Scaling Your Business with SEO: Steven Schneider on Content Strategy and Lead Generation

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[00:01:46] Now back to our episode.

[00:01:48] Welcome, everyone.

[00:01:49] This is Scaling Up Services.

[00:01:50] I'm Bruce Eckfeldt.

[00:01:51] I'm your host.

[00:01:52] Our guest today is Steven Schneider.

[00:01:54] He is co-founder and CEO at Trio SEO.

[00:01:57] We're going to talk about the world of marketing, about lead generation, about SEO, about how people can use content and search engine optimization strategies to really drive outreach, drive marketing, drive leads, drive awareness.

[00:02:11] We're going to talk to him about a bunch of different kind of scenarios and strategies and kind of his experiences in space, really where we are with this.

[00:02:17] I think this is one of these areas where everything kind of keeps evolving and changing and algorithms keep adjusting and stuff.

[00:02:22] So kind of hearing where we are in some of the in some of the technology and some of the platforms and what companies can do to really kind of stay on top of this and leverage these tools and use them to really drive business growth.

[00:02:34] I always find that service companies and growth is always about sales.

[00:02:37] How do I get more leads?

[00:02:39] How do I get more awareness?

[00:02:40] How do we bring more into the top of the funnel?

[00:02:41] So this is going to be a great program for that.

[00:02:43] So with all that, Steven, welcome to the program.

[00:02:45] Hey, Bruce.

[00:02:46] Thanks for having me.

[00:02:46] Excited to be here.

[00:02:47] Yeah, no, it's a pleasure.

[00:02:48] Sure. Before we dig into everything you're doing in the world, I would love to get here a little bit of background just professionally.

[00:02:54] Like, how do you get into this space?

[00:02:56] What's the backstory?

[00:02:56] Yeah, it's kind of a serendipitous one, but one I was thankful for, nonetheless.

[00:03:01] Yeah. So I was in college and kind of on track to just sell my soul to corporate and kind of do the traditional path.

[00:03:08] You know what it is studying finance, studying entrepreneurship, and was just going to do MBA, kind of go into investment banking or something like that.

[00:03:15] And thankfully, that wasn't the case.

[00:03:16] I had a good friend of mine who I was in classes with and he showed me one day during a presentation that he was a business owner as like you put on the bullet point slide.

[00:03:24] And I was like, yeah, right. Like, what sort of business do you have?

[00:03:27] And yeah, sure enough, he was building Amazon affiliate sites back in the day, strictly SEO.

[00:03:34] And he was making like 10, 15 grand on the side per month.

[00:03:37] That's great.

[00:03:37] Doing this in college from his dorm.

[00:03:40] And I was like, one, why are you going to school?

[00:03:42] Why are you here right now?

[00:03:43] Yeah. And two, teach me everything you know.

[00:03:46] And so, yeah, I just kind of quickly became a sponge.

[00:03:49] I'd never even heard of SEO, but I was hooked.

[00:03:51] I was addicted to it.

[00:03:52] And I saw that if he was doing it, I knew that I could definitely do it.

[00:03:56] It wasn't like he was this, you know, shining star that you see on YouTube.

[00:04:00] You know, exactly.

[00:04:01] So I was like, sharp guy, but you know, it didn't look like it was that complex.

[00:04:05] So yeah, I just kind of said, hey, teach me this.

[00:04:08] And he'd give me an article and I'd read the article, come back, give me a course.

[00:04:11] I take the course to come back.

[00:04:12] And I kind of quickly grew into him giving me a site, just one that he had like an old domain.

[00:04:17] And he said, here you go.

[00:04:18] You can't break it.

[00:04:19] Nothing bad will happen to this.

[00:04:20] Just do whatever you want to it.

[00:04:22] And I kind of use that as my playground and started making money through that with him.

[00:04:26] We bought a couple of couple of websites and blogs in college.

[00:04:29] We had a small portfolio going and then teamed up with his other partner.

[00:04:33] And long story short, we scaled to about 40 blogs at our peak.

[00:04:37] We had a team of about 30 people globally.

