Google does not have unlimited resources where they can go and answer questions across every keyword that's ever existed. Yeah. They can only do it in kind of small pockets because it costs them a fortune to do this. That will probably change over time, but still, it's just, you know, these are things that, you know, when I'm working, and well, going back to what we're talking about with the systemization, I'll kind of walk you through kind of how I go through this to select keywords. But this is one thing I think about a lot is like, "What's the traffic potential?" Um, for this keyword because, yeah, I don't want to waste time or money for myself or my clients at the end of the day, right?
100%. Yeah. I was thinking this three, four years back. I was, I was kind of, because a lot of our business, of course, is based on, "How do we get in front of a prospect who's going to the internet?" And a lot of those prospects end up going through, through Google. And so, just going like, "What is the ideal search experience?" and "How's it going to change?" And, and, and even a few years back, was just really thinking about, well, the ideal experience is not infinite number of pages, uh, of of 10 results, and I've got to sift through these and try to figure out which one is right. I read four to five different articles, and then I finally kind of come to my thing. Like, that's not the best experience. And so, it was a few years back, I'm like, "I don't know. I I think eventually it's going to go to like, one answer. If it's not the answer, it's going to go, well, here's, show me three more kind of a thing." But, but the only difference between that experience and where we are today, I I feel, is trust. It is the reason people don't use the "I'm feeling lucky" button on Google is because they don't trust that it's actually going to give them the answer that's going to solve their problem. And so, that's gonna be the big, the big challenge with AI is continue to build that trust gap, this to where people have trust that the, the one recommendation that search engine or whatever it is that's giving them is right, right? Uh, it's the same thing with ChatGPT. A lot of people who haven't used, how to prompt, learn how to prompt it well, uh, they're, they're using it for math and for the quick, easy, simple things, but they're not trusting it for the big ones because they're not sure that the answer's right. But it'll get figured out for sure. And I think even with those local searches, we'll see. But they'll probably start to use a lot more the user behavior, checking out their social graph, "Hey, they've got a friend that they're connected to that made a review for this sushi shop, and it's close to where they're searching from," and therefore, it's going to bring it over. But it, it's going to be interesting, man, seeing what unfolds this next five years.
Yeah, and I, I think on the local, like, obviously, I don't want to get too futuristic because it's so difficult to predict. But on the local level, the only thing I could see that the AI could potentially do eventually was, and it's always going to be review-centric on the local level. So, it's going to pull reviews, and they'll say, "These are the top three recommended companies based on XYZ," right? So, it'd be reviews, it'd be based on a bunch of other metrics. I think there's a possibility that could happen, but that's, that's pretty far out. I think, I think for a while, we're on the local level, we could talk obviously about this, but when it comes to local, like, you, my, not to, you know, no pun intended here, but occupy as much real estate as possible. Yeah. That is absolutely the, the key when it comes to local because local is so, uh, segmented out in so many ways. So, you know, you have your, you have your traditional Google Ads, which typically can push the local pack below the fold in a lot of cases, depending on the competition of the keyword. Um, so you have traditional local pack. Then sometimes you'll have Local Service Ads. Local Service Ads are not in every industry, but when they're there, once again, that pushes that local pack even further down. Um, and so, you know, at that point, now we finally get to the local pack, and, you know, even if you're number one in the local pack, um, there's also ads in the local pack as well. So, so by the time we finally get to the number one technically organic result, that could be number five or number six at a true ranking, right? When you consider everything. Yeah. Um, and so, you really have to be thinking about this kind of at a, at a, a broader, you know, kind of broader view. Um, and unfortunately, you know, in this day and age, there is a pay-to-play type of situation going on. Um, but, you know, I believe personally that you need to be thinking about hitting on all fronts. So, what I think about is, you know, doing Google Ads, traditional Google Ads, doing Local Service Ads, getting ads in the local pack, and then of course, ranking in the local pack as well. And then also hitting the organic, which is below the local pack. Then even in that section, there's a bunch of stuff you can do. You can, you can rank your website, but you can also rank in the directories that are ranking as well, right? So, you really, the goal is to try to just like, build as much awareness in the SERPs and, and try to cover as much ground as possible because the days of like, "I'm just going to rank my one page on Google" is, you're gonna have a tough time. Yeah. That's all I'm gonna say.
