Karl Steinmeyer - How We're Scaling Homebrew Academy

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Floatshark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, what up, Joe?

What up, Matthew? How are you?

I'm doing good.

Me too. Guess what? What? I just spit some pretzel out of my mouth. Sorry about that. We're not brain dead after this day of recording podcast episodes?

No, my brain is super fried.

Right?

I mean, it's fried in a good way. Like, my wheels are spinning after today.

Oh, yes, yes. I. I'm actually feeling. Bam. On it. On it. Well, you're sick, so.

Yeah, I have been sick, but I'm actually feeling pretty okay today. I've got kind of a lingering cough, but for the most part, I'm feeling pretty good today.

Good, good. Well, today we're nerding out on SEO Talk.

SEO Talk. And you know what? We're sponsored by Ahrefs, and we talk about Ahrefs a whole bunch in this episode. So this is like a super sponsored episode for Ahrefs. You're welcome, Ahrefs. We're not gonna charge you more for it.

Just this one time. We'll accept any tips, though. Yeah. Future sponsorships. Yeah. No, today we. We, like, dive deep on different SEO strategies, all these SEO audits, content strategies, ways that we can just leverage the most out of our websites, really.

Yeah. So here's the thing with today's episode. So Joe and I, we don't talk about it often, but we've mentioned a couple times on the show. We also, we're co owners in a business called Homebrew Academy. And it's a website that pretty much is exactly what it sounds like. We teach people how to brew beer. Well, one of the things that we've recently done is we brought this guy, Carl Steinmeier on board to help us run that business. He is an SEO ninja. He runs SEO for a lot of other companies. He, like, builds content marketing plans. And so we brought him on board to Homebrew Academy to basically help us run the content and SEO plan to keep Homebrew Academy running. So what we thought would be cool is let's bring him on the show and. And talk to him about what he's done with us for Homebrew Academy. So that's essentially what we do on this episode, is we talk about all the little tips and tricks and strategies and things that he's implemented on Homebrew Academy to really, really crank up the SEO. And, you know, one of his favorite tools is Ahrefs. So we actually do talk about a lot of various Tactics that you can use in ahrefs. So if you haven't realized already, this show is sponsored by Ahrefs. But I'm not gonna give you like a cool little tip or tactic in this intro about how to use Ahrefs because we literally give a whole bunch.

In this full ep, but you still have the ability to get in cash in on Ahrefs trial offer. For seven bucks for seven days, you can get full access to their suite of tools in Ahrefs. So that's what, that's what Carl's gonna be talking about. That's what we use as our go to SEO tool. That's. We were in a mastermind last week with a bunch of podcasters doing cool stuff. I think every single person that talked about SEO related things uses Ahrefs. So just go try out Ahrefs7Bones for seven days. So go to Ahrefs.com that's a hrefs.com or check out some YouTube videos. They put a lot of cool content out there too.

Yeah, they have amazing YouTube channel with a ton of awesome SEO strategies. So check that out as well. And then in this episode, we're also going to talk to you about Ahrefs and how we're using Ahrefs right now for Homebrew Academy. And Carl actually did an audit on our Evergreen profits website and told us what was wrong with it.

Sad face.

No, it's not that sad.

But hey, we all have improvements to be had and so you'll hear about some of the gaps that we have in our own business. But you could do like, he'll talk about his audits and he talked about what health score, I think is what he. Basically all that stuff that he's referring to hrefs can do it, but it's still up to you to interpret the data and figure out what to do with it. So maybe it's a good suggestion actually. Just go get that trial offer, like just pause and go over there to Ahrefs and spend seven bucks and you can actually like follow along with what Carl's talking about. So that could be a cool little interactive play there for you.

Yeah, and so we're going to, we're going to talk about, you know, how to find low hanging fruit keywords. We're going to talk about on page SEO. We talk a little bit about off page SEO, but it's mostly about on page SEO.

He's an on page guy.

Yeah, we talk about, you know, content and what types of content to have on your site and how to figure out what content to do. We even talk about Pinterest at the end. We open up the. This topic of he's doing some cool things using Pinterest for Homebrew Academy and a few of the other businesses that he works with. And so I wanted to open that up and talk about Pinterest a little bit. And he gave us some cool strategies and tips on how to grow your brand on Pinterest too. So lots of ground covered, Lots of ways for you to drive traffic into your business. And we're also taking notes on this thing. Really?

Yeah, we are. Your voice went I don't know how many more octaves higher.

Yeah, when I talk about notes, my octave goes, like, two octaves higher.

So anytime you say notes or octaves, you have to.

Do I have to say notes or octaves?

All right, cool. So I'm gonna have to surprise you with, like, random. So did I'm work it in somehow?

Okay, but if they go to hustleandflowchart.com comp c o m p, what are.

They going to get?

They're going to get the notes for this episode.

You failed already.

The notes for this episode.

Sam is trying to set you up, and you.

Oh, it's like playing a game of Simon says. It's like, you got to be paying attention here, right?

Well, yeah, Go get them notes. Hustleandflowchart.com computer c o m p. That's limited time, but don't worry, because if you pause this right now and go grab hreps and go grab these notes, you'll get both. You'll be happy, I promise. Matt, I think, promises to get the notes. There it is. So go get those notes. Hustleandflowchart.com comp and yeah, because, like, this is a tactical episode. You're gonna want the processes, all that fun stuff. We got you back on those. And then Carl's just a badass because, like, he literally doesn't have anything to offer. Offer.

Yeah, he's not selling anything on this episode.

He's not trying to owner. He doesn't have products. Just being cool.

He's just kind of behind the scenes working with a bunch of cool businesses. And we asked him to come share, and he said, absolutely not. These are my trade secrets. And then we begged him, and then.

He said, okay, we might have had to pay him a little bit more. No, we didn't. He's cool. So let's go over to Carl. Enough Jibba jabba from us.

Enough Jibba Jabba.

Carl welcome to the show, man.

Hey guys, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Of course.

Glad to be here.

Yeah. This is going to be a kind of a different type of episode. Kind of like a little case study, like digging in your business model. It's interesting, like you were saying, you don't really have any products or services. Oh, you have services, but like not like publicly. So it's like it's just going to be an interesting chat about deep dive into SEO and optimizations and fun stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah, definitely going to jump into the weeds real quick.

That's what you do. Cool.

Well, name of the game.

Well, for anybody listening, Carl is sort of a partner of ours on our Homebrew Academy website. We work closely with him to optimize and grow and better monetize that site. So we're going to get into some of the details around what he's doing there for us. But before we do, let's just kind of go into some of the backstory. Let's, you know, how did, how did you acquire the skills that you have now? What did you do before you were doing what you do now? And what is it that you do now?

Yeah, sure, yeah, it was to start with, it was the full cubicle hustle for a while. I was 12 years in a manufacturing environment inside of a little desk and a little cubicle in the corner of a manufacturing plant. Figure out how to make all the ends meet. One day I typed in how to make money online.

Dangerous.

