SEO Superstar Stephan Spencer Reveals What's Working Now

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue.

Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. I'm sorry, I mean the most selfish podcast on itunes. I am your host Brad Costanzo and I say it's the most selfish podcast on itunes because I literally love the fact that I get to sit down for half hour, an hour or more with some of the brightest minds out there and systematically pull all of the stuff that I want to know about their expertise out of their brains. And they tell me all about it. And I get to let you guys listen in and eavesdrop on conversations that I want to have anyway with experts and people that I want to talk to. If you've listened to some of my most recent episodes, for instance the one with Anton Kraly from Drop Ship Lifestyle, you'll understand exactly what I mean in that I'm asking questions that are going to improve and affect not only my businesses, but those of my clients and business partners. And I love to go deep. There's no script on the show. We never know where these conversations are going to go and I invite you along on this journey. Usually it's going to pay to have a pen and paper if you're driving. You may not want to do that, but oftentimes I love to get my guests to reveal some just really sizzling hot business advice. The kind of stuff that you probably wouldn't hear them giving away for free. Except that unless you're listening to my show and today's no different, I have got a amazing expert on the call today. It's Stefan Spencer and he's an internationally recognized SEO expert and a consultant and best selling author.

He's the co author of a book called I should should call it a Brick instead of a book. It's called the Art of SEO and it's now in his third edition. And I met Stefan at.

A mastermind hosted by Neil Strauss, like seven or eight time best selling author Neil Strauss where I think that was the very first time we met. And I also received his book which is right here and it is so comprehensive about everything about the art of SEO.

He is the author of another book called Google Power Search and a co author of a book called Social E Commerce. And he founded Netconcepts way back in 1995 and grew it into a multinational SEO agency before he sold it in 2010 to a company called Cover IO. Now he invented a pay for performance SEO platform called Gravity Stream, which was also acquired and is now a big part of REO SEO. His clients post acquisition include little bitty companies such as Zappos, Sony and Chanel. And he's also the host of two popular podcast shows called the Optimized Geek and Marketing Speak. I don't know if he wanted those to rhyme on purpose, but I love the way they do. Stefan, welcome to Bacon Wrap Business.

Thank you Brad. It's great to be here.

It's cool to have you, man. So you are piping in right now from Tel Aviv, Israel, is that correct?

That is correct. It's already the evening.

Yeah, it's 10pm Your time. It's like noon mine. It's funny, I was recording an episode with copywriter named Adol Amarsi yesterday. He's over in London and It was like 10 or 11 o' clock his time. So I appreciate you guys who are staying up, burning the late night hours to talk to us. But dude, once more, it's great to have you on the show. You and I met, I think it was at Neil's originally, but we keep on running into each other at a lot of other events from yes we do. Todd Herman.

Yeah, we were just at Social Media Marketing World, the Mike Koenig's social mixer thing that he did after the Social.

Media world Todd Herman's 90 day year. There's just been a whole lot of stuff and it's always cool to run into you. But this is what's super cool about this right now is and I've been a guest on your show as well, but that's where I did most of the talking. And this is kind of really cool for me to get inside your brain and pull some of this stuff out about.

Some of the things that you are working on or have seen that works and doesn't work. As one of the top SEO experts in the world who's been doing this for a very long time, I'll be honest, One of the things about SEO is it is probably personally my weakest area of expertise in all of digital marketing, right. It's like I'm much more of a direct response guy. I'm like paid ads and doing all this other stuff. And for me, SEO has always been such a shifting landscape.

Every new algorithm update, every new Change things, flip around. And I just got sick of trying to figure it out. So that's why I rely on people like yourself for that. But I'll tell you, that's why I.

Love it, though, because it's so hard for your competition to stay up to date. And if you're the kind of person who loves change and evolution, you can thrive in this environment. It is fast moving, but it's also. That's what makes it exciting and gives you the edge. Perfect.

Well, what I'm going to ask you about is how to get that edge very, very shortly. I'm also going to give you a very like, I love sharing some real world, either challenges or questions I've got with some of my businesses, like, man, what should I do in this case? And I'll share those here in just a minute. For all the listeners, you want to stay tuned because that's usually where the best stuff comes out. But I also know that you've got a pretty cool crazy backstory in history about just how you got into all of this and some of the weird twists and turns your life has taken. Give us a quick backstory around your journey.

Okay, well, where do I start? I guess I could start where I was studying for a PhD in biochemistry and I met Rob McCool at a conference back in 1994. Rob McCool, do you know who that is?

I've heard of him, but I don't know a lot about him.

Well, he's the inventor of Apache, which is the web server software that runs most of the Internet. And at the time he was the creator of Netscape Server. And I had not heard of Netscape before until meeting him. And this was 1994. So I was super starstruck and excited studying biochemistry. I knew my track was going to be become a postdoc and then become a professor and make a whopping 60 or 70 thousand dollars a year. I just decided that this was the train that I needed to hop on. And within a couple of months, I dropped out of my PhD. So I was up to my eyeballs in student loan debt. I decided to talk my way into a conference that was $2,000, but I didn't have any money, so I needed to get in for free. And I did. It was called how to Market on the Internet. It was an IQPC conference, a big conference organization that has conferences all over the world. So I was a mic runner. That was my job. I was a volunteer. That's how I got in for free. And I was quickly realizing, like Wait a second. I know a lot more than some of these speakers. So I have the mic, I might as well chime in. And I know that's pretty cheeky for somebody to do, but I was 24 years old and screw it, you know, I was like.

