How To Grow Your Organic Traffic WITHOUT New Content Or Backlinks

Good morning, everyone. This is Eric Siu here. We're going to start in about 5 minutes. We're going live on YouTube right now. We're going live on freaking Zoom right now. We are going live everywhere except for Facebook right now. And so while we wait, if everyone wants to talk about where you're coming from right now, I'm really interested. I always ask every time I do one of these webinars, especially since this is a brand new one. Hi, Eric. Where are you coming in from? Are you coming in from New York? Are you coming in from freaking Amsterdam? Type into the comments really quick. Interested to see where you all are coming from. It's all meant to be really fun and engaging. I think, you know, we're gonna learn some cool stuff. Dallas. That's cool, Malcolm. I actually haven't been to Dallas in about 3 years, but it's always a good time in Dallas. But I wasn't— also Dallas. You got— that's funny. There's Austin comes from Dallas. Austin, I was just about to say I was in Austin, Texas about a couple months ago speaking at SumoCon. So I do love Austin. Tampa, Florida. Crystal, that's cool. Virginia, that's awesome. People are coming in from everywhere. That's great. I hope you guys are staying warm. But yeah, I'm also curious too. I mean, Irvine, Jose, you're not far away. I'm actually here in downtown LA. Good evening from Italy. Wow, I'm just surprised. Like Southampton, England, Danielle. There's just so many people from around the world that actually stay up for this. So I'm very grateful for that, and I'm hope I'm hopeful that you'll get something to take away from this. Serbia, Dublin, Germany. Wow, Prague. Okay, that's awesome. Mumbai, India. And by the way, I have to apologize in advance a little bit. I do have someone that is cleaning, not cleaning, but someone that's doing maintenance on my apartment. So you might hear some noise here and there. We're actually not doing this in the office today. Then I'm running to the office afterwards. But anyway, Detroit, Oregon, Bangalore. That's awesome. Okay. So got about 3 more minutes here before we, before we get going. But I'm also curious to just to get a kind of Rough lay of the land. What's everyone's Google traffic per month right now? If you can just type into the chat, I'm just curious to see where you all are at right now and see what kind of impact we can make on the training today. Could be $10K a month, $20K, $100,000. Okay. Well, Willie's doing pre-launch. Gary says minimal. Anybody else? $5K, don't be shy. $10K per month, but you lost it. Okay. Interesting. Kenny Navarro, $5K. Okay. Okay. Under $1K. Okay. That's interesting. See, I think it's— there's a good amount of you have under $10K a month. So I think what I'll also do on this training too, just so you guys can all get some takeaway from this, I'll talk about some strategies that you can be doing and talk about where you can go to learn about these strategies, especially for those of you that are starting out with this stuff. Because at the end of the day, I think when it comes to starting a business or marketing, anything like that, It's not, it's not rocket science. So, you know, I'll give you the tips that you need and then we can be on our way. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to share my screen and you guys let me know if you can see it or not. Let me know if we're facing any issues. So give me one second here. Let me know if you guys can see it or not. Okay, sharing it now. By the way, this is our first time using Zoom. I used to use GoToWebinar, but Zoom has been great for, you know, any type of customer client calls, things like that. So anyway, sharing my screen now. Can you guys see my screen? Raise your hand, type yes if you can. Eric, thank you. Morgan, thank you. Thank you. And by the way, if you guys have any questions as we roll through this, I'm going to pause every now and then just to answer your questions. It's meant to be engaging. And don't feel like you need to wait till the very end. So without further ado, we are going to get started. So today we're going to talk about basically how you can grow your organic traffic without new content or backlinks, right? We should put a little asterisk next to it because there is a caveat to that. But again, I'm going to give you what you need in order to grow your traffic no matter what. First and foremost, for those of you that don't know me, my name is Eric Siu. I run a marketing agency called Single Grain. We're based here in downtown LA, offices in downtown LA, and we also have a lot of remote people around the world. I'm actually broadcasting from my apartment today. So, you know, we get to work with a variety of clients, but I'm really not here to talk about the agency. I'm here to talk about what you can get out of this training. So I think a big thing for a lot of you that are really getting started, you know, we're talking your traffic is you know, 5,000, it's 10,000, whatever it is exactly, uh, maybe 20,000 or so, you're going to need to, you know, think about the kind of foundational aspects or elements of marketing. So this podcast that I do with Neil over here, we are on Spotify, we're on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, whatever, even, even, uh, even on your voice devices as well. Um, so this is a daily podcast I've been doing with Neil for over a year and a half already. We've got well over 500 episodes. We do talk about how to build up your SEO traffic, how to build up your blog, how to start your website immediately or in the very beginning. Basically the foundational pieces, right? Because if you look at what Neil has done, he has 2 websites that get over 7 figures traffic. We're talking over a million visits per month. And, you know, we've done great in terms of building traffic. I mean, for the Single Grain blog, just the marketing agency alone, when I first came to the company, we're getting about 4,000 visitors a month. Now, you know, we're up to, you know, about 70,000 and we're continuing to grow. But it's all about, you know, the long growth, right? Because keep in mind, you look at Neil, it's like, okay, you know, this Neil guy's been doing marketing for a long time. He's actually been doing— he's been in business for 17 to 18 years, right? So the first thing I'll tell you all that, you know, Those of you that might be thinking your traffic's too small, you'll never be able to get there, just keep in mind that you never want to compare yourself to somebody else's chapter 25 when you're first starting out, right? Always think about where you're at and then just compound from there. And again, if you want to listen to some of the stuff in terms of starting out, in terms of building your traffic to 100,000, to a million or whatever it is, listen to this podcast. It's free. The second one is called Growth Everywhere. And this is where I interview a lot of different