Bruce Clay - The Father of SEO Shares How To Future-Proof Your Rankings

So we've all seen the statistics that say in order to rank number one, you need 1700 words on your homepage. And if you actually go out and analyze what ranks many times, every page on the first page has fewer than 1,000. Because every keyword is different, people are able to become experts with fewer words. If I'm talking about left handed socket wrenches, it doesn't take 1700 words. I don't care who you are.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float. Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt.

Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

We are back. We're back with a legend.

A legend. This is literally, I don't want to say the inventor of SEO, but he coined the term SEO.

Coined the term. I mean, well, let's let him tell the story. But yeah, he has been dubbed the father of SEO and you'll hear why. And you have. So Bruce Clay is who we have on the today and he's been doing this since January of 1999.

96. Sorry.

Yeah, 96. Excuse me, Bruce. 96. And I mean you've been, you've been. It's just fascinating. The way that he explains SEO in this episode is just.

It blew our minds.

It blew our minds. Yeah.

I mean we kind of consider ourselves savvy technical marketers who understand SEO. After listening to this, he totally shifted our perspective and frame of mind around what SEO is. And I think it's going to do the same for you.

So buckle up, buckle up. And this is something, even if you are not like thinking about SEO often, make sure to listen to this one. This will affect every website online.

Absolutely.

That wants to be seen by Google. Yeah.

And at the end of the interview portion of this, he actually shared a tool that like what is going to 10x the speed of our website at least.

And we have before and afters to prove it.

Yeah. So he shouts out this tool, I think reluctantly, he kind of said he might have to kill us for sharing this, but he shared it anyway. And so that tool is in the recording. So you're going to want to make sure you stick around all the way to the end because it's a pretty mind blowing game changing SEO tool.

Yeah. And it's a free tool, so you got to get it. And also make sure to check out Bruce's training. He's been sitting on a domain SEO training.com. pretty cool name. He's been sitting on that for many a years. I think he said 18 years and now he's finally putting out some SEO training to the masses. He's never done this before. It's always been kind of in person stuff. So SEO training.com is Bruce's education, his membership. It's how you can get a hold of him. Like, you know, actually do Q and A's and all that. Definitely, if you are wanting to go down the deep end, and you probably should, if you're, you got some, you know, reliance on Google and organic traffic, you probably want to go buy that. SEO training dot com. Yeah.

And then I do want to make a reminder. We haven't mentioned this in a little while, but at the end of every episode, Joe and I actually jump back on after the interview and we have a little bit of a chat back and forth about our big takeaways and maybe a little goofing off and some fun, easy ideas. But make sure that you hang out past the interview because we always share additional stuff on top of the interview. It's behind the scenes stuff around the interviews and I think it's, you know, it's fun and I think it's as valuable as the interviews typically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, make sure to linger to the very end and also get the action guides of this episode because we cover a lot. There's a full spectrum of stuff here, so you don't want to miss it and I bet you will miss it. But sue, our fabulous note taker has not missed them. So go get them for free. They're free of just for two weeks of this episode going live. Go to Flowchart Group.

Flowchart Group.com and make sure to enter your email address on the little page is going to be a Facebook group and plug in your email address. That's how we send you the notes. And go hang out with us in the group.

Yes, sir. Let's go. No, let's go talk to Bruce. I want to get to this conversation.

All right, Bruce, we are now officially recording. You're already giving us so many wisdom nuggets and things to look out for, but we got to repeat those for everybody else. I guess we'll share them. Right? Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

Yeah.

So we got to give a shout out to Lisa Byer. She made this happen and when she mentioned your name, I recognized it. And definitely I've heard you referenced in different things around SEO. And as the father of SEO, pretty cool title. And what named you are the one that coined the term originally, was it 96?

I think it was 96, yeah. I've been given credit for that. I just wish that somewhere in 96 I would have had a video camera and would have recorded me pointing the phrase. But Danny Sullivan gave me credit for doing it, so I'm taking it.

It's on Wikipedia too, so it's gotta be true.

Gotta be true. Wikipedia never lies.

Well, your story is one that I've been really excited to talk about on the podcast and kind of go back through some of the evolution. How does somebody get into SEO before SEO is even a thing?

A good question. Prior to that, I was the VP and general manager of the networking division of Acer. And you know, Acer back then was a billion dollar company and they made computers and it was cool. And the networking division was the largest Novell reseller in the world at the time, networking software.

But I decided I wanted to be sort of consulting. It was time I was ready. So I looked around and back In January of 96, when I started the company, I don't know if you recall, but that's when Al Gore invented the Internet, right?

Vaguely remember those days.

He kind of basically said, this might catch on. And I looked at it and I thought it might. My background is I have a bachelor's in math and computer science. I'm a programmer and I have an MBA from Pepperdine. So marketing and programming. Along comes this thing called a search engine, which is entirely software, entirely algorithm. And if you win, you make money. Let's figure this out. It's almost like.

A slot machine that you could program yourself. Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, it was almost like that. So I just decided, you know, there were companies around that were doing web design, and this is actually before even pay per click Google, their result page was just 10 blue links, no ads. I mean, this was early and I was three years before Google. So.

I got in and I started programming and wrote some tools and figured out how to change this and change that, and all of a sudden it would go to the top. And one of my prior, prior experiences, I worked in Silicon Valley for a company called Boule and Babbage. And they were mainframe performance optimization companies. That's what we did when I was there. I was there four and a half years, I did optimization. So all of a sudden I said, that's what I'm doing again. So search engine optimization was a term I started using. But you know, it's interesting, nobody really has. Who's the first? The first written, I think is My copyright on my website. But there's others around the time, and they may have heard me talk about it or, you know, you don't pay attention.

Yeah.

You're just.

You're in the middle of it.

I'm doing this for a living. Let's see what happens.

Right, Right.

So I started at my house, my dining room table. Right.

All great things.

I got it going, and we were able to get people ranked, and it worked great, and everybody was happy. And all of a sudden, people started hiring me. So I had to hire some staff. More people hired me. I raised my price. Why not? More people hired me. I hired some staff, and then discovered I had to move out of the house.

Right. And I ended up.

Actually where I am right now. We had actually grown to 12 different suites in this complex, and now we. With COVID we were able to easily get to only seven. That nobody's ever in.

Little layers. SEO layers.

Yeah. So we got plenty of space.

If anybody needs chairs or desks, let me know. And so we've got. We just grew. And.

At the beginning, I was very vocal. I think that's where I got the father label, because I was speaking at conferences and I was publishing papers, and I grew my website to, like, 1,000 pages, all of which was giving away content.

Wow.

