How to Grow Your Organic Traffic WITHOUT New Content Or Backlinks
Eric Siu shows how to increase organic traffic without creating new content or building backlinks. The video focuses on SEO tactics that work within your existing site, like optimizing pages you already have and fixing technical issues that hold you back.
Chapters
Good morning, everyone. We're gonna get it started in about 1 or 2 minutes here. While you people all flow in, very happy morning to you. Getting a little sick here, so apologies if my voice cracks a little bit, but, uh, that's always a little fun. So I'm just curious if you guys can hear me right now. Go ahead and hit the raise hand button. I just want to make sure technology looks good. If you guys can see my screen right now, type yes into the chat and see how it's going from there. And here's the cool thing. Chat's freaking awesome here. You guys can all engage with each other. You guys can all talk to each other. It's cool. You can share links, whatever. You guys can talk crap about me. It's great, right? By the way, if you want to invite your friends to this, have them come in. This is also being broadcasted live on YouTube right now. And yes, Linda, I will be enlarging the size of the slides. I'm just waiting for some more people to come in. But anyway, I'm just curious, where are you guys all coming from? I always check in every week. What city, what country are you coming from right now? Make this bigger. Let's look at the chat. Okay. We got Eric Chestnut from New York. We got, wow. We got people from Mumbai, India. I appreciate you. I can't even say the word right now. I appreciate you coming in and listening at this time. Uh, people in New York, um, Israel. Wow. People all over the place. Eric is 200% better than Neil Patel. Thank you for that. I'll make sure to tell Neil that. Let's see, what else do we got? What else we got here? Burbank, California. I'm actually here in downtown LA, so not far. Jose, Irvine. Leslie's Los Angeles. Again, downtown LA. Arthur's in down— or in LA. And We got Vancouver, we got— wow, Kathmandu, Nepal. That's crazy. That's freaking crazy. Anyway, so we're gonna get started. I appreciate you guys all taking the time to do this. I will share the slides afterwards. The recording will also be— should be shared afterwards as well. So if you feel like you're going to fall asleep or you need to go do something else, well, make sure you actually stay for this one because there's gonna be a nice little free offer for you at the end. It's in relation to a SaaS tool that we're building right now. And it's something that we're really excited about. So anyway, let's get started. So I'm going to tell you guys about a couple of ways where you can grow your organic traffic without having to build new content or backlinks, right? So I'm talking brand new content. You know, people are writing new articles all the time. You know, you're spending a couple hundred dollars, couple thousand dollars on brand new content all the time. And then also backlinks, because we're always so, you know, whenever we think about SEO, We're always trying to build more backlinks, right? Because links and content are the 2 most important things when it comes to Google. And by the way, feel free to ask questions as I'm talking. I talk really quickly. If you need me to clarify something, you need me to repeat something, just type it into chat and then I'll jump in. And just keep this engaging, keep it more of a conversation, keep it fun. We'll do some Q&A at the end as well. Again, make sure you just get one thing from this, take it away, show it to your partner, Show it to your boss, make your business grow. Everyone's going to be happy because you're adding more value to the world. So you guys, my name is Eric Siu. You guys are all coming in from one of our email lists and I run Single Grain, which is a marketing agency. I do a couple of other things as well. These are just some of our clients. I'm not going to talk too much about us. And I also have a podcast called Marketing School. So the cool thing about this training, is that, you know, we are not only just catering to people that are, let's say, advanced, but this is for beginners. This is for intermediate people and also advanced. And if you think, you know, you're not going to get enough value out of this, there's Marketing School. I mean, this podcast, Neil and I, we do it every single day and, you know, we're reaching upwards of 600,000 downloads a month. So, you know, we really enjoy doing this. We just enjoy teaching the, just Kind of any learnings that Neil and I take from our worlds. We both travel a lot. We both do a lot of speaking. So, you know, definitely listen to that. I'm going to check chat really quick. Da da da. Okay, cool. For all you people that listen that say you listen daily, really appreciate that. That helps keep Neil and I going. And honestly, it's not even the listens are great. I think that's that's certainly an important metric. But when we get emails from people saying, "Hey, like I just got my first job." and I don't have a college degree, or I just got to raise my salary, or I just got some more equity in my, in this company. Like that's, that's the thing that keeps me going. And that's what helped keep this podcast, the second one, or actually the first one, Growth Everywhere going. And this is, I actually enjoy doing this one more. This is where I get to learn about entrepreneurial journeys from, you know, people that have founded billion-dollar companies or bestselling authors or people that even invented that little credit card stripe that you have on the back of your credit cards. So this is Growth Everywhere. I've been doing this one for about 4 years or so. And this one gets about, let's say, about 70,000 to 80,000 downloads a month. Okay. So let's actually jump into the content now. Again, if you feel like the content's falling short, whatever, just listen to this podcast. You'll be good. So the hub and spoke model. This model is really interesting because a lot of people, when I see them doing quote unquote content marketing, they're just going on a a publishing schedule, right? Where they're just publishing loads and loads of content. And that, when you're doing that in the very beginning, it's not going to work that well for you. But if you're a publisher, let's say you're like a New York Times, publishing in volume, that is the name of the game because you're