[00:04:40] We were doing about three to 400 articles per month across all sites.

[00:04:44] And we scaled that to seven figures.

[00:04:46] So it was a pretty fun ride back in the wild west days of SEO.

[00:04:51] I think some of that stuff is long gone, at least the easy route.

[00:04:53] But yeah, I kind of use that to kickstart my understanding of content and SEO and how to rank websites.

[00:04:59] And now we get to take those strategies.

[00:05:01] And I've teamed up with two new partners, Connor Gillivan, Nathan Hirsch.

[00:05:05] And they are also great SEO guys, successful entrepreneurs.

[00:05:08] And yeah, we get to kind of leverage everything we've known over the last couple of years and help clients out.

[00:05:14] So it's been a fun ride.

[00:05:15] So for those who don't quite understand that story or the details of that story, the tech there, explain what that was.

[00:05:21] Because this was a whole era of, you know, Amazon affiliate and content and things.

[00:05:25] So what when you say you had a couple of domains, you bought a couple of blogs and stuff like what were you actually doing there?

[00:05:31] Yeah. So what we would do back in the day is we would buy, build or hold email outreach micro blogs.

[00:05:38] So for example, one of the first websites that we ever had was a barbecue and smoking like meat smoker website.

[00:05:45] And it would pretty much these be these little micro blogs hyper focused on one niche.

[00:05:50] And you would just write every article under the sun about that to kind of establish your dominance, grabs your authority in that space.

[00:05:58] And then you'd write a lot of best XYZ articles.

[00:06:01] It'd be like best meat smoker under $200.

[00:06:04] And then you have a roundup of the top five best meat smokers that link to Amazon and the ones that article ranked.

[00:06:09] And so that's the thing that you would do.

[00:06:12] You'd like to see a lot of people in the world.

[00:06:13] And then you would have a bunch of people in the world.

[00:06:14] And then you would have a bunch of people in the world.

[00:06:14] So in the world, you know, the company of Amazon, you know, the company of Amazon's cookie, you could send traffic there.

[00:06:19] And regardless of what that person ended up buying, if it even wasn't that product at the end of the day, say they just bought their groceries or they bought a new speaker.

[00:06:27] Anything they bought within 24 hours was essentially yours as a commission because you got drove that traffic there.

[00:06:33] So it was a numbers game, strictly numbers game.

[00:06:36] It was just how much traffic could you get to Amazon?

[00:06:39] And then you let Amazon do the rest.

[00:06:40] So it worked really well.

[00:06:41] It was fun.

[00:06:42] That's great.

[00:06:42] That's great.

[00:06:43] And so I guess what did you learn there?

[00:06:44] I mean, what were the takeaways either in terms of business or in terms of SEO or in terms of marketing that you were able to parlay into the next gig?

[00:06:52] Oh, yeah.

[00:06:52] I mean, it's I would say it was the internship I never asked for, but it was glad I had for sure.

[00:06:58] I mean, I was in charge of our team.

[00:07:01] We had 30 people all over the world, all different departments, about five different departments between writers and editors and quality assurance, everything.

[00:07:09] I mean, we're strictly learned SEO at its core, how to do on page or writing good content and vetting writers and all that sort of stuff.

[00:07:16] And then from the business side, I mean, there's obviously a whole, I mean, we could talk about that for hours and you know, there's finances and hiring and firing and everything that goes into that as kind of an agency.

[00:07:25] And then the really fun part that we kind of got to dig into was acquisitions and access exits as we bought a lot of sites and sold them and flip them.

[00:07:34] So the name of the game was kind of where all the money was, is that the businesses and blogs were sold on a 30 to 45 X of your monthly average revenue over a six to 12 month period.

[00:07:45] So the sites bringing in, you know, five grand, you could sell it for 150 grand.

[00:07:50] Wow.

[00:07:50] So we had a lot of sites and we were just flipping and buying and building.

[00:07:53] And that was kind of the model on top of the monthly.

[00:07:56] Yeah. So I'm curious, like, do you, did you make more money with the monthlies or did you make more money in flipping?

