Brian Dean — Google And YouTube SEO Strategies For 2019

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hello. We're back again.

Hello.

Hey. Hi there. It's. It's a rare day where it's actually lightning and thundering in San Diego outside.

Yep, it's pretty, pretty wet out there.

And it's. It's lighting a spark on online content with SEO. Yeah, that wasn't cheesy at all. Brian Dean's on the show today, and he is not cheesy. I'm the cheesy one. Brian Dean from Backlinko. This dude's a ninja for a long time for SEO and just how to really understand how these search engines work in YouTube as well, and how to simply apply some magic to be seen in all these places. Really? Well.

Yeah, yeah, we cover a lot of ground in this episode because I really nerd out around, like, SEO and traffic type stuff, you know, which makes sense. You got a traffic course and all, but I really nerd out about this stuff. So we dug deep on, like, how to get videos ranked on YouTube, but the majority of the episode was really in depth SEO strategies. So that's why we're calling this episode the SEO guide for 2019. Name may change in the future. CBD, something like that. It's going to be. This is what works with SEO in 2019. So we cover a lot, a lot around.

And don't worry, it's not like nerd talk. Nerd talk. I mean, there's some nerd talk, so it's nerdish talk. Yeah, I mean, Matt's involved, so there's always gonna be a little nerd talk in there. True, true that. Judging you, Matt. But I'm not judging you on how damn good you are at teaching this stuff, that's for sure.

Thank you. Well, Brian Dean, he has an article. It's probably the article I refer people to the most around SEO. When somebody says, hey, what's the best piece of advice on SEO? I I tell him, go read this article that Brian Dean of Backlinko wrote, and it's a monster, monster post. I share it with people all the time. And so I couldn't have been more excited to have him on and really dive deep around a lot of these SEO and YouTube strategies. But speaking of traffic, I did want to give a shout out to our traffic course. We do have a traffic course right now that the price is going up depending on when you're hearing this. Price may already Be up. But if you go to evergreenprofits.com traffic, we've just got an insane killer traffic strategy that we teach that's around advertising and SEO and a combination of really cool stuff, and I think a lot of people are going to dig it.

It is pretty awesome. And a lot of people are digging it already, and SEO is a piece of it. Definitely. We're getting deep into SEO, but if you want to kind of wrap in all these different platforms and leverage a ton of the stuff we're talking about, evergreenprofits.com traffic, that's where you want to go. Righty.

Let's go chat with Brian Dean and really dig into some YouTube and SEO stuff.

All right, let's go. Hey, Brian. How you doing, man?

Hey. Good. Good to be here.

Yeah. Thanks for taking the time. You're very far away from us, from us in San Diego. Tell everybody what you're doing over there.

And just hanging out. I'm in Lisbon right now and just wanted to get out of the cold and spending the fall and winter here.

I think it's brilliant.

That's what's awesome about the type of work that we all do, is that you can do that.

Yeah.

It's amazing, man. Growing. I would have never thought in a million years I would live overseas. It's amazing.

So why'd you pick Lisbon?

Well, I had been here a bunch of times, and it had the weather, the sun, the city. Had a lot of cool things all rolled into one.

Yeah. And you were saying you're in New York normally, and right now they're probably just getting hammered by snow.

I don't even check. I used to, but then I just felt bad for everyone there, and I stopped checking. I was kind of gloating to myself when I looked at the weather, apparently.

Yeah. No, I always feel bad when I get on social media and I see people in Chicago and they're like, this sucks. And I look out my window and it's 75 degrees, and it's like blue skies and the birds are chirping. And I'm like, yeah, that must suck.

It does. Trust me. I grew up in the freezing cold in San Diego. Everyone's like, that's paradise. It never rains. It's always sunny. It's warm all year round.

Yeah, it's nice. It is nice. And you got to experience it. We met you at. Well, it was like. Like a small panel type thing out in San Diego with Dana and Nate. Opt out life, guys. Dana was on the show recently, so that was fun. You know, you were kind of up there just doing like the state of SEO.

Yeah, it was cool. Ross was there. Ross Hudgens, smart guy.

Yeah, there were a bunch of guys. It was like an eclectic group. I feel like those are like the best type of events that you can go to. You just never know who the hell you're going to run into.

Yeah.

But.

Let'S kind of dig into your backstory and just kick that off. And just for everybody's sake, what the heck were you doing before to the point you're at now?

Well, I was studied in college to be a dietitian and actually was a dietitian. I graduated from college in Rhode Island. I went to Tufts and got a master's in nutrition. And that was my thing. I was going to be like this dietitian career thing. And I realized during grad school that it kind of wasn't for me. The whole like working in a hospital or working in a clinic and talking to people about what they eat, I just didn't like it. But I always liked the science part of it, like the biology and the studies and things like that. So I decided to go into research and I started a PhD program at Purdue in Indiana. And I hated it. Like, I hated it pretty instantly. Like I was went from Boston to Indiana. I went from a cool city to a college town and I just didn't like it. My advisor was a jerk. Like I just hated it all around. So I ended up leaving to get a job. I figured I have this master, I'm a registered, I have this master's degree, I'm a registered dietitian. This should be easy. But it was during the financial crisis in 2008 and just no one was hiring. So what? I ended up in my parents basement. That was supposed to be for like a couple weeks while I found a job. And it ended up being a couple months. And in the meantime, I found the four hour workweek on a bookshelf, picked it up at a Barnes and Noble, and it changed everything. I was like, oh man, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I can totally do this. For the first time in my life, it even crossed my mind to be an entrepreneur. And then over many, many years of like failing and building sites that didn't work and doing stuff on the side, I ultimately had success in 2012 with an affiliate site. And from there I was like, wow, this is cool. I want to learn how to do more of this SEO stuff. That's legit. And I couldn't find anything that was good. All the resources that I found were really vague. They didn't have any actionable stuff. And I realized there were probably other people like me in the situation. So I decided to start Backlinko to fill that gap.

Okay. That's how it started. That makes sense. And Matt, I think you've been following him for a while. I don't know what year.

So I think. Didn't you write a blog post for Noah Kagan's blog?

Yeah, that was probably like 2014.

Okay. I think that was the first time I discovered your name. I think I read that blog post and I went, oh, this shit's genius. And then I started digging and then I found your blog and then I subscribed and then really started following along to what you were doing. Now on your about page, it said that you were involved in personal finance stuff at some point. How did you get into that?

Well, that was just a site that I worked with.

Oh, gotcha.

Okay.

It wasn't like a profession or anything.

Got it. So that was kind of like one of your early entries into blogging and SEO and that kind of stuff. Okay, got it.