basically, you're selling ad space as well. So the hub and spoke model really helps the smaller guys, right? It helps you play the game at a higher level. And I'm going to show you what a real-life example of that looks like. But the idea is this. When we're creating content, we don't want it to just be a fly-by-night, you know, we get a big spike and then like, okay, it doesn't really go anywhere else, right? We want to get more value from it. We want something like this. We want the traffic to continually go up and to the right. It's like building any kind of relationship, right? You want the relationship to ideally last for a long time. Those are the kinds of relationships that are interesting, right? Whether it's, you know, with your family, your significant other, your children, for example, it's for the long-term, right? You're not playing it just for one week. Same thing with buying a car. You're not just, you know, I'm giving you all these analogies. Maybe a car is a better example. You're not going to just buy it and then just drive it for one week and then just let it sit there, right? You're not going to do that. So the hub and spoke model, the way it works is like this. You have one hub page, right? So let's say I'm writing a post on online marketing, for example. I'm going to have one kind of overview page for online marketing. And I'm going to have separate chapters talking about online marketing, getting a little more detailed saying, okay, this is what online marketing is. Maybe what is online marketing? Maybe what are the disciplines around online marketing? It's just different chapters that are all interlinking to each other and they all link to the main hub page. So you can see the hub page as the mother page and these other ones as the children, right? So the hub page is in the middle right here. Let's say you're targeting some kind of short-tail keyword like online marketing. And then you have these other in-depth posts that link back, right? Basically, they're all supporting each other. You're pointing these signals to Google saying, hey, these are all relevant pages. They're all interlinking to each other. I'm not just building one piece of content. I am building a resource. And the search engines should reward this resource because I put this amount of time into it, right? So that's basically the hub and spoke model. And I'm going to show you some real-life examples. I'm going to probably have to ask you to raise your hand when you see my screen switch. With Qualaroo right here, they wrote this post on conversion rate optimization. And I'm going to show you a couple of— you're going to see something that I'm going to talk about a little later that comes into play here. But this post on conversion rate optimization, you can see the hub page here. I just scrolled down a little bit. It says, what is conversion rate optimization? Why conversion rate optimization is important. There's just these different chapters, right? So let me show you this in action. I'm going to stop my share really quick. And then let's switch over to this screen. Let's make sure this is working. Da da da. I'm gonna share my screen. Okay. And then if you guys can share, see the new screen, go ahead and press the raise hand button. Okay, cool. So I'm gonna make this a little bigger so you guys can all see it. So I just Googled conversion rate optimization over here. Okay. This is the short-tail keyword. I think we can all agree that a keyword like conversion rate optimization is a keyword that, you know, if you're running any kind of services or you have a soft piece of software, it's probably a good keyword. So we're going to ignore the ads. Obviously we're going to ignore these other results. We're going to look at result number 1 and number 2. So the beginner's guide to conversion rate optimization, the Qualaroo thing that I just showed you, it switches spots between Moz. Right now it's at number 2. And here's the reason why it's, you know, hovers between number 1 and number 2, and number 2 is really good, by the way. So here's the thing, the Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization right here. You can see this is the hub page, right? So it gives a quick overview of what it looks like. And it says, why, why should you care? But more than anything, I mean, it links to these different chapters, right? What is conversion rate optimization? Why is it important? And you can see the design has changed a little bit. The layout has changed a little bit as well from the last screenshot I showed you. And you'll see why I think this is important in a couple of slides. But this is basically it. This is an example of a hub and spoke model. It's got 12 chapters. It's got a main hub page. This is the page. And then you can see the proof is in the pudding. I just go conversion rate optimization. I'm showing you a number 2 result. Now, just to drive the point home a little further, the keyword online marketing. Here's the thing. I mentioned my co-host, Neil Patel, right, on the Marketing School Podcast. He's got both number 1 and number 2, and they flip-flop with each other. I want to show you what I think is the better result. The Beginner's Guide to Online Marketing right here. Same idea. So if you actually listen to my other podcast, Growth Everywhere, I actually interviewed Neil about 3 years ago asking him, hey, how much do you spend on content marketing? And he said, hey, like when I do these guides, I spend about $30,000 and I give them away for free. So it's just because he wants more traffic. So you can see here, okay, the beginner's guide to online marketing. It's an introduction, why we wrote the guide, who's it for, you know, be laser-focused on your customers. This is just a hub page, right? It's nicely designed and you can click into the chapters and yes, they're nicely designed too. Okay. It's super epic. These are about, you know, 4,000, 5,000 words plus, and then you can move between the chapters and then basically move around, right? So that's what it looks like. It's, again, it's the same kind of idea. You have a hub and you have a— and then you have these different spokes that are supporting each other. Does that make sense? Okay. I'm going to switch over to the other screen really quick, and then I'm going to cover some of your questions as we go through this. And then I might even actually open up a poll too, so we can do some fun stuff there. So let's move over. And