The SEO Success Formula

Now we all know that we need to have our own websites because we can't rely on the social media sites, and the way that we can get our websites to be the destination for inbound traffic is through search engine optimization. SEO, three simple words, but if you're like me, it's not a simple practice at all. If I have all the marketing disciplines, SEO is the one that evades me the most. So I'm really delighted to have today a guest who has worked on many sites before building his own business and took the website for the business he was in from getting— I've got to read this again— 85 million visitors a year to 185 million visitors a year under his guidance when he was running the SEO for the website. So delighted to have joining us all the way from Carlsbad, California, Nick Musica, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Opticsin, an SEO specialist. Nick, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here.

It's a pleasure to have you because I'm, I'm really looking for salvation. SEO, it, it does seem a little bit of a black art, not least of which because we now have AI, and we could talk about AI and the impact on SEO and content, but also because it, it's changing so quickly, isn't it? It seems like We're like trying to swim upstream all the time. Can you, can you help us to understand first of all about you so we know who you are, obviously, but then, and then we'll start to talk about how people can use SEO and not be overwhelmed by in their businesses. So, Nick, tell us about you and Optics In first.

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Um, so I've been running Optics In, uh, since September of 2019. It was my pre-pandemic decision, uh, and it worked out great. So here we are. Um, and we, we work with folks on their SEO, uh, their website SEOs and local SEO. And because of the website is such a core— I mean, everything starts with the website, right? You can talk about social media, your website, uh, PR, your website. The website is where everything starts to get expressed and gets found initially, right? So we, because of working with folks so much and their websites have been banged, so banged up, we, and we were doing our own, own and operated WordPress design. We thought, let's just offer that as a service. So we started to do that about 6 months ago. But we, but the goal is SEO, right? Always, always comes back to SEO for us. But I started SEO in 20, 2003 in New Jersey, working for one of the babies of AT&T. And it was me and 3 other folks on this little skunkworks project that the company really didn't want to do. So they put 4 people on it, me being one of them. And there came a point in time where I'm doing all the coding and the writing and everything for this website. And our SEO wasn't going anywhere. So my boss said, well, let's go get a company. Let's just do it right. Okay. And we got a company for a 6-month contract. And I kid you not, the first 3 months were PDFs, page 1, page 2, page 3 of website page 1, 2, and 3. And they did, it was a faxing company at the time, Internet Fax. And they would put like internet in front of fax, right? There was like 5 words changed on each page for the low, low price Oh, it gets better. For the low, low price of $6,000 a month then. Wow. We're talking 20 years ago. Man, oh man, oh man. Right. And I'm like, but holy bejesus. And I show my boss, I'm like, so we talked about month 1, month 2, and month 3. And he's like, let's see what they give us for month 4. Okay. Month 4, they deliver a quote unquote best practices in internal links. Which is such a pain in the butt. It's still a pain in the butt. And I'm like, great, they did the work, they're mapping everything. No, they gave me a 1.5-sheeter of literally best practices of internal links. I copied, I copy and pasted what was in that PDF into Google and I got a page back that to say it was 1-to-1 plagiarism would be an exaggeration. To say that the spirit of 1-to-1 was there is pretty right on. Right? So we went to him and I said, so here's month 4. You want to see month 4? Here's the month 4 deliverable. $6,000 for a page and a half. Like, it was mind-blowing. And he said, okay, here's what I want you to do. Go find someone who will train us. They will validate what we know. They'll fill in the blanks around what we don't know. Okay. So I found Sherry Theroux. She's been doing SEO since 19— whatever it was. She comes in, she trains us over a day or two, I forget what it was. And she says, here's what's going to happen to one or both of you. In 3 to 4 months, you're going to get a new job. And I'm like, raising my hand a little bit. And there's only two of us in training. I'm like, hey, I have a question, Sherry. And I'm thinking, I don't want to be here anymore. This place is a little banged up, right? Like, they don't even want us working on this project. And I would love a new job. And I go, well, why do you say that? And she says, 'Cause it happens every time I give a training, every time.' And she was right. 3 or 4 months later, I'm working at a little car insurance company in New Jersey, specific to car insurance in New Jersey. And instead of doing all the content and designing websites and like, you know, being, you know, what was probably considered a webmaster at the time, I was now the SEO guy. And so I started doing SEO at that point. And then in 2009, a few years later, you know, and I hired Sherry when I was at High Point Car Insurance because I was like, because I'm the first guy coming in who can spell www, right? Who can spell SEO, who can spell HTML. Like it just, it was a very agent-centric business. And so they're just going online and I'm like, Sherry, I need someone I can talk to. I need someone I can say wireframes and you know what it means. I need to be able to say information architecture and someone knows what it means. And I'm not spending a half hour defining the thing and giving examples. We can just have the conversation. It's very low effort or lowbrow work. Are you interested in doing this? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. And so eventually she says, hey, do you want to write a book? And I said, yeah, what's it about? And she said, we're mapping SEO usability, findability. You know, when someone goes to Google, types in something, and then the user clicks on that and they get to the website. We're marrying those two disciplines. We both can do that, but people don't do that, generally speaking. Great, let's do that. So we wrote the book, and then a year later I taught at NYU, and then fast forward to 2019, I started Optics In.

