Today we’re going to be talking about a topic that I’ve been sleeping on for eight years in my business. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t think we’ve ever devoted a full episode to SEO.

In almost 600 episodes, I’ve slept on it. I haven’t talked about it.

That changes today.

Joining me to share his expertise is Gert Mellak. Gert’s the founder of a company called SEOLeverage.com. He’s the creator of the ERICA Framework. He’s also the author of the book The ERICA Framework.

Gert is a very knowledgeable person when it comes to SEO. He’s going to share how to get started with SEO, talking about things like: how much time it actually takes. Should you be getting help with this? Should you be hiring an agency like Gert’s agency? How long it takes to see results from SEO. Where does it fit in the marketing ecosystem of your business?

One big thing that jumped out at me from this interview is it’s not as scary as many of us think.

When I think of SEO, I think it’s a huge project and so much work.

Well, Gert shares with us it’s actually more about the 80/20. What are the 20% of the things on our website—pieces of content, for example—that are driving the most results, and how do we optimize? How do we make that better?

That’s what we’re always talking about here on the show: how to make things better. So, I think you’re going to get a lot out of this episode.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How soon you can expect to see results after dialing in your SEO
• Is having a YouTube presence helpful for SEO?
• What kind of time commitment does managing SEO require?
• Is SEO for everyone? Who won’t benefit from SEO?
• Can you do SEO on your own?

Links & Resources:

• The Art of Online Business Podcast episode #30: How to Create a Content Marketing Machine with James Schramko 
• James Schramko
• Pat Flynn
• James Schramko’s SuperFastBusiness Podcast episodes with Gert Mellak
• 10XPRO
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips
• The Art of Online Business website
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

Gert Mellak’s Links:

• SEO Leverage
• Gert Mellak: The ERICA Framework
• SEO Leverage’s Deep Dive SEO audit
• Send Gert an email

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.

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[00:00:00] Gert:
You want to make sure the content you expect to rank is optimized, and is in line with what Google wants to rank.

Just because I create the best piece of content about SEO doesn’t mean it’s content that Google wants to rank. It might work terrifically on Facebook ads and get a lot of traction. I might make a video out of it and it works great on YouTube, but it might just not be what Google wants to rank.

[00:00:54] Rick:
What’s up, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much, as always, for tuning in.

We’re going to be talking about a topic that I’ve been sleeping on for eight years in my business. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t think we’ve ever devoted a full episode to SEO.

In almost 600 episodes, I’ve slept on it. I haven’t talked about it. That changes, today.

Joining me to share his expertise is Gert Mellak. Gert’s the founder of a company called SEOLeverage.com. He’s the creator of the ERICA Framework. He’s also author of the book ERICA Framework.

We got connected through my personal coach and mentor, and somebody who is a good friend of Gert’s and a partner in his business.

They got connected through The Art of Paid Traffic, which this podcast used to be called—long story. You’re going to hear about it coming up here.

Gert is a very, very, very knowledgeable person when it comes to SEO. He’s gonna share how to get started with SEO, talking about things like how much time it actually takes. How much time can you expect? Should you be getting help with this? Should you be hiring an agency like Gert’s agency? How long it takes to see results from SEO. Where does it really fit in the marketing ecosystem of your business?

One big thing that jumped out at me from this interview that you’re going to hear with Gert is it’s not as scary as so many of us think. When I think of SEO, I think it’s a huge project and so much work.

Well, Gert shares with us today it’s actually more about the 80/20. What are the 20% of the things on our website—pieces of content, for example—that are driving the most results?

And how do we optimize? How do we make that better? Which is what we’re always talking about here in the show. So I really think you’re going to get a lot out of this episode here. whisker, I am an affiliate for Gert’s agency. so if you want to, go do an audit with. Connect with him and his agency.

I send a lot of our Accelerator members over to him. just go to RickMulready.com/S E O leverage and Gert. We’ll take very, very good care of you. Okay. Speaking of Accelerator, I talk about it all the time here on the show, because our program just gets results for people. Accelerator is our one-on-one coaching group, coaching and mastermind experience for established online course creators and coaches, or.

Teacher entrepreneurs who are looking to scale, right? Who are looking to take things to the next level, looking to create more impact, looking to create more profit with less hustle because. This is not about doing more and working harder and longer, right? This is totally possible to get amazing results in your business and continue to grow and scale without working longer and harder and more hours.

And we help you do that inside of Accelerator. By helping you optimize your sales and marketing, optimize your systems and processes and optimize your mindset. Okay. So if you want to learn more. And apply it’s application only, and this is open enrollment. Okay. We’re always accepting new people yet. We’re keeping the intimacy of a smaller program, which people love go to RickMulready.com/Accelerator to learn more and apply right now.

Look forward to seeing your application. All right. My friends without further ado, let’s go talk SEO with Gert Malik.

You’re welcome to the podcast. So we’re just talking before I hit record here, our mutual friend, James Schramko is the one that connected us, but I’d heard your, I’ve heard your name for quite a while now. And, it’s funny how so James connected us and as it turns out, you learned about James through.

My podcasts back when I called it, The Art of Paid Traffic

[00:05:22] Gert:
Right this right here. Thanks for having me in the show. This is, this is really funny how the world is connected. so this was, I think I ha how many episodes do you have right now? Like 400 or something.

[00:05:34] Rick:
Now we’re, we’re quickly approaching 600.

[00:05:37] Gert:
Oh, wow.

[00:05:38] Rick:
Yeah.

[00:05:39] Gert:
So I think it was like episode 50 or so when you had Tim Franco on the show, and it was just a perfect feed. This episode was the perfect feed for my business back then, which was a struggling plateaued, local agent. doing some sound, a little bit of everything and, and always ICU, but yeah, a little bit of everything and, trying to add more and more services so we can offer more and more stuff to our clients.