World-class entrepreneurs. We do it once a week. We talk about, you know, we talk about business, we talk about personal growth, we talk about things like that. And then basically, I'm going to jump into the training right now. So I think this is something that helps each and every one of you. The stuff I'm going to talk about today really covers, you know, we're talking, you know, getting to sites that have, you know, above 6 figures a month in traffic, right? But that doesn't mean you all are excluded from this that are under, you know, $10K or something like that. So the first thing I want to bring your attention to is the hub and spoke model. So when we think about building organic traffic, it's not really like this, right? You know, we think about getting press from like TechCrunch. We could think about getting press from like Wall Street Journal, things like that. Oftentimes when you get press, you're going to get this big blip, right? You're going to get a big rush of traffic and it's just going to die down, right? It's not what we're looking for. This is what we're looking for instead. We are looking to build long-term traffic, right? We're looking to build, we're looking for something to grow evergreen, right? So whenever we create something, we're not just spending a couple hundred, a couple thousand dollars and just letting it sit there, right? That's not the way to do it, right? So we've got to think about how do we build something like this? So if you look at this and you can feel free to take a screenshot of it, take out your mobile device, whatever. This is what the hub and spoke model looks like. And I'll show you a real-life example of this. But when you are creating a piece of content, instead of just making one piece of content, you want to have one hub piece of content. So it could be, you know, the main, the main page, and you might have separate chapters, right? You might have chapters 1 through 6, and those chapters might link to one another, and then they might link to the hub page, right? And then when you have a search engine like Google looking at that kind of resource, They're going to give you credit for that because you are helping— all those pages are helping lift each other up. They're all semantically relevant, right? And then you are going to be seen as a higher-level, higher-quality resource. And I'm going to show you what a real-life example looks like. But it just makes sense, right? You spent more time into it. You put more thought into the resource. It's more in-depth. Why wouldn't the Google search engines give you, or any search engines give you more credit for the hard work that you put in, right? So when you look at this right here, you have the main kind of page that's in the middle, and then you have all these support pages on the side. And then you can also have these other resources where, you know, you might email them additional stuff. They might opt in for something, but you think about it, you know, people find this and then you could take them further through your funnel. That's what you're trying to do at the end of the day, right? Organic traffic is a way for you to build pixels in Facebook and Google, and also at the same time, get people into your email funnel, eventually get them to become advocates. Get them to become customers for your company, right? As a matter of fact, I mean, all of you that are on today, I actually didn't run any paid ads or anything like that for this training. You guys are all coming from email lists, our email list. It's because you consumed our content already. So I'm very grateful for that, just whether it's Marketing School, Growth Everywhere, Single Grain, whatever it is exactly. And I'm also really grateful that you guys are listening across the world right now. So, you know, this organic traffic content marketing, that's really the gateway for you to, you know, doing some incredible things, right? So if I think about, you know, 2 years ago when I started doing content marketing, you start with blogs and then I started doing webinars. Content marketing with blogs led to me doing a webinar. That webinar led to me speaking at an event in Brazil. That event in Brazil led to me speaking at multiple conferences in America because I met somebody in Brazil. And then, you know, that led to multiple deals, right? But it's not very linear all the time. You just never expect what happens. But You just start doing good things. You just know content marketing is going to compound, which you listen to in marketing school all the time. If you listen to it, which I highly recommend you do, and great things are going to happen, right? This is one thing that you can do if you're just starting out. Think about how you can kick everyone else's ass when you're doing content marketing, make something really in-depth. What I highly recommend that you do, write this down, type in the SKYSCRAPER technique. This is written by Backlinko, which is Brian Dean. One of our friends, well-known in the SEO space. If you can figure out how to do the skyscraper technique well, and then apply it with the hub and spoke, you combine these 2 kinds of tactics together, you are going to be able to grow your traffic exponentially and scale up from there. Okay. Now, if that doesn't make any sense at all, feel free to drop your notes into chat right now. I'm happy to answer any questions. Mike, Mike, I think you said you may have to leave partway through the webinar. There will be a recording. So that will be good. And are you guys having any issues hearing me right now? Yes. Okay, good. Some people were talking about audio not working. Okay, great. Okay, so we'll keep going. So this is a real-life example of what a hub and spoke model looks like, right? So this is a post on conversion rate optimization. And I'm going to jump out really quick after I show you these slides and then show you another example. But before I do, let me check chat really quick. Yeah. So Caitlin, it is the Skyscraper Technique. This is from Brian Dean. And if you look at chat, you can actually click— Milos actually dropped a link in there. It's backlinko.com skyscraper-technique. Scott Colnett, by the way, just left a chat note. He's actually the guy that supplies Neil and I with a lot of topic ideas for Marketing School. So if any of you have any topic ideas, I mean, Scott hooks it up to us. We give him some small gifts from here to there, but Scott's been really incredible to us through this journey. So again, we can't do this stuff without you guys, the fans. So really appreciate you all. Anyway, so this post by Qualaroo, when you go to Google, and I'll show you in a second, if you literally Google conversion rate optimization, This post is number 1. And you think about it, right? It's like, why is this thing number 1? So if you see it, it's like, okay, it has chapters, right? And I'm gonna show you what that looks like. As you can see, the first chapter