You know, brain. Brain fried for at least 12 months. But it gave me the opportunity to level up some skills that I just wasn't utilizing fully utilizing in my current day job. But it kind of gave me a decent perspective too from the manufacturing like systems mindset with Toyota ways and production systems to apply those types of methodologies to a website and the content processes that go into it. I kind of, you know, worked in the middle of both worlds and kind of developed systems and processes for online. Whether it's traffic generation or content or links, you know, that's the two big buckets, content links online. So yeah, it's kind of an interesting blend. So I dived down that rabbit hole. I made a few of my own affiliate site. I end up, I sold one for six figures a few years ago. I thought the next step for me at the time was to get into E commerce. So I did the FBA game. I ended up selling that business. I didn't like it all that much. I developed a new product from scratch that was fun. So I Went through the full sourcing products in China from development, from scratch. So I created something brand new. It wasn't a private label that the FBA game typically subscribes to.

Yeah, what, what was the product?

It was a set of cat ears that go on a motorcycle helmet. I still still have that business right now.

Nice. That's right. I forgot you're into the. Yeah, all that stuff. I didn't know that was actually your own product. That's really cool.

Yeah, yeah, I made that in the full, full bid on it, Trademark, patent and you know, I still sell that. I have a group of awesome moto kitties they call themselves that. Love riding around with those things and you know, it's fun. It doesn't exactly pay the full overhead for.

A three person family in the U.S. yeah, but it's a fun business. I like the customers, I like creating the content around it. But I think I'm gonna end up selling that here next year, the year after, because it's just slow as compared to SEO and content online. I can have an idea for a product and it takes me six months to develop it.

Iterate over time with 3D printing even, that's even faster. You know, with molds and suppliers and that kind of stuff, it's just, it's just real slow, you know. But if I have an idea for a piece of content for a site, I can have it up this afternoon, start optimizing it from there and it can start potentially making money tomorrow, you know, so the two worlds are definitely of different speeds, but you got to know what you're doing in, in both of them, you know.

Interesting. Would you, would you create your own product again and go down that whole rabbit hole?

I think I would. With the intention of just knowing that it's a revenue stream. In addition to like a website, you know, there's affiliate sites, people call them Amazon sites, which is a stupid name for a website.

Yeah.

You know, if anybody wants to level up the monetization on their.

Website that's monetized heavily with Amazon links, they can look into creating their own products or private labeling a product. And that was kind of one of the, one of the different avenues to go down if you're looking for different ways to monetize those types of websites. So I think do it again. On top of that, you know, for example, the home brew space, we've been chatting back and forth offline on different products. That would be good products to be inside of the Amazon atmosphere, to be fulfilled by Amazon. You know, they're lightweight, they're easy to ship. Nothing is breakable, you know, no glass or that kind of stuff. There's no electronics. It's just products that people would find on that site. Maybe we can be an affiliate for other people's for a little while, see if they convert and then improve upon some of the downsides of those products and create something new.

Yeah, no, that's a good point. That is pretty much what you're doing for. You're leading the charge. On our homebrew site which we'll get into later on, we'll do like a deep dive on what you're doing on that site to really, really rehab the whole thing. It's been like a broke, not a broken house, but like it's like a flip for you.

Yeah.

Minus the selling off phase yet.

That's still in the cards though.

Oh yeah.

I've never totally got the Amazon effect affiliate site concept because I feel like with Amazon, like the people that are the top of their game, aren't they only earning 8% commissions on like $20 products?

Yeah, yeah. You know, 20 to $50 is kind of the sweet spot. Some people promote and like to sell courses around higher end products with higher, you know, commissions on that same 8%. You know, it used to be tiered, you know, so the volume that you sent you would get a little bit more. Then it went to flat, you know, then it's kind of been creeping down over the years. So I mean some categories are 2%, which is kind of ridiculous, but it's a, it's a volume based game, you know, it's a. The SEOs on the front end of those sites are targeting keywords in 20 to 100,000 K search range. So the volume is there. When it comes to having 30,000 through a site in a day, converting that 8 to 10% for those small commissions, it starts to add up pretty quick.

Yeah.

Now let's actually start to shift a little bit into like SEO type stuff with keywords that are getting 100,000 plus searches a month.

I think most people probably think those keywords are really hard to target. How difficult is it to go after keywords that are get that much search volume?

Oh, they're all over the place.

You know, it depends on the industry. Right. You know, so I'm, I'm an on site SEO specialist for a company called Rankings IO, which is SEO for lawyers. And in the lawyer space a lot of those guys are pretty smart and clever with their own stuff and then they retain good services for SEO, which, that gets competitive really quick, right? You know, so.

AdWords clicks don't seem to, you know, slow that speed down at all. If they're offering 50 to $100 a click, you're gonna have some very experienced competitive SEOs in there very quick, and those in those markets when those bids. But a lot of the stuff, you know, that the SEO game is fun because it's, it's not really as visual as say, like health and fitness. You know, if you're, if you're going out looking for a personal trainer, you're gonna be able to look, look at them and see, you know, you're not gonna hire a fat guy for a trainer, right? Gonna go on to the next guy and maybe he knows what he's doing or you got a referral from a friend or, you know, you like the person or it's in family or whatever. When you're go you're looking for an SEO.

You really can't see exactly if he knows what he's talking about. You can ask him for references and experience and maybe like other sites that that person has in their, like, own portfolio. But even then, if you don't know what you're looking at, you don't know what you're looking at. You know, mechanics, you know, that's the same way. I'm up in a small town here in Michigan and you know, everybody can call themselves mechanic, but, you know, you look at garage and you can clearly see if they know what the hell they're doing or not.

You know, if they have a couple old hot rods that run great and they're 40 years old and they're all tuned up and tweaked up and, you know, everybody that goes to that mechanic says great things about them, then, you know, hold on to that guy because they're few and far between. You know, other YouTube mechanics are just trying to make a dollar on, you know, hopefully trying to figure out how to fix your, you know, whatever. You bring them on the fly and they may or may not, you know, you may or not trust them. And, you know, it's just really can't have that level of comparison with an SEO, either a freelancer or an agency, because you really don't know what you're looking at sometimes.

Yeah, and that was like us when we met you. You came through what a warm referral through Brad Costanzo, our business partner. And I forget all the details of the story, but it's exactly what you said. It's like we, we looked at some of the sites you've done and you could talk the talk. And it did help that you, I think you had our book actually, the first time we met you, you're like, hey, I bought your book.

So you kind of checked all the trust boxes. And then what we did is we did kind of like, all right, well, let's throw you into the mix of things and see what you do. Yeah, it became very clear that, oh, you know your shit, or at least like you're really organized and you put on a good front. But no, it's working.

It does help when, you know, you don't have to go out there and research the questions like right off the go. I think some of the earlier stuff that we're looking at with the Homebrew site was just some of the Amazon affiliate links, like they weren't compliant. You know, it's like one of those.

You know, it doesn't necessarily fall underneath the umbrella of an SEO, but if you're running a site that gets traffic, you probably should stay within the terms of service of the affiliate program you're promoting. So, you know, you kind of got to know.

It'S not a bolt on thing. Right? You don't just bolt on SEO, it's kind of, it's interweaving between all the other areas of good on site and off site SEO.