Wow. Okay, so your early days, in the web. And as you say, people were charging a fortune. Actually, they were charging for people's ignorance, weren't they, really? Because yeah, people didn't really know. But let's, let's just think through about how we can help people that might be struggling now.

Let's do it.

Yeah, someone's got a website, they're, they're writing blogs, maybe they don't tend to it very much. Take us through the, the journey that an entrepreneur should take when they've launched a new website? And let's say those first 6 to 12 months when the business is up and running and the website really needs to be a central point for their marketing activities.

Yeah, yeah. So we're talking about foundational SEO, right? We're talking— so we're beyond the, here's a one-page website, you know, click here for, um, a discovery call or a quote or like that. We're, we're beyond that. We have, we have 10, 15, 20 pages, something like that, that we're working on.

Yep.

And so there's 3 elements and these 3 elements are at play for any type of website and they have been at play for 20-something years. How they get expressed is different, but these are still the 3 pillars, right? And so there's technical, which is how does Google crawl and index your website? Can it? Crawl and index your website. If they can, if your technical is clean, then you have, well, what is available on my site to be ranked, right? That's the on-page. And now we're talking about what do you offer and how do you talk about that, and does it map to how people search? And then we have the third element, which is off-page. How do people talk about me and do they link to me? So for someone who is— those, those are the three, right? So it's, it's this— SEO is this, this black box, this mystery. I mean, sort of, because it's Google's algorithm. However, these are the three things that move the algorithm. They always have been and they currently are. If it changes, it changes, but right now it still does, right? So for, for a website that we're talking about, for entrepreneurs who are coming out of the gate with the foundational SEO, you want to make sure that Google can crawl and index that website. So what that means is, is your website in a technical state of health where Google can do that? And a lot of folks are going to go, I have technical people, they're on it. They're not on it. They're not. Your technical people are busy doing their day jobs, right? So, and here's how you can validate that. Find the technical person who you think is responsible for the website and ask them, How many 404 pages do we have last month? How often do we check for 404s?

Just to be clear, just to be clear, Nick, a 404 is one of those pages that comes up and says page can't be found, right?

Page not found, right. Yeah. And I'm glad you defined it, but I don't feel the need to define it for the folks who I'm saying go ask the questions because the answers don't matter. Like you understanding what a 404 is doesn't matter. Just understanding that it's a thing that matters. Is what matters, right? Right. So, so ask, how many do we have? When, when was the last report? And how do we determine the number of them? What are the tools we use? And someone should be able to give you an answer, and it should sound something like this: we had 5, we had 10, we didn't have any, uh, the last time we did it was a month ago, and we used a desktop crawl known as Screaming Frog or something like that. And if they can't give you those types of answers or something that sounds like that, no one's, no one's watching your technical SEO. They're just not. It's a very specific lens, SEO. And if we're not looking at the website through that lens, it's not getting done right.