I'll just add value and see what happens. What I didn't expect to happen was at the end of the day to be uninvited from day two of the conference by the conference organizer. But I don't regret it because I got two huge accounts from that day. I got a big stack of business cards, people coming up to me and saying, you know, more than the speakers. It's amazing. And some of the speakers were big name people like GM o', Donnell, founder of Modem Media So I was upstaging them, I guess they didn't like that. And I was asked not to come back. But two of those names that I got, two of those business cards ended up becoming half million dollar accounts, each of them. So I didn't have to get angel funding, I didn't have to get friends and family funding, nothing. I just started building websites and doing online marketing for those clients. And then, you know, going from there to within a few years, I had Bird's Eye as a client. And then I got this crazy idea that I could do this Internet thing from anywhere. It was 1999. I applied for residency, permanent residency in New Zealand. I'd never been there and I don't know what drove me to do that, it was just intuition. But I got in and then I convinced my wife at the time and my kids that hey, let's do this, let's move halfway around the world. And I tried to sell the business. This was back when so still early days of SEO and so forth, couldn't do it. I had interwoven my own personal brand too much into the Net Concepts brand and nobody wanted to buy it without me.

Of a personal brand. Right. Like it's big danger.

Yeah. So if you make your personal brand and your company brand intermingle too much, then be prepared to go with the company. And essentially you have a job, you're self employed, you don't have a company, you don't have an asset that can make money and do its thing without you. So I learned, and it's hard just.

To interject right there, you know, the challenging part is when you do it, when you're growing your business, when you inject a personal brand on there to give your brand a face and name and personality, etcetera it is a great accelerator. It can be if you've got a good personal brand, but it can be a great accelerator and it can get you to the finish line quicker than just having a generic company. But what you just said is the, is the caveat, which is you have to be careful about tying yourself too much to it, to where they're buying you. And some of the best advice I've gotten, which is instead of trying to be the guru and build a cult of personality around yourself, treat yourself like a pitch man or a pitch person, I guess I should say for the product to where it's almost interchangeable, where yes, you can be out there, you can be doing the pitch, but you're still seen as the pitch person for it and you're not just selling yourself. And it's a little tweak, but I think it's an important one for anybody with a personality driven business.

Well, you know, my take on it is a little bit different, but it's close. I don't want to neglect my personal brand and I don't think anybody should because you take that to the grave. That goes with you through whatever careers and companies. So don't neglect your personal brand. That said, if you inextricably link your personal brand with your company brand, well, that no longer is a standalone asset. The point of a business is that you eventually sell it, you exit. And if it's not built to sell. Right. So that's the name of a book by John Warlow. If you haven't followed the process that Michael Gerber laid out in the E Myth. You don't have a business.

You'Re self employed. So this is very, very, very important. Build both of those in parallel, the company brand, the personal brand and, and don't interlink them too much.

No, I like that.

Anyway. Yeah, yeah. So I went on to move to New Zealand with my family and we stayed there for almost eight years and then we moved back and I moved back in part to sell my business. We were in three different countries at that point. We had dozens of staff, we had millions like 6 million in revenue at that point. And moving back to the States meant I could sell the business more effectively because it really was still at a US based business even though we had a New Zealand office and the majority of our staff were in New Zealand. And it worked out, within two years we sold the business. And now that's part that business got acquired by Covario, as you mentioned in the beginning in the intro and then Covario Got acquired by Iprospect, actually by Dentsu Aegis, the multi billion dollar ad agency conglomerate which includes the Iprospect brand. So many of my team members, my former staff at NetConcepts are still at Iprospect even today. And I did my little earn out six months and out the door as soon as the check cleared.

Oh, I imagine.

Well, I'm not employable by anybody. I think I'm completely unemployable because I can't work for anybody.

Yeah, most entrepreneurs are like that. We like the crazy startup, we like to do our own thing, we like to not ask permission, but just get in there, do stuff and then figure it out, you know, win or lose. And it's who we are. Like. Right, so that's one of the worst things is when.

You know, you buy a company and you, you're holding on to the guy who founded it and thinking that you're going to, oh, this is great, he's just going to run this and operate this for me. It's like, well, you might be missing the point because that kind of guy who's good to start up is not necessarily the best operator. It's interesting, I was talking to a guy.

On one of my other episodes named Carl Allen who, and I'll put a link to anybody who wants to hear that about buying businesses. And he's bought, I don't know, dozens or hundreds of whatever businesses. He's been doing this for 30 years. And he said one of his tricks right there for this exact reason is he goes, I like to find a business where I'll buy it and then the founder CEO will step out. But I try to retain the COO if they have one on board because they're much more of an employee type mentality and they know how to run the damn business. But I try not to hold on to the founder of it. I was like, yeah, that's actually pretty, pretty smart. And it dovetails exactly into what you just said right there.