And this was a perfect feedback then, and, and I’ve been learning a lot through your podcasts, and through James and, his teachings and his methodologies as well. So big shout out to him, definitely for reconnecting us, so to speak.

[00:06:15] Rick:
It’s funny. It’s funny. And this is a great lesson for everybody listening. So for those of you that don’t know. So my coach is James Schramko. He’s based out in Australia and I started coaching with him, in early 20, 21. And I got reconnected with him through my really good friend, pat Flynn. And it was, it was just an amazing year and I attribute a lot of it to, to James.

And so then Gert, you and I got connected and we started talking about it and I didn’t know that you. you. know, learned of James for the first time on my show, here’s something that I’ve never told James for when he was on my show. And I think, I think he was introduced to me by John Lee Dumas, I think.

And or it might’ve been Chris Ducker, I don’t know. But when James was on the show, I thought he was kind of a jerk. I thought he was kind of arrogant. And so. But that was years ago. I mean, that was episode 50 and I’ve been, you know, started this in July of 2015. So that was, you know, almost seven years ago.

And here we are, these years later, you got connected with him by hearing him on the show. Join his program. He’s a partner in your business and now he’s playing, he’s my coach. And, it’s just funny how that, you know, how that type of stuff works. And for every listing right now, you just never know what’s going to happen or who you’re going to connect with as a result of hearing somebody on a show or, or what.

So, funny way, I think, I think it just. Fun to think about, how those things have happened. So enough of all that girl let’s talk SEO, right? This is your specialty, but I want to start with who you are and what you do specifically, and kind of how you got to where you are, with your agency.

[00:08:15] Gert:
Absolutely. So my name is Gavin Miller come from Austria originally based in Spain for 12 years now, 13, I think,

I come from a development background. So when I was 16, 18, I pretty much thought my entire life was going to be programming, coding behind the computer in a small room somewhere and creating awesome code.

And this was going to be it. somehow got into creating websites. And created started creating websites for the local chess club and some local businesses in my hometown. I think a soul direct first website for 200 euros or something like this. And then the next one for 400 and kept going for a while.

And at some point I figured out the best website is not worth anything if nobody knows about it. And this is how. Became interested in online marketing, starting with ACO. So Gobi was already a thing. So we started doing really, really weird stuff in there is early SEO days. And this way of talking 20 years ago, when we started. like it was white text on white background just to sneak in some keywords on the page because Google wasn’t smart enough to figure this out and stuff like that. So really, really weird stuff. It wasn’t targeted at all. yeah, like the wild, wild west of digital marketing or SEO back then.

And then, yeah, I, at some point it became a freelance, started my own little digital marketing agency. I started with Facebook ads, heard about The Art of Paid Traffic, and we’ve already learned some additional stuff and good strategies. I think I heard about the ads manager on your podcast. If I remember this correctly, didn’t know this existed,

[00:09:52] Rick:
Editor.

[00:09:54] Gert:
Power editor, right? Exactly. There was a, this was a, this was a big step for me back then.

We did everything. I think in the last 20 years, we did everything in online marketing from, from even marketing to conversion optimization, web design program and all that stuff. And it was just really one thing that has always been growing very slowly but steadily in our business, in my agency. And this was SEO and SEO at some point became the sole focus.

Okay. So at some point we decided just to go. We still have two or three tie-ins. I think we have just have been with me for 14 years, renewing their agreement month after month with me. but we are not focused on this anymore. We are completely focused on search marketing now. So mostly SEO sometimes with Google ads when it just makes sense to compliment.

And this has been growing all the time and we have getting been getting better and better. We created the brand SEO leverage dot. Where we now have a team of 25 people around the globe, helping our clients, with their SEO strategy, many, many clients who don’t do any SEO at all, because they come from a paid ads area or have some, maybe I’d have a big YouTube channel.

YouTube channel paid ads. We have everything. So many, many companies have been growing very nicely with Facebook ads, especially we see, but at some point they then type in what they do and go in and say, it can’t be that I have so many, so much such a big following on Instagram, on Facebook. It’s cetera.

Nobody finds me on Facebook for what I’m actually famous for. So then this. Let’s stopped building up this SEO pillar. And

Let’s start giving this a little bit more momentum because many people we might be talking about this later, CSU like as a one-time thing, they might be getting like something like an audit, the defined online, improved their website a little bit, and then leave SEO again, because it’s just a more direct way to spend some, some money on ads and get some leads, get some, some traction, but they never build out this SEO pillar.

And this is just something that needs to be continued. build out continuously get some resources, but then it’s amazing. They’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of leads. You’re not paying for we’re talking. And we have a client who gets 5,000 leads a month just through their SEO and content because they have built an amazing content base to have to be an amazing lead magnets.

They are absolutely in line in tune with what their audiences once when they search for this stuff. So just a lot of things are possible. and this is why SEO is just really, really an exciting field to.

[00:12:25] Rick:
I’m excited about it because, well, I mean, I got really excited about, I should say when I heard you on James’s podcast, super fast. And you talking about, I got all excited and that was just like, part of me was like, cause I’m very much like, I I’m no different there, but I got the shiny object, you know, I’m like, Ooh, I got to go do this right now.

I was like, oh, wait a minute. I had to pull the reins back in. However, this is something I’ve never focused on in the eight years of my business. And to your point, I feel like I’m missing a huge opportunity, but I also don’t know. What I’m missing, because I don’t know if that makes sense. I don’t know what I don’t know about it.

Right. So I have lots of questions here and I know that a lot of people are thinking, well, this is all great, but I’m not going to see any results. If I focus on SEO, I’m not going to see any results for, you know, months and months down the road. Like how long does it actually take to see? And I know that it’s sort of a general question, but like how long can we.

Expect to have to wait to see results.

[00:13:34] Gert:
I mean, you just need to really resize sometimes after a few weeks already, maybe a couple of months, two, three months early resides, but then results are very different. resilience can mean that you come from a page eight on Google, where you, your thing comes up maybe to a page two, which still doesn’t help your bottom line, but you see some progress, right?

