SEO Strategies to Scale Your Website and Hire an SEO Team

In this clip, we are going to talk about SEO strategies to scale your website and hire an SEO team. So this is part of a 5-part series around, well, scaling your site with SEO. And if you're coming from YouTube, well, just hit the subscribe and the bell button. If you're not on YouTube, just go to YouTube, type in Leveling Up Eric Siu, and you will find the 5-part series in there. Um, also obviously if you're coming from podcasts, different areas, don't forget to subscribe as well. When I think about all the things I did in the early days around SEO, so I told you I made LightShowVideos.com, HowToGetRidOfPimples.net, and then Portal2Walkthrough.com. And I had— what I learned there was I learned how to buy a domain. I learned how to set a website up, you know, my WordPress website. I learned how to buy content. I learned how to buy design, and I learned how to, you know, get links. I learned all the cheap ways, right? The really scrappy stuff to set things up, because you have to learn how to do it yourself initially. Now, the problem with doing it yourself If you keep doing it yourself the whole time, you're not going to be able to build enough leverage. So what happened for me was, um, and I actually remember I was on the other side of this, but I was building all these little websites and it becomes exhausting because you're doing the same thing over and over. And you know, it just became like I started getting tired and you know, things started to fall through the cracks. I wasn't being as detail-oriented and you know, I would always look at, I would always read these other books, you know, 4-Hour Workweek, you know, people are living on the beach, they're doing everything themselves. And what I learned later was that that's a lifestyle business and that's totally fine. But if you want to be able to grow, you want to be able to scale your SEO, you're going to need a team to do it. And I remember I was hired, uh, back when Upwork was called Elance. I was hired by this company called Rush Order Tees in Philadelphia. And you know, they, they had a team already, you know, they, it was a, it was a sibling company and they had a team running and they wanted to scale their SEO. So they brought me on and you know, they brought me on to help with SEO and eventually they tried to make me a, uh, they did make me a full-time offer. And I actually talked to the founder a couple months ago. Um, and he was a little, still a little disappointed that I didn't join them at the time, but But look, the thing with that is they knew that to build, to build, you know, the empire that they wanted to build, that the SEO empire, you know, the business empire that they wanted to build, they had to build a team. So I didn't know that in the beginning. Eventually I saw that, you know, working for other people that it's really important to build a team. And well, that's when I started to learn how to eventually say, okay, you know what, I'm going to need to learn how to hire people, how to manage people too. And that carried over into how I outsourced when it came to SEO. So I've got a clip for you right now. It's actually from Mark And it's going to help you learn how to scale your website by building the right SEO team.

So with SEOs, most people believe that if their resume is good and they have a college degree and they've done SEO for other companies, they're good. That's the worst way to hire an SEO. Just because someone's been put on a project or a big brand or any website and they say they got these sites rankings, it doesn't really mean that they did. A lot of times it naturally happens or they worked with other people who may have done the majority of the work. The real way to hire SEO is to show someone your website, ask them what changes to make, and ask them, hey, can you implement the changes? If they can implement the changes, they can do everything and not just tell you like, oh, your content's off, it doesn't do X, Y, and Z. I'm like, no, be specific. Your title tag's off. Well, how would you change it? Oh, add in more keywords. No, what would the new title tag be exactly? Letter for letter or number for number, because you can put numbers in your title tag. Once they start giving you specifics and you believe that, hey, this makes sense, it's logical, and it, you know, it goes along with everything else that you're reading online with best practices, then by all means, give them a chance. What I like doing is why not test them out and try them out for a week or a month before you hire them full-time. And that way, you know that they're proven versus those SEOs out there because most of them, whoever you talk to, I guarantee you on the first page or you're going to be at the top spot. I'm really amazing at this. Not really. Where's your own website? Have you ever ranked anything? Show me your own Google Analytics.

Yeah, that's actually the big thing I wanted to talk about. It's the ones that really are good, they have burnt their own websites in the past. That means they've tried a lot of different things, right? They've tried the gray hat stuff, they tried the white hat stuff, the black hat stuff. The key thing I think when it comes to hiring, because when you're hiring an SEO, you're hiring someone that's good at experiments. They're coming up with new ideas. They're running different experiments. Of course, they don't want to do the dirty stuff on your site to burn your business down, but at least they can speak to all the stuff that they've done in the past and what they would do for you. And to Neil's point, being specific and then actually doing, working for you on a project basis. And what you're going to find too is that a lot of these kind of mid-market to enterprise SEOs, they are good at kind of managing something that's already there. They're basically, that's the thing they're managing, right? But For a lot of you that are looking to start to build out a complete kind of strategy to scale your traffic to, you know, 10,000 visits a month, 50,000, 100,000, million+ visits a month, it's executing on a playbook. And oftentimes when you're being hired as that full-time SEO, especially if you're like client-side, which is in-house, not in the agency, you are going to be tasked with a really monumental task of not just doing SEO, but doing content marketing too. So the more, the more seasoned you are with running experiments, The more comfortable you are with and talking to numbers and being held accountable to this stuff, the better you're going to, the better you're going to be as an aspiring kind of full-time hire. But on the other side, for people looking to hire these people, same deal.