Let's talk about that. So talk about like what the compliance thing was, because that was like a gray area. I know we're all like looking into it and I bet a bunch of people are probably not compliant and they just don't realize it, you know, like with Amazon link specifically.

Yeah, sure. Well, that was an easy one. They were, they were under what's called a 301 redirect. And it's easy to set that stuff up with tracking plugins, but Amazon doesn't like it because they like to be able to track where those things are coming from specifically. So if you have a redirection plugin, like a pretty links plugin, I think that statement right off the get go, it makes a nice cool little link. It's Homebrew Academy, whatever product, right? But those 301 redirects.

Aren'T compliant because Amazon doesn't know exactly where that stuff comes from. If those pre links get shared, whether it's by you or somebody else on Facebook or Pinterest or somewhere else.

They have a harder time tracking those things. So they require that those URLs be clearly displayed, whether it's short link or a full long link. If you hover over a link, you should see where you're going.

And that way they can crack down on a lot of spam too. It was really, you know, Internet marketers can destroy everything with a course. You know, they tell, you know, 600 people how to do something. Those 600 people are in networks with friends and family and they all say we should do it this way.

And.

Yeah, the spam really, the spam control on that definitely is what you say, compliance or you're out.

Yeah. And Amazon has, I mean, I'm sure they're. I mean there's like all affiliate programs is. We're always reading the terms, conditions and like make sure that you probably cycle through those things pretty often because they're updating terms and all that stuff sometimes without telling you in Amazon, I mean there's probably, it's probably the most prolific, you know, affiliate site out or, you know, program out there because people are just like, oh, here's a book. Put them in the show notes, you know, things like that. But yeah, it's, it's good. So just read the terms and don't use pretty links and all that stuff. Yeah, for Amazon now. Yeah.

So we're on like a. We're on like a Slack channel together where we talk about the Homebrew Academy stuff. And every single time I see. Actually I think I hear Slack on your computer right now. But every single time I, I see your name pop up in Slack, I get excited because I'm like, oh shit, he's just done something ninja. I can already tell like every time your name pops up, you're telling us about something cool that's happening on our site. So I want to. Let's talk about Homebrew Academy and some of the cool stuff that you've. You've implemented that that's been getting us some results over there.

Yeah. So this was by a site.

It looked like a new site builder just based on some of the content right off the get go worked on. His name is Billy. You know, he worked on it hard four years and he had a lot of content that was around the homebrew. Like his favorite like hobby at the time. You know, it looks like when he was starting to learn how to build a website. So a lot of that, that surrounds the personality of what Billy was involved with it, you know, some of his, like you can just tell like, you know, there's, you know, 30 days of posts in a row about all types of things just to get somebody in the habit of writing and putting content out, right? Interesting content and, you know, some of those keywords and URL structures on those things. You know, it's like nobody really cares if they go to Homebrew Academy. If, you know, Billy's moving from his mom's house to wherever he was moving to at the time. There's just some older posts in there that are specifically based on lifestyle of a blogger. And they don't know at the time too. They're just like, somebody told me to write for 30 days and 14 days later I'm out of things to talk.

About, talk about my cat.

That stuff doesn't, you know, they don't go back and clean that kind of stuff up. Same thing with some of the images like alt text, like the really down into the weeds SEO stuff of on page. Those things don't get cleaned up as that site owner progresses in their kind of their online journey. He looked like he went more into courses. So that site was kind of.

A lot of informational content and very low commercial content. So when I was kind of first SEO audit on it, you know, with a lot of the keywords that came back from that, there's a lot of them were informational, you know, so the first content Sprint that I set up was to level out the informational and commercial keywords that people can find the site through and in the serps.

And it wasn't monetized with display ads. You know, a lot of the informational sites out there are monetized, you know, through AdSense or maybe even a premium network like Mediavine or AdThrive as you get to a higher page view level. But if they're not specifically focused around a certain topic, even those premium ad networks will, you know, they'll want you to stay either focused around a niche that they can pitch to their advertisers.

You know, but with the informational commercial content balance.

A lot of those advertisers, they're clearly advertised because they have products to sell. So they either want to see a focus site around a specific topic that matches their target market or commercial content around it because they know people are going there looking for. They call them buyer intent keywords, you know, best this or things for home brewers. You know, whether it's gear, equipment or physical products, higher RPMs come through those premium ad networks because it's around commercial type keywords.

Make sense. We kind of went a couple different areas with that, but.

No, that's good.

Just a question that popped up in my mind is like when you're working, because I Know you work on a lot of different sites, different industries and verticals. Where do you start with your SEO audit? What are you looking for that maybe the listeners here can maybe like a few things like. Oh man, we got to button up these before anything else happens.

Oh yeah, yeah. Like some of the easy stuff, some of the low hanging fruit, you know.

Is.

With Ahrefs, it gives you a health score if you put your site into a site audit. I put in Evergreen profits into the site audit yesterday.

Hey, don't, don't, don't tell everybody about our screw ups, man. No, I'm just kidding. Go for it. I don't care.

You know, so some of the quick wins, I mean the on page, like on a homepage, you know, the heading structure, you know, those things should read like the book, you know, you should have one one H1 on a page that clearly just, you know, lays out what the page is about and then you know, three or four H2s and three or four H3s underneath that, depending on the amount of content that's on the homepage.

Right.

So with the Homebrew Academy, it was just a blog feed. So all those H2s were changing out every time a new blog post got put up. Which kind of varies the anchor decks ratios. It varies a lot of stuff as those blogs are being posted, whether it's once a day, once a week.

I think there was 15 author profiles on that site when I first started on it. So there was a lot of people writing on that thing. For the course of a year. Those homepages changed pretty frequently and there wasn't a whole lot of text on it. The homepage is the most powerful page on a site. You know, it gets the most links, it gets naked URL links, it gets, you know, links from sharing on social media. Just hey, go to this site and search for this or go to the site and check this other thing out. People don't paste in the links, you know, for deep URLs, they based in the homepage links. So those are the most powerful. Right. So it makes sense to have anchor text linked into internal pages on the homepage. Right. You know, so it's. If you don't have text on the page, like EP doesn't have a whole lot of text on a page besides blog feed. You know, it's hard to put an anchor text link into another page and pass through some of the authority from the homepage to an inner page. So that's usually a quick one that I can see, you know, adding 1500 words, detailing what the site is about, you know, it makes for a good user experience.

Right?

You know, it's all user. You know, Google cares about the user before they care about how many links you have pointing to your site. So if that text clearly displays and you know, tells a good brand story, I think is a good part of it too.

Yeah, but so I mean looking at our website, you'd suggest like, all right, add a bunch of like 1500 words or so, clean up the tags as best as possible.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and there's, you know, there's mobile usability. You know, all the images you have on that homepage, you know, they're pretty well optimized except for when you go in and start embedding stuff, you know, like the YouTube player, you, you wouldn't think that the smallest image, this little yellow Hustle and Flowchart image on your guys page, you wouldn't think that adds a lot of.