It really depends on what you’re trying to target. The big part of our work these days is to help our clients pick the up. So, if you, if you imagined in your case, you’ve got 600 podcast episodes, you’ve got 600 articles about you present those podcasts episodes. That’s a lot of content, right? There might be some episodes to automatically rank, rank I’m saying automatically without you actually actively forcing any SEO part of it, because it just, the transcription itSEOf is already a piece of condoms really decides to rank for whatever reason, more often than not.

However transcriptions, for example, don’t work on Google. And the reason is because they themSEOves don’t provide like, good content example who wants to rank, right? So if Colby wants to rank something, that’s going to be the best answer to a search query. And there’s hardly going to be a search query where transcription is going to be the best.

So, this is where, what we do is we essentially audit a website, check out everything. That’s there, check out what does could we do with this website over a period of like six months and then identify which ones are the URLs that already come up very often, but then, then check. Do they actually produce conversions?

I couldn’t care less about increasing a website’s traffic if the traffic doesn’t convert. So one of the first things we did. Is making sure that we track those conversions. So we know where does the traffic come in? What are the pages, domain, articulates. We will be attract organic traffic from Google.

And what does this traffic actually do? And once you identify those articles that get a lot of traction and decent conversions, you have essentially the artists that you want to focus on first, because this just means that if I get them even more traffic, they’re going to lead to even more. What if you have artists that get a lot of traffic, but no conversions, you might want to check on what’s the lead magnet there, right?

Can we change the lead magnet? Can we get more? Opt-ins can we lead them with internal linking to more conversions or you might have additives that they’re converting really well, but they don’t have hardly any. So how can we get them more traffic? Can we optimize them for SEO? Can we internally link them?

Can we highlight them somewhere on the page in order to get them more traction? So these are the things we, we talk about when we then stop working on a website, but let’s just be quiet. It’s really auditing. What are we actually dealing with?

[00:16:15] Rick:
So what you mentioned, for my website and having almost 600 episodes. So we have 600 show notes pages.

Are those actually helpful for SEO?

[00:16:28] Gert:
Probably not right. Probably not, but there is a chance to do a few of those episodes, raise their hand and say, look, I’m somewhat. And, and let’s, let’s, let’s do some work on on my content here. there is usually what we see with podcasts is that podcasts tend to rank well for some guests names. This is one avenue to go down.

So if you would want to rank for Tim Schramko, for example, who was on your show, you could optimize that episode for James Schramko. Well, Schramko plastic, some keyword. So if someone searches for Jean Franco methodology or coaching or whatever, this could be your, your page rank there, shouldn’t say this probably,

But it’s going to be, it’s already taped.

Yeah. but you see what I’m getting you, right? So you can get, you can essentially rank for guests names very often, rather than actually the competence you’re talking about, which is a little bit unfortunate because your condom fatigue, particular has been helping me over the years, quite a few times into the right direction.

And I would want you to come up for. taking fight is off. I want you to come, come up for, for business coaching. I want to do to come up for, I don’t know if Facebook has strategies or, or productivity or team building or whatever it is, right. Is would, all of these would be very relevant terms for you to grow your coaching client base or your following your own.

But it’s not going to happen with transcription pages. So we need to assess what we have and then draw a game plan. So usually we, then, we assessed a website and we get together and our team, okay, this is what our client wants to achieve. This is what we have, what we are working.

What is the strategy moving forward?

And then we line up the steps. We actually want to take prioritize based on impact and effort and say, okay, high impact, low effort is a high priority. Obviously if meat and a high, effort, Louie impact, we’re going to put it to the back of the line. And somewhere in between, there are some things we also need to be taken care of.

And what we do then with this is that we line this up in bite sized chunks in a two weekly basis. So every two weeks we say, look in the next couple of weeks, we’re going to focus on these four or five things, implement them, improve them. And then two weeks later, we do the same thing. Again, we call this the Erika framework, which we apply To, to every site essentially, and just make sure that all the important things are being taken care of.

[00:18:55] Rick:
So we talk a lot about content repurposing and leveraging the content that you’re already creating in different formats.

So. This episode right here. For example, we’ll use this as an example. So we, so we obviously, we’re going to have a show notes. We have the transcription, we have the audio of this. It’s going to be on YouTube, et cetera.

Is it more about creating a blog post out of this piece of content? Is our talking about.

[00:19:24] Gert:
Essentially. Yes. And the reason is very simple. If you think about 10 people making a surge about ICO, how to get started with this. And 10 of those 10 people click through to this episode’s page. How many of them do we think are ready and willing to listen to a podcast episode

In order to get this information? Probably not. Maybe.

Most of them are not looking for a podcast when they search on Google, or if they search on iTunes, they’re looking for a podcast episode on how to get started with SU and then they go for a run or walk the dog and they listen to this and learn how this works. But on Google, it’s very different.

Hardly anybody’s going to search for podcasts actively. So the piece of content, and this is something that podcasts as I have my own podcast. And I know it’s not necessarily something you want to hear the podcast for. He’s has very little value

ItSEOf, right? It’s like an add on if you wrote a content, a piece of content for Gloria, it’s an add on, if you wrote a piece of content about how to get started with SEO would be perfect.

And yet on the that they can also listen to this. If I want or watch a video is essentially. Right, but it’s not for a glue search or the podcast is not the main content element. So what we try to do, or the way we do our podcast here is that I come up with a topic. We have a writing team write a written version of.

I make a podcast recording about it. We might upload this to YouTube and essentially talk about the same thing, but for different audiences, the same way that you are usually not using a pure audio recording with the logo and put it on YouTube because the

YouTube audience explain, expect something. You also, don’t just get a transcription and put it in front of users because they’re going to jump off.