Okay, that's interesting. So you. So how long did it take to actually make something of Backlinko? I'd imagine, you know, with SEO, it's kind of a long term game, you know?

Yeah, it is. I mean, SEO's kind of weird. You can get some results quickly, but for it to really kick in, it takes months, no matter what happens, even if you do everything perfectly. And I didn't. So it took a while. I would say I got some traction early on. Within the first couple of weeks, I had published a couple posts that were kind of like. I knew my market. It was kind of like Kevin Kelly's 102 friends. I knew exactly what I wanted to read. So I created one post back in the day called 17 Untapped Backlink Sources. And it was just like a list post of these little known strategies that I picked up that I hadn't seen anyone else talk about. And from my own reading, I knew that I loved anything that no one else had seen or is a little untapped. And I started promoting that in forums and people really liked it. So I got early feedback that was good. It didn't translate into a ton of traffic or links or email subscribers or anything like that. But I got early feedback that was positive, that pushed me to keep going. And then I would say, there's no point where I say this. This is the day everything changed or Anything. But I would say within like six months, I knew I had the tiger by the tail and there was something good here.

I'm sure. And we all know this SEO changes almost daily, it seems like. But from that point till now, what are some of the big things that you've learned? I guess with SEO that kind of still hold true?

Well, the biggest thing is you need lots of links. So when I look at competitors in any industry or if I am helping someone with a site, there's a huge correlation between how many links you have and how high you rank in Google and sites that struggle. When people tell me, oh, my site's not ranking for anything, I look at it. They don't have backlinks. At the end of the day, it's what you need to rank in. There's no two ways about it. You can create the best content, you can optimize it perfectly, but if you don't have links, you're not going to rank. That's been true since back in the day, since Google started. And I feel like it's such an integral part of their algorithm. It's built on that. It's not going to change in the future. They're becoming less important for sure, as they add other ranking factors into the mix that eat up some of the pie. But in general, it's a huge part of the equation and always will be. The other is you got to create stuff that people want to share. So whether people link to it or share on social media, or share with their friends, your content needs to have a hook that encourages people to share either with an audience if they're a blogger, or one to one if it's just a person. It's like, I know someone that this is perfect for and they would send it to them. Those are the things that if you have those two things, you can do really well even if you mess everything else up.

Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, there's all these other factors I'm sure with like, you know, time on site, consumption of content.

So like, yeah, there's 200 ranking factors. Google has come out and said, which is probably an understatement because that was years ago and they've added more. They probably don't take things away, add more stuff to, to make it more sophisticated. So God knows what it is now, but the fact is, yeah, and you can go absolutely insane trying to optimize for all of them. But the big picture, yeah, those are the two things that matter most.

So out of curiosity right now, what is your current business model. I know obviously you're doing a lot of SEO and you teach a lot of the SEO. How are you sustaining yourself through the SEO?

Just training. So I don't do any client work anymore or consulting. I just sell two SEO training products. One's called SEO that Works, which teaches you how to rank in Google. And there's another one called First Page Videos that teaches you how to rank in YouTube.

Okay, yeah. So YouTube, we gotta go down that vein too. So how. I guess, yeah, if you're thinking SEO on your site and then YouTube, what are some of the commonalities there between the two?

There actually aren't that many because they're two different platforms. Google is a search engine and YouTube is more of a discovery engine. The search engine is important, is the second biggest search engine in the world. But in terms of how people find videos on YouTube and watch videos on YouTube, most of the views on YouTube, like 80% come from suggestions on YouTube. So, you know, when you go to YouTube now, I'm sure you've seen this yourself. Like, you land the homepage and they have suggestions for you there that are personalized and they're damn good. Like, they're pretty spot on to what you want to watch. Of course they're incentivized. I want to keep you on YouTube. They're going to get good at it. And in my opinion, over the last year, they've become ridiculously good at figuring out exactly what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. And then as you're watching a video, they have the suggestions in the sidebar called suggested video, which is a huge source of views. So it's more of a suggestion engine than a search engine. So the algorithms work really differently. Like if your video is something that when they promote it around and people watch it and stay on YouTube, it's going to get tons of views because they're going to want to keep. They want to keep people on YouTube, but it's not like as many people go to YouTube and search for something. So the algorithms are defined really differently. Like YouTube, they want you to stay on the video for a long time and then click to other videos and stay on YouTube. And on Google, they want you to get your answer as fast as possible and they consider you a happy user if you do that. So they're kind of two different incentives and they're two different platforms. So there's some commonalities, like you want to produce great stuff and all the generic things, but in terms of how they work. They're really different.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because when I think about how I use YouTube, I get on there and I might search for the very first thing I'm searching for. And then after that I just kind of go down the rabbit hole. I just whatever it's recommending in the right sidebar, whatever video plays next after the video I just watched and I just kind of start floating down a rabbit hole of whatever YouTube tells me I should watch next.

Exactly. And the search part, I go to YouTube just when I'm bored. And I never used to do that because there was like the homepage just sucked. And now that it's really, it's like Netflix, it's really good. You know, that's what a lot of people do. Especially because we're old, man. I can compare it to kids today, they, they grew up on YouTube. Like for them YouTube is TV.

Yeah, it's crazy, the evolution of it all, huh?

You know, and we have, I have a Roku, I think Joe might too. Something similar.

Amazon, I have all sorts of stuff.

Yeah, I mean we're both cable cutters. We don't have, we don't have cable TV anymore because we sit around and watch things like YouTube and Netflix and on like the Roku's and stuff. YouTube does look just like a Netflix. You just kind of scroll left and right through videos and just discover new stuff. So I do think that's kind of the new TV that makes sense to me.

So what are some like from your opinion, what obviously great content and all that stuff, but are there a couple things to land in those suggested videos that you'd suggest?

Yeah, the number one thing is to keep people watching your videos and keep people on YouTube. So basically how YouTube's algorithm, they're much more transparent about how it works than Google. Either by mistake or by accident, they publish research papers that basically say like this is a model of suggested video that might work. And basically how it works is they show you a video and if lots of people click on that video and then watch it for a long time and then watch another video and go down the rabbit hole, they're going to keep promoting that video. Yeah, if video B comes on and people click on it and then they watch it for two minutes and then click away from YouTube, they're gonna start showing video a lot more and video B is gonna get buried. So the number one thing is if your video can keep people watching your video but also just stay on YouTube. So one way to do that is to create playlists. So when someone watches a video on a playlist, it keeps them on YouTube longer because they autoplay related videos of your choosing and you get views. You can also suggest a video on your end screen that people can watch after your video is done playing. And just if you have a good channel, people will go to it and then you have tons of videos there and they'll just. I'm sure it's happened to you before. You end up on this channel about cats or sushi, whatever, and then you're like there for 10 hours. That's gonna help all their videos do a lot better. So if you have a full fledged channel with tons of good stuff, you're gonna do better in general than if you have like five good videos, just because there's not as much for people to binge.