Yep. Yeah, so true. And yes.

So what's your business model right now? So I know you've got your shows, which are great, but that's the one thing I was trying to remember. I was like, you know, I don't exactly know what, what your business model is. Like, are you, do you have an agency now? Do you do any consulting, coaching, et cetera? But like, what is your primary business model at the moment?

Yeah, so consulting is my primary business. I also have some coaching clients and that encompasses not just SEO and even other Forms of online marketing, but business consulting and even some mindset kind of personal development type coaching as well. Just whatever the client needs. I've gone through so much personal development over the last decade, and I've learned a few things, so I'm happy to share that. Or we could just focus solely on SEO. Well, we can get to both.

But, you know, on the mindset stuff, it's funny, like, I don't remember where it was. It was either on a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed or something. And I think it was you who talked about the book. And speaking of Neil Strauss, I can't remember where this was, but I thought. I think I saw it. Did you recommend the book.

That you had read with Neil called the Tools?

I did recommend that.

Maybe I saw it on one of your pod. I think I saw it on one of your. In one of your podcast episodes. And it's like, dude, that was such a good book. Like, I loved that book. I've recommended to several people. And I was like, oh, damn, this is really, really cool stuff.

Oh, my God, it's life changing. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one of those five tools in the book got me this breakthrough where I let somebody into my. Who I had kind of mercilessly excluded from a family member. And that was over two decades ago.

Oh, wow.

I had held this grudge against her for two decades, and.

It wasn't even in my.

Kind of view screen to forgive her, to let her back into my life and let her meet my kids and all that. She had never met my kids. And so I read the book, and one of the tools, tool number two, it talks about visualizing the person in front of you that you're in conflict with. Visualize yourself filling up with energy, love from the universe. And then visualize that flow of energy of love from you into the person in front of you and them filling up with love. And so you're not depleted, you then fill back up with love, love from the universe. And I did that little exercise with my family member that I'm talking about, and I called her up after that little exercise, and we had beautiful conversation. And within a few months, she had come to visit me in Madison, Wisconsin, and met two of my kids. The other kid was not in town at the time, and she's been part of my life ever since. And, you know, it's not without its challenges, but it's been such a gift. It's a gift for her, it's a gift for me, it's a gift for my kids. I'm a model for my children and everybody around me. And when I'm doing the hard work, walking the talk, that rubs off much more so than me sending my kids to a Tony Robbins seminar or something, which I've done.

But you're absolutely right, there's no better way to model it. And what you just said, for anybody who's listening, it's like, man, that sounds kind of woo, woo. First of all, that stuff works. This book, it's such practical tools that you can use, and I've done that many times where you have to kind of take a step back and change your perspective on stuff. And if, you know, imagining, like filling yourself with love and like giving that out, I mean, it completely changes you, I think at a cellular level, but. And it makes you realize that going around with these grudges and not forgive, you know, not like forgiveness is one of the most powerful things in the world that you can do and move on. And it just frees up so much energy, just positive energy to put everywhere else in your life. And yeah, I remember I went through that. I.

I recommended this book to so many people. And as we're talking, I'm sitting here looking for this. I know I outlined the book and the tools in there just so that I wouldn't forget it, but super powerful. And you know, it's funny, I think you talked about how you've been on this deep personal development.

Not quest, but journey as well. And I think most of the entrepreneurs, especially the ones that I know who are really successful, not just at business, but have successful lives, have done that. Because being an entrepreneur is fraught with doubt, uncertainty, second guessing yourself. And most of us, I, I think most of the successful ones we get into, you know, we're driven to succeed oftentimes by something in our past that's driving us. Maybe it's a chip on our shoulder, maybe it's a feeling of not being good enough. Maybe there's a whole bunch of mental issues because you got to have some mental issues to, to go about being an entrepreneur. There is no safety, there's no safety belts in this thing. Right. So I think you gotta be a little bit, a little bit off kilter to even jump into this business, or I think you were kind of forced into it, like you said, unemployable. But the more personal development we do, I think the better. Not just our businesses become, but our lives. And I can tell it's had a big impact on yours.

Yeah, you know, I think of business as a spiritual game that if you're adding value, which you should be, no business should survive if it's not adding value. But you know, it's a spiritual game to add value in people's lives and in their businesses. It can really have profound impacts on everybody around you. And you're a model for others. There are plenty of business people who are just sharks and are kind of unconscious in their businesses and in their lives, but you don't have to be that way. So if you can.

Kind of elevate beyond your robotic consciousness and be more aware, you know, it's such a great playing field, the world of business to apply your spiritual principles within.