[00:08:01] Um, definitely only monthly is the cashflow was what kind of kept the business life and kind of was allowed us to build because the way we kind of operated almost like an umbrella brand or like a portfolio holding company where the, the sites could then essentially feed into each other.

[00:08:15] So if we had one cash cow website, like one of the sites at the peak was making like 60 K a month just from one site, um, we could essentially use all that cash to build or acquire other sites and kind of use it as like a rising tide lifts all boats sort of situation across the company.

[00:08:30] Um, so it was really nice to kind of have a plethora of sites doing really well to kind of help support acquisitions, ongoing growth.

[00:08:37] And as long as everything balanced out at the end, in terms of like making sure that you weren't spending more than you were, you know, I've taken in, it all worked out.

[00:08:43] So yeah, it was, it was fun, but yeah, the, the, the payoffs were just kind of more as like bonuses, whatever we would kind of, you know, run a, run a site through to all the content that we saw for the roadmap.

[00:08:53] And it was like, Hey, there's, there's not really a lot going on here.

[00:08:56] Let's just, you know, minimize risk and move on.

[00:08:59] So any, um, I mean, you, you mentioned these are kind of micro sites here.

[00:09:02] Any, any interesting ones that you own kind of funny subjects?

[00:09:05] Oh, geez.

[00:09:06] I would like to say I'm a master of jack of all trades, master of none.

[00:09:09] Pretty much, pretty much go to a party at this point.

[00:09:12] And after a few talking points, figure out what you're into.

[00:09:16] And I can carry a conversation just based on SEO keyword research.

[00:09:19] But yeah, I got topics for everything.

[00:09:21] We had one of the, actually a funny one is one of our first sites that we bought in college was an adult toy website.

[00:09:27] Oh, nice.

[00:09:28] Yeah.

[00:09:28] I assumed that that was something like that was going to come up.

[00:09:30] Yeah.

[00:09:31] Yeah.

[00:09:31] First one we ever bought extremely, extremely lucrative.

[00:09:34] The commissions on it were insane.

[00:09:35] It was like 20% per sale.

[00:09:37] And Amazon at the time for comparison, it was like 5%, if you're lucky.

[00:09:41] So 4X that.

[00:09:42] But yeah, that one, that one crashed based on a penalty we didn't know from Google before we bought it.

[00:09:47] So it's lessons learned, but that was like my first kind of taste of the money.

[00:09:52] And I was like, Oh, I'm addicted.

[00:09:53] Like I'm dropping out of school.

[00:09:55] Like this is, let's just do this whole time.

[00:09:56] So yeah, we had some definitely some fun ones coming to play.

[00:09:59] Oh, sure.

[00:09:59] I'm sure.

[00:10:00] And so I guess how has the world changed?

[00:10:02] Right.

[00:10:02] Because you mentioned that, you know, the low hanging fruit is kind of gone at this point.

[00:10:05] Like what, what is the world of SEO look like at this point?

[00:10:08] Much harder.

[00:10:09] And that's kind of where I'd say the wild west era.

[00:10:11] I mean, even before then, like that was in 2017 was when we first started.

[00:10:15] And even like, if you're looking back into 2010s, it was so much easier then.

[00:10:18] So, you know, just as time goes on, Google is better at deciding good versus bad.

[00:10:23] And obviously they make mistakes, but you know, there's so many black hat strategies

[00:10:27] just over the last two decades that have emerged and gone.

[00:10:30] And so that's kind of like where I kind of, you know, saw that just from our own sake.

[00:10:34] It was like, we're back in the day when you're publishing three to 400 articles a month.

[00:10:38] I mean, your quality is obviously top of mind, but you can only get so far.

[00:10:42] I mean, when you're doing that much content.

[00:10:48] It's like, you know, I mean, that's the way we're doing that.

[00:10:48] You know, like how hard it is to rank and the fact that you don't want to waste time in SEO,

[00:10:52] because it takes so long to get that traffic.