let's go back to the PowerPoint. Can you guys see the PowerPoint? Raise your hand. Okay, great, great, great, great. I'm gonna look at your questions really quick. Let's see. And by the way, you guys can use, uh, so you can either use chat or Q&A. I actually don't mind. Uh, let's see. Yes, Brian, absolutely. You'll get a copy of the deck. Okay, cool. So now we talked about the hub and spoke model. Now we need to talk about, well, the secret to maximizing your content, right? So here's the thing. If you look at Wikipedia, I think we all know Wikipedia, right? So Wikipedia, how do they rank number 1 or number 2, number 3 all the freaking time, right? So Abraham Lincoln's— this page is a really good example. So Abraham Lincoln, American president. And the question is, why does it rank so well? So it's because Wikipedia has the almost de facto best pieces of content every single time because people are constantly adding to it. They're making updates to it. They're adjusting it. They're making the best piece. And when you make the best piece of content, you can also Google the 10X or the skyscraper technique, which is from Brian Dean. You are able to attract a lot more links than the other people. So that's the idea behind the skyscraper technique. So if we look at the Abraham Lincoln post on Wikipedia, in 2007, it had about 13,000 words. In 2011, it had about 18,000 words. In 2014, 20,000 words. And then in 2017, it went up to 24,000 words. So the secret is basically continually updating your content. And as a matter of fact, when I was in Mexico last week, I was hanging out with Syed, the CEO of OptinMonster, and we were talking about upgrading content. And he said, you know what? You know what's really easy for people? Like if you just look at certain keywords, let's go back to online marketing. If you Google the keyword online marketing, all you have to do is you search for posts that, or you search for that search result. And you know what? I'm actually going to show you a live result because I actually haven't showed this example before, but I'm going to show you guys because I love you guys. So let me do this really quick. Let me switch my screen. Switch over to this one. And then, okay. All right, you guys see my screen? Yes. Okay, great. So thank you, Amanda. So online marketing right here. Here's the thing. Let's say I am ranking well for a— let's say I wrote something on online marketing. I want to get it on the first page. So Syed was talking and then we're just talking in a circle of other smart marketers. He says, hey, If you have a blog post or you have a piece of content that ranks well for online marketing, all you need to do is just search for online marketing and look at this section, people also ask. Just take that and just answer these questions on that specific page. What is meant by online marketing? How can I promote my business online? How can I start online marketing? That's a very easy way. Just steal this process right here and deploy it to the people that write content on your team. So hopefully that makes sense. And I'll make sure to integrate this into the next presentation because Well, I actually presented that for the first time. So you guys get the first benefit of that. Anyway, going back to the slides, back to the slides. I hope I don't crash. Okay. So going back to the slides, we talked about Abraham Lincoln. So we put this into practice on our site. So we have this one post on the 10 companies with the best digital marketing campaigns. So we added, we basically added sections on Uber. We added sections on American Express. And you can see in the second row, so row 2 where it says number 1, the post was getting about 731 visits a month. Okay. Which is not bad for a blog post. And well, what we did is in 2017, we managed to 4x it to 2,800 a month. Right. So imagine this. Let's say, you know, that post, the average CPC for that post, if you were to pay for that traffic, was about $1 or so. Okay. Well, we, we just basically added About, let's just say, you know, $24,000 plus in free traffic to our site, right? That's, that's on an annual basis, not to mention the conversions that we get from it as well. Okay. That those of you that are really interested in numbers, you know, that should help you kind of quantify the impact of something like this. But also at the same time, as a service-based business, as a marketing agency, here's the thing. It actually drives consultation leads. So we looked at that post. And we looked at one of the months where it was going up and we were like, wow, you know what? It actually drives free consultations. Right? So when you upgrade something, you're tracking it. When people start to ask you, like I have people on my team, you know, sometimes question why we spend so much money on content marketing. Like what's the efficiency of content marketing? Da da da. And then I make it easy. I just say, hey, let's look at all our clients. Every single client is from some form of content marketing. I think, you know what? I think when I'm out there, when I'm out there hosting dinners or when I attend somebody else's dinner, that's content marketing, right? Building relationships to me is content marketing. Doing a blog post, doing speaking, whatever, that's content marketing, right? Without getting too theoretical, I think everything is content marketing. But anyway, for us as an agency, everything's inbound. So that should be more than enough proof for people trying to justify the ROI of content marketing. Anyway, so I think it's also really important to basically educate the stakeholders too. Like let's say you have partners or let's say you have people that are skeptical. It's really important to show them like, hey, this stuff actually works. Like we're spending resources on this. And you can see that we were basically tracking the before, the start date and the end date for when we upgraded pieces of content. And we can see the increase over time, right? Huge increases for us. And it's just something that's easy to do because you've already created that content. Why are you not maximizing those pieces of content? Right. So you're not necessarily creating brand new content. I just gave you a framework you can use. If you're ranking well for something, use a tool like Ahrefs, use a tool like SEMrush. And then from there you can figure out, okay, I rank for these keywords, number 5 to number 30, anything ranking from number 5 to number 