I think I couldn't agree more. So let's jump in, let's jump into some of the SEO stuff because I have got, I've got some big questions on this and SEO has shifted so much. I've been doing this business for 10 years. You've got a lot more, you've got a lot more, what do I call it, experience in it than myself. So I'm sure that you have seen the landscape of SEO just run the gamut from way back in the day when it was super easy, just build a whole bunch of links to stuff, spam links, doesn't matter, just links and things would do really well and it was easy pickings to, you know, the plethora of changes that Google has made, etc. Such as? Such as making. And I'm going to give you what my take on it is. Like this is almost my very ignorant take on the landscape of SEO now. But as I've heard, tons of building and tons and tons of backlinks, especially just random backlinks or whatever, doesn't really matter as much anymore that they've really got it to where just really epic content is king. I mean it's always been king, but that it's gotten a lot harder to manipulate the search engine rankings using like even white hat stuff. And I know some of what I'm saying is incorrect, but that it's, it's just become so they, Google's become so smart and it's become so difficult to actually outsmart them or to optimize that it's almost not even worth trying. It's just, just like well put out really good content and ideally get some good backlinks and then just kind of focus on everything else and hope for the best. And I know that's not the right way to do it, but I'm really curious to see what are some of the most Foundational, effective principles that are working right now in SEO and maybe what's not working so much anymore.

Yeah, so first of all, it's never too late to start doing SEO. SEO is so important, so foundational to your online business that.

It'S tragic. It's a tragedy if you do not do it.

So many sites I've seen have just appallingly bad SEO and they should know better. The problem is they don't. The developers who built the site, they didn't know what they did know about SEO and the marketing department didn't know about how to write content and develop video content and so forth in a way that was good for SEO instead of bad for SEO or like of zero benefit for SEO and also building links and not just waiting for the links to magically appear. You don't magically appear in the New York Times without putting in the effort, without actually seeking that out. Nobody's going to call you from the New York Times and say, you know what, I don't think we've ever contacted you before, but I think it's time that you're in the paper. You need a PR firm, you need to proactively do public relations. Well in order to get high quality links, you need to do the same thing. You need to do essentially public relations, you need to do outreach and if you're not doing that, you're just hoping, I guess it's a winging, a prayer that your, your business is going to increase and things are going to work out. That's really not a good strategy. So those are the three pillars to SEO by the way, are content architecture, which includes all the technical stuff and links. All three pillars have to be strong. If, if any one of those three is weak, you are going to be essentially sitting on a two legged stool and you're going to fall over. So if you had great content and you did not do any link building, so you don't have great links and yet you built a very technically sound search engine friendly website, let's say on WordPress or if it's an E commerce site, on, let's say Magento Commerce. Really solid, technically great content, but no links. Are you going to rank? Heck no. And.

That was still true two years ago, a decade ago, and it will be true in two years time as well.

So let me ask you about the link building then.

I do know that in the past there was a million ways to go out. You know, buy software that does it and you know, buy links and just do all this other crap. That, you know, is arguably gray or black hat or even just downright dangerously ineffective stuff that can get you banned when Google sees it.

But, well, some stuff was even illegal.

Yeah, exactly.

Hacking people's websites and injecting links to your site from the hack. Yeah, definitely illegal.

You're not supposed to do that.

Damn. I guess I shouldn't have been doing that all this time, but. Just kidding.

When it comes to building links and reaching out, I mean.

Is there a great example of how to make that happen? Let me give you some real world examples. So I bought a website business last year and it's got really good SEO. It's in the home beer brewing niche. And I don't know much about home brewing, by the way, I'm not the one who's writing articles, etc. But it's been around for like, I don't know, five or seven years, and it ranks pretty darn well for a lot of good keywords, you know, getting a lot of traffic, like 60,000 visitors a month organically, which is fantastic. But at the same time, I sat down and I'm like, I don't know enough about SEO personally to even audit this in the right way to say, you know, I can look, you know, I got a subscription to ahrefs, I think it's called, right? And I started to go through it and I was like, yeah. And I was like, ah, this is so advanced for me. I need to pay somebody to kind of go through it and find the. I guess if, even if it's the 80, 20, like, what is the 20% of the most highly leveraged things that I should be doing to number one, like audit it and get a good lay of the land of where, where are my strengths, what are my opportunities, what, you know, what are my weaknesses and threats here, and then come up with a good plan of action to get content created, which is not that hard to do.

But then also to go about building links in this and, you know, what would you say.

Is.

The right course of action in something like this? Listen, you've got something, it's got some good SEO, but it needs to get a lot better.

What's a good foundational roadmap for the audit and optimization at a high level?

The first step is the audit for sure, because if you are acquiring a site or you're thinking of acquiring a site, it's like having a home inspection before you buy the house. You need to do that, and that includes a technical audit of all the architectural stuff, all the configuration things that's things like canonical tags and 301 redirects and robots TXT directives and meta robots, noindex tags. All this sort of geeky stuff. There's a lot of it. Then you have to look at the content and how well that's been SEO'd and then you need to look at the links and that includes not just how many backlinks you have and what kind of. You mentioned Ahrefs. Well, there's a ur and a Dr. Score. Ur for URL and Dr. For the entire domain. You can look at those scores but you need to do a much deeper dive and look for things that are abnormalities in your link profile so that it looks like maybe that site had done some not so white hat link building in the past and that left a footprint. There is too much.