I really helped build what was the early stages of SEO, and I think that's why people have attributed everything to me at the front end. But quite frankly, I got to the point where I actually truly sort of feel like I helped build this. You can't be in anything for 25 years from ground zero and not want to feel that. And quite frankly, I don't think I really have the ego to walk around and say, I am the father of SEO.

We just met, and you don't seem like that kind of guy.

But I will tell you that I am too much of a marketer to give it up.

Right? Absolutely.

I can see that, too.

Somebody hands that to you, it's like gold. I mean. Okay, thank you very much.

Yeah.

In the middle. I mean, the first time I was really embarrassed is when somebody came up and asked me at a conference if they could have their picture taken with. I mean, that had never happened.

You're like, I'm a programmer.

What?

Yeah. And it kept going. Now I have actually spoken at over 300 conference sessions. I sponsor conferences, I've written three books, and I have offices on five continents.

That's amazing.

My brand is strong worldwide, and it's only because I was so vocal and so supportive. And so much of giving away the education and advice and it evolved into a business. In the beginning, when I started it, I figured, okay, I can be a consultant. I had this vision of Bruce Clay notebook computer, Corona and a beach.

Tell everyone, well, not starts, but when you get into it, you're like, okay, I could do this.

Hey, I can handle that. And this Internet thing will catch on.

Now it's a business and, you know, people really like what we have and it's been great.

Yeah, sounds like that's great.

I'm curious, when it comes to actually selling SEO services, what was it like back in 1996 trying to sell somebody on the value of SEO? Was it harder back then because people didn't totally understand it, or is it actually easier back then because there was less people offering it? I'm just kind of curious how, how that looked back then. It's like you're selling a service that people are just learning even exists.

Well, that was part of the interesting phenomenon on the, on the first couple of years we would.

Optimize ourselves obviously so that we ranked well. And then people would read about it and then they would go search and then they would call us. Right. I didn't have to do outbound marketing at all. I just had to answer the phone. That's when people used phones.

And I just, it was really. People were coming to me in those early days.

Yeah, you kind of held the fruit like you were the prize. And they're like, hey, look what Bruce is doing over here. And this new if he could do.

It for him, if he could do it for him and he can do it for us. But remember back then there was Infoseek, altavista, Excite. There weren't all these link farms and spammers. It was a lot easier. So you just made the website better and you got rewarded. It wasn't until Google launched with PageRank being their claim to fame, that link spam existed. I mean, it was a little bit naive to assume that I'm going to build something that can be manipulated and nobody will manipulate it.

We're humans. Someone's going to do it.

There was a lot of upfront manipulation. The thing that was little bit different about my approach is I'm a big fan of something called futures research. I, I looked ahead and I thought Google was going to survive.

Now, I didn't have the conviction to believe that I should buy stock when they went public, but I believed that Google is going to survive. And Google had developed some rules, webmaster guidelines, things like that. So I said, okay, Google will be fighting spammers, but they won't fight the people that follow their rules.

So the safe spot is to get really good at following their rules. And that was my focus. We've never had a client penalized 25 years. Nobody ever got penalized for following us. And we are able to make them what we refer to, referred to as being least imperfect. Least imperfect being. Nobody knows the algorithm. There's like layers to the algorithm, but nobody knows what's in the algorithm. And the complexity comes that every keyword is a separate algorithm. If you want to know about that, I can explain it, but nobody knows the algorithm. So it's a little bit like the story of these guys that go camping. I love to tell stories.

This is great.

These two guys go camping. They've been doing it since high school. They put up their tent, build the fire, cooking food. Along comes a bear. They go running down the path. The guy in front does not need to be an Olympic runner. He just needs to be faster than his friend. Right?

That's right.

That's it. And so in SEO, we're not here to beat the algorithm. We follow the rules, but what we do is we pay attention to the people behind us and make sure we're running faster. So our job is to beat the competition, not to beat Google, not to beat the algorithm, not to fool things, because there are people fighting the fooling things. People. Our job is to do the right things better than everybody else. And that's been our philosophy for 25 years. And it has really worked.

It's a great perspective. And it contains, I guess, a lot of these wild and crazy ideas that people might try to pull. I know there's a lot of black hat, gray hat type things, but if you know the rules more or less, and you're staying up with the trends or where Google wants to head, which I know, we'll chat about some of the future things that you're that are on your roadmap, then you're right there. You're beating the competition. You're always a step ahead of it. Ahead of them, at least it seems like.

And as I alluded to, the keyword, so what you have, if you don't mind, you have a database, 300 variables. Every page has numbers and all these little boxes, great numbers. On top of that is a weighted average algorithm.

Now, the weighted average algorithm says, logically, for this keyword, this is more important than that.

Well, the problem is that every keyword has a different intent.

I might be searching because my intent is to transact something shopping. Or I might be searching for information.

And what happens is based upon my intent. It may be that shopping sites, the page title is more important, but for information sites, the body is more important.

Right. For a shopping site, you would expect to have a lot more discrete images of a product, whereas on an information site you might expect a video or a single larger picture. So the 300 variables that weighted average that says what's more important is really dependent upon the keyword.

Then above that, you have some artificial intelligence that says people typing this keyword, they click and stay on the shopping sites, but not the information sites. So that keyword is transactional.

And this keyword is informational. So for search engine optimization, the top ranked sites are all guides and how tos. But if you search for search engine optimization agency, you don't have a single one of those. You only have agencies because those are the people selling the services. So the intent changes based upon Google's experience with the fact that somebody typed in that keyword and more people stayed dwell time, more people stayed on transactional or informational sites. So that changes it. Then above that, you come into expertise, authority and trust. In other words, are you an expert on that topic? Now it's very different from are you using the keyword?

Right.

Artificial intelligence determines if you're an expert and they determine whether other experts link to you because that's an authoritative signal. And are you trusted? Trust gets into some really strange things. For instance, if I said blueberries can cure cancer, I'm in this area called lunatic fringe and right away we all start thinking of the song.

So trust has to do with, you're the only one on the whole planet saying this and nobody agrees with you, or you're a previous spammer, or.

Your site is brand new, or you have a lot of people linking to you and they're spammers, so you're in a bad neighborhood or or so all of these like layers determine how you rank, but the number of algorithms is still dependent upon the number of keywords. So how many keywords are there in the world?

Good question.

That's how many algorithms there are.

Wow, that's scary. So we're surrounded by algorithms and you.

Can spend your entire lifetime trying to figure out one algorithm, but you're dealing with trillions.

So you don't try to reverse engineer the algorithm. And there are people who try, and there are people who claim, oh, I got the secret. But as soon as you change to a different industry, they're out of business. Or as soon as you change to I want informational, not transactional, they're out of business because they can't adapt.