30. I want to move those into top 3 position. You start doing things like this, you will get there. Okay. All right. So take your, take your cell phones out. I don't know what you're watching this on. Take a screenshot, whatever it is. I'm going to give you a framework that I've been talking about, that I've been sharing with people for quite a while now. So this is the content reusage workflow. This is by Aleida Solis, who's a really good international SEO. I believe she's based in Spain. It's just a really easy framework to follow. You can hand this off to your content team, whoever's leading your content. Keep it simple, right? So ask yourself, if you're looking at a piece of content, is this topic covered by existing content? Well, you know, if it's outdated, so we look at the first square at the top right. Or diamond, I guess. Let's look at that one. So is it outdated and is the featured information not useful anymore? If yes, then let's go ahead and update it. If not, is it incomplete or is there something we can add to it? I just gave you that framework where you can just take those 4 questions from a Google SERP, just expand it. If not, okay, could it be covered in other formats to make it easier to understand or use? So as an example, there is a woman over here in California. And her name is Chalene Johnson. So she sells different courses. And what she does is her framework is going live on Facebook and then seeing from there, you know, what topics people really resonate with. Right. And then creating separate webinars for, you know, those pieces of content. And then you can make them into separate blog posts. You can make them into separate YouTube videos. You can make them into social media posts. That's how you go about repurposing things. Right. So that's the thing. Like you don't necessarily need to create brand new content all the time. Look at what you have already. And then the thing is, when you create brand new content, there's a lot of, there's a lot of brainpower that goes into it. I'm not saying you don't need to always create brand new content. You should be, but, you know, think about adding more repurposing into the workflow. That way more people can see your work, right? You don't, you don't just, here's the thing. Even when I do speaking, for example, I don't just, you know, talk on a topic once and that's it. I constantly refine it. I constantly update it. Maybe I can put another spin on it, but, you know, if people found it useful, why am I not making the use, the, the, the maximum or making the maximum usage of it. So that's basically how this works. Before I go on, I'm actually going to ask you guys a quick question. So I'm going to open up this poll really quick. I'm going to launch it right now, and I'm going to keep this open for 30 seconds. So tell us what your business revenue was in 2017. Really curious to know. I mean, it's good to just get a breakdown because I probably should have done this earlier. But, um, go ahead and fill it out and I'll tell you why we do this. All right, closing it in 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Here are the results. So 77% of you are under $1 million, 18% $1 to $5 million, and then 3 or 4% $5 to $10 million, and then 1% in $10 million plus. So the reason why I do this, and I'll share this open with you guys, the reason why I do this is A, to get a drink of water because I talk really fast and that's the first drink of water that I got. B, it's just good to know who's in the audience so I can tailor the presentation to everyone. And I'm going to be answering your questions at the end as well. But, um, you know, it's a good mix of people all the time, right? So I got to make sure that, you know, I'm serving all of you and getting you what you need. Um, and also marketing to you later because I'm a marketer. So that's that. And then I'm going to open up the Q&A really quick. Uh, part of the screen text is cut off. Part of the chart is cut off. Are you guys, are any of you facing that issue? Um, and then Lucy asked, would you recommend copying the people also asked for and then putting our own answers to them on each blog post. So Lucy, what I would say is without complicating things, I think Lucy is talking about the framework where I said, look at the search result page and look at those 4 questions. I recommend that you just answer those 4 questions on a page that you're ranking well for already. If you're not ranking well for that specific term, go ahead and write separate blog posts for them. But I'm all about kind of taking the assets that you have already and then upgrading it. Because here's the thing, if Google is ranking you already for that piece of content and you add more to it, It's going to rank even better. Just look at Abraham Lincoln, right? It's entrenched in that position. Okay. Vishal has asked, this is a pretty epic question. I wanted to know a few things. Let me press this button. Let's see what it does. Answer live. You would like to answer this question live. Well, yeah, I don't know how that works, but let me answer that question now. So, okay. Vishal asked, I wanted to know a few things about backlinks since I work at a startup called Woovly, which is bucket list content. Multiple categories to work on. For instance, our tool, we connect a group of like-minded people and help them to accomplish their bucket list goals, which is narrowed down to travel, photography, adventure, sports, extreme sports, health and fitness, and food. So in this case, according to you, what would be relevant sites to focus so that our SEO works effectively, preferably off-page optimization? So I'm going to keep this simple for everyone. This really applies to everyone. This kind of website, you're going to be building a lot of content. Your, your on-site, having the right foundation in the beginning is super important, like in terms of your, your sitemap, your site architecture, all that. Because if you start building links to this stuff and the site architecture is not optimized, you're going to be in a world of pain, right? So it's really in your best interest to look at similar bucket list websites or even look at travel websites because they spent millions of dollars on SEO. Look at how they do it. And what I would recommend doing is having your most important categories on the homepage. Build links towards the homepage, have them trickle down. That's how ecommerce sites rank well, right? They