is what is conversion rate optimization? The second one is why conversion rate optimization is important. Number 3 is the basics of conversion rate optimization, right? So let me stop my share really quick. And then I'm going to switch over to my browser. So let's, let's do this together. So let me switch over to right here. Okay, great. So you guys can all see my screen. Raise your hand if you can see my screen right now. Okay, great. So look, I literally Googled conversion rate optimization and we can ignore the ads over here. Okay. We can ignore the rank 0, which is, it actually is important, but we're not talking about rank 0 today. But you can see actually this post from Qualaroo, it actually is competing right now with this Moz post. Usually when I Google it, it is the number 1 result. But let's go ahead and click on it and see what it looks like. So this is what it looks like, right? This is the Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization by Qualaroo. It shows a little— this is the hub page, right? And then what it does is it has these little spokes, right? What is conversion rate optimization? Why conversion rate optimization is important. Da da da da da, right? Just keeps going down from there. They've since changed it. They've you know made the design a little better, which is what I highly recommend. You know, kind of you know looking at your your high performing posts and then upgrading them from time to time, right? But this is just one example. Like this is what it takes to rank well. And if you if you go back to this, I mean let's just look at what let's look at what Moz has over here. So with Moz, they have this one piece over here. Look. Again, you can see it's super long form, right? And it's linking to a lot of different things. And then you can see it linked to a bunch of other things. But this is more around SEO. So, you know, sometimes, you know, Google will make changes and then sometimes, you know, they'll kind of test things, you know, running experiments with their own algorithm. But most, more often than not, you're going to find this Qualaroo post as number 1. Now, if I click on number 3, I want to see what Neil Patel has. This is my, my buddy. My podcast co-host on Marketing School. So if you listen to my interview with him about 3 years ago on my other podcast, Growth Everywhere, I asked him, I was like, hey man, like, so how much do you spend on content marketing? And he's like, well, you know, I spent $30,000 on guides and I give it away. And I get it. Not everyone here has $30,000. I don't think most people here have $30,000. I certainly don't have $30,000 to just spend on a guide, design it well, and just give it away. Right. But I think we can at least take the underlying strategy again. Look at this again. It's well done, right? It's a skyscraper piece of content, but it's also, it also has chapters, right? Take me to chapter 1. Right. And then we scroll through it. Like it's really well designed and look, it links to, it links back to the intro. It links to chapter 2. So everything's all kind of interlinking to each other, right? Like the concept itself just makes sense, but people are just too lazy to do this stuff because it takes time. Here's the thing. People are too lazy and people don't have the patience to wait for things. Right. So I think long-term, if we can think of just business in general, we can just wait a long time. But in the interim, like in the short-term, just get a lot of things done. We know things are going to compound. We know great things are going to happen right now. Here's the other thing that I want you to take a look at. If you Google online marketing, guess who's number 1? Neil Patel is number 1. Guess who's number 2? Neil Patel is number 2, right? So, you know, if we look at, again, let's look at, you know, this guide over here on Quick Sprout. Same kind of deal, right? Same kind of design, same kind of strategy, right? Let's look at this one over here. You know, I'm really curious. I wonder, for those of you, just how long do you guys think— how many words do you think this post is? Just type it into chat right now. I'm just curious. And then we'll actually do a test to see how many words this thing is. Okay, 400, 2,000, 350, 1,200, 5,000, 20,000, 8,000. Scott Colnut. I think Scott, we'll see if you're right. So here, I'm going to do this really quick. All right. So this word, drum roll, or this, not this word, this post, this post is 4,200 words. Okay. So Samantha Hussey, you are actually right on. I wish I had a prize to give you today, but maybe we'll start doing prizes in the future. So 4,000 is about kind of what this post is, right? And just keep in mind, not always the best result wins, right? Because I can make the argument that the Quick Sprout post is actually more well done. And this post actually ranks well because, you know, Neil has a high domain authority, right? But yeah, that, that's basically it. That's what the hub and spoke model looks like. Think about what you could do. Make a skyscraper piece of content first, and then think about how you could combine that with Hub and Spoke. That's the very first thing I want to show you, right? Now, do you guys have any questions at the moment? Any suggestions on creating good content to drive traffic to online store if you're selling physical goods? I just gave you something. Exactly. Just use this kind of model. I guarantee you it's going to work because most e-commerce companies, they just, they'll throw up a a bunch of SKUs, and oftentimes the SKUs will be the same kind of product descriptions from the manufacturer. What you can do there as one thing to kind of make yourself stand out is write new product descriptions, right? And then think about how you can go more in depth. Can you add more content? Can you add reviews to it? Can you add videos, right? A lot of this stuff is kind of table stakes with e-commerce today. So I would recommend you look at a site like Zappos or Amazon, for example. Amazon does this stuff really well because You know, they're, they're just, uh, you know, they're just a machine that buys companies like Whole Foods. Right. Um, anyway, I'm going to switch back over to my slides. I'm going to stop this share and I'm going to switch back over right now. Okay, great. So the next thing is, I think those of you that have already created a lot of content, so those of you that are getting, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50,000, 100,000 plus, traffic per month from Google, what you have to do is think about what Wikipedia does, right? So here's an example. If you look at Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, this post, when it first started, it didn't have that many words, right? Wikipedia, now it's been around for a long time. They get a lot of traffic, right? But when you look at Abraham Lincoln, just look at it over time. In 2007, the post had about 13,000 words, which