And so that's the first, the first port of call. And as you say, Screaming Frog is a good tool. And, and these 404 errors, Nick, forgive us, but why do they occur? Why do we have pages on our website that can't Load.

Yeah, it's going to be for one of a couple reasons. One, we changed something on our site and didn't do it in a way where we map something together, or we made an error, or someone else on their website linked to us. And I'm using 404s as sort of the canary in the coal mine. There's a bunch of technical items. That's just the easy one to talk about.

Okay. And then what I've also found with mine is that It's fine for desktop, but then on mobile, yeah, it's another game again because it says it's loading too slowly or whatever. So is it also the case that entrepreneurs need really to be kind of doing this twice, you know, once for the mobile and once for the desktop?

Uh, I mean, these days typically the same website We used to have a conversation of m.domain.com versus domain.com, right? That's not really a thing. And Google highly influenced that conversation because if you were to take every website and multiply it by 2, you just created double the problem for Google, right? So their come from was one website, make it quote unquote responsive, whether users are looking for the same thing and the same functionality on desktop versus mobile doesn't matter. From a Google perspective, that's easy for us and we'll rank you. And everyone said, that makes sense. Okay. I don't know if it really makes sense, but that— this is, this is the dynamic. And so most websites are one website and they're responsive. So largely that problem is taken care of with the exception you just mentioned, because on a mobile device you're dealing with different factors than with a desktop. And so whatever your download time is, Uh, it's going to be different on desktop versus mobile, right?

So you had to think about, can it be found? Are there links? And then when you talk about downloads, you're starting to talk about performance then, Nick, as well, aren't you? In terms of— so how does someone that's an entrepreneur and not technical, you've started to manage this? You talked about having the foundational part.

Yeah.

Is it Is this something that people can do themselves or are they really better off to hand it over to somebody else?

I'll give you an example. I was brought in on a contract late in the game because there was just problems and problems and problems and traffic was going down. And a gentleman who's an entrepreneur hired me to say, can you manage this SEO company? Like, I don't know if they're doing a good job or not. Sure. Okay. I'll come in. And they seem like they were doing an okay job. And the more I worked with them, the more I thought, okay, these guys, they know what they're doing. This is cool. Whether it's comprehensive or not, that wasn't my job. My job was, do they know what they're doing? Are they doing the right things? They are. Yeah. But then the more I learned how we got into this position, the more the conversation changed from we're optimizing to we're digging ourselves out of a hole. And the reason why we're digging ourselves out of a hole was because there was no governance. This gentleman who was running this website let a lot of people come on the website and do a lot of different things. So there were like 40, it was a WordPress website, there was like 40 plugins. How many of them were actually being used? Don't know. Couldn't tell you because no one really knew. The e-commerce structure of this website because he had partners coming in publishing their products on every possible category they wanted to, right? So like, I'm making it up, I don't wanna give the client away, but let's say it was a pet food website. They put dog food in the cat category, in the bird category, like it just didn't make any sense, right? So you had just no one governing it. The site didn't make sense. You had duplicate content, which is a very bad thing for SEO, the same products all over the place. And he's going, I don't get it. Why is it going down constantly? We've been at this for a year before you even got involved. And I said, well, it's because we're not optimizing. We're digging ourself out of a hole, right? So you need someone—

That is so interesting.

You need someone on it. It doesn't magically done by itself. It does, it just doesn't. Yeah.

And I think you've raised a really good point there that often people have multiple vendors over time and sometimes multiple contributors as well. And yet there isn't necessarily a house clearing and you end up with, in a way, the sort of digital equivalent of a building that's had multiple contractors putting extra walls and extra rooms onto a building without necessarily always consulting the original plans or deciding whether the plumbing actually is fit for the new building. I mean, in layman's terms, right, Nick?

Would that be fair? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah. And what you just assumed there, Jim, was there was original plan and that the owner of the house actually shows up and manages the projects, which in this case wasn't happening.

Right. So it's interesting that it's so mission critical, the website, And yet we pay so little attention to it. We don't see it as mission critical as much as it is.