Weight to a page until you run through Google PageSpeed Insights and realize that that tiny image is like five times the size of your biggest image on the site, which kills mobile load speed. Google does mobile indexing first.

Since earlier this year I think. So anything that's going on with your mobile page Speed insights on developers.google.com should be fixed. You know that that's a nice checklist of stuff to do. Just like Ahrefs, you know, with their health score, you can work your way down the list and just by taking your health score from 21% to above 80, that's gonna fix a lot of those issues just by doing that.

Now what do you do if some of the stuff that's affecting the health score is, you know, plugins that you're using that are necessary to your site. Like for example, the, the image that you're referring to with the Hustle and Flowchart logo that's in the player that's actually fed by a, you know, a third party plugin that puts that player there. So it's like, is there things that you can do to optimize the plugins or do you recommend just getting rid of those plugins and finding alternatives?

A little bit of both, you know, best of both worlds. There's some plugins that if the site changes hands, you know, it's not just built by you from the beginning. You know, if you're buying a site, a lot of the plugins are only utilized like 5 to 10% of their actual capabilities. So somebody will add a plugin with, you know, 12 different things to it, but they only want it for the one thing. And then a lot of those plugins will overlap in their capabilities, which kind of blows out your database a little bit. So you can go through and kind of prune out some of that stuff. You know, you get creative. Like that thing on your site. There's not a whole lot you can do pulling that third party resource. It happens with podcast players and it happens with YouTube embeds a lot. So usually what I recommend is creating a separate page.

You know, with an optimized image that links to that page. Right. So you have a specific page for your latest.

Podcast, like we're on now, but not have it embedded in the homepage. Just have a link with that play button that links to it.

Because we have the actual player in there on the homepage.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. Okay, I got you. And just direct them to a Show Notes page.

Yeah, right. You got to zoom in out just a little bit and kind of think about the actual user that's on the site. Do they want to listen to that podcast when they're kind of surfing around the homepage? If they really want to listen to it, they probably should just be on the internal page because they might be looking for some of the resources that you're talking about anyways.

That's a very good point. We reference that all the time. Show notes, go to the show Notes, click that thing.

Get the newsletter for sure. It's awesome.

Thank you. Yes. Okay, so you get your health score on each refs, you have that whole kind of checklist and all that stuff. And yeah, we've had other SEO folks on here and they're always harping on mobile. Mobile first. A lot of the tools we'll list in the show notes as well. Obviously the developer tools seem super helpful.

Well, from what I understand, Google is actually ranking based on mobile first. So Google is actually kind of looking at mobile and using that as a big ranking factor whether you're on mobile or desktop.

Yeah, yep, they got a lot of them. And that's a big one. You know, it's easy to say and it's easy to repeat. Difficult to put into practice if you don't know what you're doing. You know, there's some other tools like Ready Mobi that will give you a better perspective of, you know, a list of action items that you can take to actually improve that speed, you know, or forwarded developer or some hosts actually will help out with some of that stuff.

So it'll give you, you Know, a breakdown of like high, middle and low tier phones because not everybody has the same phone screen size, bandwidth, you know, whether they're connected to WI Fi or not. You know, there's some other tools that you can break into.

That I think I put together in that SEO audit. When we first started on Homebrew.

One.

Thing that I heard you talking about on the bumper of the show, the Ahrefs gap audit. I've had some pretty good success building that into an SEO audit. So combining a GAPS report, really, like when you guys are explaining, you put your website in there, you get a list of your top 10 competitors, you can run a, a GAPS analysis in that same tool on like three competitors at a time, and that'll spit out low, medium, high competition keywords that those sites are ranking for and yours is not. You know, continue to work down that list. After you get to say, 20 competitors, like your top 20 competitors, you should have a list of 50,000 keywords between all of them that they're ranking for. And you're not even coming close to, you know, an assortable spreadsheet. So that always is a pretty good starting point when it comes to putting a content plant together.

Yeah, well, even as podcasters, we could probably throw in some other similar podcasts and see what guests have really hit for them as well. And try to chase up some of those same guests, I'd imagine.

Oh, yeah, yeah. There's stuff you don't even know about. You know, it's like I had no idea what helium beer was when I, when I first that's. I was like, what?

Totally legit.

I've been drinking beer for years. I've never heard of this.

Oh, man. I'm pretty sure the helium beer thing is like a joke, but it is, it totally is.

Yeah.

You can't do it. It's, you know, scientifically not possible.

Yeah.

But the first time I saw it, I was like, what the fuck? This is a thing.

I think it was like your father in law sent to two as a matt like years ago. I remember seeing that the very first time. I was like, no.

It does make its rounds, you know, but there's hundreds of thousand people coming online every single day that have I drink beer. I had no idea what it was. And it turns out 46,000 people a month searched that particular phrase.

Insane. That was probably all started from like a viral video and now it's turned into traffic that we're leveraging to actually sell legit homebrew content and equipment and all that. Stuff, it's just really interesting. You can, you can kind of pair yourself up with like a trend or something out there. Might not be actual good value content, but it's entertaining. So it's a little common.

Absolutely. You know, and those things, they, they get natural links over time too. If you put together a good resource about, you know, something like that, people just link to it because, you know, it's, it's a pretty encompassing resource. You know, if you kind of like skyscraper the top 10 and put together an all encompassing resource on that topic, you know, you'll rank for it pretty quick on a site like that.

And you know, you'll start getting links. Naturally those links will pass through to the stuff that you've linked internally to your other pages. Right. You know, the authority kind of works its way through the site.

I guess, going back to some of the lower hanging fruit, I guess that you guys can start with. And of course the listeners can start with, you know that there wasn't a site map on that site when I first started on it either. You know, in the footer there's a privacy policy and a terms of service that were just blank template pages. You know, they didn't have any internal links, there was no formatting. There wasn't actually any CSS surrounding any of those pages, which kind of is a bunch of red flags and stuff. But with a sitemap, you know, that's, that's.

There's two different sitemaps. I guess the easy way I usually explain it is there's one for crawlers and there's one for the user. The user site map is the HTML sitemap. It's the one that you could actually surf to and navigate inside of a header or footer on a website and kind of navigate your way through the site.

That site didn't have one on it. And that really spreads through some of the links authority that just the homepage and some of those popular pages we were talking about get. Yeah, so definitely a good.

If you don't have a sitemap in your head and footer, you know, don't just link your XML sitemap, which is the one that Google crawls and you can no index stuff out of, but create a HTML site map for a better user experience.

Gotcha. Do most websites forget about that or just not think about that?

Yeah, about half of them that I work on are just like, where is this site map? You know, half. Half the lawyer sites I work on. Well, probably more than half. You know, those are like my Secretary's nephews, uncle's brother's friend made the site. Can you guys please. For, you know, personal injury attorney Chicago. They're like, no, no, I can't.

It needs a lot more work than that. But for starters, yeah, it definitely needs a site map somewhere.

Okay, are there any like WordPress plugins that you recommend for SEO? Because we use the Yoast SEO plugin and that, you know, builds a site map in it and then it also gives us per post sort of options to boost the SEO for each post. I'm curious, do you use that plugin or do you have any plugins you recommend or use? Do you prefer to do the on page stuff kind of more manually?