is, it's still pretty in-depth, right? It's about, well, that's, it's a little over 3 times You know, the size of the post that you just saw from Neil, right? In 2011, the post went up to 18,000 words, right? And in 2014, it went up to 20,000. And in 2017, it went up to 24,000, right? So what is the trend here? The trend here is that the post keeps getting upgraded over time, right? And that's how posts do well. So a lot of you that are creating a lot of content right now, just look back in your Google Analytics and look at, okay, what are the posts that actually do well? And what can I do to upgrade it? How can I make it a better experience for my audience? Right? How do I, how do I just improve on it? Right? So here's a real-life example. This post by us on 10 companies with the best digital marketing campaigns, it actually does really well for us because it gets a good amount of traffic. All we did to it was we added a little section on Uber. We might've added like another section on it just to keep it kind of up to date. But this was the original traffic amount in 2016. If you look at column or row number 2, the post was getting about 731 visits a month. So, okay, not bad for one blog post. Oftentimes, we just— if we get like 100 visits or so from a blog post in the very beginning, oh, maybe it has a little traction. This one's getting 731. It's not bad for our size. But in 2017, what we saw was that if you look at the first row over here, it went up to 2,800. That's a 4x increase. Nowadays, I mean, that post gets up to 5,000, 5,000, you know, visits per month right now. Right. So it's gone up quite a bit since then. And not only that, like if we look at some of our other strategies or, or goals that are important to us, it actually drives consultation leads for our business. So keep in mind, we're a marketing agency. That's the first thing that we do. We do paid advertising. We do SEO. Okay, great. But when you have a blog post that actually drives free consultation leads, That's ROI, right? Like I have people from my team that question me sometimes. It's like, you know, Eric, we spend so much on content marketing. What's the ROI? And then what happens is I actually do a breakdown of all of our clients and they all come from content marketing. Okay. This is just one example. This is how content marketing gives you an ROI. Okay. So when everyone, anyone ever asks you a question on whether content marketing provides an ROI, just, man, like, I think you could just go around Googling it. I think you could just go around looking on YouTube. And then you can just basically shove it in their face saying, hey, this is what kind of ROI content marketing provides. It's pretty easy for me to prove. So I'm pretty sure you can prove it too. Now, what I recommend that you do is you are very deliberate about the way that you go about upgrading your content, right? So what that means is you have to look at the before date and after date. Okay. So, you know, what happened before, what happened afterwards? It's not an exact science. It's more of like a, You know, an A/A test. You're not exactly A/B testing anything, but at least you're looking at the data. Yeah, you might have seasonality. You might have a penalty, you know, something like that. I hope you don't get hit by a penalty. I'm knocking on wood right now. But as long as you're tracking it over time, you can make the case that this should stick within your content strategy for the long term. And you can see right here, I'm proving it to you that you actually get increases. Look, it's green across the board. It's freaking green across the board. Right? I think we only had like 2 losses. And it was a very minor loss when we upgraded a post, right? So it's in your best interest to look at the stuff that you have already, especially those of you that are getting a good amount of traffic. I guarantee you, you're going to see some crazy gains. You don't need to create brand new content all the time. You don't have to spend, you know, a couple thousand bucks, a couple hundred bucks every single time when you can kind of reinvest into what you have already, right? You don't just go buy a car and say, I'm going to drive it for a week and you're done with the car, right? It's the same thing. Like you don't, you don't, I probably shouldn't use, um, yeah, let's not use human relationships in this example, but like you don't just buy something and just use it once. Okay. That's the best, best example I can give you. So that's a framework, um, that, you know, basically upgrading. Um, I just gave you this screenshot over here, make sure you're tracking it. Another thing is I want to give you a framework that you can actually use for repurposing your content and actually reusing your content. Are you guys ready for that? Okay, great. So here it is. I really like this workflow right here. This is called the content reusage workflow. This is from Aleida Solis, and this makes it really simple, right? Like you can hand this off to anybody on your team that's handling content. So simple, right? Is the topic being covered by existing content? If it's outdated, update it. I just gave, like, I literally just showed you that if you update it, it's going to work, right? Great. You know, if you don't, if it's not outdated, okay, let's move to the next thing. Is it incomplete or, you know, can we add something else to make it more accurate, relevant, useful? If it's yes, then let's go ahead and expand it. If not, let's move to the next thing. And here's what I really like. I like the third one a lot. Just think about it. Like, look, we have, we, you know, 10 years ago, maybe a lot of people were blogging, but we have podcasts now. We have this webinar that I'm doing with you. We have social media. Like, Man, we have content that we can pump out everywhere, right? So when it hits the third one, it's like, can it be covered in a different format? Like this webinar I'm doing with you right now, I can probably chop it up into 4 or 5 different blog posts, right? And then I can make those into social images, right? Maybe I can make some videos on it and post to my YouTube channel too, because that's, that's a focus for our 2018. And by the way, if you like, if you like business videos and marketing videos, go to our YouTube channel. It's just search Growth Everywhere on YouTube and you'll find us. Yeah. Every subscribe matters. Anyway, so it's important to think about like what kind of workflow you can use. And I know someone, an example I gave in the Marketing School Podcast, there's this girl named Chalene Johnson. And what she does is she goes live on Facebook and then she makes it into, you know, different blog posts, into different videos. And then she also makes them into different courses too. Right? So you can go how far— think about this. Like, When you create content, how far down the rabbit hole can you actually go? And then think about that, right? And