have really good site architecture. A lot of links are going to the homepage. That link equity is flowing to these other categories. And then those categories link to product pages. Product pages will link to different SKUs. So everybody gets some internal linking love. Okay. Anyway, moving on with the presentation. So I talked about Marketing School. Neil and I have done over 550 episodes now. We've been doing this for about a year and a half or so. So what we did was, it's like, okay, Neil, we're spending all this effort recording all the time. Why don't we try to make the most of this? So we created a blog called marketingschool.io. And, you know, we just started adding our show notes to this site, right? We're like, okay, we're doing these show notes, you know, we're transcribing the content too. Why don't we just throw it on a website, see how it goes? So we have marketingschool.io. It looks a lot better than this now. This is the old version. But here's what happened. We just started throwing content on there. And over time, the traffic just kept going up, just kept going up, right? No links, just pure content. So we're like, okay, well, that's good. You know, it's getting about 5,000 visits a month. It's nothing to write home about, but it's not bad, right? So, you know, the question was like, okay, well, if we didn't build any links, we're building all this content. How do we get even more out of this? Okay. So basically what we did was we took all that content from marketingschool.io and we're like, okay, why don't we move that over to singlegrain.com, which has a higher domain authority? So once we did that, our traffic shot up by over 20,000 visits a month. And some of you are probably wondering, well, Eric, isn't that duplicate content? And what I recommend looking at, and yes, technically it is duplicate content, but Google doesn't really mind because if you look at what Matt Cutts said about duplicate content a couple of years ago, Just Google Matt Cutts, C-U-T-T-S, Matt Cutts duplicate content. They start looking at duplicate content when you're producing, we're talking hundreds or thousands of the same thing over and over and over. I'm not saying you guys should go out and scrape content, 'cause that's not the way to do it. I mean, I actually think that's really dirty, but we took something that we had already that we own. We took that asset, moved it over to another asset, and then that lifted everything across the board. So that's one way you can go about doing it. I think, you know, when I think about all the content we're doing around podcasting, which is audio, I think about all the content we're doing around video as well. It's just like, man, you know, we're creating a lot of content. Why aren't we trying to figure out how to maximize it in terms of, you know, domain authority and then also even transcribing the content too? So that's what you can do. And the next thing I want to talk about is Google Search Console. So if you use Google Search Console, go ahead and raise your hand. I want to see who in the audience actually uses Google Search Console. Wow. Okay. That's a lot of you. So it looks like about 30 to 40% of you actually use Google Search Console. So I'm going to show you how Google Search Console can help you get more traffic from what you have already. But I'm also going to show you where it falls short as well. And this is where I'm going to show you a little neat toy that we put together that you will have the privilege Of getting access to, so I'm gonna I'm gonna re reshare. Let's move this over. Let's take a look at right here. All right, if you guys can see my screen, raise your hand really quick. Okay, great. Thank thank you guys for being really engaged about this. Like Zoom, honestly, I have no affiliation with Zoom. I just keep harping on how Zoom is such a great webinar system, at least for. What we do. So in Google Search Console right here, there's a new version of Search Console. I'm using the old version right here. Well, we'll do a tutorial for both because I like you guys. So what you do is you go to the search analytics section and it's like, yeah, you know, traffic's going up. Awesome. Make this a little smaller. Okay, great. So what you do when you go into search analytics in the Google Search Console dashboard, what you do is you sort by clicks, impression, CTR. And then you go from queries, you switch it over to pages. Now you're asking, Eric, why are you even doing this? Like, well, why? This makes no sense. Okay. Well, what we're doing is we are looking at the pages that have a high impression count, but a low click-through rate. So what does that mean? That basically means Google is giving you the impressions for a piece of content, but you are not doing your job as a marketer. to bring people to your website. So if the click-through rate sucks, right, title's not good and a meta description is not good, or either or, right? Or it could be both. So you can see here, you know, we have this one post over here. Oh, look at this post, like 3,800 keywords now, or 3,800 clicks per month now. It's getting even better, right? We start from 700, went up to 2,100. Now we're at 3,800. Proof's in the pudding. So, okay. Number 3 right here, we can see the CTR is, you know, my average CTR across the board is about 1.83%. We can see here we have a 0.46% CTR. Google's giving me 88,000 impressions. I'm getting 413 clicks. Man, if I can even get that to 1%, I'll get 400 additional clicks per month, and that'll be an additional 5,000 clicks per year. Imagine if I just keep making these changes across the board. You know, we have this 1.76% on video engagement, probably important to us because we started our video production team and we've been doing videos for clients. And we have things about keyword tracking and all that. And it says 2017, probably should change that, right? So the idea here is that you're constantly like, you'll export this. And then what you'll do is you'll just make the title and meta description adjustments, and then you'll be good to go from there. It's a fairly manual process, which is why we built the tool that we built. But this is the old Search Console. So because I like you, I'm going to do the new Search Console as well. And then what we're going to do is we're going to hit open report with performance. And then we are going to do, click on impressions and then click on the average CTR. And then what we're going to do