[00:10:54] And if you lose it overnight, just based on being dumb to trying to cut corners, you're,

[00:10:58] you're shooting yourself in the foot.

[00:11:00] So yeah.

[00:11:00] So yeah, there's a lot more expertise and authoritativeness and a lot of those eat signals you might hear about that try to ensure people are playing by the book and they're not cutting corners.

[00:11:09] So yeah.

[00:11:10] So walk us through just kind of high level.

[00:11:12] What an SEO strategy, like when you're working with a brand or a company or an individual, you know, who's a thought leader kind of thing.

[00:11:19] What's the, you know, what is the high level strategy in terms of leveraging this whole world of SEO?

[00:11:24] Yeah. So there's, I'll start by saying there's two different sides that you can look at.

[00:11:27] So local SEO, which is what we don't do, it's kind of like driving local business and foot traffic.

[00:11:31] But the other side, which we do dabble in for service industries and B2B folks and SaaS is pretty much taking a look at who is your ideal customer and doing a lot of psychological plays on what are they searching for?

[00:11:43] And within those searches, if you break it down and dig a little bit deeper into the psyche of that, at what stage of the buying process or the funnel per se, are they in?

[00:11:52] So if you're looking at something like content writing services, like something that we would rank for, that's usually someone who's like a CMO or a co-founder or someone who's looking to like sign up for services.

[00:12:03] Someone who is like, what is blog writing is so far removed from buying that blog writing service.

[00:12:09] But so when we take a look at the keyword research, we're looking at all the keywords and trying to determine one, can the site even rank for this?

[00:12:16] How competitive is it in the total landscape?

[00:12:18] Two, where is that buyer at in their process and what actually makes sense for an ROI perspective of making sure that we're going after the right stuff, resources allocated.

[00:12:27] And then three is like, how do we write content that speaks to their pain points, speaks to a solution offered by the client?

[00:12:33] And then how do we kind of marry this all with a cohesive 90 day strategy that allows us to kind of like put them on the map?

[00:12:40] Yeah. And, and, and what does it take to get them on the map? Like what, what are you actually doing to getting them to rank in these, these search results?

[00:12:48] Yeah. A little black magic and a little luck.

[00:12:50] Eye of Newt, a heart of Toad.

[00:12:51] Yeah.

[00:12:52] Yeah. So what we do is called the one strategy that works really well is called the hub and spoke. I'll try not to let people who are listening blaze over.

[00:12:58] But if you could pretty much imagine like a wheel, you know, you have that center prong and you have all these little prongs going off of it, like a spoke.

[00:13:04] And the goal is pretty much right content in a silo or a hub. So we have like on our site, we have a lot of like B2B content.

[00:13:12] So we speak to that B2B customer. We're going to have 10 to 15 articles around different types of B2B topics of BSEO, B2B content writing and B2B blah, blah, blah.

[00:13:21] And then all of those are kind of like interwoven and connected to each other so that when Google reads that content in order to index it, they say, Hey, you have a ton of B2B content.

[00:13:31] And then you're saying you must be an expert on this subject. We're going to rank you over the next person in line who only has one article.

[00:13:36] So what you're pretty much doing is you're trying to establish authority and establish yourself as a brand who actually has the expertise to cover that topic with, you know, some well mannered authoritativeness so that Google wants to show quality content.

[00:13:51] So there's a lot of 10 million other variables that I could rattle off, but I won't. But yeah, that's kind of the name of the game is just trying to establish yourself as an expert and letting Google know, hey, ranking.

[00:14:01] And generally, or this is helping drive top of funnel or like what are the results that you actually generate from an SEO point of view in terms of, you know, sales and marketing?

[00:14:13] Like how do you feed into the company's sales process?

[00:14:16] Yeah, it's a great question. So most people think that blogging is dead, which is, I'm thankful it's not because we wouldn't have an agency. At the same time, what we do is we typically go after bottom of funnel keywords first, because we're entrepreneurs at the end of the day first, besides SEO guys, like we just take a course, we know how to do this.