then maybe you need to hire resources. I— we're over here at the agency, we're thinking about like, okay, can we hire someone that's just focused on repurposing content? We're almost thinking about calling this person a content repurposer, right? Maybe a better name for that, but think about if you can hire a role for that, because anytime we hire a new role, you're ultimately looking for a list of tasks. To be accomplished, right? So I think it's really important. I think in 2018, maybe 2019 beyond, there's so much content coming out now that it's in your best interest to repurpose your content, right? I'm not going to go all the way down this workflow. Take a screenshot of this. This is definitely going to help you grow your business if you're not doing anything like this. Okay. I'm going to stop for questions really quick. I'll look at the Q&A. Okay. So Craig asked, are you using tools to track content performance and schedule workflow? Yeah. So for scheduling workflow, we use a tool called CoSchedule. That's CoSchedule. And that helps us a lot. Everyone gets on the same page. And then we also use Asana too for our calendar, just at a very high level for people that aren't in CoSchedule. We basically use that. So hope that helps. He said, Diply is one of the fastest growing media companies ever. I actually haven't heard of Diply. So I actually cannot help you with that. So that's one of those scenarios where I just say, I don't know. Milos asked, how would you go about promoting what is basically old content that's updated? So I think you need to go about, I mean, if you're, if you have old content, first, first of all, make sure it's up to date. And then from there, you know, in terms of promoting it, what's working really well for us right now, I'll tell you, is when we boost posts on Facebook, we will look for posts that have a 10% or so engagement rate. So we calculate engagement rate by likes and shares divided by the reach. If you're above 10%, then we're going to put another like $500 against it and see if it can really take off. All right, that's enough for questions for now. I'm going to come back to you all in a second. And, you know, as we go through this, by the way, the chat is really engaging right now. I appreciate you guys dropping the links in there. I'm not sure if you guys can actually engage in there. Let me know if you can, because this is my first time using Zoom. So I'm not even sure if you guys can see each other in chat. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. I'm going to just keep using Zoom. Yeah. Keep helping each other. Okay. So here's another thing that we do. For those of you that listen to Marketing School, do you really think that we're going to do 500 episodes and not repurpose our content? So we have this other blog called marketingschool.io. And what it basically does is we have someone that handles show notes for us. So they basically will transcribe our content, kind of the high level. of each episode. So you can see right here, when we first made the site, it looks really basic, right? Like there's this really outdated picture of both of us. And you can see the timestamps and then the resources we all talk about that we link to and all that. But what we found was that we built no links. We just created pure content, right? And the site just keeps growing, right? So this site alone gets about 5,000 visits a month. We haven't promoted it at all. Nobody links to it. It's just another resource that we have, right? But what we did also after that, it's like, okay, like this thing is clearly— Google's giving it some credit. Why don't we put all that content on a site that has a higher domain authority? So what I did was I put the content on the Single Grain website and our traffic shot up by 25%. So this is just another way of thinking about how you could go about repurposing your content, right? So if you go to marketschool.io, it looks a lot better today. If you guys want to go there, Check it out, subscribe to the email list, subscribe to our giveaway. Again, repurposing, it works. Okay. So question now is, how do we actually even do more with this kind of stuff, right? So what we did was we threw this content over to a site with a higher domain authority. We talked about that already. And I think we already talked about the single grade portion, so I'm kind of repeating myself. But now I want to talk about how you can actually leverage Google Search Console. So this is something I talk about on the podcast, but I've actually never done a high-level demo with you guys, right? So I want to show you how you can actually get more additional search traffic without more links and content. So I'm going to switch my, my share really quick. And I'm going to switch screens. So let's go over here. By the way, while I switch screens, those of you that think that I need to talk slower in the future, type in yes in the chat. Okay, great. It seems like you guys are okay with my speed, which is pretty funny. Usually I talk at like 2x in real life. But anyway, okay. So those of you that have Search Console right now, Google Search Console, go ahead and raise your hand in chat. I'm just curious to see how many of you actually are using it at the moment. Okay. Quite a bit of you. It's at least a third of you. I really like this Zoom thing. It's honestly, I think any of you using webinar right now, I'm not affiliated with Zoom at all. I think this is the best webinar tool. The fact that I'm broadcasting live to Facebook right now or YouTube right now. And also I'm doing this with you and I can just, it's just a better experience, man. Anyway, so here's what you got to do. When you log into Google Search Console, okay, I'm just going to go to the dashboard. So we'll start from the very top. Go to the search analytics section. So click that. Obviously the traffic is trending downwards because the new year just hit. So, you know, ignore the seasonality. What you want to do is you want to click on the clicks, the impressions, and the CTR. Okay. And then from there, make sure that you are highlighted on the pages section. Right. And the final thing you need to click right now is you need to sort by impressions, sorting from descending. Okay. And then what you're going to do now is you're going to look for pages that have a high impression count, which is, that means Google is showing your page, right? It's giving you the credit, but you have a low click-through rate, which means your title and your meta description are not ideal. It's not drawing people to actually click through. to your site. Am I making sense there? Okay. So if we look right here, I mean, you know, we have this one post right here on, you know, best online marketing companies, right? And then, you know, that one gets about, at least last month or last 28 days, 1,844 clicks, about a 1.54% click-through rate. And then our homepage right here, we're at about a 1% click-through