Yeah.

If Nick, let's just move on a little bit to the impact of AI and content because I think for many people, obviously the pace of change with AI and pace of content creation has grown wildly. Yeah. What's the implication for people that have got websites and maybe are thinking about using AI to create blogs, or, you know, I use Lumen5, for example, to create videos. Um, what's the implication of AI and AI-created content for SEO, either on-page or as you say, off-page?

Yeah, let's talk about on-page, which is, which is the second pillar, right? What are you saying? How do you say about yourself? And so Google, for a very long time in its guidelines, has said, if you auto-generate content for the sake of manipulating search results, we may devalue your website. So that is, that has been in existence for a very long time. And then AI came out and it's, it's sort of that same thing, but they also put another section in there. And they, they weren't very clear about it, but what was clear was auto-generated content for the sake of manipulating search results is a bad idea. So let's, let's hold that item in spirit and then look, look to see how it actually rolled out. So folks who were doing, producing 1 page a month were now producing 10 pages because it was easy. Folks who were producing 10 are now producing hundreds. Those who were producing hundreds are now producing thousands. Multiply that across the entire internet, and you have a lot of pages about roughly the same thing because it's all a variation, right? And so when people produce content like this and they go, I don't understand why my content is not ranking— forget ranking, it's not even getting indexed. It's not getting indexed, right? Google's finding it maybe and going, I've seen this 100 times, I don't want it. I don't want it, right? And so people are going, they used to hire me for good content, for getting found, to produce results that support the business. And then the conversation changed. I can get cheap content. You never said about the, we never talked about the result. Your result was cheap, was producing cheap content. You got exactly what you asked for.

Sorry, you did. Yeah, Nick, just to interrupt you there. Sorry, but that's such a great point. That when the volume of content went up, it became a commodity. And Google has in a way then been the arbiter of quality and said, actually, this is not authentic content, and therefore it doesn't deserve to be ranked. And kind of as a dead man's break, right, has stopped all that flooding into the market. And we're seeing that with LinkedIn as well, aren't we, where Autobots are creating responses that have become so— you want to use the word asinine— as to now warrant not responding to them, right? So that's interesting that AI actually isn't going to take over then because it's not genuine. Is that your view, that we have to then still go for value and low volume rather than It's like free and low value.

Here's what I tell my clients is let's produce good quality content and let's talk about how much we can produce. And then I tell them, tell all your competition you're using AI content. If they ask, tell them you are and you're doing it at scale. And I tell all, yeah, and that's sort of the joke. But when the serious part of the conversation is, Jim, you and I, we want to create a quality website, right? Okay, well, here's what that means. What about AI content? And we have that conversation. Well then, well, but that's expensive. Well, I mean, it depends on what you, what you consider expensive, you know, digging yourself a hole for the next few years or working towards something that's worth growing, a business that's worth growing and a brand that's worth growing. And then we produce good content. And the easy, easy for most people example of this is thought leadership content. Well, how do I use AI for thought leadership content? Are you kidding me? Did you really just ask that question? No, no, no, no. I mean, maybe, you know, great ideas can come from anywhere and can produce a good thought leadership piece, but please don't do this. Dear ChatGPT, I need to produce the thought leadership content on X. You know what you're going to get back? All the garbage that's currently ranking or not ranking, right?

And it's an oxymoron, isn't it? It's an oxymoron really, isn't it? Because actually anything that you get from ChatGPT has been written before, right? By definition, it already is in existence, so it can't be thought leadership. So Nick, we, we talked about 3 pillars. Yeah. Uh, and then we've also talked about different phases. You talked about foundational.

Yeah.

There. Um, and then you've also got a second phase.

Yeah.