We don't even try to reverse engineer the algorithm. We believe that if I put in this keyword and we look at the top 10 results, we can determine it's informational or transactional. Then we have this knowledge base that says, well, most transactional sites respond well to this. Then you analyze what Google's rewarding and then you beat them.

For instance, we've all seen the statistics that say in order to rank number one, you need 1700 words on your homepage or on your page. And if you actually go out and analyze what ranks many times, every page on the first page has fewer than 1,000.

Because every keyword is different, people are able to become experts with fewer words.

Right, interesting. Okay.

If I'm talking about left handed socket wrenches, it doesn't take 1700 words. I don't care who you are.

That'S just the way it is.

Yeah.

So excuse me for going on this little rant here, but wow, this is the complexity that has been built up over the years. In the beginning, just put the word where the search engine can find it. And now we're into the subtleties of semantic search and link analysis and speed and server structure and, and all of these things that get in with the Google Page experience updates and the core web vital update that's coming in May, and all those things that are really complex, we just have to deal with them as SEOs.

Well, this is the first time I've ever heard it explained like this and in a very clear way. So thank you. Because you've waited what, 20, 26 years you said or so to launch your SEO training. That's a little pitch for you. But yeah, I mean, you are an amazing teacher at this. But it's, it's wild because, yeah, you're right. If you just look up any keyword, you immediately see, okay, is it informational or transactional? And we can kind of just scan it with our eyes. And now knowing this and it's keyword based, you, you, it sounds like you have a rule book of best principles or best practices for your clients. So based off of this information, and I'm sure loads of other information, you now have pretty dang good tests that you can work in a lot of varieties of markets with your clients, it sounds like.

So if I may, I'm going to springboard off of your plug. We have a site called seotraining.com we're just launching it because we used to deal with classroom training and I did a really, a flagship course. It was four and a half days.

Yeah. People signed up for a whole week. Did they get a cool plaque which was really popular in the winter.

But I've, I've ported it and actually just, just released it as a online course. So people can take.

What you just had in 10 minutes. This is 15 hours covering 12 major categories. Everything you want.

It's more of a. It's a membership.

Which means that you have monthly Q and A sessions and you have webinars and you have ask us anything, videos and deep dives and books and tools. Not just the ability to take my 15 hour course every month for a year. It's a membership area and it's, it's reasonably priced SEO training dot com. I've owned the domain for 18 years. It's time to build it up online. Sort of forced me in that direction. But that is, you know, if you liked this description, you guys need to take the course.

Yeah. And we'll link it up in the show notes, of course as well. That was good. Time for the plug.

I like it.

Go ahead, Matt.

I was going to ask about the, you know, you were talking about the complexities of the algorithm and how every keyword kind of has its own algorithm. And it seems like now Google's even going more in the direction of if your search query doesn't even require us to show you a website, we'll just put it right on the homepage of Google. So I'm curious what sort of effects you've seen in the SEO world from Google. Just pulling some of the featured snippets and the various sort of schema things that get pulled to the front of Google. How has that sort of impacted the SEO world?

Well, when featured snippets and answer boxes started coming up, a good example would be how high is the Eiffel Tower?

Google knows the answer. They just give it to you. Yeah, that's an answer box. Or if it is something more complex, that Google isn't going to just give an answer, but they want to refer you to a site that is an expert on it. That's where they do the featured snippets. Now if what most people don't know is if Google doesn't get a lot of clicks or attention to a featured snippet, people jump over it and go to the organic results, Google will stop showing that featured snippet. It goes away. Just like local Results, you may get a local pack with the map and the three entries. If nobody clicks on any of them, after a while, they go away. Because Google doesn't believe that that query is appropriate for local results or appropriate for the featured snippet. So the impact was, as soon as it showed up, everybody freaked out. Featured snippet. They're going to get all the traffic, if they even get traffic. Google's giving the answer away. It turns out the featured snippet actually got more traffic. And number two, the people that weren't the featured snippet, they got traffic too. So users just kept going, especially in informational sites. So it turned out okay.

Yeah. So it wasn't Google.

It turned out just fine.

Yeah.

Google wasn't eating everybody's lunch. It was. Yeah. Because that was sort of the. When a lot of that stuff popped up. That was kind of the thing that we were hearing is like, well, SEO is going to die soon because Google is just going to display the content and nobody's going to click on our links anymore. But it sounds like that hasn't actually materialized.

Yeah. And one of the things I'm fond of saying is that every Monday, it's a new industry.

That's true.

Right. Because Google's changing, according to Google, over 3,000 times a year. If you do the math on that, they're changing eight to 10 times a day. Let's take 10. But probably three of them are fixing the things they changed yesterday that didn't work for real. So there's seven.

Now let's look at your keyword. You do the keyword. There's a million competitors. You have to think, if they change one time a year.

A million competitors, one time a year. You have 30,000 competitors changing every day.

Wow.

That's the math of it. So you have Google changing the algorithm every day. You have 30,000 competitors changing every day, and all you have to do is beat them.

I refer to it as like juggling Rubik's cubes, trying to solve them in midair while the colors are changing.

That's sort of where SEO is.

And by the way, my experience with SEO has certainly changed as the industry has matured. For instance, in the beginning, all of the expertise was in agencies. Nobody knew how to do it. They all hired agencies because nobody had staff to do it. Fast forward 10 years now, the people in the agencies have changed jobs, and some of them went in house and some of them became managers of SEO teams. They're training their own people. Now all of a sudden, you have in house SEOs five more years. You got to believe that a lot of SEO departments or Even if there's one strong SEO in a company that they have 10 years experience.

People started coming to us and complaining that they've gone through two or three SEO companies and they have found that they were training the SEO company on how to do SEO because the in house guy had 10, 12 years and the agency had interns. Right.

We've dealt with that before.

That's where I pivoted my entire company, every SEO analyst, every pay per click analyst, minimum of 10 years experience. I don't even interview them under 10 years experience because I can't take having a client of mine ever say they know more than us. And as a result people hire us especially for situations where they absolutely need the answer.

You just do it. And experience really does count. And if you have a team of that where they can bounce off each other, we could solve almost any problem. It's a little bit like if you needed brain surgery for a family member, do you take the person that's done it 200 times or the person that's done it twice? And how important is price?

That's right.

Especially if it's a loved one. Right. You understand how it works. So in the wild, people who have a tendency to hire us.

They hire us because they need a solution and they don't really believe it used to be. You could believe this, but you don't really believe that I could afford to do it twice because it's a competitive space. Right. And if I do it wrong the first time, my competition doesn't, I'm behind.

And an incumbent has an advantage. Expertise, authority, trust. People will link to you if you're an incumbent and if you're behind, you can't do that. So people hire expertise. And I've been doing quite well since.