rate. Probably not going to mess with anything around 1%, okay? Because that's, you know, fairly decent for us. And again, your mileage may vary. We have some clients where their average click-through rate is about 10%. So if you look at this post right here, we have this one on 15 free SEO tools to improve your Google ranking, right? That has about 208 clicks for a 0.19% CTR. So that tells me there's actually something to improve there, right? So, you know, if we actually look at it, we can look at the page itself. You can go away. Let's look at it. So 18 free SEO tools improve your Google ranking in 2018 and beyond. So we actually ran a test on that one. And, you know, we're going to see how it goes. We actually just changed it, but these are the kinds of changes you want to make, right? Like you look at this one, we have this post on video engagement, 0.64%. We got this one right here. It's got 45,000 impressions. It's got a 0.03% CTR, right? I'm going to check chat really quick since, since it's going kind of crazy really quick right now. Yes, this is being recorded. Great. Okay. So 0.03%, that tells me that here's the reality, right? It's saying that Google is giving you credit, but you are not. You basically suck at bringing people to the point of sale, right? Marketing is bringing people to the point of sale, or at least bringing them to your website. You got to attract people, right? So how do you write a better title and meta description? That's how you can improve your click-through rate, at least with Google organic. And it's simple, man. You can do this. There's a lot of people I know that do this, you know, once every month or so, once every couple months. Some people do it a couple times a month. But just looking at the stuff, especially if you have a lot of pages on your website, you got to make these changes. If you don't— look, you don't make these changes. We have this one post where one of our locations ranks and has a 0.1% CTR. If we can get that to 1%, to get a lot more traffic, right? Imagine how much it compounds. This can be, you know, a 5, 6, 7-figure difference, maybe even 8-figure difference in your business, depending on how big your business is. But for those of you where your organic traffic actually matters, you already have content on your site, you have to be looking at this from time to time. What I would do is, you know, maybe, you know, you show 500 rows and you download this. That's basically how it works, right? Now, for those of you that don't know, Google Search Console actually has a new version too. So I'm going to show you what that looks like. This is the new version of Google Search Console, and it shows you data from up to the last 12 months, right? Previously, you could only see the last 3 months or so. So all you have to do is click into the new one, hit full report. And you do something very similar to what I just did. You do total impressions, you do CTR, and you sort by impressions, right? Make sure the arrow is pointing downwards. And you can see, oh, look at these. Guess what? I rank for all of these keywords right here, right? And we can also, you want to move over to the pages and look, this is showing me the big opportunity, right? 0.2% click-through rate. If I can get it to 1%, I'm going to 5x it. I'm going to get 2,500 clicks a month. So additional 2,000 a month and per year, I'm going to get additional 24,000, right? So hopefully this makes sense. I think, you know, I think it makes, it's fairly easy to understand. But, you know, the problem with Google Search Console, with what we've seen, like, it's a great free tool. But what we did from our end, because we're, you know, we're online marketing nerds, is we basically decided to build, you know, one of our own tools, right? And we have someone on this webinar right now that actually is a customer of this tool. His name is Brady. But this is a tool we created. It is called ClickFlow. So ClickFlow, look, you can see the logo actually just changed. But what ClickFlow does is it actually shows you how much more money you can make, right? So it basically takes what we're looking at from Search Console, and we can look at, okay, you know, we can say our conversion rate out of our website's 1%. We can say a lead is worth to us, you know, maybe $500. And our tool shows us how much more visitors we can gain per month. Okay. What it does from there is it says, okay, based on the numbers you gave us, Eric, and the number of additional visits you can gain, you can gain additional $100,000 a month in monthly revenue. That's $1.2 million a year for my business, okay, that I can potentially gain. Even if we cut that in half or even 25%, it's still worthwhile to look at, right? I think we can all agree that, you know, 6 figures is, you know, worth at least maybe having your SEO manager or even you take a look at, right? Or your marketing director. So for those of you that are interested, do you guys want me to actually walk through this tool? Just raise your hand if you do, say yes. If not, I can just move on to the next thing. Okay, great. So walking through this really quick, if we move down, I'm going to start with the very bottom, right? What this tool does is it shows you potential sites or pages where you can gain a lot of clicks, right? Right now, you know, since we just refreshed the tool, I'm gonna scroll down a little bit since sometimes it gets buggy. You can see we have this post right here on should you be tracking your keyword ranking? It actually does the calculations for you. So it says, okay, you know what? If we can get the CTR to about 3%, because our average is about 1.16%, if we get it up to 3%, we can gain 1,500 more, right? But look at this. This CTR is piss poor. It's 0.02%. Anybody here on this webinar right now, if you just made a quick, a couple of quick changes, could make a big difference on this post, right? So the question is like, okay, What kind of keywords should we be targeting? Well, if we actually went into that, into that page, we can actually see all the keywords, the top 50 that that page ranks for. And we can say, okay, well, you know, what are people actually searching for? This page is actually getting 2,300 impressions a month for keyword tracking. Should we focus it more on keyword tracking, like keyword tracking, what do you need to know, or keyword tracking 101, right? Or should we be looking at, you know, other things? That people are looking at. But here's the thing. I'd rather just look at the things that have a high impression count and go for that. Make some changes, right? Not should you be tracking your keyword ranking in 2017. First of all, 2017 is already over. We should be thinking about a more evergreen title, right? Maybe we should even think about changing the URL slug as well and think about, you know, how that might look and maybe redirect that, right? I don't always recommend redirecting, but you can do that. Now, the