No, that's, that's a good one. That's kind of the industry standard. You know, they've had their bumps and bruises over the years, but it's improved over time with, you know, feedback and stuff and that we use across the agency and I use it on my, my own sites. It does build an XML site map, but that's not one that you would be able to go to as a user and just kind of navigate through the site. I mean, you can when you know what you're looking at. If you look at those things every day like I do. But you wouldn't want to have that linked in your, like your footer navigation for somebody to go to if.

You know, if they're trying to navigate to a page they couldn't find either on your home page or your page or something like that. Yeah, you need to build a separate HTML sitemap.

Is there a plugin for that or a tool or something that you recommend that does that or is that a manual process?

Oh, yeah, no, there's plugins, I mean, with Word plus, there's plugins for everything.

That's true.

It's been bad. You know, you gotta watch the, watch the bloat on the page speed. But yeah, there's simple HTML sitemaps plugin that'll take the XML sitemap and just reformat it to embed on a page.

Okay, cool. Nice. So that's a good little resource there for folks.

Yeah. Yep. Go to Homebrew Academy. It's, it's, it's in the footer. Just click on it.

I'm talking about, see the example there. Nice. Okay, so anything else on that kind of startup phase or what you're looking for?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's a good, if you have a 404 page, it's a good spot to embed that HTML sitemap too. Somebody lands on a 404 page for a lot of different reasons. Most of the time, like part of my job is to go in there and obviously redirect that page that's broken to a relevant page that passes the link authority through from any other external sites that may have linked to it. But just a good catch all is to have that sitemap embedded inside of a 404 page. And 404 is just a URL that's broken that doesn't work. So it'd be the main slug of a website, plus something that doesn't have any content there. So it's oops, you landed here. You may be looking for these things and usually those things that websites will list out as either a portion or all of their HTML sitemap.

Okay. So you just plug it right there on that 404 page. So the standard redirect goes to that. So it's always passing the juice. Okay, got it. Smart, huh? And then of course there's content. There's probably a whole con. I heard you mention content sprints.

Earlier. Does that come after the audit phase?

Yeah, yeah. It's when we identify.

You know, what the site is lacking. Whether it was, you know, say it's all commercial content. You know, we don't want the site to look like an E commerce store when it's not. You may need some informational content that can support some of those bigger authority style pieces. And you kind of go through, I call them a sprint really, because it's not sustainable long term, posting 10 articles a week. But it's great to get out a massive amount of focused content to a site to be able to start to work on other areas, you know, so you would want to spread that out across 12 months. You'd want to contain it and you know, in a three month instead of a quarter. And that way the following month you can start to identify keywords that have landed on the second or third page. Ways to optimize and improve those, to improve the rankings.

Yeah, so it's just, it's just a thinking process really to be able to identify where sites at and what you should focus on.

Gotcha.

Okay, what are some of the other cool ways that you use hrefs? Because I know we've had some conversations about that in the past about, about some really cool stuff there. You know, for example, one of the things we like to do is we like to search on ahrefs on our site, look at what keywords we're ranking for on page two and three, and then just add more internal links to that content on our site. And a lot of times that is enough to just boost that to maybe the 10th spot on page one or something. Are you doing anything like that? Any other cool little tricks that you can do with Ahrefs to help your SEO?

Yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, there's a bunch inside the site audit. You know, it shows if pages are orphan pages, you know, if they're just out there and they don't have any links, you know, if it was.

Part of some type of campaign that just got lost or, you know, there's, you know, there's full teams of 10 to 15 people that have good or bad communication working on these things. And sometimes those pages get created and never used. So they're just called orphans. Not a good user experience. There's, of course, there's pages that have links to redirects, you know, from those sites evolving over time. And the underlying architecture usually gets thought about last. So the guys like me that come in and clean all that kind of stuff up, you know, you can see a redirect to a redirect to redirect, you know, over the course of like one year, then the next year, the next year. And it's those redirect change, they call them, you know, they take a while for the page to load because it has to continually talk to the server about where's the next redirect, where's the next redirect, you know, so those, those are a bunch of the things inside of the site audit, you know, and it's got.

Rank trackers, which come in super handy for a lot of different stuff. You know, you can just throw your site into a rank tracker and see what it's already ranking for and then sort and export that data if you want to. If you're better at spreadsheets, you know, and, and look at ways to improve that existing content.

One of the things that usually gets thought about last is like keyword cannibalization. Sometimes people think if they create five pieces of content around a specific topic, that's going to give them more opportunity to rank for that topic. But if Google has a problem identifying two pages on your site for one keyword that you either found in the keywords explorer or rank tracker.

They'Re kind of, at least in my experience, you know, I don't know exactly what Google does, and I've never met them in person. But.

That algorithm is going to have a hard time determining which keyword so it's going to lower both of them. You know, if there's a difference, that it knows this keyword is the only one on that site and everything else is created equal. That one is going to outrank the combination of both of yours.

So would you suggest doing something more like a skyscraper post around that specific keyword once you identify that as one that you can rank well for?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you're going to put in the time and effort to create a big piece of content like a skyscraper is, you know, if you get to the point where you think it needs a second page, it should be a child page inside of that. So site architecture.

So that's like a part two or something of that blog post, and then you link the two together and all that stuff. Is that what a child page would kind of be?

It's more like.

Like say you have five of a certain thing, like a product. You know, there's a. Another site I work on that has motorcycle trailers. So I wouldn't want to put out motorcycle trailers on all five pages. I'd want to put out a big page about motorcycle trailers. And then, you know, it'd be site name forward slash, motorcycle trailers, forward slash, the name of the trailer. So the child one page deeper inside of the actual internal site structure.

Gotcha. Okay, got it. And then you would link that within WordPress in the back end there.

Yeah, that's interesting because I've definitely been guilty of that in the past when we will put like a blog post up and it'll do really well. It'll rank really well for a specific keyword and it sends lots of traffic. And I'm like, cool, this is working. I'll make another article on that same thing and I'll own two spots on the front page of Google and they both go down.

It's pretty common. It really is. You know, I think a better way to do that and some. Some really good SEOs have kind of talked about this a lot, but is to improve that existing piece of content and then relaunch it. So you can either relaunch it to your list with updated, revised, whatever language you want to use surrounding that, but you know, to expand that original content with your part two and have that under one particular resource. Yeah, as you're talking, I just thought about Homebrew was doing that with shipping beer. There's all different, you know.

Clubs and things that you can get beer shipped to your house through the mail, that you can join up on a monthly recurring revenue kind of thing. But if you have like the ins and outs, shipping beer, how to ship beer, how to ship craft beer. I think there was one on how to ship beer bottles. And you know, it's like those are all going to compete with each other. They're actually going to help each other out. They're going to compete and if they're competing they're all going to get kind of dropped. So I combine them all together and guess who's ranking for, you know, how to ship beer?

Yeah, that's awesome. Now how much does the date of the post matter? Is that a ranking factor? Like if we're going to go relaunch a post that we wrote a year ago but updated, should we change the date on the post or is that not even a factor? Does that even matter?