Once you get beyond, what is that, maybe 6 to 12 months, once you kind of lay down the foundations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then we get into growth mode, right? We're, we're into growth. We, we've proven our product and market. We feel good about it. We're building a team and now we're looking for various marketing channels to, to support the business. And so SEO is a very valid marketing channel for folks who have brick and mortar, who have products and services, not so much for small publishers, not so much for affiliates. Those folks are having a hard time right now for exactly the reason we're talking about in terms of AI content. Either they used it or they got grouped into the bucket of people who did use it. Either way, it's a hard time for them right now, right? So when we talk about growth, we're still talking about that technical. We're still talking about producing content and we're producing backlinks via PR or getting on blogs or, uh, you're saying something from that leadership perspective. There's multiple ways to do it, but now we're talking about scaling that up a little bit more, really talking to your audience about what they're searching for and what they want to find and giving them something that's worth sharing, worth reading, and therefore worth ranking.

Right, right. And also podcasts, of course, are great for backlinks. And also, if you're talking about a topic those keywords that are part of your conversation, they go into my show notes, for example, and get linked back to you. Absolutely. So podcasting is actually a great way as well of generating backlinks as well.

Yeah.

Nick, what would you say are, if you like, or maybe we've touched on like a common mistake— well, no, sorry, just to finish that. So high-value content means that an individual within the company or a hired person writes a piece of original content, then just to be clear, to give people that are listening and me too some guidance, we've talked about what it shouldn't be, but what's your ideal then piece of content that goes on the website?

You know, I was chatting with a young lady yesterday about content and she goes, you know, I write it in my own voice., and, and I have a very specific style of writing and, and, and. I'm like, perfect. And I told her about John, this gentleman I worked with at Esurance. And John was a very good writer. And one day I called John over and say, hey John, I'm the SEO guy at Esurance at this point, which is a, what was a big insurance company in the States. And, you know, John, John comes up to my cube and he's like, you know, like, I don't know if I want to This is my interpretation. He's like, "What is this SEO guy going to tell me about writing?" I said, "Let's take a look at your page. Let's take a look at insurance. What are we talking about here?" So you know where we work, Nick, you know how we make money. It's about car insurance. "Yeah, yeah, but you said insurance." Yeah. There is no product known as insurance. Insurance is a category of products. There's, there's home insurance, there's renter's insurance, there's life insurance, there's car insurance, also known as auto insurance. Right now we're getting to some language. And so I walked them through the document, right? And so like, did you get into an accident? No, you got into an auto accident. Did you, did you buy car insurance? You didn't buy insurance, you bought car insurance, right? Did you have coverage? You didn't have coverage. You had car insurance coverage. Right? Like you need to make sure. So his, his writing was good. And what he didn't do was have SEO factors in it. In this case, it was the keywords, but his structure was good. His story was good. He had a great CTA at the bottom. Everything was good. So for John, who was a good writer, he just had to go, oh, so I just need to use the keywords people are searching for. For you, John, that's the case here.

Absolutely. That's interesting. That's really fascinating. Thank you for giving us a a real-world example there of writing something that is detailed enough that the vocabulary in the article doesn't make any assumptions that the reader knows what it's about, and therefore the search engine doesn't make any assumptions or worse still, ignore it. So Nick Muiseker over there in Carlsbad, if there's a mistake that you've seen people make or rather that you've seen people make or even that you've made yourself in building up Optin Optics in? What would that be?

Yeah, it really is one of the same, right? So, I'm a classic shoemaker's kid, right? Don't ask me about my shoes because my shoes are awful. I'd rather talk about my client's shoes because they're pretty good, right? But, my biggest mistake and I just corrected it in the past couple of weeks is I'm focusing on SEO for my website. I wasn't, I wasn't doing it for a while. And so that is the biggest mistake because I didn't need it. Right. But now I'm in a position where I want to grow my business. Well, now I need it, right? So I'm coming back to eat my own dog food, right? I'm coming back like, here's the recommendation I give everyone else. Like, now it's time for me to actually do something about it for myself. So cool. But that is the problem people come into. And so like, and here's what it is, Jim. I am ready to grow my business now. Well, you should have started your SEO 12 months ago, Nick. And I know better and I still did the same thing, right? Right. So when I talk to someone and I just talked to someone, it was yesterday as a matter of fact. And she's like, I need help with this website. I gotta get my rankings up for Black Friday. I said, you don't want SEO, you want paid search. I'll make an introduction for you. Right? Right. Yeah. You know, if you want to talk about SEO in the new year, yeah, we'll talk about SEO, but you know, this is not the thing for you. Right? So the biggest mistake people make is assuming you can start to SEO now and get results tomorrow or not having that foundation in place. I mean, I had the foundation in place, but I didn't really give it the effort that it deserved, especially for someone whose main business is SEO. Like, it's silly. Why did I not do this? I should have been doing it the entire time.