So, dude, I love it. I, I, I want to take the Google leak thing towards the end if we have time. Uh, so, cliffhanger that for everybody there, if there's time. But, dude, first of all, I wanna, I want to acknowledge you for your next-level book color organization. I zoomed in on that. I'm like, "That, that actually is a bookshelf that has Nathan's things on it. You've got the SEO book and that side." I'm like, "The color organization on that, dude, next level." I love it.
Thank you. Thank you. Very OCD.
So, yeah. So, we'll, we'll turn it back over to you and, and really talk about how to build that SEO machine and how can people think of SEO in a more process-based way.
Yeah, I mean, for me, and this honestly hasn't really changed. Like, my, uh, my systems have changed, but the overall strategy and kind of the way I walk through it hasn't changed very much over the last decade that I've been doing this. And I always begin with keyword research. At the end of the day, we, the keywords are simply demand. That's what, that's what we're trying to figure out. Like, where is the demand and how do we capture that demand? So, in this case, we, in the context of search, we're trying to find where's that search demand in Google. Um, and so, for me, when I'm thinking about building a keyword database, uh, there's a few things that go on. Uh, it, it will largely depend on if the website is completely new or if the website is is established, maybe has some keywords that's already ranking for. Um, we can kind of go both routes, but I, I'll start with an existing, assuming an existing business. Um, and the way that I do that is I will run, I will run that website through a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs. Those are really the two, uh, juggernauts, juggernauts when it comes to keywords. Um, and I will run that through, and then I will pull all the keywords that that website is ranking for. And the reason I do that is because I want to see, um, where they're ranking. And the, the reason why that's important is I always begin with their position in the SERPs because that, um, will determine what strategy we're going to ultimately use. So, for example, if you're ranking from two to 15, okay, that's what I would consider in what the first bucket is, are low-hanging fruits. Yep. Those are the most important keywords because if you're ranking number two and you can make some adjustments and get to number one, it's actually a 100, 100% increase in CTR. Yeah. So, you know, typically, you know, things are very different now, so take this with a grain of salt as far as CTR averages, but typically the number one spot, you could say 30% CTR, that's probably going to get lower over time, right? But let's just say 30%, number two, that gets cut down to about 15%, and then you go to number three, you're down to like 9%, and then progressively gets worse as you go down. So, you know, to, to ultimately do that, um, is, oh, yeah, and also, yeah, if you guys have this tool as well, so perfect. Yeah.
Um, so, yeah, so what, what I would do is I would look at these low-hanging fruits and look for opportunities to optimize this specific set of keywords. That's the most important thing. Um, so, th, this is really good right here, like you're mentioning, Nathan, in this example here for this site. So, we just put it into the Keyword Explorer, and this data comes from SEMrush, that resource you had mentioned there. And so, this one here, if they were to move it from three to two, as an example, what is that ratio increase there that, that they may expect, that you're mentioning?
I mean, they'd probably be going from like 9% CTR to 15% CTR. So, we're talking significant, significant.
Oh, big time, especially when you're talking 390 searches for that one search phrase, guys. So, that's where, yes. Okay, cool. Love it. Yep. Exactly.
Yeah, so I always start there. Um, but that's, you know, identifying the position is kind of just step one in this process. That's kind of just like, "All right, we're going to put these into buckets based on their position." So, the buckets that I personally use is low-hanging fruits, which is two to 15, and then, uh, 16 to 50 are just what I call existing keywords. Um, and then anything beyond position 50, or what I call clustering opportunities. Now, it might seem like, "Oh, wow, keywords are ranking beyond position 50, those must be totally worthless." Right? Come to find out, though, there is so much opportunity in those keywords because when you're trying to improve your performance, one of the, one of the deficits that you usually have to narrow in most campaigns is a lack of topic authority. Right? So, if you, like, "sell my house fast in Louisville," right? So, your number one job is to become the go-to authority for that topic. Right? So, you need to make it abundantly clear to Google that you are the website that is the authority on selling houses fast in Louisville. Like, that needs to be your number one objective. So, the way you do that is, it's kind of a two-pronged process. Number one is you create more topically relevant content to that idea. Um, that's the first part. And the second part is on the link-building side and building the overall site strength. Separate topic altogether, but let's start with the, uh, on the content side. I really want to highlight this because this is a huge mistake that a lot of local businesses make, and this is very, very, uh, devastating. I've had to clean this up more times than I can count. Um, and so, what some local businesses will do is like, "All right, I need to build like topic authority." So, then they might start creating content about like, "how to sell your house fast," and they won't add any, um, they won't add any location-specific modifiers to that, right? Or, um, "what is a house?" or, you know, they start going down the line of all these kind of broad keywords. That is not the way you want to do on the local level. What you want to do on the local level is you want to combine whatever your core offer is along with the location that you're trying to, uh, drive leads in, right? So, um, so, like, for example, I work in the personal injury space quite a bit. Like, that's one of the ones