Unnatural looking stuff in the link profile. Too many of the same type of sites linking or too many of the same TLD top level domains that are linking or you know, it's just same anchor text, the underlying words and the links are two much focused on money keywords and don't look natural. You got to do all that sort of analysis and then you buy the site once the site checks out. And you're not going to probably be skilled enough to do that audit yourself. Totally. It's possible you'd have to take a course. You maybe read my book and then you can do that. Right. 994 page book.

But you couldn't make it a thousand. Come on.

Did you even think about just adding six more pages just to say.

I did. You know, I just round it up and I just say it's a thousand page book. So it's, it's a little daunting. I do have a. By the way, I have an SEO do it yourself audit course that is about 12 actually maybe more like 16 hours of video content. It's very, very good. So that's probably the quicker, better way rather than just reading the 994 pages. Right.

Well and I'm, I'm of the. Yeah. I'm the kind of guy who likes to hire somebody to do it for me and then give me the.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Give me the prognosis. Yeah. What's wrong with it and what do I need to do to make it right. Right.

So what an audit includes is though all the recommendations and not just the identification of all the issues. The thing is, is now you got a roadmap of things to do. Who's going to do it because if you don't have somebody to implement the audit findings and recommendations. There's no ROI in the audit.

Right.

So that's, that's very, very important. And you don't want to, you don't want to get chintzy and go the budget route and hire the low priced supplier to do the implementation because that's where you end up with a penalty if you get it wrong. They cut some corners and they built the wrong kinds of links or they misconfigured things. They actually accidentally got the whole site de indexed. But oh, they'll fix it. It'll come back and never comes back quite right. There's all sorts of issues. So it's better to not hire anybody then to hire the wrong person. Yeah, hire somebody who's cheap. And cheap, I mean like if it's somebody who's under, let's say five grand a month. Yeah. Not fiverr. Right. If it's, if it's a fiver to hire this person, then you know, you're going down the wrong route. So $5,000 a month retainer is probably the minimum for somebody really good at SEO. So my retainer is $15,000 a month and of course you get what you pay for. So if you hire somebody who's, let's say $1,500 a month, be wary that what they produce for you is probably going to be a whole lot of nothing. Just some reports that dance around some stuff and it's a snow job. They're not delivering anything. It's smoke and mirrors or they're doing something that's really sketchy, like low quality link building and that's going to come back to bite you big time.

So when I'm hiring, and this leads me to actually a different thought thread here, which I love and you've given me some of this. So if I am looking to hire somebody to do this, what are some of the things that I should make sure that they're doing? So, I mean, would it be basically, I mean, and I guess it might fall around those three pillars that number one, they not only audited but they are making sure that technically everything they on the site is as it should be and that new content, when it's created, is done, you know, with the right, you know, using the right linking strategies and the right.

You know, technical etc. And that it is good original content. But then also should they, they should be going out and building high quality links in a white hat ethical way. Is that correct? Like those are the three things that I should basically be looking for in somebody who's going to manage that aspect.

Well, you're probably going to end up with more than just one person, because how many people do you know who are really technically adept, able to go in and change the HTTPD conf file or the. Htaccess file, go in and code some regular expressions into the rewrite rules and not screw it up and in the same day perhaps write a really remarkable blog post that goes viral and is super compelling and very creative. And perhaps also to have the skills of a PR professional to do the outreach and let the right bloggers and influencers know in the right way, with the right angle, the right hook.

What are some of the right angles in letting them know, in getting them to link to you? Because I mean, obviously, you know, you can sit, like you said, sit and pray and hope for organic backlinks, but that's probably not going to happen.

But what are some of the more effective ways to reach out? Just finding other sites that have talked about something kind of similar and letting them know that you've written an article that kind of builds on that point or accentuates it, etc. And just, hey, listen, would you like the length of this or is there a better way to work? Right. You know what I'm saying? I know that sounds.

Yeah, I know there's a better way to do it, for sure. Do you ever get those kind of emails? Yeah, absolutely.

And I ignore them for the most part.

Exactly. You ignore them. They're of no value. It's like they're trying to get something instead of trying to get. Give something.

Yes. So what is a. What is maybe a better approach that tends to work a little bit more often.

Right.

We have a great piece of content or a lot of content. Like we're really proud of the. Of the content there. How would you go about reaching out and.

Yeah, well, that is the prerequisite is that it has to be great content. I would say remarkable. And I'm using that term very deliberately. I'm using remarkable because Seth Godin uses that term remarkable and he defines it as worth remarking about. It just simply has something about it that is worth remarking about. And I actually just interviewed a few hours ago, Seth Godin for my.

Kind of hard to get too. So congratulations.

Oh, yes, I've gotten some really hard to get people like Dan. Oh, wow, you got Jay Abraham.

You got old Dan. That's great.