Yeah, it doesn't matter as much as people like to tout about it. It's more of a feel good type thing. You know, it's. It's why people call themselves white SEOs or black hat SEOs. It's more of a computer between your ears. Need something to feel good about. But you know, if it makes sense you can.

You know, we're talking about more static type pages like Home Academy and how to ship beer. There's sites that people still follow with blog feeds and RSS and like 5 years ago Internet that if a new post comes out it looks like the same post from last week, it might be a problem to their readers type of thing.

Right.

Those are more personality driven.

Yeah, because I know in the rankings I mean you'll see the. Sometimes you'll see the date of the post, you know, right there in the rankings and it's almost like oh, if you see 1 from 2012 you're a little bit less amp to like eh, I don't know, I'm gonna go with the one from like 2019 or something. So maybe that would help what you're saying, Matt, but it's probably minor in the grand scheme of things.

Have you been on Google on your mobile? Have you searched on your mobile device recently or has it been mostly desktop work for you guys?

I search on my mobile every once in a while on the Chrome app on my phone.

Why do you ask that?

Well, updates roll out some type, I think last month to the month before the little ad like this is an ad.

Resized to the same size as a website like Favicon. It's just a way to hide that inside the like the user experience. Those things are designed the same, you know, they take up the same amount of space on a mobile device. I think the URL.

Went away a few months before that. So you'll see like website slug and then maybe the title tag of the page rather than the full like naked URL of a website.

Okay. So it's a little cleaner and it's. It looks like I'm actually on the. I just looked up Helium Beer right now. I was like, where do we rank? And we're on the first page and everything has an image next to it. It looks like if there's a featured image, it's just like a nice big placement of a search result. It looks nice.

So are they trying to make the organic results look closer to the ad results so that the ads feel more native? Is that kind of the goal?

Yeah, yeah. They won't say it like that, but I think.

You nailed it, Matt.

Absolutely. That's kind of the primary goal there is to have ads inside of organic search results that look the same. Obviously that helps with.

That's the whole intention of Google anyway. They want a good user experience. They want, you know, just a good UI and they want time on site to the relevant content pieces they're directing people to. So it just makes sense.

Yeah. So do you do any off page SEO? Do you do any outreach or are there any places that you know that when you get links from these places they're. They're powerful links that aren't hard to get or anything like that. What's your off page strategy? Or do you only focus on on page stuff?

Yeah, on page is more my offense. You know, I prefer to have a killer offense rather than, you know, a decent offense and a decent defense. So, you know, I look at ways to rank stuff in Google just with killer on site SEO. And if I can't start the conversion rate process on that, if it's E Commerce or buyer intent keywords, I'll start an actual process for.

Having those things get natural links. It's a resource that people would naturally want to link to because it's actually that good. It provides that much value and they can find it because it's already on page one. And that will usually kind of trickle through to the rest of the site. So one resource added every other week or every month, internal link properly will start to lift up other resources and then commercial type keywords too. So yeah, I don't do a whole lot in the link building thing I've tried in the past and I just didn't like the, like the process as much as I like having Great. On site processes.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Is there anything when it comes to SEO that we're kind of missing or that we haven't touched on yet that we should touch on? I know it's such a broad topic and there's so many different places we could go. I just want to make sure we get like all of the sort of biggest gold nuggets out that the listeners could walk away with and go, oh, I know, I could go implement that.

Yeah, yeah. I think we covered a lot of it. You know, for businesses, they can go through an SEO audit process. You know, obviously get a referral from somebody that you're comfortable with working with. You know, it's. That's different from just the regular site owner. You know, like, you guys made Evergreen profits, right? It's not like you.

Bought that from somebody, at least. I don't think about it.

No, we didn't.

Yeah, we built it. We're actually in the process of working with a designer to completely overhaul it. So your feedback on this episode is amazing because we're going to. We're going to put that into, you know, what. What we expect expect when we have this redesign finished.

Shout out to Greg from Studio One.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He's inside, you guys group. He's awesome.

Yeah, he is. He's cool.

I think besides having a good, like a great homepage with like.

A good amount of text that explains the whole story right there on the one page that you land on. And it kind of flows. Nice. And it has internal links to other pages. Just creates.

You know, I tend to lean more on internal links inside the container. The text container, like inside of an individual poster page. I guess that's one thing you can look out for, too, is the actual menu, the sidebar and the footer. Those links are on every page. So if you scrape a full site that's got 500 pages on it, there's going to be a hundred thousand links to one page from, you know, every single page. Once the math extrapolates, right, it may be 50,000 links, you know, but those are obviously going to be that. I mean, they have to be devalued. Right. You can't have that many pages on one site with the same anchor decks because it's the menu. And, you know, have it be the same weighted factor as an internal link that's got.

Maybe not the exact match keyword. Maybe it's a phrase match or partial match or, you know, two or three extra words that really explain. Or sell the link better, you know, sell it to be able to get somebody, not like sell the link, but you know, to get somebody actually click on it. You know, you'd never put like drop here on a, on an email to your guys list.

Couple benefits, why you guys like it. You know, you'd explain a little bit more. You'd kind of sell that link on why somebody want to click on it.

Yeah.

That's going to actually expand the anchor text internally to a site to another page.

Yeah.

So that's interesting.

And footer is not as important as people make it out to be.

Yeah, I've never really thought about that. I've never really thought about the fact that Google is probably looking at whether this link is within a piece of content versus in your menu or your sidebar or somewhere like that. But that. That totally makes sense.

Is there a way to like, mark this as like, this is a menu, this is a footer. So it doesn't.

Well, I mean, there's already CSS sort of stuff there, but I don't know if Google's looking at that or not.

Yeah, yeah, it's inside Ahrefs. Yeah, it's a. It's one of those tools that if you know what you're looking for, you can definitely find how many links are in content compared to nav. Nav links, I guess, is the shorthand.

And do you think it's just like a matter of them looking at the css and the CSS is telling us this is a menu versus this is a content.

Yep. Yep.

Huh. So, yeah, that's what you would.

Okay.

All right. There's the answer.

One other real quick thing I know, you know, with, with Homebrew Academy, I think, I believe we talked about doing like a few little things on Pinterest. Did you ever do some stuff with Pinterest with Homebrew Academy?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a.

What were some of the things that you were. You were testing with Pinterest at Homebrew Academy?

You know, so that's just an algorithm, just like Google is.

Pinterest has different factors that it uses to rank pins in their own search. Right. So if you search particular things around the Homebrew beer space, you know, you can, you can almost hack those with your board names and keywords inside of pin descriptions. And like the one people forget about most is to actually name the image when you're uploading it. It's not just Image 456, you know.

It'S keyword, keyword, keyword, the actual file name of it.

Like in the actual, like JPG file or whatever actually make it the keyword is the file name.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Do it on your website and do it on Pinterest. You know, one of the. One of the earliest successes I had on Pinterest was with the motorcycle helmets. You know, if you search motorcycle helmets on Pinterest, I had like four different boards. Bluetooth, motorcycle helmets, airbrushed motorcycle helmets. You know, all those boards would come up before an actual pin would. That kind of gave me the.