that I've worked in countless times. Um, and when, when COVID happened, a bunch of personal injury lawyers decided that they were going to start writing about COVID-19 on their website. And, you know, "Here's how not to, here's how not to get COVID on an elevator," right? They, something like that, right? Some off-the-wall thing. And so, what happened is they ended up building the wrong topic authority for what they specialize in because a personal injury lawyer needs to, like, when it comes to SEO, you want to stay in your lane. You do not want to go and venture off and start talking about topics that you are not an expert in. Um, that's really, really important. So, when it comes to local, you want to try to create, create content that hits on both fronts: your expertise and the location. So, what you don't want to do, the opposite of this, is some people will do, like, if they're talking Louisville, they might publish something like, "Things to do in Louisville." Right? That's halfway there, right? We're almost there, but now you're missing the, the topic, like, the subject matter expertise. You need to have both of those combined. So, what I would do, uh, to kind of, uh, kill two birds with one stone, is I would create something that hits on the, the subject matter expertise, uh, the location, and can also serve as some sort of link bait, okay? And so, something that I would do would be like, um, "Statistic: 2024 statistics about selling your house fast in Louisville." Gotcha. Yep. I'd build a data-driven asset about that. Something, you know, start to get really specific. And I would build that out because what I've done in that scenario is I've, I've hit on all kind of the three elements that can, you know, ultimately help you grow site, site authority the right way. Got it. And when it comes to driving links to your website, like getting backlinks, the best thing you can do is just create more linkable assets. So, when I'm creating content, I'm thinking, "How do I make this as linkable as possible?" Yeah. And there's certain content that's linkable, and certain content that is not. Um, and typically, like, data-driven content is my go-to because data-driven content, people love to link to data. It's referenceable. Um, it's like, local reporters who are looking for to, like, support something in some sort of article they're creating, they go to Google first. So, you want to be there with this data so then you can, you can get those references, uh, to your site. So, yeah, I probably threw a lot at you there, but we can kind, I want to, I want to press into that last part a little bit because, because especially for, for our industry, I don't think we're unique. I think HVAC or home services have feel like they have the same challenges. Is they always go, "Well, how do I make content that people actually care to link to?" Right? So, instead, they end up making a big old article from from AI or ChatGPT, which we had a session on that yesterday, and you guys can go do that. Um, but, but the problem with that type of content, like Nathan is saying, it's not going to really attract the backlinks. It's going to get content up there. It might help with your topical authority, but it's not really going to attract and build authority from other people saying, "Hey, this is a good resource," and link to it. And so, the data side, um, and, um, I've been talking about data with my team too, like, "How do you create more data-driven content?" That's stuff that is actually way more easier than people probably expect. So, Nathan gave you guys one example, but let's kind of riff on a few more examples. It could be a real estate agent, could be a real estate investor, could be a home services. Yeah. What are some other examples that put you on the spot, but that's kind of pop to mind that maybe be good, good ideas that people can kind of start to brainstorm?
Yeah, I mean, I could go all day with like HVAC, right? I mean, there's so much, there's so much material there. Um, so, like, I'll just, because I'm in St. Louis, I'll just use St. Louis as an example. Um, so, like, if I was building out a, trying to build out a link-bait type of campaign for an HVAC business in St. Louis, I would start to think about things that are not so, this is, this is kind of the key here. You don't want to go after topics that, um, are the same answer in other locations. So, for example, like, if I went after, um, "What is creatine monohydrate in St. Louis?" That's not a good topic because the answer is the same in California. Gotcha. Yep. So, you want to try to find things that are variable to that location. So, St. Louis has kind of unique weather here, right? So, um, you know, things that are specific to, like, "How often do, uh, do furnaces break down in St. Louis, Missouri every year?" Uh, "My furnace went down in the winter two years ago," right? So, like, to know how often it happens to other people, once again, that's a linkable idea, right? Someone can go and link to that as a reference, say, "Oh, I didn't know that. You know, this happens to 1,400 people every year," right? 1,400 homes, right? So, I started to like, break that down and try to find those, like, specific ideas. And you can just basically take, you know, furnace repair, everything related to that, like, um, for example, in St. Louis, I don't know where you guys are located, but we have, we've had the cicadas come over the last six weeks. Like, "How do the cicadas, how are they gonna affect your air conditioning unit outside in St. Louis?" Gotcha. Yep. Right? So, you can start, you can even tap into some news-jacking elements as well for things that are more current and kind of build that out as well. So, there's endless abundance. Um, obviously, just because I have experience, I can come with ideas, but you can also go into ChatGPT and put a prompt in and just say, uh, "Give me linkable ideas for a plumber in Chesterfield, Missouri," and give me, you know, some data-driven content ideas, maybe give me some, uh, free tools or calculators that I could build. And you could have it give you 10, 20 ideas. And right there, I mean, done this probably hundreds of times, and it's, I'd say usually like 60% of them are solid.