You’re going to have enough ridiculous. The high bounce rate. You’re not going to have opt-ins are hardly going to have opt-ins. And the opt-ins only really come probably from your listeners who then want to download what you mentioned or want to check out. This reference that you mentioned will get like a

Written summary, so they don’t forget about it, but it’s very little traction that comes from Corey this way.

[00:21:32] Rick:
Does this help does having, cause I, you know, I will also been talking a lot more about here on the show, especially here in 2022, the importance of if somebody is doing a podcast to be video, you know, doing it on video, as well as your recording, which is exactly what we’re doing. And then, you know, we have the art of online business, full episodes channel on YouTube, but we also have, you know, a clips channel, the art of online business clips or highlights.

Since we’re talking, Google is having a presence on YouTube, helpful in terms of SEO as well.

[00:22:08] Gert:
I think it’s part of the overall brand important. This is you’re not going to rank higher with your content just because you tick this box. Did you have a YouTube channel? Google is going to make an effort to see how legit you are and having a decent following on YouTube on your brand is going to help you overall the same way as a PR campaign might be helping you as well.

We don’t create YouTube channels just to back the SEO. what we always see is a very good correlation between the brands importance and how many people search for your brand. How many people search for your name on gory and the actual ranking Stan. But even if you have the most important brand, that transcription might still not rank, and you can have the best YouTube channel with 2 million followers.

If you want to subscribe as there condom, that’s not optimized for Gloria, still not going to.

[00:22:56] Rick:
Gotcha. Okay. so super basic question here. And you might be like, well, yeah, of course, Rick, but is SEO for everybody? Are there people that really, it’s not gonna help?

[00:23:09] Gert:
I think SEO is for everybody who knows that their audience search on Google when they want to buy what they offer. And this pretty much call us probably 99% of business. Because if you think, even if I want to know the, my local plumber, his phone number, I’m searching on gory. If I, if I want to find a place to, to have dinner or have my birthday dinner with my family, I’m going to search on Google.

If I need business help, I’m going to search for glory on Google. If I want to learn how to play the guitar, I’m going to search on Gloria. So Google is just a one stop shop for us in order to get information, to learn something, to consume something. more than half of all queries have local intents, even very small local businesses can benefit from SEO. However, the SEO is going to be different for the local drugstore than for an international business. Right. So, it’s just different strategies, different tactics. There are different things are important. So we’re in low. Probably needs more content. The local drugstore probably needs more luxury references and citations from other maybe local businesses or local school, a local town hall, et cetera, because Google on a local level, it looks a little bit differently, but I think over the years, I have come across businesses that work mostly for public offerings, from the governments, et cetera, where they say, look, nobody’s going to search for what we do on goalie.

They’re going to search for our name and to find our website, but they’re not going to search on Google because everything has this public process on how, public works is going to be handed over to a company. but there’s, there’s definitely, I think room for SEO for pretty much every business B2B or.

[00:24:53] Rick:
And I’m feeling like it’s, and I’m speaking from my own experience, right? It’s been an afterthought for me, thus, I’ve never done it, but we’re here in 2022. I feel like I talked about this in my, my thoughts around 2022. At the end of the end, the December, 2021, I did an episode about, I think it was like 14 thoughts about the year coming up.

And one of them was SEO. I feel like years ago when I started, it was something that a lot of people talked about. And then, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the skirt. Like then, you know, sort of it wasn’t talked about a whole lot. And then now in the past, especially I would say in the past a year and a half or so, and especially with.

After Facebook and Instagram went down for whatever that day was, people realized, oh, I really need to diversify where I’m getting traffic and, you know, the importance of organic and SEO started to come back up.

Would you agree with that?

[00:25:57] Gert:
I would agree that this is definitely an on and off. I can definitely say we, our own agency has been growing like crazy since the epidemic hit, because many, many people who were used to spend $3 on Facebook to get 5, 6, 7, or more dollars back suddenly were out of business, because there was a period when. Where this just didn’t work this way. And there was like reorientation, if you don’t know, if you can get a low enough toilet paper and you’re not going to spend money on Facebook for something you see there, it’s just the way it is. And this is where many, many people said, look, it’s all good. We have Facebook, we have Google, we have YouTube, whatever it is.

But if someone wants to buy the few people that still want to buy, come find us because they go to Google to search for what we have been SEOling for 10 years on Facebook. And they can’t even find. So, this is where, where I say, look, SEO is not going. I’m not suggesting anybody ditches, Facebook ads paid channels, YouTube, whatever it is.

I think those channels work great. We do them ourSEOves. I do Facebook ads And YouTube ads mySEOf for my own company. And to make sure that we get a certain brand awareness. As you should be one of the channels you actually bet on because it’s not only because Facebook and Instagram might be away for a day.

It’s not going to be much longer anyway. And, and those things happen. I’ll also cooler, had some issues in the past. And I remember Google g-mail did work for a day or something like this a year or two ago, these things happen, but it’s a day and that’s. But ultimately, I think if you have a decent authority in your space and decent, decent brand importance in your space, you should come up with someone searches for what you’re doing.

Right. So, and those are the people we need. Can’t forget this. This is different moment. People are in when they search. Right? So every day on Facebook, The state’s me a little bit, these days already, but then I’ll read they on Facebook. Right. And everyday I scroll through the feed because I have some time to kill before I pick up my kids from school or whatever it is.

And the moment of consuming something really for a few minutes, not even minutes, talk about half an hour to, to take out a course or a video or something like this. I just scroll it mindlessly so that the importance Facebook ads at this moment can have on. Is very, very limited. And this is where you then see those ads come up 58 times because they just tried to find this moment at some toll at some point where you finally opened and you’re finally ready.

And you have seen this, this widget for 200 times, but now to 200. not always the time where I want to know if this pocket knife can also cut my, my woodworking stuff. Right. and then it’s going to happen. Gloria is very different. Whenever you open up re you have said this at least decide to time, it takes you to consume the content or get the answer you’re looking for.