Data, I guess, to realize that.

Cleverly named Pinterest boards with a lot of content that supports that kind of mirror images, a good site architecture.

So, you know, keyword stuffing is obviously, you know, a problem that they combat with spam filters and everything else.

But it can be manipulated in the good sense of the word to be able to provide the metrics that they're looking for, because they're looking for the same user experience, how to keep people on their site longer to serve them ads from brands that want to get in front of those same customers.

That makes sense. And that's like YouTube as well. I've heard the same strategy with uploading videos is put the keywords in the video file name before you upload it. Yeah, I mean, they're all the intention of all these platforms. And obviously YouTube and Google are owned by the same company. So you think that their algorithms are pretty similar. When you said, yeah, do that on your website, when you upload images, put in the file name. And then Pinterest, they're just going for the same goal. Keep people on their site so they, you know, make more money that way. So same kind of algorithm concepts apply.

Yeah, so if you kind of split those into two different buckets, you know, there's informational type pins, like people are looking at pretty pictures. You know, guys actually like looking at pictures of, you know, full glasses of beer, you know, but.

If you have text on the image, it's just like trying to run a Facebook ad that's got too much text on it. They're not gonna go out and say that just like Facebook will, hey, you got too much text on your image. You're trying to drive somebody off our platform because you're telling them what this pin is about if they click through to it.

You know, so if you have like half your content that's got text on it that explains whether it's a recipe or how to do something or something that they'd be interested in.

You know, then the other half, just straight up good pictures that People like to repin to their site or, you know, repin to their own boards, just kind of actually engage with rather than every single pin you put up trying to drive traffic off of their site. Yeah, they're just going to dial you back on your reach.

Really hard. You know, now they're a public company too, so they have other incentives. But yeah, it's just like YouTube, you know, they want to keep people on site. So you might have to split your strategy in half. Half of it to be provide value on YouTube to get more reach than the other half to either retarget that same user.

Yeah. Or drive them off. Yep.

So are you seeing pretty good traffic from Pinterest then?

No, not on Homebrew. Certainly. Certainly not.

But the. So but the helmet site, it is, it did send some pretty decent traffic back to your site.

Yeah, thousands of visitors. You know, it was up to close to a thousand a day at one point.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess with Pinterest it must, I mean, this is just my own theory, but it must be just kind of a demographic thing.

I mean, I'm a beer drinker, Joe's a beer drinker. We're not really on Pinterest very often. And so I'm just, I'm just wondering if it's, you know, some demographics are on there and some just aren't yet. And I'm. I'm wondering if maybe like a lot of the homebrew crowd, the craft beer crowd, people like that are not quite on Pinterest yet.

No, it's. It's kind of a segmented strategy. You know, it's a process. It's a good foundation with content that targets keywords and that kind of stuff. But then you have to start.

Playing with the user a little bit, you know, in the good sense of the word. It's women that are on there, they might be looking for gifts for their husband at homebrews that they can't find.

I like sense.

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's kind of seasonality a little bit, but it's also.

Crafting that message a little bit. You know, once you know the user, you know, then you can start to actually put up paid ads on that platform that they want you to put up anyways.

Yeah, yeah. So you can create like a board that's called like gifts for the beer level beer lover or something, which will probably always get a little bit of love throughout the year because there's obviously birthdays and stuff like that. But then, you know, you Have Father's Day and Christmas and you know, all the other various holidays throughout the year where you give gifts that, you know, people might be searching Pinterest for gifts for beer lovers. And now we have all of our items that we talk about on Homebrew Academy. And that could drive some traffic. Is that kind of the idea?

Yep.

Yeah.

You know, you can't, like, you just can't start a site and have it start ranking. You know, Pinterest is kind of the same way. They want to see a little bit of age, a little bit of engagement, they want to see a couple other things. So those things start to dial up over time. People talk about sandbox on Google a lot. A new site under six months isn't going to hardly get any attention. And when you really think about it, it's actually a pretty good thing. You don't want somebody starting up a site, even talking about the homebrew side a lot. 150 start homebrew sites tomorrow. 150 people start homebrew sites tomorrow. You don't want them having the opportunity or even the chance to outrank us for some of the keywords we've been talking about, you know, and then it's a six month journey to be able to get there or have a chance to get there. Yeah, yeah. Pinterest is usually three to four months from my experience, but since the ipo, things have been changing pretty rapidly over there.

Yeah, no, that's. I mean that makes sense. It's like with podcasts, there's so many coming online all the time. But like the statue show, I don't know what exact stats are, but most of them drop off. So it's like, yeah, if itunes is ranking every single one of those or even Google, which therein lies a question really quick to you is you don't want all these new sites or new podcasts just outranking the ones that are super established and aren't going to go away. Really quick. Before we wrap up, have you seen any, do you know of any ways to rank podcasts you in Google? Because they're doing a lot of changes with ranking shows or episodes. We've heard a lot of things about Google transcribing with their AI the actual content of podcasts. And I don't think that's live yet, but have you seen any strategies around that?

Well, my initial thought is be like similar to voice search, they've been incentivizing FAQ schema across a lot of different industries and some of the more experienced guys have been manipulating that pretty quick. I would imagine that there's going to be some type of schema that can be added to a page or podcasts relatively quick if there's not already. I don't know too much about that space. Right.

You know, just formatting that stuff correctly like you would a good optimized blog post with one header that answers like the question about what this whole thing's about. You know, H2s and H3s. You know, kind of like every single book that you have on your shelf is formatted in a certain way. Right. You know, you want to be able to read chapter to chapter and have some headings in those chapters. I think formatting the podcast would probably give you the best chance of.

You know, telling Google what this thing is actually about and then having your own transcription. And they're probably just going to go ahead and not necessarily believe you 100% anyways and trans have their own. But as long as those things start to match up, you know, then you start adding your trust value.

I imagine the new ones would rank even faster.

Yeah. I don't want to go too deep down this rabbit hole, but I have to ask, now that you mentioned it, with the FAQ schema, have you experimented with that at all? Are you using that on Homebrew Academy or any of your. Your legal sites or anything like that?

Legal sites? Yeah. It kind of works in the jewelry space a little bit with people looking for.

There's two sides of the fence too. Right. There's this side of people that says, let's not do that because it's going to contribute to zero clicks in the SERPs.

Right.

There's some stuff that you most likely wouldn't want to click to your site anyways because it's going to have a bounce rate pretty damn high because they found the answer, the one word answer to the question that they were after.

Yeah.

The lawyers face it works really well because somebody that has that question, if you provide them a good answer, they're going to have more questions than just the one. You know, they're going to have questions surrounding that entire topic. So you're going to show up for most of those. People also ask, you know, like, if you click on that box, you're going to get four or five more questions. Right. You know, there's a whole content strategy based around that to continue to expand thin content on your site just by adding those additional questions in that Google knows those users are already asking.

Yeah.