That's really good right there, man. I, I love that. So, one of the questions that pops up for me, Nathan, is how do you, um, like, going back to, like, SEO overwhelm, how do you prioritize? Okay, I'm going to spend this amount of time doing, uh, link bait, like, really good, high-quality content that people want to link to for the purpose of getting, you know, backlinks, versus, "Okay, I'm going to go hard on this one keyword, 'sell my house fast Louisville'," just try to rank for that. How do you prioritize those?
It's a good question. Yeah. So, I, I'll kind of go back to the keyword research component and then kind of work through as far as how his priorities should be set. Um, so, once you build your keyword database, and obviously, I could spend an hour just talking about that, but I'll just kind of zip through that. But basically, you know, you really want to focus. I, I'll mention one part here that's really important as far as, uh, prioritizing keywords. Um, I have a kind of a philosophy of, "Start at, start at the bottom of the funnel and, and work your way up." Okay? So, what a lot of people will do is when they're, when they're like, "All right, what are the keywords are going to go after?" Well, typically, what they'll do is they'll sort their keywords by search volume. And this is a huge mistake, massive, massive mistake. Because what will happen is if you go and just target keywords that have high search volume, those are typically the keywords that will also have low conversions because usually those are more top of the funnel, they're more informational in nature. So, to get that traffic into your world is going to take a lot of nurturing, right? So, you're going to have to, you know, if, if you target informational keyword like, "I don't know, what is a plumber?" Very broad. Are you going to be able to close a deal that day on someone coming and coming to your house? Like, "Yeah, I don't know if you're gonna get a deal on that, right?" It's gonna take a lot of pushing them down the funnel. You're gonna have to get them on a lead magnet, and then you're gonna have to nurture them, and then you're gonna have to try to figure out like, there's just, it's just not a good fit, right? And so, it's better to start at the bottom of the funnel, which is like that keyword that you just brought up recently, like "my house fast Louisville." That's a perfect bottom-of-the-funnel keyword that would get high priority in, in our process, right? So, we would identify all the keywords that have an extremely high probability of driving qualified leads, like sales, really high-quality sales qualified leads into our world. Um, and then from there, that's where we begin. And every single thing we do from that point forward is to support those bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. Yep. Um, and so, I'm looking at a couple things, looking at the intent of the keyword. So, you know, "sell my house fast Louisville," that has more investigative intent, right? So, it's, it's not necessarily all the way down into the bottom of the sales cycle, but it's getting there because a keyword like that, they're not actually brand aware at this point. So, they haven't said, "I want to go with this company or this company." They don't even know who the companies are, right? So, they're just trying to figure out like, "Who should I work with?" That's more still in the middle. But then once they get lower, now you're getting into the real conversion, uh, conversion area. So, you really want to be hitting keywords at kind of each stage. Um, but begin with, you know, really focusing on the intent that really matters. And you can just tell, it's pretty obvious usually, like, "plumber Chesterfield, Missouri," "best HVAC company in Chesterfield." Pretty obvious what they're looking for, right? Um, so, those are the best types of keywords to focus on. And then the second part of it is relevance. So, how relevant is this keyword to what we actually offer? I know it seems, it seems very simplistic, but believe it or not, believe how many people don't think about that. Uh, because usually they'll prioritize like informational keywords, and you try to map out like, "How is this going to get to here?" And this, there's too much of a divide between that keyword and the offer that they, that they sell, right? So, like, I sell SEO training. I'll go after a keyword like "SEO training Denver," right? That's a great keyword. But if I do something like, "What is Carrot?" Could I get them into my SEO training? Maybe. But it's the, the gap is way too wide. So, that's why it's like prioritizing those is the most important.