[00:14:31] And SEO, I mean, if you it takes so long to get up and running that people kind of get antsy and they're like, you know, we haven't seen the results. Why are we not? Why is that coming through?

[00:14:39] So you start bottom of funnel, make sure that all the low hanging fruit is there. All the service pages or landing pages are set up correctly and optimized. And then you go after all the blogs that have the most intent behind them.

[00:14:49] So like for going back to our example, it might be how to choose an SEO agency or how to work with a writer or blah, blah, blah, blah, like things that are more in that decision making process.

[00:14:59] I'm going after lead magnet keywords are great. Anything that has a PDF checklist, quizzes, et cetera. And going after that sort of content, letting it rank, and then pretty much figuring out how and what lever to pull in order to convert that into a nurture sequence.

[00:15:13] So it's really, really difficult to convert someone straight away on a $5,000 a month service just from landing on the blog. But what you can do is throw them into a newsletter sequence, let them build into the brand, let them become accustomed to who you are and everything you're about. And then you look back in six to eight weeks, and maybe they're warmed up enough.

[00:15:32] So what we kind of eat, live and breathe is bring in the best, most opportunistic traffic, get that there, and then figure out what to do with it. And that's kind of everything else is, you know, works itself out.

[00:15:44] Yeah. And so when you're, I guess, how do you do that work with a company? Like what is, what are the conversations or what's the work that you do or the research you do for a given client for a given company to figure out what those things are? I mean, I guess, how detailed do you get into understand their customer and the buying process?

[00:15:59] Yeah, so we do a lot of bunch of keyword research kind of going in blind, which is good and bad because the benefit of that is that we don't have a bias in their brand. We can just look at the brand, like look at the website straight up and say like, this is what we kind of think from a data perspective.

[00:16:12] And then what we do is we take a bunch of keywords, say like 100 or 200 keywords, and we'll prioritize it based on just SEO data, like what is the best opportunities that we think they can achieve.

[00:16:22] And then once that's done, we'll take it to them and say, hey, we created a 90 day roadmap. Here's what we think we should do. What do you guys think is best? Because they know their brand and they know the business way better than we ever will. And we know that.

[00:16:34] So then they come to us and they say, hey, you know, these topics are great. Maybe I'd switch these around or let's prioritize these sooner. But I think this looks good. And then we'll give them the other 200 keywords and say, hey, okay, outside of this, why don't you prioritize these high, medium and low?

[00:16:48] And let us know what you think based on just what we found. This is just extras. And then from there on out, we kind of use a little bit of a mixture of their goals and priorities with our data and our kind of knowledge of what they think they can achieve.

[00:17:01] And then we kind of marry the two. And then obviously just talking to them a lot about like, who's your customer? Who's your competitors? We do a gap analysis, like kind of all the traditional stuff.

[00:17:08] And what type of companies, I guess, generally tend to benefit most from this kind of strategy? Are there types of businesses or situations that lend and sells well to SEO strategies?

[00:17:20] Yeah, I'd say, I mean, obviously like service pay services as a offer online, anything that can be, you know, like one of the good ones is like law is a really good, like somewhat, you know, you have to have a law writer and someone who knows their stuff.

[00:17:31] But like, it's a pretty easy niche. If you have a good domain authority, especially if you're working on like a legal manner, that's not just state specific, if you can cater to like national wide US cases or whatever, anything else would be kind of like software as a service is good just because people can sign up for a free trial anywhere and use the tool.

[00:17:49] I mean, there's industries, healthcare is a little more technical. So that's there's there are some niches like that fall into what's called like your money, your lifestyle that are just inherently more difficult to rank.

[00:17:58] I think raising beans, Google says, hey, if you're going to put out content that could affect someone's money or someone's lifestyle, meaning their finances, their health care, you don't want to like, for example, you wouldn't want to read an article on type two diabetes medication if it was written by your neighbor, who doesn't know what they're talking about.

[00:18:15] So things that have a little bit more sway on people's decision making, Google has to definitely be a little more picky.

[00:18:21] But yeah, I mean, things that are pretty generic, you know, like I said, like accounting is really easy, accounting services.