Yeah, well, this whole thing, I mean you've seen so many of the shifts in the evolution of this whole industry here. And we were talking about this actually prior to hitting record, we actually ran our website through this tool that's created by Google, but I doubt anyone really knows about it. It's got a URL that's like a mile long.

It's called the Lighthouse Report.

That's it. So you mentioned there's an upgrade coming or update coming with Google, obviously a much bigger update. That's what the core web vitals, I believe it is. And it's mainly a page experience type play here. And there's a lot of new factors that we should Be aware of. And I like.

Absolutely.

I want to quickly, because I remember you mentioned it was another analogy in the beginning of how many people show up or how many pages show up for a search result and how just knowing some of these factors right here that are coming are going to really pivot.

Those movements quite a bit because you're just playing against the other guy. It's not the world.

Yeah.

So I'll describe that. Google has a release. It is due May of this year and they told us about it a year ago.

So it isn't like Google loves giving out information like this. They give it out when it's going to be important. So everybody heard it, but a great many people didn't pay much attention to it. I mean, we're in the middle of a virus who's, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of things going on.

Exactly.

Yep. And.

This update is divided into two parts. There's something called Core Web Vitals. That's the first part. And the second part is called Page Experience.

Page Experience is are you truly mobile friendly? Right. Do you not horizontally scroll down?

You know, it was an interesting concept when people started talking about how do you determine if a button is big enough. I know that when I push a doorbell, I push it with my pointer figure. But it turns out anybody under the age of 20 pushes a doorbell with their thumb.

You know why?

No, think about it now. I can't. Wow.

Got it.

Yeah, that makes sense now.

Yep.

So how big are your buttons?

Getting bigger and bigger. Huh?

I mean, you got to lay things out intelligently. So mobile is getting to be a bigger and bigger and bigger usability factor. It's called Page Experience.

Safe browsing. That's an experience. That's a big item. HTTPs, are you secured? Right. You better be secured. Now when secured came out HTTPs, my original thought is, well, Google's trying to put all the spammers out of business, Right. Because they can't really rank a spam site unless they're secured. So if I make Everybody with those 50,000 domains buy a certificate, it's going to get expensive. Little did we all know that somebody was going to come out with a free certificate. Oh, bummer. And then you have this other thing. You've gone to a website and you see all of a sudden a great big pop up appear. Right. It's called an interstitial. It turns out that Google considers that annoying.

So if it pops up in the first 20 seconds.

You'Re actually going to lose rankings.

That's part of this page experience update hasn't happened yet, but come May, you better not pop it up in the first 20 seconds. Now, some people can't help it. It's like login. Okay, got it. Or a zip gate, which is what zip code are you in? So I can put you in the right this or that. Sometimes your mission requires it. Got it. Okay. But most of the time it's just saying, join my newsletter. You can do that on exit after you've convinced them you're smart.

That's right.

Don't ask them to join your newsletter before they have a clue who you are. But if it shows up in the first 20 seconds, you got a problem because that's in the face. And so the usability issues, the page experience issues are kind of important. Now, we were talking earlier. I have an opinion that if you do a query and you get a million results, that 10 of them at least are going to work on getting these things to be good.

Okay, maybe 100, maybe some people have bought in and said, yes, we're going to work on it for this whole year. Yes, there are people who have done that. But just recently, Google said if you are not good status for a lot of these items, you get no boost in your ranking. But if you do have it, you get a boost.

Well, if you believe that I'm on page one out of a million and I didn't do it, but my competitors did and they get a boost above me, I just lost my traffic. No, I'm not saying that'll actually happen. Google has said that the quality of the website, the expertise of the website is still a dominant factor, but likewise, out of the top 20 out of a million, they're pretty close to each other in expertise.

And therefore this is a tiebreaker. And therefore this could be painful, at least for some of your top keywords, your money terms especially. So there's a lot of people doing that. The second part that we discussed was the core web vitals, and this is far more important. And that's where you saw your performance numbers.

And part of it is how long does it take to load your images. It's called Contentful Paint. And so Google cares based upon how long it takes to load your largest image in particular, but it's also your text blocks.

So I'll give an example. I have an image and I have text around it and below it. Well, if you don't give me height and width information on that image, Google cannot load that text because they don't know how much space the image takes.

So largest contentful paint is when does Google have the ability to paint your images for a browser? How long does that take? And they have some performance thresholds for it. We'll go one step further. Even after it paints, you also have something called first input delay. Now, first input delay is just because the page is there doesn't mean you can click on things.

So there's this pause of like it's all just trying to figure itself out. And then now we can work with it.

So you may have a page that's just full of JavaScript and the browser's still executing all this JavaScript and it's not ready to take answers.

Your input delay has thresholds.

Your largest contentful paint, your first input delay, those have to be in the green zone in order for you to get the boost. But the one that is hardest is the cumulative layout shift.

I think we've all been to a website. You go to the website, you see it, there's a button there. You go to click on the button and the button moves.

It's a trick. Like a lot of news sites, they're going to show you things and then click to go to the article. But then all of a sudden an ad gets inserted and all that content gets pushed down. And when you click to go to the article, you actually end up clicking to go to the ad.

That's right, yep.

Right.

Especially worse on mobile Layout shift.

Yeah, and that is not so much in seconds as much as it's a number calculated from a lot of things. So it's how far does things move and how many things move and what percentage of the screen do they move. And in fact, some of them can actually be below your screen and you're moving them. Right. So Google has numbers and there's software all over the place that you can use to determine whether you're in the green zone. And if you're green, green, green, you get a boost if you're green, green, yellow or red. Too bad, because Google said all three give you the boost, not two of three.

Now, how would that impact? Like, you know, on some of our sites we use scripts that cause the images to lazy load, where the images don't load until you scroll and actually get to it. So they don't need to call the images from the server until the browser actually gets to that point on the page. How would that impact some of these metrics? If Google is trying to see how long that stuff loads, but it's not.

Actually loading, so you shouldn't lazy load Anything above the fold.

Okay.

And in fact, if you really want speed, this is a secret. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. If you really want speed, the CSS in the JavaScript that controls the area that's at the top of the screen should be inline, not separate files. Interesting, because then it loads with your source code.

Yeah.

It's faster because they don't have to go get that file and then execute it. Right?

Yeah.

So your design team has got to get smart about where things are on the page in order to end up with optimal scores. Right?

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Lazy loading, we do it all the time. My website is really fast and it'll be faster when we put up the new version because we have been working this full time. We have full time people just debugging this. Okay. And we do it for clients, we do it for everybody. And that team has moved us to right around 98 percentile. And in our work in progress copy, we got it to 100. With the complexity of my site, if you go to my site on a phone, go to my site on a phone, it's pretty fast. You do a dropdown and you pick one of the menu items before your finger is an inch and a half off the screen. It's already loaded.