Got it.

That makes sense. It's like you're creating like an ecosystem and you're just basically trying to create like a fence around it and be like, don't go anywhere because we want consumption.

Exactly. And the cool thing is, even if they go to watch other videos on other channels, that still helps your videos rank better. So there's a thing called obviously you want them to keep them in your thing, and that's most of the time it happens. But the cases where someone jumps to another channel, it's called session time. If they jump to another channel and they get in the rabbit hole there, and that happens over and over again, Someone clicks on video A, they end up on channel B and they go down the rabbit hole. YouTube's still going to promote video A because it keeps people on YouTube and that's their goal. At the end of the day, it's.

Like a catalyst that makes sense. Well, staying on the YouTube vein, I do eventually want to get into like the search SEO stuff on Google. But staying on the YouTube vein for a minute, what sort of advice do you have to get people watching videos longer? And have you found any sort of length to be ideal?

So about a year and a half ago, we analyzed a million YouTube search results, and we found that the Average first number one result in YouTube was 18 minutes, which is a lot longer than people think. And part of it, my opinion anyway, is that if you want to keep people watch a video for a long time, the video's gonna be long. You know, if your video is 30 seconds and people watch 100% of it, that's only 30 seconds. And YouTube doesn't really care about the percentage. But if your video is 10 minutes and people watch half of it. That's 5min minutes, which is much more than 30 seconds. So I think there's a place for longer videos. Not necessarily just to make them long, but just a sense that people are afraid to create longer videos. Just like back in the day, people are afraid to create long blog posts. They were like, no one's gonna read them. There's attention span's really short. And that mentality has carried over to YouTube in some ways. But when you look at channels that do well, a lot of them publish really long videos that are 10 plus minutes long. So I'd say if you, if you've wanted to publish long videos that cover something in depth, but you've been afraid because of some arbitrary limit, you want to keep them to three minutes or five minutes, whatever, I would extend it out because it can help your watch time. It can help the amount of time people spend watching your videos. So that's the number one thing in terms of length. There is no perfect length. Like, I've seen videos that are two minutes do well, I've seen that do 25 minutes. I've seen hour long videos succeed. But I would say in general, I wouldn't shy away from longer videos. If that's something that you think you can cover a topic really well and you want to cover it all.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then you get guys like Joe Rogan who are three hours long.

Exactly. People watch. It's like sometimes they have 100% people watch the entire podcast.

Oh, I know people that have a timer. Literally every single day, whenever he goes live, I'm watching, I'm like, dear God.

Yeah, it's insane.

That's intense.

That's like your podcast, right, guys? I mean, I know I have my timer.

Yeah, you better.

Joe Rogan.

I don't bother with that. But the awesome folks, who needs to.

Listen to that guy?

So with the YouTube videos, what sort of advice do you give people to get people watching the videos longer? So let's say I was to make a 15 minute video. I know you've talked about in some of your YouTube videos about some mechanisms that you can do to keep people just watching longer.

Yeah, so this is going to sound kind of weird, but the most important thing is the first 15 seconds. And the longer your video, the more important that 15 seconds is because people can see that the video is whatever. Right? 12 minutes, 15 minutes. So say you made this 15 minute video. If someone's gonna say, all right, they're kind of like, let's try this you know what I mean? They've got one finger on the mouse ready to click on something else on a 15 minute video, let's face it, unless they know the channel and know that that's totally different, in that case, they're in it to win it. You know, Joe Rogan podcast is three hours. People watch it, but in most cases, you found this new video, you don't know what it's gonna be. You're really hesitant to watch it. The first 15 seconds is super important. And YouTube's data actually shows that most people leave in the first 15 seconds. And if once they pass that 15 second threshold, there's something magical that keeps them around for a lot longer. So for the first 15 seconds, I like to use something called the PPP formula, which is preview, proof, preview. And these are really more for how to videos, but they can apply to any sort of video content on YouTube. So first you preview what the video is to let them know they're in the right place. You're like, hey, in this video, I'm gonna show you how to create a podcast. And then the proof is showing that you know what you're talking about. So, you know, this is the same process we use to grow the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. And this is how we got, you know, so and so guests to come on. And then at the end, you give a little sneak preview of one little nugget and tip you have inside. And you say something like, and in this video, I'll show you the process and exactly what microphone I recommend. And the person's like, all right, I'm in. Compare that to most intros, which are like, podcasting is growing at an exponential rate and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then people click away. You know, if you just get right into it with this preview, I found that your retention time goes through the roof. And people are more likely to stick with you through the entire video.

I love it. Because you're giving them something tangible, obviously backing it up with proof, but you're just cutting kind of all the bullshit that a lot of YouTubers would do with this long intro.

When you're opening loops in their brain too. You're kind of, you're opening a loop saying, here's what we're going to talk about. And then people kind of go, well, crap, I need to get at least that far so I can hear that part.

It's like, it's only 10 minutes, I'll watch it.

Exactly.

I love it. Now that's. Now I know, you're big on obviously quality content and you know there's content out there that could potentially negatively impact, you know, what you're doing on SEO. Is that the case with YouTube?

Not really. On YouTube, there isn't as much of like a domain authority effect. So, like your channel is. It helps if your channel is popular, but it's mostly indirect. You know, like, for example, you put out a new video, if you already have a million subscribers, more people are going to watch it, more people are going to comment, it's going to get all those signals and it's going to do better. But it's very indirect. I've seen videos from channels that have 50 subscribers and they have like 10 million views. You know what I mean? It's not as important. But on Google, if you don't have any domain authority, if no one has linked to your site, it's very, very unlikely that one piece of content is going to be a hit. On Google, it's never happens. So it's not as big of a deal. On YouTube, if you have a couple weird videos that don't do well, or you want to do an announcement or something that only gets views from hardcore fans, that's not really a big deal.

Cool.

Okay, good. One less thing to worry about.

This is kind of the last question I have about YouTube, but we were listening to you on Noah Kagan's podcast and you were talking about the concept of pattern interrupts inside of videos. Can you quickly touch on that and how people can do that kind of thing?