[00:18:27] Oh, interesting.

[00:18:28] Like bookkeeping. Those are kind of the things that we have. We also have like a client who's in the M&A space.

[00:18:33] I mean, yeah, it's pretty random, but it's all over the board. But yeah, we always start with an audit just to make sure it's a good kind of fit for both of us.

[00:18:38] And then if we get the thumbs up from our team and vice versa, we'll kind of just hammer down.

[00:18:43] And what what are some of the typical mistakes I guess you see, like when you come in and do these audits?

[00:18:48] Like, you know, what are the things you find that, you know, people aren't doing right or kind of key missed opportunities?

[00:18:53] I think the main thing is that people kind of think that because they have a website, that's good enough and they'll just forget about it.

[00:18:59] And they focus on everything else moving forward when really you should treat your website almost like a car and that it needs an oil change every six months.

[00:19:07] You know, you should be updating it with fresh, relevant content, updating the footer or the navigation or, you know, adding fresh content and just kind of making sure that it lives and breathes just like every other entity or asset you probably own in the business.

[00:19:21] And then the other thing, too, is just not putting enough social proof or trust on your website.

[00:19:25] Like people, I mean, there's so many easy ways to do that.

[00:19:27] Like if you have a Google business profile that has 200 five star reviews, like screenshot that and put it on your homepage.

[00:19:34] Or, you know, if you get a great review on LinkedIn, like take a screenshot of that and put it on your service page.

[00:19:39] Like screenshots are so easy to take and people just kind of like glance over that idea.

[00:19:42] But I think it's inherently more difficult nowadays to get trust across the finish line.

[00:19:47] And so when you can just like take this information from a XYZ and put it on your site, it goes a long ways.

[00:19:53] Yeah.

[00:19:53] And when you're engaging with a client, I mean, what does the typical process look like and timeframes?

[00:19:58] Like how do you kind of get them from, you know, struggling in this area to performing, you know, well in the sense of it's actually impacting their business?

[00:20:06] Yeah.

[00:20:06] So we have a three week pre onboarding phase.

[00:20:09] So like, for example, we're selling out November right now.

[00:20:11] This is being filmed on September 30th.

[00:20:13] And that just gives us some time to like prep and do everything.

[00:20:16] And then we hit the ground running in October.

[00:20:17] And then we, the 90 day roadmap is the first sprint.

[00:20:20] That's how we work every 90 days.

[00:20:21] We meet and go over strategy.

[00:20:22] And we try to bake in some results, at least traffic wins within the first 90 days.

[00:20:27] So that means that like, hey, we're going to be seeing high intent traffic.

[00:20:29] We're going to see upticks in your click rate and impressions and all the things that matter.

[00:20:33] And then around that six month period is kind of where you have enough traffic to start, you know, like I said, kind of tinkering with it and seeing what works, what doesn't.

[00:20:40] But we try to only work with people who have that long term mindset.

[00:20:42] Like SEO is not a 30 day, let's see what happened sort of thing.

[00:20:46] So people usually only sign up if they're like, hey, I'm in this for at least six months.

[00:20:49] Like, let's see what we can actually like do some damage over the next year or so.

[00:20:53] And that seems to work best.

[00:20:54] And I mean, there's all these new tools and everything.

[00:20:56] I mean, I've, you know, I get all these messages on LinkedIn and emails for, you know, all these new kind of SEO tools, whether it's, you know, AI or optimization or, you know, automated publishing and things like that.

[00:21:08] Like what, how is this space kind of morphed from kind of a technology and technical strategy point of view?

[00:21:14] Yeah, it's really interesting to see kind of how things are emerging because, you know, AI has really changed the game.

[00:21:20] Yeah.

[00:21:20] Good and bad.

[00:21:21] You know, we're an agency that focuses on 100% human written content, human edited.

[00:21:26] And everyone's like, why aren't you switching to AI?

[00:21:28] Like, you know, you could, you could do these articles for a fraction of the price.

[00:21:31] And it's just, it's not sustainable yet.