Your website is so cool looking too. Yeah. It's got a lot going on graphically, you know.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

It's really complex and we can bring that all the way up to a hundred score.

That's very. I'm curious, for people like us who are, you know, we're big on WordPress.

Right.

How would somebody go and inline the CSS if they're running their website through WordPress. Because WordPress kind of takes control of the CSS for you, for the most part, not fully.

And our site is WordPress. That complex site you just saw with that speed, that's WordPress. So we do lazy loading. And in fact, an internal document at Google, I think they published it on web dev.

They actually have the ability to lazy load JavaScript and all the rest of it too, not just images. So you can cause a delay load. Now I'm going to give you just our experiments. We found that the three things that are the largest.

Hurting speed things. Google Tag Manager is number one. Hurt.

Really?

Wow. So using Google's tools actually hurts you in Google's algorithms.

Yes.

Google fonts.

It gets worse.

Whoa. Okay.

Adsense.

Oh my gosh.

Come on.

Google obviously has different teams that don't talk to each other, but it Turns out that third party and advertisements and things that you have to dynamically load that have a tendency to be large files like font files and things and all this stuff that you have to dynamically load. Those loads delay some of your scores.

And Google Tag Manager attempts to do everything for you. And it takes a while just to open Tag Manager, let alone have things that have to open within Tag Manager.

Now, I'm not saying that they're bad. I'm saying that if you have an issue, you have to really get down to the programming level and understand where the delays are. If that is important to you. Now, it could be that you're in an industry where nobody fixes this.

Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. Don't worry too much in case you're.

Sort of tied.

Right? But it is going to happen and people are going to care an awful lot. If I was number one or two and I'm now number five or six or gone, that is going to matter. Even if it's a third of your keywords, that's a big chunk of traffic and it will matter.

Now also, I'll mention that in the industry a lot of people are talking still about amp.

And how AMP can give you speed. But AMP has restrictions. But if you only want speed, AMP could be a Solution. However, on 5G, a regular website with caching in 5G will outperform AMP.

Oh, wow.

Interesting.

Hello.

So in actuary Google years ago, it's actually in my big ebook, Google years ago said that.

With the advent of networking in the United States, that AMP here in the US may not be needed. Now in India, where everybody's 2G amp's a big deal. Right. But in the US, I mean, our network is just so fast that it isn't nearly as important as it once was.

Yeah, no, I know this is sort of like an in the weeds kind of question, but do you, do you recommend against using Google Tag Manager and just kind of putting any sort of pixels and that kind of stuff just right inside of the header code yourself?

If it is always above the fold, I would modify my templates and put it outside of Tag Manager. The thing is, you still incur the overhead of Tag Manager if you're using it for analytics.

Which people do. There is a real advantage to Tag Manager. Everybody loves it. I love it. You love it. Everybody loves it. The problem I'm quoting is that it is a reasonably high maintenance, high overhead item.

And we've had to look at it. For instance, we took our homepage. This is sort of an experimental Approach, we have issues with everything, so we inflict it upon ourselves. So I took the homepage and only had the header, just the top of page, stripped everything else out, and it loaded pretty quick. And my score was pretty high. Put in the footer score, pretty high. Then I put in sections and figured out where the overhead was. And Tag Manager was always there. Just like that. I lost 70 points.

Wow. 70.

That doesn't mean everybody's going to have the same thing. A lot of people overload it because it's so easy to use.

Right?

Sure.

Right. And then because it's in Tag Manager, they don't minimize their files, which, by the way, is a big score advantage. Minimize your files, Right.

For your. Your content shift. Right. Yep. Most people understand that the content shift is really based upon your frame. Right. Well, what you don't know is that 731 pixels, the frame Google uses is 12,140.

Ah. They're looking at everything pretty much.

So you could be shifting down below the screen and not knowing. That's what's killing you.

Wow.

I mean, looking at our. I don't know if we talked about it, but yeah, we ran through our score and I guess SEO, when it says SEO, because that's the only one. We got green. Bruce, we're 92 there. But is that more what the technical SEO or this is referring back to the latest.

You're on page. Technical SEO, that is, no malformed tags, no broken links. No.

Got it. Okay. So. And that's pretty much where we've always focused a lot. And when probably most people. That's what you hear. It seems like a lot.

Yeah. But the performance score of ours is 18, which is in the red out of a hundred. That's what we've been talking about. So all this is like, oh, okay. I could see the picture now. I can see what we get.

All right, so right now, while we're on this thing, put in this thing called Nitropack. N I T R O P A C K I O. Nitropack IO.

All right.

I think they have a free version. I'm paying for the top end for my site. It's that good. Put it in. It's a plugin.

Okay.

Wait 10 minutes, then rerun your test.

Okay. We'll do a before and the after. And after we get you out of here, we'll probably put it in the recording and report back. Awesome. We're signing up for it now. It's doing something. Yeah.

It says, hold on, Nitropack's doing some Work. So something's running in the background now.

Interesting. Okay. Any other cool tips? Any. Any little hacks?

You don't need any others?

That's it.

Okay, now we do know that. Here's what happens. You, even with Nitropak, you put it in, but it's a little bit like a camouflage. It does some stuff, but it doesn't fix everything. You still have to go through and fix it. Right. Because anybody can run that. How do you get to be first among equals, least imperfect. Right, sure. So you still have to spend the time to make it better. But this is a clear speed tool.

Perfect.

One of the best ones we found.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, that's an awesome resource.

Hopefully you don't have to kill us. You've given us a lot of little details.

When Guido shows up and knocks on your door and it's a big guy with no neck.

No neck. Yeah, big bat. Right.

I'll start running, then you'll know. So then you're safe.

I run in with Bruce finally caught up.

Oh, man. Is there anything else, Bruce, that you think that the audience here should know about? I mean, we're speaking to marketers, which are pretty. We're savvy bunches. So I don't know if we should give too many.

Yeah.

But I would consider myself a savvy bunch. And I was pretty much blown away by everything you said.

Do we want to give them all the choice?

Well, I think my personal view, everybody should join our training membership because we spent what, 40 minutes? Ish 50.

Try 15 hours. And then every month you get to dial into a zoom and you get to ask me anything, as long as it's not about a specific site. It's general SEO stuff. How can you go. I mean, this kind of a conversation every month.

It's absolutely amazing.

I have two books that we have written that are going to be member only when I get them self published. We have my Dummies book. I wrote Search Engine Optimization all in one for dummies. 740 pages.

I saw how big that was.

Like, wow, it's for big dummies. And it's three. We've done three editions. And Christopher Jones and I, we've decided that the two of us. Chris Jones is great. He used to own Pepper Jam before it was originally sold. He's written books.