So pattern interrupts are anything that changes your mindset. It's actually an NLP thing. I don't know that that part of it. I'm not big into nlp, but basically what it is, it's like a state change. So if you're bored and then surprised, that's a pattern interrupt. And another way of looking at it is just looking at the name like it's a pattern interrupt. There's a pattern and then there's an interrupt in the pattern. So, for example, in your video, if you're in front of the camera, that's a pattern, right? And then if the pattern sustains for a long time, it gets boring. Like, if it's just the same shot of you for, however, 10 minutes, it's boring, it's a pattern. But if you interrupt the pattern every so often, it makes the video more interesting and more compelling. So if you're in front of the video for 30 seconds and then you show a shot of something for two seconds, and then it's back to you, and then the camera angle change and then there's a joke, then there's music, and then there's another joke, and then it's back to you. And then it makes the video much more compelling. And people are more likely to watch. If you watch successful YouTube videos, most of the time, more successful YouTubers, they use pattern interrupts constantly. Like PewDiePie and Mr. Beast and all those guys, they're constantly changing stuff. Like it's almost like two seconds without something changing. So I recommend looking at those videos as inspiration. You don't necessarily have to copy their style because they're maybe not for the target demographic that you have. They're usually for younger people like Logan Paul or something like that. But they're masters at pattern interrupts. Like, the videos are just crazy and it's even hard to keep up because it's just moving so fast. But that's what you want. The moment someone gets bored, they're clicking over to suggest a video. They're going back to the homepage or they're checking out the subscriptions. Just so many temptations on YouTube that you're better off going overboard and making your video just crazy and than making it boring and stale.

Got it. So an example might be you're talking about maybe an SEO concept which can get sort of technical at times, and maybe people might start to zone out. And then you mention a cat video and then all of a sudden you have a picture of a funny looking cat on the screen going rare. And then it goes back into the thing and it sort of snaps them out of the state they were starting to fall into.

Exactly, exactly. The more you can do that stuff, the better. Of course, if your videos are about cats, they have built in pattern interrupts. It's already interesting, but for most of us, cats come in handy for that sort of thing.

That's like these. Yeah, we should just start dropping cat like sounds in our podcast. Maybe we need to start layering those in. That's cool. Now, the pattern interrupt thing, I remember because I did a lot of sales videos back in the day for a lot of big product launches, and that was a huge piece of everything. I always thought it was like every 10 seconds or so there should be some kind of movement or some kind of new thing appear, and it totally works. We tested the engagement and I was like, holy shit. Okay, patent interrupts.

I'm curious, do you notice that there's. Have you looked at the data to see? Okay. People tend to drop off around this time. So that's a good time to do it, or is it sort of arbitrary?

It's good to do that for your. The problem with YouTube is that you can't really edit existing videos, but it's good to watch your older videos and real and learn when people drop off like. And you'll probably notice patterns I had when I first started, I was really into storytelling. I was like, oh, storytelling is big and you gotta tell stories. And, you know, there's a lot of marketing hoopla about storytelling. That's a different topic for a different day. I don't really buy it. But anyway, I bought into it at the time and I was always telling these nonsensical stories. And then at the end I'd have some. Some way it tied into SEO and inevitably my audience attention would tank when I started telling these stupid stories that had made no sense. And I was like, you know what? No stories. So instead of stories, I got right into the point. And if I did tell a story, it was just a very, very small example. Just to illustrate the point I just made. I didn't lead with the story. So once I took stories out, my audience attention went up a lot. Another thing that really helped, you can also do the opposite, like, look where audience retention tends to do really well. And I noticed whenever I show something on screen, like text that was like a graph or a chart or keywords to search for or tools, I recommend audience retention is really high because people would pause it and they would write it down or they would go back to it. And that helped my audience retention in general for the entire video when I started adding that stuff. So, yeah, the best thing to do is actually like, ignore my advice, pretty much look at your own videos if you have videos and figure out what works best for your channel, your audience, your topic, pattern interruption will almost inevitably work for everybody. But there probably are a couple things that are unique to you, unique to your audience that you can identify and be like, okay, this is something that definitely is not working, or this something is definitely working. And then double down on what works and cut out what doesn't.

Totally makes sense.

Yeah, that's cool. And I know YouTube. I think semi recently with their analytics and dashboard, the whole back end got a lot better. I believe we don't go into YouTube a lot, but that's like one of the. But that's what I remember is like, you can. That's just a note that I'm mentally taking right now. I'm like, okay, we need a deep dive.

Well, yeah, YouTube is one of those things that's sort of been. We know we should be when we're doing it in our business, but right now. So with our YouTube channel right now, it's kind of like we curate other stuff there. So we'll make Facebook lives and we'll do these podcast episodes and we'll, you know, we make little videos and post them on Facebook to our group, and then we just pretty much repurpose it all. So it's also on YouTube. And for some reason, our channel never seems to get any traction.

Well, most people. There's. There's a lot of people. Honestly, I don't think everyone has to be on YouTube, especially if you already have a multimedia format like you guys have podcasts. I feel like it's better to just be really great at one thing. Like, I've always. I've thought about having a podcast for, you know, forever and. But what kept me from doing it is I have YouTube and I feel like. I mean, I'm not like, I don't need. I'm not like a megalomaniac. You need to like, watch me on YouTube, listen to my podcast, read my blog. You know what I mean? I'm not like that. I feel like I'd rather. If I have a great YouTube channel, I don't really need a podcast. And I feel like it's true the opposite. Like, if you have a great podcast, which you guys do, you don't necessarily need, like a YouTube channel. Not to say you shouldn't do it, but I wouldn't feel guilty about not having it and that it's not this must have thing.

That's really good what you said there, because it kind of gives because I know a lot of listeners, they'll write in like, oh, crap, okay, this is something I got to learn now. Add that to the list. No, no, no. Pump the brakes. You know, priorities. Simplification of everything is the way to go.

Well, quite honestly, that's one of the issues with our, you know, our podcast is we have such a wide variety of sort of marketing tactical advice on here that I think people listen in and feel like, oh, I've got to do all of this. This is. This is all necessary to my business. But no, it really is just kind of a pick and choose and go deep on one or two.

Right?

Yeah. And it's what you're good at. Like, if you're like an audio file and you listen to podcasts and you're on constantly listening to podcasts and you Just can't get enough. Then podcasts are probably what you should do because you know the space. Like for me, I love YouTube. I watch YouTube all the time. I subscribe to a billion channels and follow. So for me it's. I know I can do better on YouTube than I could on a podcast. So that's the other thing. So yeah, don't feel guilty if you're not on YouTube. I'll be like the most chill guest ever. Actually, don't do it. Just quit.

You're good.

Go to Costa Rica. You don't need to do anything.

Do you think YouTube is harder now than it was when you started your channel?