So we have a very, very strong intent when it comes to guru, a very strong intent. And this also. Means that the value of the leads and the sales tends to be high. Because we are not impacting someone who wasn’t. So looking for this at this moment, we’re impacting someone who exactly now needs this. And if you want to know about LinkedIn strategies and they’re put in front of you in an ebook about the top 10 tips, you’d never know.

Do when you reach out and try to connect to some with someone on LinkedIn, there is a high chance that you opt in because it’s just right now use the moment you have the time you have the intent and you want to solve this. You want to fix this. Do you want to learn this? This is where search marketing and specifically SEO.

It’s just really, really good. And then on top of that, you have groups essentially being recognized as a trusted. I just talked to the other day in a while now, like my daughter’s birthday party with, with someone who said, look, I really only trust glue on the first top results, the top five results.

Right? So he switches for a provider. Is it a B2B company? He searches for a provider and look, we always make it to. Honestly, among the top five choices, school shows us. Right. And we skip the ads because we know this is biased and we focus on the organic ones, right? So they consciously make this decision.

And we have seen this from, from user studies as well, many, many people know what is an ad and what is not. Google is, have mandatory to, to announce this what is an ad? And so they focus on organic, but then they trust, they trust Google to figure out what is important for them among 500,000 different races.

The trust and automatic algorithm to figure out exactly what is important for them. And this gives us so much value. And then if you talk about how long this takes to build this up, every SEO is going to say 6, 8, 12 months. We’re talking something like this in a few weeks, probably to create a momentum where you just know it all.

There’s always something happening with SEO, but in six to eight months, probably, but then think about what is it really worth if you’re getting a hundred leads every, every month for. To your business, which have high intent are in the zone and graded to take action. What does this really mean for you and this very often, definitely makes it worth to wait a little bit, dedicate some resources on an ongoing basis to this, and just make sure that somebody’s a part from all your channels really looks after your SEO as well.

[00:31:21] Rick:
So I think we’re convinced that SEO is necessary. I kind of, I kind of look at it as almost like an evergreen FA well, it’s like an, it’s like an, we’re running an evergreen funnel, right. It’s kind of running in the background of your business, still generating results for. This is doing it organically.

Right. So how does one get started with this? So if someone’s going to DIY this and just do it themSEOves, what are the types of things that they need to be thinking about doing and like how time consuming is, is this on a cause I know that you mentioned before, like it’s not like a one and done thing.

It’s a consistent thing that we need to keep up.

What kind of time commitment are we talking to?

[00:32:04] Gert:
I think it’s important to recognize that it’s very easy to lose a lot of time and resources on SEO. If you focus on the one on the wrong things, and we see clients focusing on their SEO plan. And make sure that all the boxes are green in the Yoast or rank math plugin. And okay. Now I see always taken care of, I don’t have to worry about this anymore.

It’s just not like that.

[00:32:24] Rick:
That was me by the way.

[00:32:26] Gert:
You and, and, and probably two other three people I’ve talked to say, no, no, no. We have SEO under control because we look yours is ticking all the boxes. so this is just like a very, very tiny part and very often absolutely misleading, right. The way to get started is first of all, to make an assessment make, get your site or.

And make an assessment. What do we, what are we actually working with? Right? There might be Arctics instead of doing really, really well. And you haven’t even recognized, we were all reading last week, a website, that’s one of the best in during this. And in terms of traffic and brand-awareness et cetera, they don’t even have conversion tracking in place in a way where they could assess which articles are they wanted to bring in the conversions.

So very often the first thing with the audit, we also check for what a data points, if we have the right data or otherwise help our clients set this. So at least from then to the future, they track where the conversions actually come from, because there might be just one or two articles that drive all the traffic, or you might have 200 articles to drive enough traffic and conversions to your business.

But if you don’t know, you don’t know where to focus on on the side, like yours, who can’t optimize. You’re not going to optimize 600 auditors. Maybe you’re going to optimize. And then see if you can increase conversions and NZ. Okay. What else can we do? Right. So we, obviously, after the audit, we want to create like a stable foundation.

Sometimes we have like additional roadblocks, like performance, like linking broken links, things like. Meta descriptions. Very often we skip metal descriptions and they actually trying to get us a click from, from search. Does those almost the most, some of the most important takes and we can identify which ones are not actually bringing the clicks or rates we want.

So there’s a lot of, a lot of things that should be taken care of, but we always try to make sure that we prioritize them and then make sure that there’s just always something moving, going is moving really, really fast. We have just had the year with the most algorithm updates, I think. Announced algorithm updates, who was, is crazy busy.

My personal view is to preparing for artificial intelligence, starting to generate more and more content. We see very good tools like Jarvis and others create very decent copy already, especially for paid ads, but also for blog content. And we are probably one or two years away from someone just creating an entire compensation to click. With an, with such an engine. And I think we has so many updates because they really need to prepare for a different era where they just need to really know who is behind this. Is this a legit brand? Is this a legit business? Can I really trust this content? Or how can it tell with morelli.com away from Rick Mulready to.com?

And the second version might just rewritten automatic version of yours. There are a lot of problems that are coming and it’s just so important to always be. On the pulse on what’s happening and readjust. We might go back to the crews several times during a year, if they are important for our clients overall progress and make small changes, just to make sure that this artery is still in line with what we wants to see gets refreshed, gets an updated date.

So Google also understands that this is fresh content users. See, this is recently updated. This is not from 2011 and, and irrelevant. There are a lot of things that need to be taken. But once you keep this up and keep the momentum going and dedicate some resources to it, that’s fine.

[00:35:48] Rick:
It sounds like this is not something that we really should be doing ourSEOves, so we should be getting help with it. And I’m not like, like this isn’t well, I do want to plug your agency, but this isn’t intended to plug your agency right now. It’s like with all the change, like we need to know what, what really stood out for me, what you just said, Gert was like, we’re not.