Yes. No kidding.

And Chris and I have decided to do version four together. So we're going to have the next edition of that and all this stuff to help people understand and stay current.

And you get to take the course. And then when we update it, you get to take that too. Part of the annual membership. I mean, it's. You can't go wrong. So I'd encourage anybody in content, maybe the people at the top of the food chain in your IT department or your webmasters, and certainly your marketing team, you really are, to take it. It's going to be very, very useful. It even has logically community forums where people can ask each other nice.

That's always really cool to get feedback from other folks too and see what they're up to.

Very cool.

Anybody ever have this problem? I mean, granted, we got a lot of experts, but you may not want to hire us for a project and you may just be a do it yourselfer that knows what you're doing, but you haven't seen this one before.

Yeah.

And so that's available.

This is designed as an environment.

I kind of think of it as like a Disneyland where you have your different lands, but it's all together.

See, Matt, I've had this Disney analogy of the journey and everything because we just put a course out on podcasting and marketing and it's a journey and there's a core journey, but then there's all these splintered off areas that you can go to and it's exactly that. I love it. We're on the right path, Matt.

Yeah, I wanted to make sure I shouted out the URL again. So seotraining.com is where that one's at. And then you said you were also working on something@seotools.com, which is coming out soon, maybe out by the time this episode is may not what's going to be there.

SEO tools is being aged at this point. Just letting it sit there. I've owned it. I actually bought that directly from GoDaddy for 1295.

What year was this?

Back in 1999. So I've owned it for 22 years and we have our own SEO tool set. We are really beefing it up. We're in the development stage now. We're beefing it up and then we're going to put it up on SEO tools. And people in the membership area, they get it as part of their membership. So we have SEO tools, It's focused on tools and it's really more power tools. I'm not trying to replicate what other people do.

I have this belief that there's a lot of really broad use tools out there and they even give you recommendations for what to fix, but they're giving 1 million people the same recommendation. How do you be better than them? Yeah, pay attention. Fix those things. But we give you power tools that do a deeper dive.

Yeah, it's like.

And that's our approach and that's why we have it. Our own staff uses it. So we have seotools.com.

Which will within two months, I believe, be republished. We have seotraining.com and then we have Bruce clay.com, which is all about services and everything. You guys being able to solve problems.

Yeah. Everybody needs to go to it just to see how quickly it loads with everything that's on it. Yeah.

An amazing site.

Oh, there's a lot.

There is a lot there that's amazing. Bruce will put everything in the, in the, you know, the show notes here and we'll probably talk about it on our little outro here too.

Yeah.

Because this has been fascinating and it's a whole perspective change for us. So can't wait to share with everyone else. Thank you so much.

I think that a lot of people, my experience has been, even when I was doing the classroom version of our course, which, by the way, I will do a single classroom version sometime in the fall, but when I was doing that, people would come in and they'd say, how can you possibly teach SEO for a whole week? Right. I saw this video. It was 40 minutes.

That's right.

Right. So I teach it for a whole week and then they come up to me at the end of it and say, is there a follow on class?

Oh, you want more?

Okay, they want more. I mean, it turns out to be very good. But we have 15 hours of video in 25 minute chunks and there are Q&As that we've recorded for each chunk. And I mean, we have all sorts of stuff built in. Probably within about six to eight weeks, we're going to have an integrated certification program.

All of that's going into it and might as well. We have the ability to do it.

Yeah.

And it will. I think it'll be loved by the people that take it so well.

Hey, we'll support you in that. And I think it's the best domain on, on the topic too. You can't really get a little bit more clear.

If somebody starts thinking, where do I get some SEO training? The first thing they're going to type into Google is probably going to be SEO training.

So that may happen.

Yeah, probably will. And I like the fact that, like, oh, I'm aging a domain, kind of like a fine wine. It's like 22 years. It's almost ready to go.

It's almost ready.

Well, the rabbit hole goes way deeper than I think most people think, and I think you definitely opened up some eyes to that today.

Yeah. Thank you very much. That's been.

I'm pretty sure nobody thought of the algorithm that way, or there's an infinite number of them. Nobody thought that, or I don't think anybody understood that. The page experience, core web vitals, could actually destroy a company if you don't pay attention to it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. You know, and it takes a month to do it, and then it takes a month for Google to know you did it. So if you're not started, you're behind.

It's in May for about a week, get going.

And all of this stuff is going on in. A vast majority of the marketers don't know anything about it. And that's where shows like yours really help everybody.

I hope it gets out there. I know it will. But, yeah, I don't think we've heard anything about this in the marketing community, not. Not in our circles. So this is the first. And hopefully, you know, let's. Let's stay in touch because it seems like there's probably going to be a lot more updates like this, you know, coming in the future.

There'll be more.

Oh, yeah, always. All right, Bruce, I'll let you go. Thank you so much, my man. Appreciate you.

Thank you for having me. I'm glad I was able to be here. Now you guys are going to go home and not be able to sleep tonight.

We're going to read every article on your site, sign up for the training. It'll be good.

All right, Bruce, it was good chatting with you.

Yeah.

So our wheels have been spinning since we stopped the recording of that podcast. And we've been having conversations about the conversation we just had, and we realized we need to be recording our post conversation about this because our heads are spinning from that talk.

Bruce brings the heat. Yeah.

Well, I mean, to be quite honest, I love all the people we've had on that have talked about SEO, and everybody gives great advice, but the way he described, there's a different algorithm for every keyword and different keywords you basically have to treat in different ways based on the intent. Nobody has explained SEO to us in that way before. And it just clicked to me today.

It clicked immediate and immediately. And I'm not even the one that's deep down the rabbit hole in the SEO stuff is like you. But the way he described it, I mean, it Simplifies the game. And we were talking about this prior to recording because we realized we should be recording post chat, which is, this is why these things exist. We were just like, why? Why hasn't it ever been presented this way? Yeah, it seems like. And I don't know if it's the marketers or if it's just not the full understanding of this, but, man, the way that he described the algorithms and the fact that you don't have to try to make up rules or do all this tricky stuff, just try not to screw up too much from their rules that they're giving us.

Yeah, yeah, come on. Even when you talk about tools like Ahrefs, which we love Ahrefs, and we use it, and I'm not gonna, you know, I feel like I need to make disclaimers about this stuff, but I really don't.

They're not sponsoring us.

No, they're not sponsoring this one. But when you look at tools like Ahrefs. Yeah, let's say we had a brand where we had a lot of competitors. Since we're in the UFO space, I don't really feel like we have competition in the traditional sense, but everybody has competition when it comes to SEO. Right. You want to outrank people.

There's a limited space.