[00:21:33] It's a lot of really kind of murky water out there.

[00:21:35] And Google is still sifting through good versus bad.

[00:21:38] And we just don't want to jeopardize our clients' brands and put them at risk.

[00:21:41] But I think AI and just like all these tools are emerging.

[00:21:44] Like they're great for that reason.

[00:21:45] Like they're a tool.

[00:21:46] We use a few in our kind of toolbox in order to save time and automate some processes.

[00:21:52] And I think that's what they're, you know, that's what the beauty of them is for.

[00:21:55] But yeah, like you, I'm getting three new tools a day in my email box.

[00:21:59] And there's always something to, and yeah, you just have to wait for someone, like a friend of mine, like, hey, you should actually check this tool out.

[00:22:05] And I kind of see what it's up.

[00:22:06] But yeah, it's, it's opportunity overload at its finest for sure.

[00:22:09] Well, and it seems like it's becoming such an arms race, right?

[00:22:12] It's like, because it's so easy to generate content now.

[00:22:14] It's like now everyone has to generate, you know, 10 times more content than they did before.

[00:22:19] Like, like where's the end?

[00:22:20] Like, how do you think this all going to play out?

[00:22:23] I don't know.

[00:22:23] I feel like those who try to cut corners are definitely gonna get slapped on the wrist.

[00:22:26] We've already seen that from some big sites.

[00:22:29] But I think that like one of the things that is, like I was just talking to a client about this the other day who was, you know, kind of asking me a lot of these same questions.

[00:22:36] And our conversation pretty much just pointed to the fact that SEO content is like the craziest upside return.

[00:22:41] In my opinion, obviously I'm biased, but the difference being is that, you know, like with PPC, for example, like when you stop paying for those ads, like it's dead.

[00:22:48] Like what you don't have anything left.

[00:22:50] SEO content, like that's a piece of real estate now.

[00:22:52] You own that.

[00:22:52] It's an asset for your brand.

[00:22:54] Like, well, we write the article.

[00:22:55] We upload it for you.

[00:22:56] We publish it.

[00:22:57] We make sure that you're in a good position to rank.

[00:22:59] And then regardless of whether we stop working together in a year or two, that article is still yours.

[00:23:02] Like it's still going to drive traffic.

[00:23:04] It's still going to live on your site.

[00:23:05] As long as you update it, maybe every six to 12 months, like it's still going to continue doing its job.

[00:23:10] And so the kind of, you know, battle between SEO taking so long is that fact that, yeah, but you're essentially trading your long term investment in order for an even longer term investment once it's done right.

[00:23:21] So I think to your kind of question, I think that those who do it right will continue to kind of stay in the test of time.

[00:23:26] And those who try to figure out the way to squeeze six seconds off of it is going to, you know, feel the burn.

[00:23:33] Yeah.

[00:23:33] And how I know Google is always, you know, making tweaks, you know, some of which they tell you so much or they don't in terms of how their algorithms working and how they're choosing what to show, you know, for different keywords and things like that.

[00:23:46] How what I guess, how do you keep up on these things or how do you continue to kind of figure out what's actually going to work given changes to the underlying platform?

[00:23:54] Yeah, I mean, what we've learned is that through ranking thousands of articles and working on, you know, almost close to 100 sites now is that you can't reinvent the wheel.

[00:24:03] I mean, everyone knows that there's everyone in SEO, I should say, knows that there's, you know, some pretty core basics that you stick to.

[00:24:09] And if you just do those right, you know, you do them longer than your competitors, you focus on it, you make sure it's an ongoing task, chances are you're going to win.

[00:24:16] And it's not a matter of trying to, you know, trick the algorithm or figure out what works and what doesn't.

[00:24:21] The algorithm, in my opinion, is usually meant to combat those who are trying to cut corners.

[00:24:27] So as long as you just kind of stay in your lane and do what's right, like you're not really concerned.

[00:24:31] Like, for example, all of our clients since we've started have seen growth through Google updates.

[00:24:36] So every time a Google update came, they got a little bump instead of going down.