is go to switch to pages over here. And we're going to do the same thing. We're going to sort by impressions going down. And you can see here, this shows the last 3 months. And this one, the SEO tools one is really bad. It's actually even worse than what we saw for a 28-period. So probably should make adjustments here. I recommend, you know, just taking like 50 or 100 or so and then exporting it. Now, the cool thing with Search Console now is I think you can actually go— yeah, you can go back 12, even, you know, 12 months. So it used to be that you can only go 3 months or so. Now you can go even beyond that. So that's what I like about Search Console. Now here's the thing. Search Console falls short on a couple of things. A, it's very manual. B, it doesn't tell me how much more traffic I can gain per page or even per category. It doesn't show me how much more money I can make, because I think, you know, we're doing marketing, we probably want to make more money at the end of the day, or, you know, whatever goal we're trying to acquire or hit, not acquire. We're not trying to acquire any goals. We're trying to hit the goals. But anyway, so we created a tool called ClickFlow. And this is the Single Grain site right here. And, you know, it basically shows you, okay, how you're doing with the tool, right? So it shows you the click increase over a 3-month period, the CTR increase, you know, the number of tests that I've created and the ones that I've won. So 11 out of 14, not so bad. And then the revenue growth I've gotten from using the tool. So this is dummy data that we have right here. It's not real data, but I just want to give you an idea of how this looks. Excuse me. So here's how it looks. When we first log in, we have a Suggestions tab over here, and the Suggestions tab will show us, okay, well, Eric, on the website, the average click-through rate is about 1.33%. And then the average, the average CTR is 1.33%. And then we're allowed to set a target threshold for what we want to aim for, right? So let's say I want to aim for a 2% average CTR across the entire website. I can set it to 2% over here. Some websites like, you know, I, you know, my friend's gun blog has about like an 8% CTR, average CTR. And then maybe he wants to aim for 9 or 10%, right? So I have different thresholds. It just depends on your niche. Now what happens is it will also show me how much more revenue I can gain. So it shows me I can gain 10,000 more clicks per month and then how much more revenue I can gain. So basically I just entered that in by, let's say our conversion rate is 1%. And then our conversion value is about $500. It just does the calculation for you over here. And then based on the 2% threshold, I can get about 10,000 clicks per month, which is not bad, right? So right here, I can see the very first suggestion is, you know, talks about effective SEO techniques that work in 2018 and beyond. 1.96% CTR. Okay. That's probably okay. Not bad. But how about this one? We rank for San Francisco SEO agency. SF Agency, you know, focus on your ROI. Maybe that, that's something to add, right? Maybe we can write something, a better title than that. All we need to do is hit the add button, right? And then it's added to the pending tests, right? So then we have pending tests over here. And what that means is this. Our system is waiting for you to change the title or the meta description on your website. Once you change it, the test will automatically start over here. That's basically all it means. And each test is run over a 15-day period and it compares to the last 15 days just to see how things are going, right? So these are all pending tests because, you know, the system's waiting for you to make a change on your site. Now we're also adding a done-for-you version down the road, and then we're also adding a fully automated version as well. So you can see right here, these are the completed tests. This is the control version I had. You know, we had a post here on YouTube advertising checklist. Well, the CTR was about 1.3%. The clicks coming from it was about 129. We just changed the title here to step-by-step checklist and the CTR went up 23% and the clicks went up 50%. Now, again, this is dummy data. The implications for this are huge, especially if you're getting 6 or 7 figures plus traffic from Google per month. If you make these kinds of changes, these are— this is like additional 6 figures in revenue, this additional 7 figures in revenue, additional 8 figures in revenue, right? You can see we changed this one on podcast advertising. I really liked this one, you know, the ultimate guide to running Instagram ad stories that would generate massive ROI, you know, great, went up 50%, right? 63%. So if you're getting, you know, you have one post where you're getting, you know, 200,000 or 300,000 visits a month and it's evergreen and you're able to squeak out additional 50,000 or 100,000 visits a month from that one, you know, that's money in the bank. So, you know, you're able to restart the test as well. You're also able to dive into things at a page level just to see how the page is doing over time. You can see this one, the traffic's going up over a 3-month period. And what I like about this is for me, it saves me time because all the tests that I've ran will be recorded in here. So I don't have to keep manually putting things into Excel sheet. I can also see the top 50 keywords for these pages as well. And we're also working on a partnership with SEMrush now where we will get the keyword volume data for you. So you can write better headlines at the end of the day. And again, if you don't want to do it, we're going to add a done-for-you service as well. So, I mean, this is the tool at a high level. And I'm actually going to jump back into the presentation to see what slides we have left. So yeah, you have Search Console, you have the new one, you have ClickFlow as well. We're in private beta on that. But you're on this training with me, so we'll talk about the goodie in a second. Okay, so we're back and we showed it to you live, and then I'm going to make this bigger. So all you need to do right now, I mean, if you want to see, if you actually want to give ClickFlow a whirl, I ask that you just don't share this link right now. Just go to singlegrain.com/demo. We are doing private beta. We're in private beta right now. We're actually, you know, we're doing a lot of, you know, talking with customers. We've onboarded