Oh, by a lot, by a lot. Especially in B2B. So when I started there were almost no good B2B channels. Every channel that was even remotely B2B was this like self fluffing nonsense. You know, it was like how we can. It was all about their company. You know, it's like our widgets can help you do, blah blah. Our agency is great and it was no value. That was about. I started about four years ago. Over the last couple years, B2B has really blown up like this because people are realizing that it's not for kids. YouTube is huge. That has more users than Facebook and people spend more time on it than Facebook. But it hadn't been taken seriously. People are obsessed with Facebook marketing, which I never have really understood why outside of Facebook ads. And they've kind of ignored YouTube. And over the last couple years people have realized that YouTube is super powerful and untapped. People spend tons of time on there and it's a great way to get your brand in front of people in a compelling medium that's way more powerful than text. So there's definitely more competition and the bar is getting high. But I love that because it's like I'm fine with if the bar, if the bar is low, then it's hard to stand out because it's crap everywhere. But as the bar raises, I don't mind putting more money, more effort and more time into my content. So for me that's a good thing. But I've definitely noticed in the last couple of years the bar like in competition level go up.

Yeah, yeah. We're on the same page with Facebook. We've always kind of thought it was a little overrated. Even Facebook advertising. I know everybody's super hot on Facebook advertising. We do a little bit of it, but mostly just from a retargeting perspective. That's about it. We think there's much better platforms on the vein of advertising. Just out of curiosity, do you do any advertising through YouTube?

No, I'm like, Hugo, I do some retargeting stuff just because it's there.

It's probably not even worth it if you do money and time investment. But yeah, no, I don't do a lot of ads. I try to put everything into organic.

Yeah, I mean, you've basically gone deep on YouTube and SEO and you know what works for you. So why go and go down a whole new rabbit hole when what you're doing is working?

So I'm curious, it split between YouTube and SEO where? And obviously SEO has gotten a lot more difficult, I would imagine as well. How do you split your time? Is it pretty even or do you choose one over the other?

No, it's like 70 or 80% SEO.

Wow, cool. I think that's a good topic to shift over to then.

That was my idea.

Well, it's just because YouTube is great, but it can't be your number one platform. Okay, it can be, but the problem with YouTube is that someone watches your video.

The steps they have to take to become a leader or customer is huge. Like, they have to watch your video, they have to enjoy your video, they have to find out who you are, they have to click on a link in the description or go to your channel page, find the link to your site, land on your site, your homepage has to be optimized and sign up for a lead and blah. It's like a million steps to become a leader customer. That said, that small percentage that does that jumps through all those hoops, they tend to become customers. So when I send out customer surveys for people that sign up to my courses, I'm always surprised at how many people say they found me on YouTube. It doesn't show up in my Google Analytics because people search for like Brian Dean or Backlinko and Google and it ends up going through Google. But a lot of people find me through there. And it's such a powerful medium, video compared to text, that they're much more likely to feel like connected and part of the community and all that stuff. But in terms of a traffic source, it's nothing. It's like a faucet versus a fire hose. It's not even close. Like Google, someone's actively searching for what you do or what you sell. They land on your page, they're already on your site. And your page can be optimized specifically to get that visitor to sign up or to buy like it's. It's not even close. So I spend a lot more time on Google. YouTube's more of like a side thing that I think is important, but it's not nearly as important as your own site.

Yeah, podcasting is very similar. You got to figure we have like hour ish episodes. So if somebody's sitting with us for an hour, they're going to be pretty much our hottest prospects for, you know, buying stuff and getting on our list and, you know, going down our other rabbit holes.

We face the same issues where people end up just googling or finding something else. Maybe it's an email because, you know, we're trying to like everything's interlocked so it's so damn hard to track that.

Yeah, it's, it's. Yeah, that's why customer surveys, to me, this totally off topic are awesome because it seems with all these advanced analytics, multi attribution tracking, blah, blah, blah, you don't know. And if you ask someone, how did you find me? Like, it's old school. Right before Google Analytics was even good. Remember, so many sites would have that when you bought something or signed up. And they don't have that anymore. But I don't necessarily have that. But I send people surveys and ask them, how'd you find me? What made you decide to sign up? Blah, blah. And yeah, I found that a shocking amount of people say YouTube and it would never show up in analytics. And it's just another reason, like talk to your customers. You'd be shocked at all the stuff that you'll find out. And yeah, YouTube's good for that stuff, but it's still, relatively speaking, a small percentage just because of the way the platforms work. It's like podcasting.

Yeah, we always say podcasting. And YouTube probably too is like this invisible audience that you're talking to that you're like, occasionally you'll get the email or the message or you talk to someone in person, but in reality there's a crap ton of them out there and it's amazing. But yeah, it's weird.

There's no referral tracking from our podcast back to our site. We can't go into Google Analytics and see this person found us on itunes. Listen to our podcast, then came to our site. No, it looks like somebody just typed in our URL and went to our site and we never knew they came from the podcast. And that's, you know, that's what we get. We'll go to events and you know, we go to traffic conversion every year and things like that. And that's Some of the biggest feedback we get is, oh, we've discovered you because of your podcasts, and we would have had no idea without talking to people. So we totally resonate there. Now I want to shift gears and really kind of dive into the SEO stuff on just Google search. Now, really, there's kind of, from my perspective, you might have a different perspective on it, but there's really kind of two things to focus on, like internal SEO, getting everything on page optimized, and external SEO. Is there more to it than that? Are there like other factors, or does it really kind of. Obviously those two things are pretty big topics in themselves. Each. But is there anything else other than like kind of getting backlinks and doing on page optimizations?

Well, those are two. Those are still the two of the big ones. There's a third emerging factor that is kind of a blend between the two, which is user experience signal. So how people interact with your site in the search results, that's becoming super important and more important. And it's eating away at the importance of the other two, although those two are still the most important foundation. So I would say those two things are important. This third one is coming in real fast.

Got it. So I kind of want to try to touch on each of those little buckets just a little bit. So let's start with the internal SEO. You know, as we record this now, we're about to roll into 2019. We're the date that we're recording this for about, what, three weeks away from 2019. So I'm probably going to title this podcast, what's going to Work for SEO in 2019? There you go.

With internal SEO, what sort of two or three things are the biggest things to put your attention on? Like, what's the 80, 20 of the internal SEO?

So the most important thing is to have one keyword per page. So if you optimize a page and don't really have one keyword in mind, it's probably not gonna go well. So that's the number one thing is to be like, okay, I have this page. It's about this topic, and it's designed to rank for this specific keyword and you'll rank for others. Like, if you optimize around 1, you can automatically rank for hundreds or even thousands. Like, I have one page on my site that ranks for like 2,000 keywords. It's really only optimized around one, so.