[00:24:39] So I think that's really kind of what it shows is that if you just play by the rules, like Google likes that and they have no reason to, you know, penalize you or, you know, take a peek at your site.

[00:24:48] They're like, hey, these guys are doing what they're supposed to move on to the others.

[00:24:51] So and we've been talking about blogs, I think, you know, for this thing, how are things like, you know, video coming into play here?

[00:24:57] Because I know that, you know, there's there's so much video content out there as well that that I know people are investing in.

[00:25:03] How do you approach some of these other forms of content?

[00:25:06] Yeah, I really like video. I think that it's an emerging thing.

[00:25:08] I think there's different ways to do video outside of just like put your face on a camera and hope it works.

[00:25:13] You know, I think that it's a very nice complementary asset.

[00:25:16] So if you are blogging or you do have a, you know, even creating content on LinkedIn, like I create content daily and it's usually in a carousel format or graphics or whatever.

[00:25:26] But even through doing video as a animations play or something that's just a little more visually stimulating, I would say, I think it's I think it's a great move.

[00:25:34] I mean, obviously, we're in the attention economy right now and everything is has diminishing returns as long as you're not trying to appeal to someone beyond six seconds.

[00:25:44] But yeah, I think we'll see. We'll see that definitely take shape and kind of become a very dominant player in the space forward.

[00:25:50] So if I'm a owner of a service company or a responsible leader in a service company looking to approach SEO, what how do I start?

[00:25:58] Like what are some of the things you suggest people think about or questions you ask themselves and then, you know, figuring out how to develop a strategy and who to work with to help, you know, really get SEO working inside the business?

[00:26:08] I think the main things that are really easy to do that are free to do is to first off, remove yourself as the business owner or the founder, wherever your role is, and like put yourself in a non-biased role when looking at your website.

[00:26:21] So how does it feel? Does it work well? Is it clunky? Is it fast? Does it load well?

[00:26:27] Kind of like what is that user experience like making sure that it doesn't feel like it was built in 1997 or any of those like, you know, catastrophic things that you see when you go to a sketchy website or what it looks like.

[00:26:38] And then beyond that, if you're looking to expand your strategy, I would say to, you know, work on a keyword strategy that makes sense for your brand.

[00:26:45] There's a pretty easy thing to make sure like your homepage, you don't want your homepage to be called homepage.

[00:26:49] Like you should be your brand plus maybe your ICP or some service you offer just to kind of like tell Google like, hey, this is what I'm about.

[00:26:56] This isn't actually just a homepage.

[00:26:57] Updating your footer, making sure there's important links there, putting an author on some of the pages like your blog.

[00:27:03] But I mean, strategy wise, take a look at your competitors, see what they're doing, bigger competitors than you, obviously.

[00:27:09] And then if you want to kind of get serious about it over like a long term period, I'd say work with a strategist.

[00:27:13] You try and do it yourself.

[00:27:15] You can try and learn it.

[00:27:16] But as a business owner or a founder or CMO or whatever your role is, like your time is way better spent doing something else that can actually move the needle for the company.

[00:27:24] So yeah, outsource it to someone who knows what they're doing.

[00:27:27] It can save you time and save you resources along the way.

[00:27:29] Yeah.

[00:27:30] Steven, it's been a pleasure.

[00:27:31] If people want to find out more about you, more about the work that you do, what's the best way to get that information?

[00:27:35] You can look at SEO.com, T-R-I-O, SEO.com.

[00:27:39] You can Google my name, Steven Schneider.

[00:27:41] You can also find me on LinkedIn.

[00:27:42] I'm pretty active there.

[00:27:43] Always looking into that work.

[00:27:44] So don't hesitate to reach out or ask me SEO questions.

[00:27:47] This is what I nerd out on.

[00:27:48] So always happy to help.

[00:27:49] Steven, thank you so much for taking the time today.

[00:27:51] It's been a pleasure.

[00:27:52] Of course.

[00:27:52] Thanks, Bruce.

[00:27:55] You've been listening to Scaling Up Services with business coach Bruce Eckfeldt.

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