If you do, that format should work, theoretically.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I like the idea. I've always been hesitant to really dive deep into the. Not always, it's kind of a newer thing that people are talking about. But I've always been hesitant because I've always thought if I put the answer right on Google, that disincentivizes the click. So I see the benefit of taking up more real estate on Google. But I also see with a lot of niches, if somebody gets their itch scratched, they don't need it scratched anymore. So it's always been a debate in my mind about how much sense that makes for people who are trying to drive traffic to the their website.

Yeah, it's the, it's the big depends. You know, it's. I don't fall on either side of the white hat, black hat type gamer conversation. I don't fall on either side of this either. It really depends, you know, if somebody's looking for, you know, what birth stone is, January, and you tell them, you know, they didn't want to go read your 10,000 word post about it anyways, you know, they were going to go to somebody that was going to give it to them at, you know, above the full page content and not serve them 16 ads before they found the answer to the one question they were after. You know, so it's really driven around voice search, you know, that data Google feeds into their voice search algorithm. So that's why it's so heavily incentivized. Yeah. So they can go ahead and leave that search market too because, you know, that's one of the untapped frontiers. But.

Yeah, I think if you provide an answer to a complex question and simplify it to the point where somebody knows that that answer serves their, like their itch, but yet they kind of want to know a little bit more about why you know so much about it. You know, there's other ways to perk somebody's interest, if you will, more than just putting dot, dot, dot at the end of it. Because that's crap too.

Yeah, that's probably not going to do it.

No, no, it's, you know, it's good copywriting at that point.

Okay.

Yeah, nice.

That's. I mean, maybe it's a good strategy. But the big depends, like you said, big depends, that's what Matt wears.

Well, let's wrap it up. We didn't even touch on your business model, but I know we're kind of running a little short on time here, but it's just like you have an interesting way that you partner up so it's just like wanted to just super bring it up super quick. Here is you're not like an agency, you're not just a freelancer. You actually partner and you do this cool stuff for the right websites and you get a piece of the action. There's all this. So it's just like a cool model that someone can just put in their head and oh, that's an option for me maybe for SEO or something else.

Yeah, thanks man, I appreciate that. That definitely is. It provides a better win win scenario I think to partner.

And it kind of provides like alignment across two people or two businesses really. And that's kind of where it really is self serving to start with. You know, it was one of those things like I have people ask me for help with these types of things, you know, but time and resources are limited. So how do I partner with somebody to where it's a better long term.

You know, mutually beneficial arrangement, you know, rather than just giving somebody, you know, per flat rate for consulting or, you know, whatever other business models out there. I kind of went with.

People that have found me through other projects I guess is kind of where that came from because they wanted help. But I wanted to kind of build a more intimate.

Long term relationship with those people that were asking for help. If that was something they were after, then we could work together. If it was a two week SEO consultant, I just wasn't interested. It didn't interest me and it didn't benefit them all that well either. So I kind of went with more of the partnership model that's been working out really well.

Yeah, I think it's smart, it's long term and you might get the piece of an upside if there is one that gets sold or whatever it might be. I'm not sure all the agreements you do, but either way I think it's cool because you're in the know, you're in right in the middle of opportunity and you're getting to see if there's actually momentum in these things. So it's cool man.

Let's business models. Sometimes it doesn't even cost anything too, you know, like this homebrew site, it didn't have a single ad on it and you know that was found money. Right. You know, quote unquote. It's not like we had to split anything in half. It was just we tacked on a new revenue stream and that was the partnership. And now both of those revenue streams increase every month. Which makes more sense than just splitting one in half. Right.

So that's True.

Depending on the site, business model, all that kind of stuff. Most of the time I kind of operate under that found money.

Area too, which is usually a pretty easy stuff.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's the way to do it. Yeah. With display ads is what you did for us. So affiliate stuff. So cool, man.

Well, thank you. I appreciate you guys having me on.

Yeah, we covered a lot. I'm like. And I feel like there's more that we could go down, but is there.

Anywhere you'd want to send people after listening to this? Do you want. Do you have like a site or a social media account or anything like that that they could go learn more about you or get in contact if they have, you know, some idea to work with you or something like that?

Well, yeah, that's something I want to talk to you guys more about. I kind of want to leverage your guys's knowledge and experience when it comes to kind of maybe exploring something in that space. One of the.

You know, one of the things we talked about earlier with the GAPS report inside of ahrefs, I kind of built that into a spreadsheet inside of an SDO audit and that's been really good. When it comes to sending that to new clients or new partnerships, they kind of really love how it kind of gives them an action plan to move forward a day to day or an action plan. I actually did that for a few other people and they said that should be like, you should sell this. Right.

You know, I'm really that good at it. And it kind of provides a window into somebody's business that they haven't necessarily thought about and looked at it from, you know, comparing it to 20 competitors. So I picked up contentgaps.com I haven't built anything on it yet, but I'm curious to see from you guys perspective, what do you think is available for something like that? Because I think it's a good opportunity to provide, you know.

A data driven approach that you can hand off to an editor or even just a small site owner or somebody that doesn't necessarily know like where to go from. Hey, I just learned about this business online affiliate game, you know, where to start type thing. So we'll see. I'm not sure if it'll materialize, but you know, I'm on Facebook, LinkedIn and you know, wherever else.

So we'll link you up. Yeah, I mean, at a minimum what you could do is package that up and make a video that shows people how to use that spreadsheet and pair it up with something like ahrefs. And that could be a free opt in. So you can grow an email list, you know, of interested folks and maybe work them into your agency. But you know, the way you do business or you can package it to sell. Same idea too.

Well, you're actually going in and running this report for people's websites, Right. It's not just a spreadsheet you're giving them, right?

Yeah, you know, it's a combination of all the different tools inside ahrefs. You know, it presents data in like an action plan rather than just, you know, here's how to use ahrefs better. You know, there's plenty of content surrounding that for from my affiliate brothers out there.

Yeah. I mean, you could even use it as an audit. A way to just kind of give a lot of cool value. Maybe it's a one time thing you charge for, but then it can materialize into a really cool partnership for you as well.

No, I think it's an amazing idea. You can go out there, you could sell that audit for people, and then it is also sort of a.

A little bit of an audit for yourself to, you know, maybe flesh out some companies that would be good for you to work with on a closer level. So you know that it's kind of like an entry point, a one time fee to kind of get your feet wet with, with SEO stuff and give them an action plan. And then once you give them the action plan, then you go and say, hey, look, by the way, you're making great waves with your business. If you want me to help you implement this action plan, here's something we can do in that realm. And then now you're partnered with another company or, you know, so I think it's a good idea.

Well, Carl, you got like about a month or so until this episode goes live, so you got some time there. Package our.

The very least put an opt in form up on content gaps.com so people can go and get on a list in case you start offering these services.

Well, yeah, with the four thumbs up over there, I'll have it on. Done.

Sweet. Yeah, man, sweet. I think we got everything, man. Yeah. Thank you for your time, brother. And I can't wait to keep growing this thing.

Yeah, likewise. You know, we'll have to, you know, follow up on other ways we've monetized it later on down the track.

Yeah, give us a few months for sure. All right, have a good one, man. See it.

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