We’re not optimizing 600 pages we’re looking at. All right. Well, what, you know, we talk all the time. About 80 20 here on the, on the podcast is like, what are the 20% of the pieces of content on the website that are going to give me the 80% of the results? So if it’s like five articles or what have you, that sounds more manageable because when.

For me, especially like when I think of SEO, when I’ve traditionally thought of SEO, it’s like this big overarching thing for the website, we have to do all these different things, but it’s not what I’m hearing right now. I’m hearing like, let’s identify these 20% pieces of content that are actually driving traffic.

And, you know, are we converting from that traffic, which is obviously really key and then those few articles or what have you let’s optimize those.

[00:37:02] Gert:
Absolutely. So it’s really all about creating a, like a, a foundation where no artificial. Hindering glue from indexing and understanding your site correctly. And there’s definitely site structure coming in. If you have 600 pieces of content categories might not be enough in order to structure this well.

So there are some things that need to be taken care of, but then really once you have enough data that gives you clear trends and is on a site like yours, we’re talking a couple of weeks probably. And we’re already going to know where the conversions come. Then you can really Sue mung on those URLs are very often called them to VIP 20 to very important

Pages. They’re very important, 20 pages, so to speak, because it’s hardly more than 20. You’re really focusing. This doesn’t mean that you never changed the other ones, because if there was something doing well in 2015 and just still have it around, it might be interesting to go back to this article and rewrite it and republish it or something like this.

This can be informed as well. But essentially you want to keep the amount of focus, URLs small, but just really continuously circling around those. And imagine you have one topic, I don’t know, email marketing on your site. It’s just bringing in a lot of. You can then create more content around it because if this drives the right people into your audience, into your site that are ready to then opt into your mailing list, why not create more blogs, more podcast episodes around email marketing or more additional content around email marketing.

And so we identify something that works and then try to surgery around this topic in order to expand its importance, doing essentially more of what works with.

[00:38:40] Rick:
Can we do this in terms of, I’m assuming that we can create a strategy, for example, like that just one thing just popped into my mind is for affiliate partnerships.

So, you know, like we, you, I know you’re familiar with like 10 X pro.io. Like I’ve completely moved my business over to 10 X pro.

Officially while we’re recording this the second week of January, we’re officially in there, like all of our courses, all the, of the billing, the landing pages, affiliate center, et cetera, et cetera. Could, if somebody wants to create an additional revenue revenue stream from an affiliate product, or what have you, software tool, whatever it might be, I’m assuming it sounds like we can create an SEO strategy around this.

And even if we don’t have anything that.

[00:39:32] Gert:
Absolutely the affiliate space, is one of the most important spaces. And very often all lost the most advanced spaces, with SEO, because to can’t make it work with pay debts, do not most worked on workout in most cases in the affiliate space. So they go after organic queries, right? And this is where you can go off to all those tiny queries around you feel productive on to promote.

And if you pick tannics pro go off their query, that says how to set up a Stripe with paid Titanics pro for example. right. So, and this, this is something that’s going to rank really well because it’s a niche where it’s a niche product. It’s not, there’s not too much competition. but you can also do this on, on, competing products with a big following and big media presence as well, because you can still go very tiny.

We rank, we do a lot of promotional content. I’m shopping if I’m not for affiliates, but just because we have a lot of shopping sites as well, with RSU. So we just have content around Shopify on our, on SEO, leverage.com, right. Just as informed information on how to set up, at a no shipping and things like those on the Shopify.

‘cause you just, if you want to identify who you’re talking to and what problems you can solve for them in what you can, you get brand exposure in exchange for solving their problem. And once you see it, this way, affiliate is a very good way. And like podcasts like yours. If there are products. You can certainly also see in the analysis that you start ranking for those products might be page five, might be page eight, but once you see some traction page eight, then it means that you are among the top 80 results out of 500,000 on the internet that Google considers is already says something.

If you haven’t even promoted, optimized. Right. So there might be something where you can go a little bit more verdict on this and maybe create two, three articles around the specific product optimized this ranking URL already for this specific term, and then get some affiliate commission as well.

Yeah,

[00:41:30] Rick:
I like it. The wheels are turning, man. The wheels are turning

[00:41:33] Gert:
It’s definitely a lot of options. Yeah.

[00:41:37] Rick:
It’s a big rabbit hole. Right. And we can that we can go down. So with that said, going back to like getting started with it, it, again, it does sound like this is a, this is one of those things in our business that we just should have somebody help us with with that said how much time are we talking on our end?

And granted, I get that it’s different depending on how many articles or what needs to actually happen, but is there a sort of, you know, ballpark. What kind of time can we expect to devote to this and what type of role or do we need to have specific roles on our team to help support these initiatives?

[00:42:18] Gert:
That’s an excellent question. We have, essentially, when we work with clients, we have two modes in which we work with them. So one is, is a consulting program where we assess their decide. Usually we start with an audit, right? And then we assess and say, okay, from here, what makes the most sense based on what we have seen in the data.

And then some people go on a consulting with us, and this is where every couple of weeks they get along video from. And we have an application, a web application that can log in, see action items to see a dashboard. Where does my traffic come in? How does it convert this other converse much better than this other case in red and greenhouse, which audit is a better this month than last month, et cetera.

So we try to extract from Google analytics and Google search console, the main tools we use for SEO, everything that’s relevant and strip out everything else because many, many people don’t really know how. Really make sense of all the data that’s got being gathered. So we fetched just what we, what we need and then line up what should be the focus in the coming two weeks.

And this really is because we have seen so many people spent years, not weeks or months, but years on something. They still believe they were doing something for their SU. But the way I remember a particular site, this woman was creating 900 blog posts over a period of 18. And I asked her to assist them.

Initially, I had to go through 900 blog posts and, assess which ones answers something people might be searching. And she just came back after two years, really crushed and said, throw them my way. So this is all uSEOess, right? Because the content was created for social media, but not as CEO in mind.