So when you use a tool like Ahrefs, all of our quote, unquote competition is literally getting the exact same data we're getting. They have the exact same, like, upper hand that we're getting.

Right.

And that was kind of one of the things that he was leaning into is, you know, everybody has access to all of this same stuff. You just gotta be less bad at it than everybody else.

That's it. And I like the fact that, yeah, you know, out of a million search results, 10, maybe 100 people are going to actually optimize, you know, especially for this thing in May that's coming up here. And, you know, obviously every industry is different. You know, if you look at the, let's say, the wedding industry or something, as compared to the Internet marketing industry, you know, we're probably going to be way more optimized rather than these other industries out there. So, you know, you have an advantage if you have this info in a different industry or any of them. You could probably just assuming that it's really going to affect rankings big time. And it sounds like it will.

Well, one of the things that, like, was fascinating to me, and I don't know, maybe I'm just naive or something, but I don't feel like I've heard anybody else in the SEO space, in the circles that we run in and stuff like that, talking about this update that's coming in May.

Like, I haven't heard it.

I mean, I'm sure, like, I'm sure all the smart SEO people that we know are aware of it, but this is the first I'm hearing about it. And now I'm like, you know, you and I were sitting here going, let's install this damn plugin that he's talking about, like right now. This thing here.

I'll talk about this thing here. It's the least I can do in this nerdy talk. I'm looking at numbers so I can read. No, the whole thing is. Well, we ran this thing called the Lighthouse Report, which, I mean, it's a. It's a Google developed app that Lisa Buyer actually. So Lisa, big shout out to you.

Yeah, Lisa actually ran the report for us and sent it to us.

Lisa, we freaking love you. And that is amazing. This is amazing. You made this happen. And yeah, you, you help us so much on all these ways. But you sent us this report of our website, which it all looked great except for like one number. And we said on there was 18. It was the performance, which is all the stuff that Google's gonna look at primarily in this next update that Bruce was talking about. And then Bruce hinted to us on the podcast, hey, go get Nitropack IO and install that in your website. There's a free version. There's also paid versions, tiers. But we ran some initial tests on their website and these are demo numbers. I guess we should. We'll preface. These are demo. We did not install it yet, but we will and we will report back probably our. Maybe our. Yeah. Let's put the screenshot of our numbers before and after on the show notes page. It might be different from what we're about to say now. Okay, let's do that. We could do that. Cool. So basically this thing is comparing us on desktop and mobile, and we are on the Nitrogen Nitropack IO website. So you should definitely try this out for yourself. Matt, take it away.

Yeah. So if you go to Nitropack IO, you plug in your URL and it does this sort of analysis of like, this is what your sort of speeds look like. Now. These are what they'll look like if you install our plugin. And so on desktop, our overall score is currently 78. And this claims it'll get us up to 99. On mobile, it's saying our current score is 33 and it will get us up to 95 by installing just this plugin. Now, I'm not gonna go, like, I.

Don'T think we should go through, like.

Every line item, but, like, there are some things here that are, like, pretty damn impressive. So, like, the speed index our desktop version is getting is loading in about 2.27 seconds right now. This plugin will get it down to 0.3 of a second, a third of a second. Right. On mobile, it's taking 6.64 seconds to load. That's fricking ages. And this plugin's gonna get it down to one 1.7 seconds, which we could probably even improve that one a little bit more. But neither here nor there.

Right. This is literally just installing the plugin.

This is literally just installing that plugin.

Because I was like, hey, Bruce, all right, so what else do we have to. He's like, that's all you gotta do. Yeah. What?

Well, it's saying right now that it estimates that we're losing about 26% of our visitors on mobile due to speed. Like, the performance of the site. And this app claims it'll get us down to zero. Like, we won't lose any visitors because the site speed is within the range.

Wild, man. Every. So, like, just for context here on the mobile side of things, on the chart, every before number that we have is in the red.

Yep.

And. And all the after is in the green. It's an. And they're all cut, like, crazy down. I mean, I was going to say in half, but, like, there's one that goes from 10 seconds to 1 second.

Like, dude, there's one that goes from 1.76 seconds down to 0.06 of a second.

I think I was telling that to Bruce on there, and he's like, that's.

The time to first bite. Which I'm not totally sure how that's defined, but.

Well, it matches a lot with what he was talking about in the Lighthouse report when he was breaking down the stats. Like, there's the first contentful paint, and then there's the first meaningful paint. These are all new terms that we're just learning today. But, yeah, those are all in here accounted for, and they're dropping all those numbers.

So, yeah, that's just kind of crazy. So, yes, we're going to install that plugin, and, yes, we'll share the results after we do. And if you're a POD hacker member, we'll probably talk about this as you know how it relates to the SEO of our podcast and you know the.

New app that we're going to start recommending to people. Yeah. Or should we not?

Does it have an affiliate program?

I don't know.

Maybe I'll edit all this out if it doesn't. No, I'm just kidding.

This is one of those things. You're like, wow, this thing really does the difference here. That's wild. Yeah.

So anyway, I was saying right after we got off the call, I was like, dude, I could have chatted with Bruce for three hours. I think I only got through maybe a quarter of some of the notes we have here of rabbit holes we could have gone down with him. And I'm like, all right, this is just going to make people's brains explode. Let's maybe break it up. And Bruce has already agreed to come back, so we'll have him back on the show.

I mean, he's so cool. No, I just love the way he thinks, how he presents this information. And, you know, going into this interview, when I was researching him, I was like, there is so much wisdom here. And, you know, it does come with wisdom. It's basically an understanding of what you're doing. You know, it's like a deep, level layer of understanding. Like, way deeper than someone. Like, he was saying, you know, he doesn't hire anybody under 10 years of experience for his team of any kind of, you know, management position or, you know, direct position with the client. And it's like, just think about that. Then he has this collective wisdom that's surrounding in his company, doing tests all the time, knowing, seeing trends, all that. We're like, this is going to be a good interview. There's just a whole different way of looking at SEO, the way he's approaching it.

The dude who coined the term SEO is coming on the podcast. This is definitely going to be a.

Good interview, and it just shows the way that he understands how everything works. Yeah, that was my big, like, that's the. Aha.

Yeah, yeah, you just get it. I mean, he's been so frickin, like, entrenched in this world for, what, 26 years?

What was that, 24 or 26?

Yeah, something like that. Like 20 plus years. A lot of years.

He was sitting on seotools.com for 18 years. He said, yeah. And then another, oh, no, sorry, seotraining.com. yeah, that's what it is.

He ages his domains like a fine wine.

That's what I told him. It's so cool, though. It's so cool.

Oh, man. And after we hit record, he was telling us about some other cool stuff he's working on. He swore us to secrecy on it, but.

One day. One day.