other benefit with this tool is when you're doing those changes manually in Google Search Console, You have to download the CSV, you have to manually go into Excel and then basically record all the changes manually. What this tool does is it's going to show the changes automatically. This is when changes were made and it's going to just keep deploying new changes and it's going to show you what the changes are to that page, specific page over time. Now, what happens afterwards is you have your completed tests. Okay. So if I go to see all completed, I can see here, I have a scorecard, right? I have 8 out of 11 tests won. Okay. So, hey, I'm not that bad, right? I'm at least decent. Most of my tests won and I've gained 380 clicks or so. And my CTR has increased by 0.2%. Again, this is a very small sample size. This is just kind of a demo account of the tool ClickFlow, but you can see, like, let's just check out this one over here. The control was Ultimate Guide to Running Ads on Instagram Stories. We got a 1.7, 1.75% CTR. The clicks were 291. Guess what? We make a change when we call it the Ultimate Guide to Running Instagram Stories That Will Generate Massive ROI. Come on, man. Look, 50% increase in CTR. Our impressions have gone up. Our clicks have gone up. Look, if you can just keep making these changes over time across the board to your business, you're going to see results that compound. You're going to easily get to 50,000 visits a month. You're going to easily get to 100,000. easily get to a million. Our target for this year, look, I'm telling you right now, we're at 70,000. The goal that I'm putting my director of content on is to hit 250,000 visits a month. And I actually have much higher aspirations. I want to get to a million, but look, it's doable. You do things like this, you have a content base already, you're going to be able to get there. Okay? Now, the other thing is, what I like about this is it's going to show you the running tests. It's going to show you potential clicks to gain, also the clicks gained, and also when the experiment started. What basically happens is once you decide to start a test, when you decide to kind of change— when you change the title, it's going to look at the previous 15 days, and it's also going to look at the 15 days after. So it's basically an A/A test. It's not exactly an A/B test. And from there, it's going to automatically display the results for you. Okay. So it is looking at your website, it hooks in with your Google Search Console. Once you make the changes, the test will start. And we are actually making, you know, on the product roadmap, we are making a done-for-you service where, you know, this one's a little more manual. We're making more done-for-you service as well that will automatically kind of make the changes for you, but that is going to require you to, you know, use our content delivery network. So we have a couple of different solutions here, but ClickFlow is the thing that we're showing you today. And for those of you that are kind of, I guess, any of you that have any questions on this, I mean, this is how the tool looks. I mean, it's basically in very, very closed beta right now. So it really actually only makes sense for companies that are getting 50,000 visits a month or so. Anyway, I'm going to move back to my slides. I'm going to answer your questions in a little bit. Give me one second. And actually, I'll answer your questions right now, but let me switch back to my slides really quick. Okay, great. So I think you guys should be able to see my screen. I think for those of you that are actually interested in the tool, we're not going to try to hard pitch or anything on this webinar. Just go to singlegrain.com/demo if you think it's a fit for you, and then we'll reach out to you if we think it can actually make a difference for your business. Again, we're in very closed beta right now. We're only taking on, you know, select kind of customers for that. And I'm actually going to dive into your questions in one second. But if you actually want help with your marketing, this is the other side of things. Just go to singlegrain.com/help if you want the agency to help with paid ads, SEO. But again, you know, if we're talking about the ClickFlow demo, just go to singlegrain.com/demo. And now I'm going to open it up for questions. Okay. So let's see. I am reading through the questions right now. Feel free to keep asking questions too. So someone that's asking for ClickFlow, any of you, any of you that are asking for ClickFlow, just go to singlegrain.com/demo for the demo. And then Caitlin is asking, when posting on content platforms with higher traffic, so like LinkedIn, how do you make sure that you're not competing with your own site? Do you not post it on your own website too, or do you use canonical tags? So great question, Caitlin. I remember we answered this on Marketing School a while back, but here's what you want to do. Like, if you think about, there's a lot of people that post to Medium, for example, that they're basically syndicating their content to Medium, right? And what happens is Medium actually allows you to have a canonical tag, which is exactly what you're suggesting, that points back to kind of the original source, right? That does help you. That does save you. But here's what I recommend. Like, if you're going to post to like, take a piece of content and post it to like LinkedIn or Medium, keep in mind that those platforms have their readers read in a unique way, right? So Medium, it's like, you know, you have, it's very well designed. It's beautiful. And, you know, things are very well spaced out. You have a lot of subheaders and bullets, maybe not that much media. It's a lot of text, right? It's very simple to kind of consume. Now with LinkedIn, I'll tell you what's working right now. LinkedIn kind of posts where people are sharing kind of their their kind of entrepreneurial stories, like LinkedIn is good for that, right? But, you know, the kind of the LinkedIn blog posts right now, they aren't working that well, at least from what I've seen. So if you want to make LinkedIn work, just a side tip, Caitlin, think about how you can make the post work, because I'm sure you've seen a lot of that take off right now. Okay. I'm opening up chat. I have too many Chrome extensions. Yeah, it is clickflow.io if you want to learn more. You can also go to singlegrain.com/demo. That's actually where you fill out the form, and that's where myself and my co-founder will actually kind of review and see who we can actually help a lot with that thing. It's definitely not a fit for everyone. Just keep in mind, we're scratching our own itch here. It's definitely not cheap either. So let's see. Does ClickFlow keep GSC, so Google Search Console data, in a database to allow longer-term reporting? Okay. Fantastic question. So the reason why we created ClickFlow, one of the reasons at the beginning, is because Google Search Console only gave us 90 days of data. Now they're giving us 1 year, right? But what ClickFlow will do is it'll give you past the 1 year. So, you know, as long as you have the tool, it's going to give you all that data. We're going to be storing that within our database. Okay. Malcolm is saying that he used to rank number 1 in Google for website website design, which is great, as well as website development. He says he believed that he lost traffic due to Google penalties and some due to negative SEO. Could I take a look at your site? Okay. So I guess for this question to be helpful for everyone, and Malcolm, we do have episodes on how to recover from Google penalties in Marketing School. So that's what I would recommend. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, people talk about negative SEO, things like that. If negative SEO truly happened to you, All you have to do is just reach out to Google. Oftentimes they'll scrutinize things a little more and, you know, they can take care of it for you. So it does take some time. It's not— I wouldn't say it's very easy to do, but it does take time. How does ClickFlow compare to BrightEdge? I think they're 2 completely different tools. BrightEdge is more of like an enterprise kind of suite, like a management thing. Our tool is more for, you know, making the management or increasing clicks to pages that you already have and making it grow exponentially. And then also thinking about how we can make things more automated for people in the future. Again, staying within Google's guidelines. Oh, fantastic. So Brady says he's up about 2K clicks since he first started running tests. And Brady, we're going to have a chat later this week. Apologize for missing today's. Great. Seems like there's a little more Q&A questions and then we can work towards wrapping up. Just looking at it really quick. Feel free to ask any more questions, by the way. Steph Roberts just said that she's just started doing this for clients and she's calling it— and she's calling— oh, interesting. Okay. So earlier I was talking about hiring a content repurposer, right? But she's calling this role a content syndication strategist. I actually like the sound of that. That sounds really smart. I'm actually going to steal that from you, but I'll give you credit for that, Steph Roberts. I think we're going to be looking for content syndication strategists. Brian Ortega. So he's asking, so I guess some of the stuff I was talking about earlier, you know, how does this apply to a florist? I think, look, when you look at, you know, you have the 1-800-Flowers of the world and you have the Boox of the world, they actually create a ton of content. So I don't think there's any particular boring industry. Like if you Google Moz, so M-O-Z, Moz boring content, you're going to be able to find a lot of different case studies or examples that they have about this type of boring content, quote unquote. Like I certainly think what I do is boring, So, you know, you just think about how you can actually be of value to people. And here's an interesting point, I guess, that applies to life, right? I think instead of trying to be interesting all the time, you have to think about how you can be just interested in other people. Now, when it, when that comes to content marketing, in terms of being interested in other people, that means thinking about, you know, what are the trends? What are people interested in searching for? And then kind of fulfilling that demand and helping those people, right? So it's helping people first, and then eventually you're going to get all the traffic that you want in the world. Dean Martin, any advice on the ideal ratio of how much time spent developing new content versus promoting it? Great question. So I have this one interview on Growth Everywhere where I talked to this guy named Derek Halpern. So that's D-E-R-E-K, last name is Halpern. So that's A-H-A-L-P-E-R-N, Derek Halpern. And so what he said was, And keep in mind, this guy has a list of about 300,000 to 400,000 people. He's created websites that have about 40 million visits a year, things like that. So I was like, what's the secret, man? Tell me what the secret is. So he said, honestly, like most people spend so much time creating content. They don't spend much time promoting it. What he recommends is the 80/20 rule. You spend 20% of your time creating content, the other 80% promoting it. Because when you're starting on the very beginning, nobody knows who you are, right? It's like starting out. It's like starting like elementary school, right? You know, you're kind of You're growing, you're leveling up. It takes time, right? So reach out to people, build relationships. I would even say, you know, maybe you spend 5% or 10% of your time creating content, the other 90% to 95%, just spend time promoting it. That's how you do it. Brady just asked, who am I most excited to interview on my podcast this year? You know, honestly, Brady, I actually, I actually don't know because there's so many people scheduled. It just kind of happens in a blur. But sometimes, like, because I've scheduled it so far in advance that, you know, I'm just surprised that they actually talk to those people, right? So, you know, I do do some research ahead of time, but like last week I talked to the— or 2 weeks ago I talked to the CEO of Animoto. And then last week I talked to somebody that grew his company from $75 million to $275 million. So that interview is gonna happen or go live in the next couple months. That company is called, I think, I think, Cason or something like that. You should definitely check that one out. So I can't answer your question directly, but you should check out that interview that's coming up. Just asked, his site has gone down tremendously due to unwanted toxic backlinks. He thinks his competitor sent them all. Ranking 3 and now he is ranking number 7. How do I fix it and prevent it from happening? So Kenny, When you drop from number 3 to number 7, that's actually not a huge drop. I actually don't— that actually doesn't seem like negative SEO unless you've lost like— I guess if you can clarify how much traffic you lost. I wouldn't say that's a ton. And keep in mind, there was a Google update that happened late, either late November or middle of December. So you might want to kind of match up your traffic trends with that. Okay, great. So we are going to work towards wrapping up, but if you want to check out the demo, just go to singlegrain.com/demo, fill out the form. You know, both myself and my co-founder will look at it. If you guys actually want marketing help, okay, feel free, go to singlegrain.com/help. And if you want to reach out to me directly, perhaps I can make an intro for you, help you out directly. eric@singlegrain.com. And I will let you get back to your day. I'm hopeful that you got something out of this and I hope you all have a good rest of your 2018. Catch you later. Bye.