And this is something, even if you do this as a DIY, you want to make sure that content that you actually expect to rank is optimized and is in line with what Google wants to rank. Just because I create the best piece of content of all this year. It doesn’t mean that this is conduct the glue once drank it, my brick terrifically on, on Facebook ads and get a lot of traction.

I might make a video out of it and it works great on YouTube, but it might just not be what Google wants to rank. And even if Google recognizes, this is a great article and is, has 8,000 words, what do they want to rank in this particular case might be 400 words and average auditory is perfectly fine. As long as it talks to the users. Okay. So this is where we really want to help people save on resources. And then when it comes to the team, I definitely encourage people to have a team if they go into SEO with an agency. And the reason is because there are going, going to be quite a few things that need to be taken. It’s hard to define this on ours, but a user project we work with.

Just did a video before a usual project might be, we assessed this, we see a few, our deacons have dropped. So we do some work on those meaning we optimize them, rewrite paragraphs, et cetera. So might take a few hours. Then we see, we need to internally link differently to a few other articles. We map out the content and to make sure that these articles linked together, et cetera, then we, someone should.

Talking to the tech person is always important to have a tech person not be responsible for the work for your WordPress site. In most cases, yourSEOf, or if you have 10 X, bro, you can essentially forget about this part, but there’s always very often sometimes something that needs to be done on the tech side, in terms of performance.

Can we make this page load faster, can be improved the caching to make you decide, respond better or have the rendering go faster once in a while there’s a performance issue. We need someone to go through, maybe a list of keywords. We have research to assess which ones are more important than others. We really don’t know your target audience.

You’re the one most target audience base. So I can provide you with a list of topics. I think. But I need your input in order to assess which ones we should focus on, which ones might not be a fit, which ones you remember, you already have somewhere on, on your, your site, and might just need to add a paragraph there and try to get that one ranking as well.

So there is some, a little bit of back and forth. Whenever you work with an agency, dairy is a little bit of overhead. I haven’t seen an agency that works without completely independent of the client. You have some communications on back and forth because texts. Maybe talk about 10 hours plus a week easily, just because of this back and forth because of communication because of the do videos and, and, the work on this.

And then we have like the same Peggy, same package or same consulting program where we essentially execute the 25 people in my team right now and growing. and we take over more and more sites. And this is where people might still maybe have a VA helping them, but don’t have anybody who can go through 200 images and make them.

Or create 50 meta descriptions in a compelling way, in a decent amount of time, and then open up 50 articles in order to put them up there and track the click through rates, whether they improve on 25 of them or go down and 20, if there’s a lot of, a lot of steps involved, we have developed an application that makes it easier, but it isn’t a lot of Meg mechanical work as well involves because very

[00:47:37] Rick:
Yeah,

[00:47:38] Gert:
An optimization to have to roll it out through a series of URLs.

[00:47:43] Rick:
I’m laughing because I’m like, holy cow. It’s just want somebody to do that.

[00:47:48] Gert:
I think, I think the point is, is really that once you, once you audit the website, you understand what the potential impact is. I have an example from, from the call today, there’s a client who gets, I think they got like 10,000 impressions on Google and the 0.2% clicks.

Which is really ridiculous, right? So they Google things 10,000 times.

They, one of the best search results to come up on page one, top, half of the page, which is really, really good, but only 0.2% check on their results. Right? What this means is that they could easily, and we checked out their electric rates. They could easily get to 2%, which would be 10 X. Alright. So once you identified those URLs, and even if they are 50, you really don’t have an issue going through those, because it’s just means that with the exact same rankings, you’re going to get more traffic.

Right. And one, this is why we really talk about impact and effort where say it’s a relatively small effort for. We have six writers on the team right now to create 50 optimized meta descriptions. We can’t guarantee their work better, but we have a very good feeling at this stage. And most of them probably will be doing better.

Right. And so we can create this for our clients, run this by them, if this is okay. Get this up. And if you weeks later Trek with our system, with our software, what those click-through rates do, because we tracked a benchmark of when we updated this and then our application automatically fetches the current click through rate.

So we know how this evolves over time. We had doubled the traffic just with this method. Right? So, so this is why it’s important that I’m trying to understand, or you don’t only just understand what the technical tactics. But we make really, really sure that you understand why we think something’s important.

And if we ask you to no index, certain set of pages, meaning asking glue to ignore those, it’s mostly because either they might confuse Google or go, we might be wasting their processing time who really assigns a certain processing time to a website. And for example, there are real estate sites out there that keep every single listing day about.

And it might be 20,000 pages who we needs to process all the time,

But only 500. Maybe I actually relevant. And from those 500, probably hundred aren’t really doing anything. So we still have to process all this other stuff. And new listing might take longer to be ranked and belong to be processed.

So this, we always make sure that we know why we do certain things and try to really think about this from Hulu’s perspective.

On what actually makes sense. A lot of this is when you then get it explained it’s common sense, but when you’re just focusing on getting this article out and published, and you just want to have this to copy and paste into your Facebook feed for today, you don’t think about these things, but if you, if this compounds over time, It’s just a lot of waste.

[00:50:39] Rick:
It’s another reason why we really need to have somebody helping us with this because. I mean, I wouldn’t know how to keep up with all the changes. Right? For example, you mentioned that Google made more changes in 2021 to the algorithm that they’ve ever done talking about. If we were to do this ourSEOves, even if it were like in a consulting role.

So like, if I’m working with you in a consulting role, I gotta have a writer. I gotta have a web person. I got to have, you know, certainly a VA that’s going, that’s helping with back and forth. Lots of different roles. Somebody who knows how to like compress images and so forth. Like it’s Like why not just have somebody do this?

[00:51:19] Gert:
I think for, for a business does established the best ways to outsource it and outsource as much as you can. because I mean, we we’d worked, we probably have healthy clients with a done for you health declines with the consulting package, roughly I’m very happy with both versions. but it is important that you can guarantee the resources for ongoing implementation.

