The 80/20 of SEO For Software & Service Companies — Travis Jamison — MicroConf Growth 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] hey guys tribes Jamison over the last decade I've been lucky enough to found it about ten companies I've been lucky enough to exit a couple of those invested and a few dozen companies and I purchased wholeheartedly a couple companies and through all of this the backbone of everything for me personally has pretty much been SEO so that's I'm gonna ramble about here for my talk I definitely recommend watching the screens more there's gonna be more stuff up there and it's gonna be happening with me so the original talk was supposed to be the 80/20 in 2019 but I've got 12 minutes so that is not happening so I'm

0:48just gonna go over 5 SEO hacks that are working really well right now so the first one is less is more need to audit your existing content instead of worrying about new content as much if you have a large established site what that means is removing underperforming content will frequently produce better results than adding new content so again removing the stuff that Google is not rewarding will make your site in general go up so site health plus improving the topical relevance equals winning so how it works real simple step one is identify the pages to remove so we're going to be using href and analytics it's all you need to do it we have the

1:33audit checklist it's the things that look for we have is the page older than six months if it's not then it probably hasn't had time to reach his full potential does it generate traffic obviously is it about the core topic of the business which means is it topically relevant if it's an offshoot post you might have made it could be bringing the site health and relevance down a little bit and of course has thin content get rid of it and of course what has good backlinks you want that but so after auditing you're gonna have an easy decision with the bulk of your data there's a page have no backlinks have no

2:05traffic and it not top irrelevant if so just get rid of it it's gonna make it easy here is a screenshot of a business I bought a few months ago my team just got done auditing it you can see that we have trashed over 2000 of the 3,000 post using just the easy metrics that I just went over it can be quite extreme but after that you have such a few tougher decisions that you can get into what happens if a page has good backlinks to it but no traffic you can actually think about consolidating posts so maybe 301 it to another similar topic you can

2:41combine the link juice a little bit what if a page is getting traffic from social media but hasn't no organic rankings in that case you can actually think about no indexing the posts it's not providing any organic value for you or you can improve it and last a href sand traffic think tank have really good guides on this that I referenced and here is the results of after the tougher analysis you can see I deleted 2700 out of the 3,000 post this is not the norm but you can see it can be pretty extreme here are the results speak for themselves alright hack number two borrowing brand

3:23names so a few years ago I founded a software called a MZ tracker it was in the Amazon FBA space one of our main competitors was named snack shop so what did I do I went to our forum and I created this clickbait e post snag shout warning and then I ranked it for the term snack shout their brand name you can see we got almost 22,000 visitors to this post these are people coming to this page that had no idea who we were and we were able to convert them into our customers on the page we talked about hey our friendly competitor snag shout who we

3:57just happen to be much cheaper than and then a plug later on we got a ton of customers in this post who never would have heard of us otherwise and our product was better and cheaper so how you use this competitors I just talked about also synergistic brands other brands in your industry that maybe you're not a competitor with zapier does a really great job of this every time they do an integration you know Trello to Gmail they're gonna make a post about it they rank for a ton of different brand names and get links from them and also brand versus brand so imagine drip in its early days before anyone had

4:31heard of him if they had ranked for a post MailChimp versus Aweber versus drip all of a sudden these people who were looking at mail chamfers as Aweber are now considering drip they never would have before it you just leach traffic off number three focus on the buyer intent for your keyword I'm really emphasizing your here and I'll go over that in a second why I'm doing that so you've probably heard of focusing on buyer keywords before I've been preaching it for years here is an example of the average keywords of a site you can see that little tiny red sliver is the transactional keywords keywords with like at buyer intent

5:12behind them here are the keywords that lead to customers that little tiny red sliver is now making up eighty percent of the customers that are coming in from organic so I'm gonna tell you like why I emphasize your product so what i mentioned a MZ tracker before our first feature that we built in was actually just a keyword rank tracker for the Amazon search engine an Amazon keyword rank tracker so as obvious gonna be the first thing that we built in you can see that we had combined total search volume about 200 searches a month for those two terms guess how many subscribers who got from there let's do some SAS math I've