That's really important, man, because, you know, all, sometimes dive in on, on a client's sites or even, even on our own site, uh, from time to time, and you'll see a traffic increase or decrease, and you could, you go, "Oh my gosh, we're winning!" But then you look at the keyword that that brings in. As an example, when we bought Carrot.com, number of years ago, of course, we were ranking really, really well for the vegetable "carrot," right? And so, our traffic went up, and it's easy to celebrate that. But it's like, "Oh, well, it's a very low likelihood that those people are actually going to turn into our software buyers, right?" Um, or some of our clients will create content that really is a massive leap to get them to the spot that they can do business. So, that's key, guys. Is we're not just trying to grow traffic and rankings. It's trying to get in front of the right people who have a real chance of, of us solving their problem with their services or products. That's key.
Yeah, and I mean, this is, we all suffer from this, right? Which is chasing vanity metrics. I mean, I've done it more times than I can count. It's, it's easy to go that route. But the problem is, when you look at the conversion rates on these keywords, it's just not there. And so, yeah, it might make you feel good that your traffic's going up, but it's not producing dollars. And so, for me, I just, I don't want to waste my time or my client's time on keywords. In fact, we've had campaigns where, when we, when we looked at their keyword profile and their traffic, they're ranking for a bunch of off-the-wall stuff, like not even close to their subject matter expertise. And we actually went through and deleted it. Like, so, we, we made our client lose traffic intentionally. And that's, you know, almost a fun conversation to have with a client, "Hey, by the way, we're gonna make you lose traffic today." Yeah. So, uh, because people get so obsessed with traffic that they forget that it's not about traffic, it's about actually making money. So, um, and so that's why I start bottom of the funnel. That's the key. If you just make that one shift to like, "Okay, bottom of the funnel, work our way up," there's utility in informational keywords, by the way. I'm not saying they don't have any utility. It's just that as far as where you spend your time, that's where you should begin. So, with that in mind, the next kind of phase of this is, once you've identified those topics, um, then you want to start to build out your service pages, right? That's really critical. So, those service pages are the, are the pillar for local SEO. Like, you got to build out the service pages. And one thing you can do is you can actually just do a keyword gap against your competitors. There's a couple ways. So, it gets a little tricky on the local level because there's low search volume on a lot of these tools, so it doesn't paint the full picture. There's a little workaround for this, though, okay? And then there's, I won't talk about the ethics of this, but I'll just, I'm just gonna say it, okay? Because this is just, this is a, I, I think of SEO as like, it's kind of like a war, right? And so, you should be able to do whatever resources you have at your disposal, you should use them. So, what you can do is you can use a tool like Screaming Frog. Okay? Screaming Frog SEO Spider, it's a desktop application that you download. You put your domain in there. You can link up Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Page Speed Insights, and Ahrefs. You can link up all those APIs in there, and then you can crawl your website. So, I highly recommend doing that for yourself. Like, crawl your own website and just see your performance for your entire website as a whole. That's a good thing to do. That's a part of our SEO audit process, which gets overly technical, so I'll kind of skip past that part. But the, the thing that I'm talking about here is when you're trying to build out your, uh, content plan, what you could do is you, you can actually run your competitor through Screaming Frog. Yep. So, what I do is I run the, one of the top competitors who's really killing it, I'll run them through Screaming Frog, and what happens is I get their whole sitemap. So, now I know exactly the types of pages to build. Instead of having a guess, I know, "Oh, okay, they have all of these pages about these various service offerings. I need to fill these gaps for this business that we're working with." Yep. And so, the goal is to fill gaps. I'm just, I'm, I'm identifying gaps, I'm filling those gaps, and that typically produces the outcome. So, we focus there, build those service pages. And the way that we create a service page, if you want to talk about that kind of tactically, um, your page should always match the intent of the keyword. Okay? So, if it's, if someone is searching, uh, for "sell my house fast Louisville," we should create a commercial-driven page. We shouldn't create like an informational piece of content that doesn't match the intent. Well, because we want to try to drive leads. So, the way we structure that page, um, should be really, uh, conversion-focused, right? So, we're going to have a phone number above the fold, we're going to have a form above the fold, we might even have a sticky form that kind of chases them through the whole page. Um, we're gonna have that left-right format designed to make sure it's easy to digest. Um, and we're only gonna have content on those pages that's actually gonna take that person from having no clue who we are to actually becoming a lead. So, that's going to be, of course, you know, all the psychological levers that you can pull, which is social proof, you know, uh, risk-reducing risk through guarantees and, uh, a good offer. All those things. That's what we want to focus on. Um, so, that, I'm, I'm, I'm saying this specifically because I just see so often, you know, someone thinks because it's good for SEO, I'm gonna write a bunch of content on this page. So, all of a sudden, they're talking about, it'll be HVAC St. Louis, and they're talking about the history of HVAC in St. Louis. And I'm like, "No, don't do that." Like, you, you save that for a different page, but don't, on this page, we gotta, we gotta get people to move. We got to get them to actually submit a form. So, it's just a slight shift. It makes a massive, massive difference, um, in conversion rates as well.