And look at what their strengths are. Some people are better at content. Some people are better at on-page. Some people are better at link building. Ask them, what's your weakest strength in SEO? If they say, no, I'm good at everything, well then start drilling into each of them. How, what's your process on creating content? What's your process on doing on-page SEO? How would you build links for my industry? How would you build links for auto insurance or a very competitive industry when you don't have a brand? Make sure that it's very actionable. If they can't give you step-by-step details, it means that they're giving you vague answers, probably based on what they've read online versus what they've actually done from implementing these tactics. You want people who are tactical, who can get stuff done. I would also ask to make sure they know how to modify basic HTML code, because if they can do that, they can make some of the changes themselves. The last thing you want is an SEO person who has to keep going to your developers for little changes like, hey, you know, can you help me create this sitemap? Well, like, no, can't you just install a WordPress plugin or, you know, can't you do it yourself? You want people who can take action as well.

Yeah, and I think on this podcast we've had SEO interview questions, so you can go back, I mean, just go to our Marketingschool.io website and just search for SEO interview questions and you should be able to find some to get you started. They're not the end-all be-all by any means, but it's at least a starting point. Anything else, Neil?

No, that's it. And the last thing, Eric and I both touched on this already, but make sure you check out their own websites. If someone's an SEO and they don't have their own website, I don't know how they're experimenting and learning then. So yeah, they may be good right now, but if they're not continually experimenting and testing out, they may not be great where they put Probably won't be great a few years from now.

All right, so here's one more video from our YouTube channel to go a little deeper. Point number 1, you have to look for the most impressive work that they've done. So I always like to ask, what's the most impressive thing you've done in terms of SEO, and why do you think it's impressive? So from there, they can elaborate. You can ask them what projects they were assigned to, what they're specifically asked to do, what was their contribution, what were they measured on. You can start to get really deep with that kind of question. In fact, This is a question that Elon Musk likes to ask when he interviews people, and he's very— he's known to be very tough on people, which is why he's built such great companies. You might give him your URL and say, hey, what would you do here? And you ask them to do it right in front of you. Slide them to your laptop and say, hey, what do you see on this website? What would you change? Would you make any technical changes? What would you do from an internal linking perspective? What do you think is wrong with our link profile? Do we have some dirty links? Do we need to disavow? What would you do specifically on my site? And from there, you can really evaluate if they know, well, they know what it takes to become successful with SEO. Point number 3 is I always like to ask for referrals when I'm trying to source talent. So one of the key problems with finding good SEOs is there's a big shortage of SEOs nowadays. So I like asking for referrals all the time because, well, in the marketing space, if you look at, even if you aren't known in the marketing space, if you go to a site like inbound.org, if you go to a site like growthhackers.com, you can get referrals just by looking at the people that are posting there. So, that's a good place to source talent. I think going to Upwork, for example, it's a hit or miss for the most part. Point number 4 is, well, what's their SEO process? Tell me how you approach SEO. What's your 90-day plan? How do you look at it? Do you start with an audit first? What do you do exactly? You want to understand how they think, and you need to understand how they think so you can determine whether it aligns with how your thinking is when it comes to SEO. Last but certainly not least, is you have to make sure that you double, triple check on your reference checking. A lot of people will get to the final point and it's like everything passed, they did well on the test, they did well on their SEO process, you're feeling good about them. But when you get to the reference check portion, people aren't feeling that excited about them, especially the first 3 references. Oftentimes you can read between the lines and be like, oh yeah, that guy, Noah. You can tell from that point he's not really that excited, right? You can tell when people are gushing, like let's say for example, some person, A person we hired recently, talked to reference check, and they were gushing. And I said, so how did you feel when that person left?

Devastated.

Why'd you feel devastated? That person was everything to me. How would you rate that person on a scale of 1 to 10 versus their peers?

10.

Right? I never hear 10s. Maybe sometimes I'll get a 9, but I like asking that question because when someone's at a 7 or 8, okay, great. What's stopping them from being a 9 or a 10? Then you start to realize what their true weaknesses are and if they're really they're really a good fit. The final thing I'll add around reference checking is make sure that you do second-order reference checking. You have the first line of defense, the first 3, but you want to ask the first line of defense, hey, who else should I be talking to? Then you get to the real meat and you get to talk to other people that, well, aren't the— aren't buddy-buddies with the first line of defense, right? So you want to get to the bottom of it and you want to do your due diligence because investing on SEO and investing on people is really big, it's a big time commitment, and you can lose a lot of money and lose your shirt that way. All right, so that is the end of this series. So I hope you enjoyed the series. If you haven't seen the entire series yet, go to YouTube, type Leveling Up Eric Siu, and you will find the series there. It's gonna help you grow your SEO. Let me know what you think was missing from the series, 'cause we can make another series as well. Let us know in the comments what you'd like to see from an SEO perspective, and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever platform that you are coming from, and well, we'll see you in the next video over there.