5:53got about 150 visitors a month from that post 30 subscribers a month again that's an insane conversion rate because we are really scratching the itch that people are searching they didn't search SEO software they didn't search Amazon seller software they searched Amazon keyword rank tracker and we were the answer for that multiple we've had almost a million dollars in EM our are just from a post sorry million dollars to the valuation of your business sorry just from a post that brought in 150 visitors a month so I'm not saying to ignore the other keywords all I'm saying is focus on the transactional keywords first especially if you're early on in your business it's

6:34going to get you the profitability way way way quicker over time build the trust build the community that type of stuff but it's start with the transactional stuff number four new rule less keywords more topics despite all the stuff I just said about keywords in the last hack in 2019 it's far more about the general topics of pages than is about keywords so I'm saying don't go and create separate pages targeting each individual keywords you want to create a master post covering the whole entire topic so go over some specifics this is a blog post of mine and you can see it has really shitty rankings like the

7:16highest it ranks four of the keywords that I'm tracking is 19 here are here's the traffic from the last 30 days 2600 visitors where is that coming from that's not ranking for anything the long tails so I dropped it into a href and examining kinky words and you can see it ranks number one for bazillion long tails and if I could take the screenshot it would keep going down about 40 of those so all kinds of awesome stuff coming from it so what does this mean it means to stop focus on the individual and focusing on the total topic and that includes backlinks anchor texts are a

7:58lot less important Google is figuring out what a page is about you don't need to spam it with anchor text like this to tell it what it means and the second thing is a stop half-assing the content like cover the entire topic so go to some keyword tools it doesn't matter what find out the other keywords so here we got unicorn food unicorn macaroons unicorn chocolate unicorn dishes incorporate that type of stuff find out the questions that people are asking how to make unicorn food what is unicorn food trend and incorporate some of that so a few more points specifically on the content more guides of course use structure within your post

8:42so if you can use the list table of contents schema markups tables Google is eating that up they will reward you with some Rich Snippets all day long and they love your content ask and answer the questions I mean literally ask and answer a question in the post question what is the best food for unicorns answer well the best food for unicorns is literally put this in your content and Google will reward you with the Rich Snippets and tf-idf we honest I don't have time to go over this it's going over you can do this that's the that's the basics of it though hack number five the final one how to

9:28get five hundred and forty eight percent more backlinks using the methods you are already using that's a number about them alright so the most common like white hat link building techniques right now everybody's using the broken link building yes posting skyscraper posts you probably all know about this skyscraper post if you don't know this where you just create the most comprehensive guide about a subject that exists and then you reach out to everybody linking to and through your guides and say hey mine's better like out to be instead now this is brought on a whole lot more email spam just from these posts alone that's also a number so to answer the

10:12question though how do you actually get more links from using the exact same methods and the answer isn't to incentivize the prospects so to do this you can offer when you're doing the outreach you can offer to promote the post in your social media if you're an established brand and have a great social media this is an easy win people want to be exposed to it so it's not like the magic ticket is just gonna up your conversion rate of people saying yes and even if you don't have a good social media presence it will still up your conversion rate newsletters fantastic if you have an established

10:48brand especially with synergistic brands kinda like we mentioned zapier was doing if every link you got you promoted in your newsletter say hey these people are talking about it check it out they're gonna love it they're just gonna bring them more customers it's not gonna be competitive towards yourself free products this is mostly for like physical brands ecommerce but software I can get away with it as well and the last that most people don't like but it's true and all for to pay an administrative fee for their time so if you're reaching out and saying hey don't mind paying $50 $100 - for the administrative costs for your staff or

11:25their time do this to make this post for us to post it if you don't like it but it's it's what it is we personally when we do this type of outreach we use a dummy agency as kind of a a buffer between us so we'll set up a fake website of some agency and do the outreach there so that way they don't really know who we're reaching out for that keeps us kind of separated a little safer at the end of the day that is the winner unfortunately - getting the highest conversion rate the newsletter is second and if you have a really good brand it

11:58can take it over like if MailChimp was gonna release us in their newsletter

12:08you