That would be number one, because that kind of hits everything else. The second thing would be make sure you have to have your keyword or close variation in your title tag. It's kind of old school, but it's still really important because Google puts a lot of weight on it. And also it affects that other bucket, that user bucket, because people know your page is about that, so they're more likely to click on it. It matches their search. The other thing I keep in mind is to have a keyword in your URL and not have a lot of other junk in there. So you know, if your keyword was SEO in 2019, you'd want to make your URL something like SEO 2019 without too. It's okay if you have some other stuff in there, but that would be ideal. But you don't want it to be like slash category slash page slash, blah blah blah, and then it all written out. SEO in 19. Brian Dean this pocket, you know what I mean? It eats away at the relevancy of the URL. So you want to stick to that keyword rich URL structure.

Got it. Now, how important is the domain name these days?

It's just important for branding mostly. I mean you'll see the occasional, you will see sites that rank partially because they're domain, but in my opinion, it's not the domain itself. It's that when people link to it, they use the anchor text when they link to it with the name. So for example, if you're like usedcars.com, when people link to you, they say the anchor text is used cars a lot and anchorage text is still super important. It's probably the most underrated ranking factor. I've seen it work really well lately. I've seen people spammers used it lately. It's still working really well. I think that's how it helps you. If your domain name contains a keyword and then people are linking to it and your name is the keyword, it can help you rank for sure. In terms of branding, it's probably not great unless you have an awesome name like usecards.com or creditcards.com, but for the most part I think it helps in that sense.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I remember maybe four years or so, four years or so ago, if you wanted to create a blog on healthy food recipes and you owned HealthyFoodRecipes.com right at the top. Like the day you bought that domain and installed WordPress, you'd be ranking at the top of Google for that keyword.

That was me, man. That was how I got into SEO is that kind of stuff. And it was totally True, it used to work well. Now I think they took out the domain because it was basically Google wasn't as sophisticated. Right. So imagine you're creating a search engine. You're kind of like, well, if the site's called HealthyRecipes.com, i guess it's about healthy recipes. Right. So we should give it a boost. Yeah, it's gotta be good or at least relevant. You weren't as worried about good back then. You were just it was related to what they're searching for now. They've nailed the relevancy and the quality too. So I think the bump comes more from these exact match anchor texts that people get from the name. So if people searching are linking to it and they're saying Matt from healthy recipes and they're using that as an anchor text, I think that helps a lot because they put a lot of emphasis on anchor text.

Totally makes sense. Now a question that I hear often is what about the. Oh, I'm drawing a blank on what it's called like the.com.org.net oh, the extension or the. Yeah, your URL extension.

I guess so actually yeah, I ran into a Google guy a couple years ago and asked him about that and he gave me a response that made a lot of sense. And it's basically we don't really look at it. And the reason we don't is because the domain names, at least before they created this thousand they released a year and a half ago. But before that most of the domain name extensions were country related. Right. There are called cctlds like country top level domains. But what happened was people started using them for other stuff that had nothing to do with the country. Like.co which became popular is Columbia and I.O. i think it's Transylvania or something like that. It's a country cctld. So from Google's point of view, if they looked at it and said okay, this is.

Cos are Colombian websites, they're not going to rank them that highly in Google us. But they quickly realize that most of the people that register these domains, they're not in Columbia. And the same for IO and tons of them are like that. So I think indirectly it can help or hurt you, but directly, no. So for example, if you're a German site and you create a.de it's going to help you rank in Google because people are more likely to click on it. Like if you're a German person, you search for a German keyword in google.de and you see a.com, a.IO and a.de, and you're looking for something German, you're going to click on the.de and that's going to help your traffic and rankings. So I would say based on what he told me, which does make sense and what I've seen, directly it doesn't make a difference. But indirectly, it makes a huge difference.

Got it. And, and just from a branding perspective, dot com always looks good, right?

Yeah. You can't go wrong with a dot com.

The original.

Yeah, yeah. So then just staying on the topic of internal, real quick, how important is it to be sort of cross linking your content on your site, like going back to old content, linking to new content and linking to your old content from the new content, things like that?

It's important, but it's somewhat, it's a little overrated because most people like don't have any links pointing to their site. And internal linking, what that does is it passes authority around. You're linking from page A to page B and page A sends link authority to page B. But if you don't have any link authority to pass around, you can interlink all day long. It's not really going to make a difference. So a lot of people do that and they find it doesn't help and they wonder why. And that's why you need to have links from other sites pointing to you for that to help. But once you have that, it's super important and it can help a lot.

Got it.

Okay, so then let's switch over real quick to external SEO, because I think this is probably the more difficult part of SEO, at least from my experience, the harder part of SEO is getting people to link back to you. So what sort of advice do you have? What's kind of the 80, 20 there? What advice do you give people?

So I think the number one thing that I've picked up over the years is your content needs to have one thing that'll make people link to it, which I can give you some concrete examples. So if you're publishing like 10 tips for whatever, it's probably not compelling enough for someone to link to. Like no one's gonna log into WordPress and go through all this hassle and add your link, even if you email them. So the number one thing is to have a hook that gets people to link. And the thing that has worked well for me and I've seen work in other industries over the years is numbers, or having numbers on your site. So it can be a case study, like how we grow a podcast by 158% using the strategy, then someone has an anchor that they can link to in future blog posts. So whenever someone wants to talk about a way to grow a strategy, a way to grow a podcast, they can cite you because you've grown your podcast by 158% and they'll do that. But if you just say we grow a podcast, or 10 tips for growing a podcast, it's all about having a number. So a couple years ago, we did a huge Google ranking factor study with like a million search results and people linked to it like crazy because it's just full of data and numbers. And that was an extreme example. Like, that was really expensive and hard to do. And I don't necessarily recommend that, but it just goes to show the power of numbers. A lower tech example is I published a case study of how I increased my subscribers by conversion rate for email subscribers by 785% using this strategy called the content upgrade. And it gets linked to all the time because I have that number in there, 785%. So then when someone's writing ways to increase your email subscribers, they link back and they have that number. So I'd say the number one thing is when you write down, sit down to write a post, if you want someone to link to it, you got to think, why would someone link to this? And a lot of times the number is the answer.

That's really cool. Yeah. It's this tangible number that people want to kind of know the answer to. Whereas, like a list, like I've seen a million out of those.

Exactly. Something tangible is the word I was looking for. It's perfect.