Yeah, that's a really good point that SEO really is a long-term strategy. Rather than a quick fix. So that's also really, really good to, to bring that, that point home, Nick. Nick, if there's a, a number one tip that you'd share with my fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneur, you know, that may not be SEO related, because we've, I think, talked about a tip probably being start early and, and be genuine. What would your, your advice or tip be to an entrepreneur? Now you've had your business going for 5 years, so congratulations.

Yeah. And so here's the reason why I started my business was I just didn't want to work for anyone else. It was that simple. And congratulations, 5 years later, I gave myself a job, right? And so now I'm going, oh, great. And also good news, bad news. I could do this all day long, right? But I don't want to do it all day long. I want to grow a business. And so I started change my mindset. I had to figure out what I want to do, how I want to do it. And what really helped me was a book called, I have it in front of me, so I want to screw up the title, 10X Is Easier Than 2X. It's fantastic. And so the basic premise is you can double your efforts of how you're doing things now and you can double your revenue. It's a simple math equation, roughly. Or you can say of 100% of my time, 20% is the most valuable. And then you take the 80%, you start to carve that off and give it to someone else who can execute on it. And that 20% is what you're really going to focus on. And then at some point, that 20% becomes the 100%, and then you rinse and repeat. 80%, carve off. What's the new 20%? And so it's not a real math problem. 10x is easier than 2x. It's a philosophical thing, but the way it gets executed is take your highest leverage things, activities for the goals you're looking to meet, and then keep on doing that all day long. And so for me it was, well, I got a job, I gave myself a job. Cool. I'm doing a bunch of things. Well, I don't want a job anymore. I want to grow this business. Well, I need to change how I think. And that's helped me shift my thinking around why I'm doing what I'm doing today and what I'm actually growing.

Nick Muzica, that sounds also as though you've given us a tip, but also you've given us your book recommendation. And so the book was called?

Yeah, 10X Is Easier Than 2X by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

Okay, that's wonderful. Thank you. We'll include that book in the show notes. And Nick Muzica over there in Carlsbad, California. If you want to reach out to you, how can they do that?

Yeah, go to opticsin.com. Um, there's some work up there. Again, I'm reformatting the website to show off more work, um, but it has a discovery button up at the top right-hand side, and that's our first step with folks, is, are we a good— is SEO a fit for you? One yes or no. We want to come out of the conversation with that, and ideally we want to be that fit for you, but if If SEO is not a good fit for you, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it out of the gate like I did the young lady yesterday. And, uh, and we want to be the fit. And so, um, the conversation is to be sure that we actually do have a good fit.

Nick Muska, I think we've had a wonderful fit today. Thank you so much. I've learned a lot from you in a very short amount of time. So anyone that gets to work with you, I can see, is really very blessed, and I'm sure will get great results. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Thank you, Jim. So we've been listening to Nick Muzga, and I think what's been lovely about this conversation, if I can use the word lovely and SEO in the same sentence, is really kind of demystifying the, the practice, but also giving the very reassuring news really that AI is not actually a threat, if almost on the contrary, because so many people are going to be using AI to create content that actually is going to disable their SEO efforts. So for those of us with small budgets and smaller companies, remaining authentic, writing honest content, but being there regularly on our own website and offsite is actually going to be the route to success, which I think is really, really reassuring. So thank you to Nick for giving us that insight. And if you've enjoyed this show, do please, as always, share a review, and share the show with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur, because I don't want anyone to go unnoticed for what they do. My name's Jim James. Thank you for