a couple of customers too. And, you know, the feedback has been incredible. So go to singlegrain.com/demo. And then if you actually need help with your marketing this year, you can just go to singlegrain.com/help. And then these are our clients. But again, I'm going to open it up for questions, but just go to singlegrain.com/demo if you want to mess with it. And happy to get your feedback. So It is now time. It is time for Q&A. Opening up for Q&A. Ask whatever you want. Okay. Scott is asking— oh, Scott Colnut, you're back on again. Love it. Thank you. So Scott Colnut recommended try Chrome extension Similar Sites. That's cool. Wow. People are watching this on iPhone 7. That's cool. Okay. So Scott, Selasky. Not sure if I pronounced that right, but is it wise to post the full podcast transcript for SEO purposes? So let me give you an example. When I used to lead marketing at Treehouse, which is an online education company a while back, we did a lot of these videos. Once we published the transcripts, our traffic, organic traffic jumped by about 20%. So not bad. Linda is asking, do I have a paid service to get our domain authority ranking? Yeah, you can use SEMrush, you can use Moz, or you can use Ahrefs. Let's see, Tim. Okay, Tim's asking about businesses and web content that are highly specialized with low click volumes. Do the same techniques work? Absolutely they do. So let me give you an example, Tim. Let's say you are selling plungers online. It's very niche, right? Nobody talks about plungers. What would work for you is thinking about how you can take it one step higher, right? So instead of talking about plungers, maybe you can talk about home improvement or DIY, that kind of stuff, right? That way you can build a bigger audience because if you have a bigger audience and then you become known as the plunger guy, great. But if you niche too small, it's hard in the beginning. So I think it's important to niche, but But, you know, sometimes you got to jump one level higher. Eddie's asking about how to get the beta of Search Console. You actually all have the ability for that right now. If you have Search Console, you just need to click the button to get access to it. Brian's asking— okay, yeah, thanks, Linda. You covered me. And then now I'm going to read the questions. I was actually reading the questions from the chat box. But now I'm going to read it from the Q&A. So start from the bottom. Actually, let's start from the top. Let's do that. Someone's asking if marketingschool.io is still up. Yes, absolutely. It's still up. Caesar is asking, what if we don't have much control of the amount of content we have on our product pages where we make our sales? We're an e-commerce site pushing for a more minimalistic design. So, wow, maybe I shouldn't go to the office today. So anyway, and by the way, you guys should write in chat if you think I should go to the office or not, because I love going to the office, but I don't want to get people sick. Anyway, so Caesar's asking that. I think, Caesar, what you can do is you can have a blog and write the content there. And here's the other thing. When you think about where the attention is nowadays, look at YouTube, look at Instagram. A lot of people are putting their efforts there. You know, the blogging, it is, it's much harder now because, you know, we're talking millions of pieces of content are being published every single day. But, you know, the attention is really with, you know, the Instagrams and the YouTubes of the world. So trying to build some kind of brand there, that would lend a lot in terms of helping you grow. Let's see. Lucy says Google Search Console says that you have— there's a couple errors. Sitemap is HTML, HTM, and won't show me my data. You probably would have to— honestly, the answer for me is I don't know. What I would do at this point is I'd probably Google the error itself and then try to find a solution. How do you decide if a single large post is better than the hub model you mentioned? So what I usually like to do, let's say you're starting out and you have— if you're starting out, what you want to do is you could just publish smaller blog posts. And then later, once you start to see things do well, in Google Analytics or you look at Ahrefs, what you can do from there is you can just decide what to upgrade and what to make into hub and spoke. That's basically what we do at Single Grain a lot. We look at what's already performing well and we look at how we can make them stronger. If you think about— and for those of you that have watched Power Rangers before or like Voltron before, you think about all the Zords and all the Tigers, they're separate, but when you combine them to make the bigger, the Voltron or the Megazord, Well, you know, it's a lot more powerful, right? And you can defeat the bigger monsters. That's what you want to do. That's— you got to combine the efforts to defeat the bigger monsters. I'm not even sure if that makes sense to everyone, but that's all I got. Okay, so Nihal said, you migrated complete content from previous site to Single Grain. How did this affect and how did Google not recognize it as duplicate content? I'm pretty sure they did. But as Matt Cutts said in that post, They don't really look at things unless it's like, they're producing like a perverse violation is like 200 to 1,000 pieces of content. Right. So, you know, marketingschool.io is still there. What we have done to kind of add more value on marketingschool.io with those transcripts, we have the show notes, but we don't have the transcriptions there. So we have the transcriptions on singlegrain.com. Raymond's asking, can I re-explain the companies you're working with and how they would, they would be an added benefit to what you're already doing with ClickFlow? Not sure how to interpret that question, but the companies we work with, we help them with paid advertising and SEO. ClickFlow is a SaaS product that helps you optimize the content that you already have. Ideally, it's a tool where you have a site that has at least over 50,000 visits from Google per month, ideally over 100,000. And those of you, the ClickFlow link where you say you're stuck on billing, just use the little Intercom chat button on the bottom. Either my co-founder or I, actually, we're going to just jump into it and help you with that if you need that. Okay, I'm still looking through the questions. Vishal is asking, what's the best competitor analysis