Yeah, he was very tough to get, but I actually had to fax his assistant who then faxed Dan. Yeah, Fax machines, they still exist. So if, yeah. And this is to the point of being, of persevering. If you know that you will have a mission and you have something remarkable that is worthy of being shared and spread and that will change the world, you'll get eventually what you're after. So you got this prerequisite of remarkable content that it is worth sharing, it's worth spreading, it's worth remarking about or worth discussing. Now you got to get it out there. And when you're outreaching to, let's just say, an influential blogger. And so we talked about your website being in the homebrew space. Okay, so you are outreaching to a blogger who's a homebrew blogger. He's like so into it. He's been doing it for years and years and years. And you're new to it. So you don't have the right words, you don't have all the right connections. You can't say, hey, we, we were at the same conference a few months ago, but we didn't get to meet. I wanted to say hello. Now, you don't have that camaraderie. You don't have the.

Shared experiences or anything. So what you have is. There's a continuum here. This is a continuum, starting with the really low quality outreach of, hey, I've got a great piece of content that your audience, your readers are going to love. And that's not serving anybody but you really, you think that serving their audience, but it's not all the way to the very end of that spectrum where you just want to give, give, give, give, give. And whether you get a linker or not is of no consequence. Right? So if you outreach to somebody and say, I want to do a free SEO audit for you, and I don't expect anything in return. I just love the mission that you are on and things that you're doing in the world. And I want to be a part of that. And I expect nothing in return. And I charge, you know, 3x number of thousands of dollars for an SEO audit. I'm gonna do it for free for you. And I also happened to write this book and da, da, da, da. And like, wow, okay, now that's the other end of the spectrum. And I've done that. I've outreached to nonprofits who are doing amazing things in the world, and I've offered my services for free without any expectation of anything. When you give without expectation. And this is a spiritual lesson too. If you, let's say, give to A homeless person and you have expectation that thank you for it, or they will at least be respectful as they are receiving the money from you, you already lost the game, right?

Yeah. Give without expecting. And I mean, that's where the. I've kind of run my life like that. And it's work. It works out phenomenally well. Yeah, but so that's giving.

When you give and you don't have expectations of receiving, you get the blessing from, from the light, from the creator instead of just getting that little bit of something that smile or the thank you or whatever, it's not about that. That pales in comparison in comparison to the blessings you get from the universe. So if you outreach with that in mind and say, well, I want to be somewhere closer to the give end of the spectrum, but I can't just give selflessly to the point where.

I can't pay my bills. So what's more kind of in the middle. Well, what if you collaborated with them? First of all, you offered to.

Help them with some sort of research study or some analysis that they're doing. You've been following their blog and they're testing all these different homebrew recipes and all this different equipment and everything. And you contact them and say, hey, I know you've been struggling to get all this equipment and to get donations for the equipment and stuff. I'd love to just help you with outreaching to those companies and see if they'll donate. You've probably gone through some of them, but not all of them. I have some connections in the industry. I just bought a site in this space and I've been outreaching to them and building relationships. I'd love to just help you get the rest of your equipment so you can finish your study, your analysis. Like what? Oh, yeah, okay, sure, that's great. Or let's say you just want to collaborate and instead of outreaching, like, I want to write a guest post for your blog. I hate those. Delete, delete, delete. What if it's, hey, I've got this great infographic that I'm working on and it's missing some stuff because I'm not an expert like you are in this area of home brewing. I'm a new entrant into this space. I just acquired this business, name of it, blah, blah, blah. And I would love to collaborate with you on this infographic about the history of home brewing. And there are a bunch of missing pieces here. Here's the draft that I have. And you know, you can see that I've Made some headway. It's going to be a great infographic once it's finished, but it would be so much better if I got your involvement.

That's great.

Then they're going to be more inclined to help and to shout from their rooftops once that's done and published, to let their fans, followers, etc. Know that this infographic is out there because they had a hand in it. It's got the mark of their ownership, their authorship on it as well. And of course you're going to give them credit and everything, but then hopefully they will attribute you as well as.

Co producer of that and then link to your site. So that's just one example. You have potentially hundreds of ideas from a brainstorming session for different kinds of link building campaigns that you could do. I do this for my clients. I do a link building strategy where I will brainstorm for an entire month and come up with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of ideas for remarkable content marketing campaigns. And whichever ones resonate the most with them are the ones that we will prioritize. And that could include things like listicles or how tos, checklists or worksheets or viral videos, man on the street interviews.

Personality tests, quizzes, all sorts of stuff. And you know, whether it resonates with the linkarati, the influencers who have a lot of link authority as far as Google's concerned or not, you don't know. You just kind of throw some mud against the wall and see what sticks and not everything is going to perform super well. It's not all going to be a home run, but you just have to keep.

Keep hitting, swinging the bat and get some singles, you get some doubles, get some triples and you'll get the occasional home run.

I love it.

It's one of those things that, I mean it confirms it that it's ultimately it's about doing the work, doing quality work. And it sounds like when it comes to content, I mean, if you can do a large quantity of quality content, Neil Patel comes up, you know, in my mind as being one of those guys who produces all those remarkably long ultimate guy, like every blog post he does, which he releases, or at least he did like one a day, H1 was like 5,000 words and it was insane. Like, so he's one of the few people I've seen do it like high, like high quantity and high quality at the same time. But if you're, if you can only focus on one, would you probably focus on really remarkable content? Putting the extra effort in to less but better quality.