Yeah. So with that kind of thing, are you kind of. You're putting that stuff out there and you're hoping that the right people will find it and link to it, or do you have sort of an outreach strategy to make sure that people see it?

Oh, you definitely got to have an outreach strategy because if you hope there's so much content that it's really unlikely that people are going to find it. WordPress has a stat that 2 million blog posts are published every day. And that's just on WordPress powered platforms, which is a big chunk, but not all of them. So it goes to show there's a lot of content that comes out. So even if you put out really good stuff, you put out amazing stuff. If you don't have an audience, it's going to be really hard to get in front of people. And that's why I recommend using Blogger outreach. I actually just wrote a guide on blogger outreach a little bit ago that can go into details on how to find people to reach out to, email scripts and things like that. But the gist is.

Outreach is key because you could just get it in front of the right people. You don't necessarily have to ask them to link or ask them to share. If you get it in front of enough people, some of them will link, some of them will share. Maybe in a future post they'll remember because you had a cool case study and they had to cite. They need an example and you're top of mind. Outreach is super key. And it's something that I did in the early days. I hustled like crazy, sent thousands of outreach emails and it made a big difference.

Makes sense.

Yeah. Okay, so the sites that link back to you, does the domain extension matter for that? Because I remember a few years ago, everybody was saying you need to get the. You need to get the Edu backlinks you need to get. Like those are higher value backlinks. Does that still hold true today?

Well, it's funny you say that because someone recently asked Google rep that same question and they said that actually they put Edu links lower on the totem pole because they get spammed so much because of that idea that everyone's spamming them, finding ways to get links on them that they basically devalued them. And they've actually recommended that Edu sites no follow all of their links to other sites just to kind of reduce the level of spam. So I don't think there, I don't know if it's there. It's true. If that was just a way to discourage people from spamming them. But the point is, I don't think there's anything special. But those sites just tend to be authoritative anyway. And I think that's why they are or were powerful, because they have more authority. I don't think it was anything magical about their domain name extension that might have been true. Maybe in the back in the day, in the early Google days, like if I'm Google and I'm just starting, I'm like, hey, these sites by default, not just anyone can make an edu or a.gov site. You need to be like a trusted organization. Let's put more weight on those links. It makes total sense. But once you pass a certain threshold and you can kind of people are spamming and whatnot, I can see why they would say, you know what? That doesn't really matter.

Got it. Yeah, because I've heard a lot of people, you know, talking about, what do they call it, like, scholarships, right?

Oh, yeah, scholarships, yeah.

Where basically you give somebody like $500 towards their school or something in exchange for them to write an article about you or something like that. I don't remember Nate was talking about it at that event that we were all at.

Yeah, that's a good example of something that. It's like Gary Vee says, marketers ruin everything that a couple people started doing and then it blew up and now it's like basically spam. And that's one of the reasons Google, if this is true, they basically devalued links from Edu sites because just people are doing stuff like that at scale.

And I feel like a good takeaway with everything we've been talking about here so far is like, if you just stick to really solid principles, you're probably going to last the test of time. And maybe it'll be a fast rise or a slow and gradual rise, but you're not going to get maybe slapped by Google if you have a ton of Edu links from like four years ago.

Yeah, well, I mean, it seems like the key idea is if you create really, really quality content and then just kind of make the efforts to spread it around, those are kind of the biggest keys. A lot of the gray hat, black hat sort of things, they come and go. I remember we were at Traffic and Conversion Summit, one of the very first ones back in, I don't know, 2010 or something like that.

In Austin.

In Austin. And back then they were, they were flat out teaching you from stage to go to Fiverr and for 5 bucks, buy 500 backlinks and go buy for $5, buy 20 edu links and just let these people just get your links everywhere.

That was, that was before Roland came in and cleaned it up. Roland's probably listening, so.

Hey, Roland.

All right. It used to work.

Yeah, it was, it was, I wouldn't say good advice, but it was actually, it worked.

So.

And no one saw it coming, that it was going to stop, but it did.

Got it. All right, so anything else on external or no? Yeah, external LinkedIn stuff.

No, I think that's pretty much it. I mean, there are tons of tactics and things like that and another shameless plug from a content that I published. But it goes into a lot more depth than we can do here. I published a big post the other day of link building strategies as 178link building strategies. So awesome. You can go there, go nuts. You can sort them by beginner, intermediate and advanced. So you can find strategies that are more like for your level and you can go nuts.

Awesome.

Because there are a lot of strategies and it depends on where you're at, kind of what niche you're in. There are different opportunities and stuff, but that's a good place to start.

Sweet. Well, we'll definitely link up any of that kind of stuff in the show notes for this episode. So then the last little quick rabbit hole is the user experience. What kind of quick tips would you give people to optimize that user experience?

So the number one thing is to make sure that people want to click on your result. So your title tag should include your keyword. That's the science part. The art is how do you use your keyword in a way that's compelling too and create a cool headline. So the reason that's important is because Google pays really close attention to how people interact with the search results when they search for something, especially if they don't click on a particular result or they do click on one more than average. So like the number four result gets about 8% of the clicks or 10% of the clicks. If it's getting 20, that's telling Google, wow, this results really relevant. People want to find this. Why are we burying it in the number four spot? We should move it to one or two. So the most important thing to start with is to make sure people click on your result. And the best way to do that is to look at what's there ranking above you and see if there's any consistent things. And also include ads in there because ads are optimized for clicks. Google AdWords ads. So kind of take inspiration from them and apply that to your title tag. So for example, when I had this post about list building that I wanted to rank for the keyword list building and I looked at the ads and they all used.

They all use terms like list, database and email list. And they weren't using stuff like how to build a list. They're specifically talking about email lists because they must have tested their ads and realized that list building was too vague. Had to be about building an email list or email list database. So I use those terms in my title and description tag and I got a higher click through rate and it helped me rank number one. So that's number one. The other thing is when people land in your result, you got to keep them. Then it's kind of like YouTube. You want to keep them there and you don't want to Go back to the search results because that tells Google that person wasn't satisfied. So the better you can satisfy that person and the better you can keep them on your page and prevent them from hitting that back button, the better your stuff's going to perform.

Got it.

That makes sense.

That's the quality content. Yeah. Keep them in your little. Your little area, maybe in your website or domain as well.

Yeah, that's where internal linking, they go down a rabbit hole. They sign up for your newsletter or just like it's for kind of basic stuff, like it's formatted well. Like the font's big, it's easy to read. That stuff makes a big difference. You'd be surprised how much content like doesn't rank well because it's hard to read. So that kind, like you said, the principles are still really important. And a lot of times if you nail that stuff, I wouldn't say you can ignore SEO, but you don't have to be obsessed with it to do well.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy because we've done that and there will be some random blog posts that we have a pretty good idea of the keyword that people are searching for for say, an affiliate product, because we do a lot of that in a niche, kind of its own domain. And that will rank fairly well and brings consistent sales to this day. But it's just following those principles. Just a very simple title and then some internal linking.

