MBA2203 Guest Teacher – John Murphy – How To Get More Organic Traffic And Sales While Becoming Less Reliant on Paid Ads

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John Murphy, today's guest teacher, runs a seven figure e commerce business. And he actually learned how to do this, how to optimize his store, his business for SEO because, because he wasn't able to run ads anymore. So he turned to organic traffic. He was like, how can I get traffic via search? And in that process he learned a great deal. Some things that worked, some things that didn't, some things that are kind of okay. So to save you all the effort, the time, the anguish, John is here to show you the three things that actually are going to move the needle the most. His mission is to help as many business owners improve their SEO so they can rely on organic traffic and not paid acquisition. I'm going to pass it on to John Murphy now to teach his guest seizure lesson on how to get more organic traffic and be less reliant on ads. I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my takeaways. But for now, take it away, John.

Hey there, I'm John Murphy. Thank you for joining me today. Today I'm going to teach you how to get more organic traffic and sales to your e commerce store while being less reliant on paid acquisition channels like Google and Facebook. So let's get down to business. Today's lesson is my process that I still use today to dominate the organic search results. Here's what we're going to learn. Step one, Write valuable content that Google loves to rank. This is the content that will rank on page one of Google and other search engines like Bing, for example. First you should search on Google for your main keyword and see what comes up. Those results are what Google thinks is the best content online for that search term. So that's the style of content that we're going to try to follow just make it better and more helpful. We're not going going to try to force Google's algorithm to like different type of content. We can see what Google wants, so we're just going to give it more of that. Okay, let's say you sell mattresses. For example. Hypothetically you can search for the term like best mattresses and see what type of content is on page one. If you find multiple results that have lists of like the best mattresses in a listicle type format, then that's the style Google deems valuable. If on the other hand the content is more of a technical and educational nature, then that's what it seems as more relevant. So that's what you should do. So give Google what it wants. A good tip is when creating content that your customers are looking for, is answering their questions just like an FAQ section or a common misconception section, Your customer service team should already know most of these commonly asked questions from their day to day exchanges with customers. But if you want to find out what people are actually looking and asking online, you can go to a website called answerthepublic.com and enter the keyword mattress or your industry keyword and you will get results for all of the questions asked online with that keyword in it. You can choose from there which questions to answer in your content. Generally, bigger is better. So the longer the content or larger word count the better it ranks, but only if the content is actually helpful. So no filler content, no fluff, just pure valuable helpful information for the reader. That's the first step and that is now your pillar piece of content. Or if you visualize it like a bicycle wheel, the hub and spoke system. So the pillar piece is the hub and is the most important piece of content for driving traffic. Then you will want to create smaller pieces of content that target long tail keywords. For example best mattress for under $1000 or which mattress is best for a bad back. You can create shorter pieces of content answering one question or targeting one specific issue. Then smaller pieces of content are the spokes in the hub and spoke system and you will link from the small piece of content to the pillar piece of content just like a hub and spoke system. So if you can imagine that this internal linking strategy from the smaller content to the pillar piece is very important. When Google crawls your website and finds 20 pieces of content all about mattresses, it needs to make a decision on which piece is the most relev to display in the search results and where Google sees that out of those 20 pieces of content, 19 of them are all linking to the same piece of content. In this case, your pillar. Google understands that the pillar piece of content is the most relevant page on mattresses on the website and will publish it and will push it up the rankings. Google will also see 20 pieces on mattresses in general and see your website potentially a topical authority on the subject, and will reward you by further increasing your rankings and pushing you up. Okay then, step 2 Dream 100 process for getting backlinks the Dream 100 process is very valuable system that you can use for multiple strategies. For now, we're going to use it to identify backlink opportunities. Backlinks are still a strong ranking factor and I'll show you how I approach it. First of all, it's important to know that not all backlinks are created equally. It's important to get backlinks from sites that are relevant to your industry. So if we stick with the mattress niche, for example, relevant sites could be in the home and living industry, interior design, or even health and wellness. Since a good night's sleep is so important. Backlinks from relevant sites are like getting a positive vote for your site. The more relevant sites link to your site, the higher your site will rank. So how does it work? The Dream 100 process involves creating a list. You can use Excel or Google Sheets as you prefer and search online for 100 or preferably even more sites that you would most want to get backlinks from. You can go online and search for sites in related industries using tools like Ahref or Semrush to see how much traffic they get and how high their authority rating is. These platforms give a score from 0 to 100. Usually a website with a higher rating than yours is a good place to start. So if you've got a domain rating of maybe like 10 or 15, anything above that number is a good place because it's a positive reinforcement for your site. So all you need to do is identify these sites by searching online, understand what type of site it is, and recognize how best to ask for backlink. For example, if it's a blog, you can offer to write a guest post for their site. Bloggers are always looking for new content and if in exchange all they have to do is link to your site, usually in the author bio, then it's a good deal for them. If you find a review site where the author is reviewing products in your industry, you can offer to partner up with them and have them Review one of your products Another easy way to look for articles commonly known as expert panel posts. These are really good opportunities. This is where the website invites a bunch of experts in the industry to answer one question. It could be a question like what's your number one tip for a great night's sleep? They ask the experts and package those replies as a kind of top tips for a great night's sleep. Experts share their tips Type of article when you see these types of articles, you can just reach out and offer to answer the question and invite them to include it in the article. They usually will oblige because it helps them keep the article updated and refreshed, which Google loves. So it's a win win. Honestly, there are hundreds of ways to get backlinks and there's not enough time to go through them all. But you get the idea. Identify the opportunities and reach out in a way that helps you both. As long as you're offering value, you'll get good positive feedback. Okay, so Step three Build an Affiliate army this is the final step for today and by far the most underutilized of all and in my opinion, the biggest needle mover. First of all, what is an affiliate? We've all been on those websites that review products. You know those the best sleeping bag for cold weather or the best mattress for under $1,000. Almost always, if you click on the button in the article aptly named, See price or Check Details, you are swiftly transported to Amazon or another big store like Walmart or Target for ex. What just happened was you clicked on an affiliate link and if you make a purchase, the original website owner gets a small commission from the seller, usually Amazon. Those websites are affiliate sites and they are everywhere online and in every industry, so you won't have a problem finding them for yours. The reason why we want to build an army of affiliates is very important to understand. Let's say you absolutely crush steps one and you produce amazing content and get high quality relevant links and you manage to get to page one. Google will only allocate a maximum of two spots on page one for the same website. So even if you crush it and get two spots, there are still approximately eight spots occupied by others, all trying to compete for page one listings. And they could be referring sales to someone else. These affiliate websites live or die by ranking well. If they rank well, they can earn commissions, but if they don't rank well, they never get clicks and the business doesn't generate revenue. So they have become masters of not only ranking on page one, but also at getting the reader to click the call to action buttons on the page. Now remember the Dream 100 process from step two. Well, you can use it again to identify affiliate websites. It's simple. Just google a few search terms that your customers are using. For example Best memory foam King size mattress and see who ranks on page one and even page two. Some will be affiliates when you identify a large number of affiliates. But before you reach out to them, you'll need to set up an affiliate program. It's quite simple also you just need to just search online for affiliate program for merchants. Or if you have a Shopify store, just go to the Shopify app store and look at the menu options. It's as easy as syncing the app and choosing what commission terms you want to offer. When you have the program set up, you can reach out to those affiliate websites and invite them to join your program. Many are on Amazon and Amazon offers terrible commissions, usually in the range of 3 to 8% and cookie windows of only 24 hours. So that means if the customer purchases after 24 hours, the affiliate makes nothing. So offer a competitive commission and bump the cookie window to 15 or even 30 days to entice them to join. Then imagine you occupy two spots on page one of Google and three of your affiliates also take up a spot on page one. You immediately own 50% of page one results plus those affiliates already getting traffic. So you will see immediate bump in organic traffic to your site. And you only pay a commission if those referrals turn into a sale. And remember, if they become affiliates of yours, they're also linking to your site. So they too become high quality relevant backlinks. Remember step two. So those are the steps. Those steps have been an absolute game changer for my business and they can be for yours. Don't sleep on the power of organic traffic. It's the combination of all three strategies that make this work so well. Okay, so what did we learn today? We looked at how to create great content that Google rewards with Page One rankings. We learned how to get high quality relevant backlinks to reinforce our website's authority. And finally, we learned how to team up with a players online and build an affiliate army. Alright, this was John Murphy. If you want to go deeper to see my entire process, you can visit ecomseoformula.com thanks again for joining me today. Now back to Omar.