Well, quality. Okay, so there's this triangle of effectiveness. It's quality, time and money. Oh, yeah. Okay, so you can't have all three. You can't. It's just not gonna.

Choose two.

Yeah, exactly. At most, choose two. So if you want high quality and fast, then forget about cheap. If you want high quality and cheap, then forget about fast. You want cheap and fast, forget about the quality. So you want high quality content. You have to. In order to do effective SEO, it has to be high quality.

It's so all of them, stay with high quality. If you've got to like that, that should be kind of like your anchor point. Right? And then decide, well, if I don't have the budget to go a lot in quantity, then just do them once.

In a while and then you have super high quality epic posts. And maybe they're only once every few weeks, but that's so much better than, yeah, mediocre quality blog posts on a daily basis.

Exactly. Now, is there any piece of SEO wisdom, advice, etc. That you would normally only save for your high paid customers and would never reveal for free on a public podcast like this?

Well, I'm always very giving, so I will.

Can't tell you how many times that's worked.

Like I've gotten. You son of a bitch. I can't believe you got that out of me.

You know, I believe in business karma and if you hold back in a business. Yeah, I just, I don't hold back. In fact, that's how I got my book deal. How I got the art of SEO was because I was so giving in a session called Give It Up First. SSMX advanced in 2007 and I was just sharing my super secret tips that nobody else knew. And I got the audience to raise their hands, say, do you know this one? Know this one? You know this one? I gave stuff away and almost nobody raised their hands for most of them. And the room included some of the top SEOs in the world. And yeah, that made a splash a bit. Oh my God. So three weeks later, I'm at the SES Toronto conference after SMX Advanced and Rand Fishkin, who I had never spoken to, knew of, of course, founder of SEOmoz now called moz.com, but at the time it was SEOmoz. He comes up to me in the speaker room and gives me a hug. I'm like, wow, hi, nice to meet you. He said, dude, you really brought it. SMX advanced a few weeks ago at the Give it up panel. It was Amazing. And we just had the best conversation. And in that conversation, we decided to do a book together that wouldn't happen if I had shared everything. Not holding back. And, you know, it's funny. And so I gave Danny Sullivan that idea of give it up session. And. And he said, we're gonna not let anybody blog. You're gonna embargo. Not let anybody blog about the content of this session. It's gonna be super secret. And then he changes his mind at the last minute within the fir. I don't know, within two weeks of the conference, saying, well, you know what? I. We'll just do it for 30 days. Like what? That's a big difference between never getting to blog about these secret tips and you just have to wait 30 days before you spill the beans and. Okay, whatever. Yeah. So my stuff that was like super ninja about how to identify the indented grouped listing. You know, back when Google did what was called host crowding, and I figured out how to check what the true position was when you see position one and two and you could know that it's actually not probably number two, it just appears as number two. So I just did ampersand num equals nine to see nine results per page of Google search results, and then num eight to see eight and so forth until that indented result dropped away. I figured that out on my own. I love reverse engineering the Google algorithm, and I shared that on the stage and I blew everybody's mind. And then that was out for the entire world to know about 30 days later. Kind of not fair. But I'm not complaining because I got an amazing book deal out of it with that amazing conversation that Rand and I had after the show. So I love it. I love it. As far as, like, what sort of thing can I share that super secret that not very many SEOs know about?

Yeah.

All right, so there's a way to do link outreach that is essentially like having salesforce.com as a salesperson and nobody else in your industry has it. You know, back remember when early days of salesforce.com and it wasn't widespread and it was like a secret weapon that you could have salesforce.com and do all this sophisticated stuff. The lead nurturing, everything that you could do, you could still do by hand, but it was so much better, more facilitated, and you didn't drop the ball on different leads because you had salesforce.com so there's a tool called Pitchbox that is the best link outreach tool. It is essentially like salesforce.com for outreaching to influencers, to the linkerati. It has workflow, it has a template library. But don't use the template library because those are just for ideas. You got to come up with your own brilliant idea. Not just a little bit, but completely. Because everybody's thinking about, oh, how do I get noticed with my guest post pitch? You got to stop with the guest posting and think about how do I add massive value to the person and how do I build relationship with the person, how do I get into their world and understand what life is like for them and have them feel like they feel gotten by me. Those aren't the sort of conversations that typical link builders are having. True, you need to think differently, but you need to use a powerful tool that allows you to scale this outreach. And that's what Pitchbox does. And it's super white hat. Yeah, there are black hats that use it, but it's the agencies that are white hat that I think get the most benefit out of Pitchbox. Because how can you scale your outreach if you're doing it all by hand? You're using.

Gmail or something to outreach to every single one of these bloggers and you're not using tools that prospect for you, that identify the bloggers in that niche. Let's say it's home brewing and it aggregates all of those.

Opportunities together, allows you to prioritize the different contacts that it finds at each of the sites. So maybe there's a marketing director, maybe there's a communications director and maybe there's a webmaster and you want webmaster at the bottom of the list because that's where all the spam ends up going to maybe contact the marketing director first with your pitch. And so this, well, it does all that for you.