I'm really glad you said that, man, because so many people will get hung up on just the SEO. Like, "Let's look at all the keywords, let's look at all the other entities, look at the intent," and just create a bunch of content. What you're saying is, "No, you need to put yourself in the mind of the seller, in the mind of the prospect. What objections do they have?" and walk through everything that they're going through in their head so you can get them to become a lead. Instead, can't just purely focus on SEO, you have to do both.
No, exactly. Yeah. And I mean, I, I'll just say, I have a unique advantage because I actually sell my own products. So, I'm not just a guy who does, like, goes and gets hired by a company and then just does SEO because if you just do that, you don't understand the nuance of having to sell stuff. Actually have to sell stuff. So, you know, it makes a big difference when I, you have that, um, experience. But yeah, it's, you, you have to do it based on the intent. So, if it has commercial intent, you build a commercial page that's more, you know, more direct response focused, in my opinion. I really like kind of a direct response type of approach there. Um, but then if it's more informational, like we discussed, the link bait, you know, uh, the informational content, that should live on the blog or elsewhere. But yeah, this is, this is a, ex, a perfect example, um, of what I would recommend.
Yeah, this is one of our members. We had on our summit yesterday, on the first day of our summit, who's crushing with SEO. He really hasn't done a lot of updating on his site in, in the past three or four years, but he's still ranking for some competitive terms.
Yeah, yeah. And so, along those lines, when you create that content, there is, I'll add a couple nuances here. Uh, the, the other nuance is you should definitely consider using NLP to structure that page. So, natural language processing. There's a bunch of tools out there. I have my own tool that I built, it's called Rankability, but there's also, uh, Clearscope and all these other content optimization tools. They all do a lot of the same stuff, basically. But the reason why it's important is because what it does is, when you put a key through a tool like Rankability, for example, it extracts all of the topics from your top competitors. So, that way, when you build out that, build your page, what you're really doing is you're building the most relevant and comprehensive page that covers that topic completely, right? And that's, that's really what matters. Um, and so, I highly, highly recommend, you know, considering doing that because it makes a huge, huge difference. Um, and so, that's kind of the other piece of that. Um, and then, obviously, once all of the service pages are built, that takes a long time. That can take, depending on the complexity of the keyword you're going after, right? I mean, if you're just going after like one core commercial keyword, shouldn't take you that long. Um, but I'm thinking in the context of like an HVAC business that has, you know, HVAC at the top, and then we've got furnace repair, furnace installation, uh, furnace maintenance. Then we've got air conditioning, air conditioning repair, uh, you know, you go down the list, there's a lot, right? Then there could be even emergency, you know, uh, heating repair, right? So, there's just like, a lot of little variations that you'd want to build out separate pages for. And on that point, um, if the, if the keyword has different intent, it deserves a different page. So, you'll see sometimes you'll find an HVAC company that's like, "Okay, we're going to build one furnace page that talks about repair, emergency, installation." They slap it all on one page. That will not perform super well. It'll be much better to have one dedicated page specifically for furnace repair versus furnace installation. Totally different intents. Like, someone who needs a repair, they don't want to drop 10 grand on a furnace. They just want to get it fixed. So, when it needs an installation, different buyer, right? So, they're totally different. Um, and I'm not saying Google always delivers the most relevant results either, but at least logically working through that process.