Pretty cool. Next time he's on the podcast, I think that stuff will be ready to talk about.

Depends if it's too good.

Yeah.

All right, so check out Bruce's training. By now, you know why it's@seotraining.com. pretty easy to remember. It's amazing SEO training.com. and go check out his YouTube videos, his website@bruce clay.com. i mean, that website is just cool. Like, it's designed really well, it's optimized, and it has amazing training. Like, boom. Trifecta.

Absolutely.

We gotta have a trifecta of our own. Matt, man, I need to go. Bruce, status with our websites. Yeah.

What do you mean? What was our trifecta?

We're moving on. We don't need to go down that route now. Moving on doesn't matter.

I thought you wanted to explore the idea of our trifecta.

Rewind 15 seconds and you'll get the answer. Okay. Okay. Isn't that what you can do on these podcasts? You just go.

Yes, but they don't. Don't fast forward. Because what we're saying is really important.

Yes. And we're recording in real time, so we cannot rewind. Damn. That's what I was trying to get the universe down. Okay, we're done. We're moving on here. Notes. I don't know how the notes are going to turn out for this episode. The action guides. But you should get them. Yeah. Because sue was taking them.

Why wouldn't you know how they turn out? They'll turn out freaking amazing.

Amazing. Yeah, but I mean, like, it's just.

There's a lot in there.

There's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot. So go to flowchartgroup.com and you can get the notes. Be quick. Two weeks of this episode going live, and they're free, but then they go away after that. So flowchartgroup.com plug in your email address and you will get the notes and hang out in the group.

This episode sponsored by Easy Webinar.

It is easy.

It is easy. So Easy Webinar is our favorite webinar platform. When we do webinars, we use this, and we love it. Because you can do live webinars, you can do hybrid webinars.

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We're not gonna say the contents of said webinar.

Yeah, that's to your discretion.

That's for the other Joe.

Maybe read the terms of service, because that might be to their discretion as well. I don't know.

That's a good point. I hope we're not pissing off Casey about the OnlyFans reference. Yeah.

I don't know if Casey ever makes it to the sponsorship portion of this episode. If he does, he'll probably call us out on this one.

Casey, we're waiting for your call. Hey.

It makes the sponsorship more memorable.

That is true.

Right. So my favorite sponsor reads ever are Conan o'. Brien's. And I know you agree with me on this.

They're becoming more Conan, like now because his sponsorship reads.

He just goofs off during the sponsorship. But I actually remember all the products that he's talking about, and that's.

Yes. And it's just way more fun as us, so.

And I apologize that we screw around during some of our sponsorship reads, but I think it actually is beneficial.

I think it's been beneficial based off of what we've heard from you and the fact that you've been a sponsor for so long. So we appreciate you and love you as a buddy and is a friend and a sponsor of this show. Yes. And you should go. Actually, let's give a call to action, because now we're just thinking.

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Pod Hacker. Now, we could screw around with this sponsorship slot as much as we want.

These guys, they just gave us a blank page and they said, go for it, boys.

Yeah. Joe has pictures with his shirt off inside the membership.

So, you know, everybody wants it. If that's valuable to you, there's a low monthly fee.

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Oh, gosh. Is there an Easter egg in the membership that you put that you didn't let me know about?

Yeah, if you buy the annual version. The pictures are with Joe's shirt on.

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Well, Joe, let's tell them what Pod Hacker is.

I don't know what it is anymore.

And I promise Joe's shirts on in.

All of them, except for right now.

Pod Hacker is our answer to.

Let'S see. No, it's the new way of looking at podcasting. It's basically we caught ourself in the middle of two worlds. You have the digital marketing world, which is where we were born.

No, but this is. This is where we started. This is, like, most of our time, but we've had this podcasting thing kind of always in the mix, but now it's become more of a thing, and we find ourselves kind of in the middle of this mashup. And that's what Pod Hacker is. It's basically using podcasts, but also really other forms of content. And we're going to start getting into there soon, starting with podcasts, but then bringing in all these growth hacks and digital marketing principles and things, and basically smashing them. Smashing them, Smashing them.

Put the extra H in there.

I'm emphasizing smashing and combining the two, but we're actually, like, giving the all the. You know, we're basically opening the kimono. Right, Matt?

I like that.

Is that the one? Okay. Just making sure we're showing the goods. Checking the lexcon over there and opening the kimono, and boom. This is how you basically launch a podcast. This is how you engage with people who are coming through your podcast guests, but also your listeners. This is how you're amplifying, getting more of an audience, more downloads and loyal listeners, and a community. Remember community.

Community.

Kind of like our Hustle and Flowchart community and our pod hack community.

Yep.

You can build that in the back of a podcast. Yo. Good. And then also monetizing. So we break down our beam method, the four stages of the Pod Hacker journey. And when you are done being a Pod Hacker Journey person, you will become a pod hacker, an official pod hacker. Well, I'm just making this up now, but. No, not really. Come on. We talked about, like, we want to incentivize this. Gamify it.

Yeah.

Come on. Come on. Where are you in this whole thing? You freaking built this thing too. Jesus.

Do we talk about. Do we?

Yes, we do.

I'M acting. I'm the voice of the audience.

You're not acting like I'm hearing it.

For the first time.

I'm yelling. Kids are probably like, what is Unki Joe mad about?

No, but Pod Hacker is. It's basically we're opening the curtains, the kimono, trench coat.

Yeah. You don't need a reset. It's what the hell I just said.

I mean, we're basically Joe showing the.

Goods, but with my shirts on. Okay, moving on. No, we're breaking everything down that we do, but also combining the marketing world, which needs to. In the business side of podcasting. Yes. Which is not normally told. On the same vein, Pod Hacker. That's what we do.

Yeah. So podhacker.com, we do sort of open and close the doors so we can sort of manage the flow of customers and who we're working for. Joe's gesturing at me, and it's making me laugh and making me lose my concentration.

Now we're opening and shutting the kimono.

Yeah, we're opening and closing the kimono over and over again.

Go with the analogy.

So go to pothacker.com. you can get on the waiting list if it's not currently open or if it's open. Grab that stuff because it's not going to be open for long.

Go get it.

Oh, this is the craziest, weirdest outro. It just went off the deep end at some point.

We've been talking for a while. Alrighty.

Well, we can go ahead and wrap up the talking if you like. This episode and you know, people that are trying to learn SEO that are in this kind of world or they don't know anything about SEO, they need their eyes opened to SEO. Send them this episode.

Maybe not your competitors, though.

Yeah. Don't send it to the competitor.

This is the one exception where you don't want to share an episode with a competitor.

Yeah. Use this as your secret advantage episode.

There you go. But share with you, with everyone else. All right, see you next time.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

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