You can do automated follow up so you have a template for what the follow up is. Hey, I'm about to reach a deadline for this article and I really wanted to quote you, but I still haven't heard from you yet. Could you please get back to me before five o' clock tomorrow? And that's your follow up. And you automated it. So you went into pitch box and you said on day 12 or day 14 or whatever, send this follow up email, forwarding the original email and it handles that all for you. And it shows a pipeline report. Sounds just like Salesforce, right? So sales pipeline, but now this is an outreach pipeline.

By the way, I see your little testimonial right on the front page of their pitchbox.com I love it. I love it. This is super cool. I love tools like this. I am not. And I'm familiar. Like, I've used Mailshake and I've used. And I forget what. I've got a couple other ones. I forget what they're called, but. But I've used them a little bit. But not to a large degree, but I know I love stuff like this and I love having tools, but, man, this has been fantastic.

But that also brings us to the. To the end of the interview, or the epic sizzle, as I like to call it, on bacon wrap business. And this has been, you know, this has been fantastic. And I can already tell that these folks, after listening to you, are going to want to get a little more dose of Stefan. What? You got two podcasts out there, right?

I do marketing speak and yes. And the optimization marketing speak, I'm going.

To guess, is a little bit more marketing oriented.

You would guess correct. Yes. And the optimized peak sounds like it's SEO, but it's not. It's all about life hacking and biohacking and personal development.

Love that. So, marketingspeak.com and is it optimizedgeek or.

Theoptimizegeek.Com, either one will take you there.

Of course. You got both. That's fantastic. Stefan, is there any nuts you're trying to crack in your business right now? And by that I mean, are you trying. Is there anybody you're trying to meet? Is there any skill you're trying to learn? Is there anything you're trying to find or get rid of? I mean, this is where me and my audience can potentially add value to you.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I'm working on a relaunch of my membership site currently.

I would love any kind of.

Introductions to experts in that space of building up membership sites. I have a team who are working on it. We've gone through the training from Stu McLaren, which is tribe, and yeah, we're in the process of implementing all that. But what's the membership side about?

Is it primarily SEO or is it.

Yeah, it's primarily SEO. There's online marketing components to it as well, like conversion and social media marketing and analytics and so forth. But yeah, it's primarily SEO focused. And this is a new area for me. I've been doing a membership site for only about a year and a half. I have a small membership base and I really want to expand it and I want to serve a lot of people, like thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So I know there are subject matter experts out there. I need a workhorse who's actually going to implement it for us or assist with the implementation because it's great to get some advice. Like I've gotten advice to switch from using just simply Memberium to Memberium plus learndash. Great, great advice. And we're in the process of implementing it and then we've had issues with integration of Zoom.

With infusionsoft and I was just like, ah, there's so many little issues that crop up. So that's my current challenge right now.

Okay, well, I will put my thinking cap on and if anybody out there listening, if this fits the bill, if you either can help Stefan or he can help you. Stefan, is there a good way to get in contact with you if anybody wants to hit you up?

Yeah, yeah, of course. So My email is stefantephenspencer.com My main website is stefanspencer.com that's where you can go for tons of resources on SEO, free downloads and webinar replays. All sorts of good stuff. And oh, by the way, I'm happy to give your listeners, Brad, a free chapter from the book, not just any chapter from the Art of SEO, but chapter seven, which is the chapter I always recommend people start with rather than chapter one, because it really gets your creative juices flowing. It's all about link building and content marketing and how to use that for.

SEO. How did they get there? So that chapter is going to be@marketingspeak.com Bacon Gotcha.

I'm writing that down and it'll be in the show notes.

So I'm going to include in there some other freebies as well, some really valuable downloads, including my SEO Myths white paper. I'll include a blueprint for hiring an SEO either agency or consultant or in house employee. And I'll include the SEO BS detector. So the kinds of trick questions you can insert into an interview, whether it's for an agency or for an individual that you're hiring to do SEO for you, how do you know that you're not getting snookered because you don't know SEO? These are trick questions that you can insert very slyly into the interview process and find out that what they are doing is actually blowing smoke. Like for example, tell me a bit about your process for optimizing meta keywords. Sounds very innocent enough, but it's a trick question because there is no correct process for optimizing meta keywords. Meta keywords never ever counted in Google. They were never a ranking factor.

So if they say something, you know that they're bs.

Yeah, the only right answer is meta keywords. Are you serious? Google never counted them.

So there you go.

I love it. I love it. Marketingspeak.com Bacon Guys, you heard it here. Stefan, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. And for everybody else, take a look at the show notes here. I put a lot of maybe putting a lot of the links here below. And if you have any questions for me, if you've got anything you'd like to run up the flagpole, give my second opinion on, you can always reach out to me personally@askbradaconrappedbusiness.com Happy to see if I can lend a hand. Until next time, Stefan. Thank you very much. And go get some sleep, dude. I know it's getting late over there in Tel Aviv.

Will do.