That's the way it should be structured, so yeah, I like that, man. The key, the key there, and I'm, every time I look away, I'm writing, I'm writing some notes here. Excuse me. Uh, dude, this aligns so darn well with the way that our platform works. And so, as, as people are, as people are asking questions, you know, what, what do a service page mean, or these other things, everything Nathan's mentioning, y'all, except for rankability, like that's something we don't have in our system. Let's connect after this because we don't, we don't do a great job once you want to create the location page and make it unique from there, of aiding people with the tools yet. But we call them location pages. And so, if anyone is hearing Nathan, uh, say service page, we pretty much say like, hey, what are the locations you do business in? A lot of our clients are doing business in five cities or 10 cities or three states. And then within each city is what services or, or what are the different intents of what people would search in those markets. So, uh, as, as, as Nathan's describing it, guys, one to one is, is location pages, um, for that vernacular. Dude, this is awesome, man. So they do the key search, they create the service pages or location pages, uh, use the keyword gap analysis. You can use Screaming Frog to get the crazy deep analysis. Everyone using our SEO tools, um, you can use that to put in your competitor's URL as well to at least get gaps and keywords. But, um, that's, that's a crazy cool opportunity to be able to go like, how can we then give them inferences, say, no, these are the ones you should focus on. So that's something we're working on behind the scenes in our software. Um, what comes next though? So they create those pages, what's, what's next?
Yeah, and I want to, I want to rewind just one click back, just because I, I want to make sure that like, I want to give you, I want to give the best strategy, okay? Because right now, there's a certain strategy that works incredibly well for new websites. So like, if you're building a brand, let's say you're going after a new location, right? You want to go after, uh, you know, Chesterfield, Missouri. You want to sell houses fast in Chesterfield. And let's say you already have like an existing site and it's kind of more branded, it's going after a lot of locations. Those don't perform as well as a hyper, hyper relevant type of site. So when I mean hyper relevant, I mean very relevant. Like, uh, so the example I give in my training program is a, a keyword, St. Louis SEO consultant. Okay? If you look up St. Louis SEO, you're gonna find two things. You're gonna find my site, got seo.com, which is very old and very strong. So that's not the one I'm talking about. But you'll then, the one you'll find is actually ranking above my very strong and old website is St. Louis SEO consultant.com. This is one page, one page, and it's beating my DR 73 website. Now, why is that? Because it's literally the most relevant website for that query. It's the most relevant. So, um, you know, exact match domains have been demonized, especially with the recent leak. People like, oh, it says exact match domains in here, they lose a little bit of points. Yeah, there's the biggest lie, biggest lie, because I've tested this literally for the last five years. These exact match domains outperform general branded domains on the local level all day, all day. And especially not just in the traditional organic, in the local pack. Like, go and just have some fun and search some keywords in the local pack to see what you find. You're gonna find keyword-rich businesses that dominate. Um, and so when you use that, that kind of double play where you basically, so there's ways to do this safely, okay? So what you do is you have your, your main company, let's say for me, it's got LLC. All right? That's my, my bigger company. Uh, what I would do is I, I'd get a DBA. So my DBA would be St. Louis SEO consultant. Yeah, that's a protection from getting suspended from Google. So if you have a DBA, even if you were to get suspended, you could, you could appeal and you'll probably be fine. So because there's just, there's, it's actually a legal name by, like, in the state. So you do that. And then what you do is you build out the Google Business Profile in the exact match domain name. You'll rank in a couple of weeks. You'll beat, you'll beat, uh, websites that, uh, you'll beat businesses that have tons of reviews as well. Like that's how overpowered this is right now. I'm not saying it's always gonna be like that, but it's that overpowered right now. Um, and so you can rank there. And like, funny enough, I ranked for, um, Chesterfield plumber in my where I live, like just to prove the point. Like, I'm, I'm not a plumber, and I beat a bunch of plumbers, like just to prove the point. Um, and so, so you know, you can rank in Google Business Profile or in the Google Business local pack, uh, and then you can rank organically just as easy as well. So if you're, if you're going after a new city, I would highly, highly recommend considering this approach, um, because it makes your life a million times easier. Like it, you'll rank easier, it works better, uh, it just across the board, it's much easier. So it's really encouraging for someone who hasn't started their business yet or, or maybe they're in the early phases and they can, they can afford to kind of rebrand their company and choose a more accurate business name. But even if you have, you can still launch a new website, get a new domain for, you know, sell my house fast Roseburg or whatever it is. And, and, and I, I just think of it as like, you're just building out a lead generation property in a specific target market. That's the way I think about it. Uh, and as far as the costs, like I always, sometimes we, if we have a campaign with a client that has a general, like a general domain, and they're, let's say it's not performing the way that I like, well, on the back end, I'll do what I call an insurance policy. So I will build out one of these assets. And unfortunately, it gets awkward because like right now, I have this one client where my asset that I build is outranking him. And it's like, you know, but I give it to them, right? I get, it's their asset, but I'm just, just showing like, it's more effective. Yeah. Um, so, so yeah, it's, it doesn't cost a lot. That's the thing. Like I like this one I'm talking about for this client, it costs me maybe, I don't know, 50 bucks. Yeah. I mean, like the, the, the risk to reward is enormous. It's enormous. So, um, and we've just found doing that is actually less time, less effort, less capital than trying to make one domain rank for tons of locations. It's really hard to do that. You need a lot of authority to do that well. So, and most businesses don't.