tools to find out the top backlinks? So I like either, I like either Ahrefs or SEMrush. Those 2 are really good. I use Ahrefs a lot to look at competitors' backlinks just to see how they're doing over time. And actually in Ahrefs as well, I like the ability where it shows like, you know, the number of new keywords that are ranking and then top 3, top You know, top 4 to 10, all that kind of stuff. How much link building is too much? I think this actually ties in with looking at your competitors. If you think they're doing really well, you look at them, look at what their link velocity looks like. And then, you know, those tools will show you a graph in terms of how quickly they're building links and what volume they're at. That's a really good link. Yeah. Let me see if I can— if you guys look at the chat right now, Dylan posted the, how does Google handle duplicate content? There's a video from Matt Cutts that Dylan Brady just put in. Linda's asking, what if your service doesn't lend to video or beautiful photos on Instagram? Linda, I'm curious to learn what your business is. What else besides blogging will help? So podcasting would be good. Like, I'm talking to you through audio right now. Like, I'm building a relationship with you. Yeah. And just, yeah, you have the written word, you have audio, you have video as well. I think nowadays everything's basically available. Everything's fair game. Market research. Okay. Interesting. So here's the thing, Linda, we work with a market research company based in Barcelona and they do really well. We run Facebook Messenger ads. So we collect subscribers in Facebook Messenger and then we message them through there because we're always looking to collect data. And to incentivize the consumers to fill out the surveys, we basically, you know, we'll do that. And that works really, really well. We're getting, you know, we're knocking the cost per acquisition number out of the park. Amanda. So Amanda says she has a pretty unsexy industry. So photocopier sales. So where I would take that is one level up, right? Like when you talk about, when you talk, like you got to think about the people that are, that are buying these, these photocopiers, right? Like, what are they trying to do? Right? Who are they trying to reach? And then where do these people hang out? Right? And then from there, I mean, you're basically building out different personas and you're getting into the head of like what these people are interested in. And you can go from there. Because I think no industry is too boring. Again, if you start with like plungers, for example, you think about like, well, what are those people interested in? Right? They want to keep it like a nice home. Right? Home improvement's really important to them. Right? Or, you know, they just, they don't want to deal with their They don't want to deal with the mess that they put out. But you can get creative. I mean, there's actually this one post on Moz about how to create content for boring industries. Just Google that. That should help you get to where you want to go. How many internal links every article with good traffic should have in order to help the overall website ranking? So in general, you don't want to think like So I recommend that you change the way you think about that. I think it's, again, you have to look at your competitors first, look at how they're doing. You have to look at how competitive that keyword is. And that's how you're going to be able to rank. Because here's the thing. When we create content for the gun industry, again, I'm not into guns, don't chastise me. But when we create content for guns, for example, it does well because that industry is still fairly new, right? And just like when people are creating content around cryptocurrency, It's still fairly new, right? But when you're in such an entrenched industry like digital marketing, for example, it is, it is much more difficult. So you have to look at how competitive it is. You can look at the keyword difficulty using a tool like Moz or SEMrush or Ahrefs. Tyler Bauer on Keyword Finder, kwfinder.com. I've actually never used it before, but there's another tool called lsigraph.com if you want more ideas on creating content. Totally didn't answer your question, but just gave me another thought. So sorry. Okay, great. Let me check the Q&A, see if we have any final questions, and then we will be on our way. So Vishal, I'll tell you. Okay. So I don't— I think the people that are asking for like, how many links should you build per article? Or like, what's the perfect word count for an effective article? I think it just, or how much link building is too much. I think it just really depends on the, um, the, the industry that you're in. Right. So right now the perfect word count for us, we're kind of zigging, we're kind of zagging where other people are zigging. Right. So, you know, people in the internet marketing industry, they're just, you know, they're creating a lot of blog posts. Right. Um, and a lot of people are starting to do long-form, um, blog posts now. So yeah, we do long-form blog posts. We're talking 1,500 to 2,000 words, but you We're like, okay, we need to double down on webinars. We got to double down on podcasts. We got to double down on video as well, because other people aren't doing this right now. So you got to think about the things other people aren't doing and look at what's working well for other industries and think about how you can go in a different direction. Because when everyone starts to go into one area, we talk about that, that's a red ocean, right? You want to go towards where there's more of a blue ocean. So Google blue ocean strategy. Think about that for your business. Think about that from your marketing perspective. And that's going to help you grow. For a blog, we are adding a keyword in the title of a blog, meta description, and in the content as well. You are not over-optimizing. So that's her question or his. Okay. So I am going to be taking off now. I'm going to go recover a little bit because I'm getting a little sick. And so hope you enjoyed this. Just go to singlegrain.com/demo if you're interested in ClickFlow. If you're having any issues, use the little chat box. I'm curious to get your thoughts on how it goes. It's definitely going to help you people that have sites that have over 600 or 6 figures in Google traffic a month. So I will catch you all later. And until next time, keep growing.