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I'm a big believer in investing in SEO. Every dollar you spend on getting free organic traffic is a dollar worth investing because this is sort of building for the long term. This is something you're going to continue to get and reap the benefits of for years to come. So for example, if I am able to get my site ranked from page 2 to page 10 on my best keywords, this could be the difference of thousands upon thousands of more visitors for free every single month. That means more chances to get more leads, more customers without spending a dime on ads. This is why I recommend spending a couple of hours implementing some of these techniques that John shared with us today every single month to improve our blog posts to use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to see where we rank for our keywords and and make sure that we're always improving. Now remember, Google has updates frequently. They update their algorithm and it's good to be in the know and check your rank for keywords after these updates to see how you're doing and if there's anything you need to do to improve. For our software company, Webinar Ninja, SEO is the number one way we acquire customers. And the reason this is so powerful is because when people are searching for something, they are interested. They are buyers. They have a higher likelihood of buying your product because they're looking for your product versus trying to feed somebody some ads that are not really on the radar. They're not really looking for this product. They're not really interested right now. The urgency is not there. When somebody's typing keywords in Google, they're telling the world I need this. And when you show up, you have a chance to win them over and convert. And it's much easier to convert somebody who's looking to solve a problem and you have their solution versus somebody who is not even aware they have this problem in the first place and you convincing them they have this problem so you can sell them the solution. If you want to learn more from John Murphy, especially if you have an E commerce store and you want to optimize your SEO, go to ecomseoformula.com that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you loved it if you did. Hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app right now so you don't miss an episode. We're on every single app, whether it's Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya, Overcast, you name it, we're on it. Just hit subscribe or follow so that you get all the goodies. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I know that a lot of people think SEO is boring, and it's not as fun as coming up with creative ad campaigns or launches or funnels or whatever. But in my experience of running businesses for 20 years, it's the boring stuff that people don't want to do is what actually brings in the money. And what's great about it being boring is that people don't do it, and therefore you have a competitive advantage because you're doing the things that people don't do. You'll begin to love it once you start seeing the results. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Hey Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?

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