So, dude, this has been amazing, man. I could be on here with, with you for another hour and go into backlinks and all that kind of stuff. Uh, guys, anyone curious about backlinks, the tip Nathan gave earlier, that's the thing to go do. Like, figure out, can you do one? Can you do one a month? One a quarter? That is something interesting that other people would actually want to link to you. You can go, like, a lot of people buy links and things like that without getting into, into that conversation. And, and that, that's a challenge because oftentimes when you're buying links, the quality of those links can be really, really subpar. Um, not saying that buying links is a no strategy, but, uh, it, it's, it's trickier for the long term, I feel for sure. What, what's your, I know we're at time, but, um, what, what's your take on on buying links? Because that's something that came up like three or four times yesterday in the chat. What's your take on that? Is that relevant? Is it not? When is it?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'll start with a disclaimer. It's against Google's guidelines, right? So it's against Google's guidelines. So take, you know, there's, there's risk involved, quote unquote, risk when you don't know what you're doing. So that's kind of the thing. And, um, I'll just say buying links doesn't work when you go to a vendor and they decide where to get you a link. Yep. That's not what you want to do. What you want to do is find a vendor where you can see the websites and you can filter through the websites and you can pick the site that you want to get a link on. You can see the associated metrics with those links. Uh, relevance is key. You just have to get relevant links. That's all that matters. On the local level, you, like before you even think about like buying links from a vendor, you should be thinking about getting, like getting links on donation opportunities. Like Chesterfield, start looking up places where you can donate in Chesterfield. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get these links. And there's the exact localized links that you need to build proper, build a proper link profile. Um, getting interviewed on your local news. Like I did this in my, uh, in where I live. I got interviewed on this KSDK, St. Louis, and I got a really powerful link for just like, I think it was like a two-minute interview. So like, it's worth it, right? See, you can do these things. You don't need a ton of links. You just need a lot of really relevant links. Um, and going back to the content side, I absolutely agree. Um, you don't need that many content assets. You only need, you know, if you're just starting out, try to build like three to five and then just spend all your time promoting those and driving links to those assets. You don't need to drive links directly to your service pages either. If you drive links to your informational assets, that authority flows to the service pages. So rising tide lifts all ships. So I, I like to focus in on driving links to the pages that deserve them and then internally linking to the, to the, uh, service pages. So yeah, I love it. I, I love it, man. Like I said, I wish we had another 15 minutes. Nathan, I, I'm gonna hit you up after this sometime. I'd love to connect over the next three weeks and for sure kind of wrap some ideas around. But, uh, guys, fill up the comments box. I know there's some good questions. We will get to those questions, uh, throughout the day for sure. Uh, dude, where can people follow you? Where can people find you? Learn more about, about what you guys do because you have an amazing YouTube channel. First of all, guys, go to his YouTube. But where else can they find you?
Uh, yeah, YouTube, you can find Nathan Gotch on YouTube. Go to go seo.com. I have my training program. Honestly, my training program is more kind of for agencies. So yeah, I mean, if you want to learn kind of the, the geeky stuff that agencies do, it's certainly a good fit. Um, but honestly, I think for most people who are probably listening to this, Rankability would probably be the best option. Rankability.com. You can get a free trial. You can learn how to optimize your content. Um, it's highly recommended. I mean, almost a lot of, a lot of agencies use our tool to optimize their clients. So just think about that. Dude, I, I appreciate you big time investing the time with, with us today. Guys, pop in the comments box, show appreciation, love towards Nathan, and we're going to move into the first breakouts of the day. And guys, go follow Nathan. I'll hit you up, buddy. Appreciate you hitting, spending the time with us today, man. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
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