What does not lead to results. And we have, I have actually asked some clients to leave our program because we had tasks piling up. We make suggestions and assigned. And if someone never executes on those assignments, it just doesn’t really make sense, but it can, I can give the best assignments. And if I have a personal trainer at the gym that I still need my, my bar of chocolate and never worked out.

The results are not coming. And they’re going to say, look, you can continue to pay if you want, but it doesn’t make too much sense. Right. And we’re in a very similar boat, the best SEO results we get from dos who are actually masters of execution or have the resources to Alto. Is this. Take care of this.

I’m going to respond as fast as I can with approvals and texts, corrections and stuff like that. But I don’t have time for the rest, which is perfectly fine for him and probably the norm for an established business. And they don’t really have to worry about SEO, but it is important. That is something that’s consistently moving.

And this is where the framework has just been so important. We have developed because we just made sure that by weekly, this is actually how.

[00:52:48] Rick:
So if we’re executing on our end, just going back to the rules, if we’re just executing based on the, you know, the consulting that’s being offered to us, a web person who can make changes in the backend. I like the technical side, a writer who can update both articles and meta descriptions and so forth.

Probably a VA. Who can maybe manage the overall thing and make sure things are getting done. Am I missing anybody?

[00:53:15] Gert:
And there’s usually a tech person. we don’t do the tech ourSEOves. So we usually we can put the kinds are in touch with someone who takes care of. And they’re doing a great job and have a team of 20 programmers. And then somebody can always jump in and help, but we don’t have the tech capacities, but you definitely want to have more than one people helping you with take, because if your site gets hacked today, you don’t want to wait until this person comes back from their vacation for two weeks and have your site go down.

In the meantime, you want to have a service rather than an individual. But you also don’t want to take care of the security updates, et cetera, yourSEOf, because this is the first thing that’s not going to happen. And it’s going to jeopardize your, your business. Essentially. It takes such as just very, very common.

[00:54:01] Rick:
So I am sold on focusing on SEO. Like I said, it’s just, I think it’s smart business in, in this day and age to have, like, it sounds kind of like pull dough. Why not have an organic, like organic strategy to be getting quote unquote free traffic when people are searching rather than complimenting our paid efforts.

And, you know, diversify and traffic is something that’s always smart. and you know, a big thing that big lesson that jumped out for me today is like just the whole do it with intention. And it’s not like we have to do everything on the, on the, on the site. It’s figuring out what is driving the most results and optimizing those things.

So the whole going back to the 80 20 thing, so lots of. Cool too. I mean, not surprised I was, I was really looking forward to chatting with you today here at Gert. And, I’ve learned a ton of taken a bunch of notes over here. I want to make sure that people can connect with you. I know that you’re very, I’m not no promises here in Europe, but you’re probably going to be getting inundated with people, reaching out, wanting to know more about how they can do this with you.

Learn more about SEO, et

[00:55:13] Gert:
Mm.

[00:55:13] Rick:
Are some of those ways that they can connect?

[00:55:16] Gert:
Yeah, absolutely. That would be definitely be very happy to talk to anybody who wants to consider this and just talk them through how, how this would look like for their site on the best place would be SEO, leveraged dot. and there are conflict bottoms you can schedule in booking a call with me directly. in my calendar recharge, you can also reach me at gifts, T E R T at SEO, leverage.com directly. drop me a line, happy to respond as soon as again. And, even we can even do this by email, with a little bit of back and forth, and then agree on, on the call at some point, if this makes sense and just talk it’s one thing to hear how this works in theory.

It’s another thing that. I have you on a call. I can show you look, you are, depending on these three years, for example, let’s make them, let’s get you a more solid foundation or we see how you’re running Google ads. So there’s probably some information there we can use for SEO strategy as well because every project is really, really different. we work with a lot of coaches and a lot of course creators a lot of Shopify sites. but also some are really big B2B and some small freelancers and local businesses. We have a little bit of.

But then it’s really a matter of understanding. Who do you want to reach and how do those people search?

What do they search on close to before then make the decision, but you also might be accompanying them through the entire Bible.

[00:56:39] Rick:
Yeah, I love it.

Guys, if you reach out to Gert, let him know you heard him here on the podcast.

Gert, thank you so much, my friend, for coming back on the show. We’ve come full circle here. You listened years and years ago, and here you are.

I know that you and I are going to talk about my site. I’m almost embarrassed to have that conversation. I love the site, but as far as being intentional with SEO, like I said, we haven’t been.

I think it’d be really interesting to do a case study of here’s where we’re starting, and then here’s where we are a few months down the road. These are the things that we’re doing, et cetera, et cetera, and here are the results so far. I think it’d be really interesting to have you back on and chat through that.

So, thank you again, Gert. Really appreciate it, man.

[00:57:35] Gert:
Thank you very much. My pleasure.

[00:57:36] Rick:
If you want to connect with Gert and get an audit done of your website for your own SEO purposes, and figure out if it’s a good fit to work with Gert’s agency, go to RickMulready.com/SEOLeverage. You’ll get connected to chat with Gert, do an audit of your site, and he’ll share with you what possible next steps are and what it might look like to work on your SEO and improve your SEO.

This is something that I’m definitely going to do. I think it will be fun to share a case study after I work with Gert and his team. Because I’ve done no SEO on my website, and I think it’s a great opportunity for creating an asset, a more intentional asset I should say, with the website. I’ll share the SEO journey here on the podcast.

Thank you my friend, as always, for listening today. If you are interested in our Accelerator coaching program for established online course creators, online coaches, or teacher entrepreneurs, go to RickMulready.com/Accelerator.

Until next time, my friend, be well. Thank you so much for listening, as always. I think, I thank you 18 times, but I really appreciate you.

Be well, and I’ll talk to you soon.