Yeah, yeah.

We don't really have time to get into this today, but you also have a really killer strategy called the skyscraper strategy that we'll link to in the show notes. But it's essentially creating fairly long form, really, really high quality content. And you've got this whole strategy around it where once you've created it, you kind of do some outreach beyond that and things like that. So we'll definitely link that up. But one thing I wanted to touch on really quickly was the quantity versus quality question, because I know with your blog you're not super frequent. It's not like daily or I don't even think you're weekly blog posts or anything like that. Right. Aren't you more like maybe like a once a month kind of blog post?

Yeah, about once a month.

And so I think a lot of people have been fed this notion that you need to be creating content very consistently. Like daily content is what matters. And I think your proof that that's not necessarily true.

Yeah, it's not true. The thing is, it used to be true. I think when blogging first started, it was like this cool thing people are publishing every day or every week. And it helped you. And Google had part of the algorithm which really rewarded fresh content and sites that were updated a lot. But those days are so long gone. But unfortunately, the people that started in the early days are still around and they're saying, this is how I built my blog in 2008 or 2007 or whatever. And they don't realize that if you started today, it's completely different. And the competition level was nothing compared to what it is now. Now it's all about quality, because your stuff really needs to stand out. Like that stat about 2 million blog posts every day. It's insane. So if you're going to stand out, your stuff has to be ridiculously good. And unless you have an army of people creating content for you, you know, it takes a long time to create something amazing, sometimes an entire month. So, yeah, I definitely recommend if, like, if you're hustling and grinding and trying to get your blog going, and if you're doing it for a long time with this weekly, bi weekly, whatever, take a break and just focus this month on producing something really outstanding. And most people find that it does a lot better than 50 blog posts that are mediocre.

For sure. Yeah. And that's when my wife was recently starting her blog and this whole new niche I told her to skyscraper.

Go use that.

Stop hustling. Don't be like the other people.

Yeah. I gotta be honest, when it comes to SEO, I think your blog post on the skyscraper technique is probably the blog post that I've referred to the most amount of people when they ask about SEO.

Definitely.

Wow.

It's not even really an SEO post. It's funny how SEO is more about content now.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So before we kind of wrap everything up, are there any essential tools that you use or you'd recommend for all the stuff we've been talking about?

The tool I use probably most is Semrush for keyword research. Because most keyword research tools, you type something into it and it gives you a list of suggestions, which is helpful, but I just can't be bothered to do that anymore. It's just such a pain. Now with Semrush, you can put in a competitor and you can just see all the keywords they rank for. And if they're similar to you, they're similar size and link authority and all that stuff. If they're ranking for something, you probably can too. Especially if you skyscraper them and create something better than they put out. So for me, it cuts through the kind of the noise of the keyword research tools and gives you a list of keywords that are all doable.

Very cool. Yeah, we use Ahrefs in our business. We haven't really used Semrush a whole lot.

We used to.

Yeah, we used. Yeah, I think you did. I never really got into SEM. It was more me. Yeah. Nowadays we use Ahrefs. Cause I kind of felt like Ahrefs did what Semrush did, plus what Bussumo did, plus has some like internal audits it can do on your site for on page optimizations. And it just, it seemed like it did a lot. But you don't, you don't think that that's necessary. You think SEMrush is probably the best way to get into it.

I find it. I use it a little bit more. It's a little better at that thing that I just mentioned than Ahrefs. But the good thing about Ahrefs, like you said, is that it's a better value overall because you get the best link analysis tool in the market. You get a really good keyword research tool, the type where you type it in and you get suggestions and information on it. And I don't really think it's as good as BuzzSumo, the Content Explorer yet, but they're working on it and you can reverse engineer competitors keywords. It's not as good as Semrush, but in terms of an all in one suite, if you just were like, okay, I want one tool for everything. I think, yeah, ahrefs is probably your best bet.

Cool.

And then on your blog, do you use like WordPress, SEO by Yoast or anything like that?

Yeah, that's the one I use.

That's what we suggest all the time too. It's so easy.

Sweet.

Turn the light green. That's always our rule.

I like being validated that we're at least doing some things right.

Couple things.

Most things not. So wrapping it up, we always like to ask, are there any books you like to go to often or ones you, you recommend to other people?

That's a good question. I would say I read mostly nonfiction, like repeat, repeat style and not business books.

Under the black flag. I've read a lot about. I like pirates, so I've read a lot of pirate books. That's an awesome pirate book that I've read a couple times. So for me, I stopped reading business books like a year and a half ago, so I don't really read that. The only one I've read a lot that's even remotely business related is A Four Hour Work Week. And recommended. Like, I've read that probably like ten times.

I'm curious.

That's probably it, though. I kind of hate business books. It's so boring. But Four Hour Work Week's so cool that I can read it again and again.

That was a big catalyst for us in our business too. That was one of the early books.

That we read, but I haven't read it in years. But the fact that you reread the Four Hour Work Week, I think you're the only one that's actually said that there's probably still AHAs. I know a lot of this stuff could be outdated, but it's the principles.

Yeah, a lot of it's outdated, man. Like it recommends you do adwords to test. And. And Ferris is like this totally different person if you follow him now and his podcast. Like, he's like this brash, arrogant dude and now he's more chill doing meditation and whatnot. But anyway, it's cool to read because it's more for the inspiration than the tactics. Like, I. Even when it came out, I followed it to a T and just fell flat on my face. I don't think the tactics were necessarily like one size fits all. But in terms of inspiration, in terms of like, hey, I'm doing too much or there's more to life than working all the time, or maybe I can have someone help me with things. Man can't be beat.

Yep, for sure. Those are principles that we'll always have to live by to actually be happy with business.

So your main website is backlinko.com. that's where you talk about all the SEO and YouTube strategies and all that kind of stuff. Is there anywhere else other than that that you want people to go check out? Any. Any social medias you prefer people to follow you on? Anything like that?

No, that's the best place. So, yeah, I'd recommend they go to backlinko.com and sign up for the newsletter because there's a lot of exclusive content that I only send to email subscribers.

Very cool. Cool. Yeah, we'll link it up along with everything else we mentioned because, yeah, that's a rabbit hole. Backlinko. That should be your go to bookmarked resource for everything SEO. Thanks, Brian. This has been fun, man.

Hey, thanks for having me.

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