475: Proven Strategies To Grow Your Traffic 4X in 6 Months And Rank #1 In Search With Jeff Oxford

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. today I’m thrilled to have Jeff Oxford on the show and Jeff is someone who has helped boost my search engine traffic over Forex for both of my web properties over at bumblebelenons.com and mywifequitterjob.com. He’s one of the few SEO consultants that I actually trust and in this episode, he’s going to teach us what it takes to rank a website in Google today.

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Now on to the show.

02:01
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Jeff Oxford back on the show. most of you guys listening to this podcast know that I generally don’t like SEO guys, mainly because there are a lot of spamming ones out there. But Jeff is someone who I trust mainly because I’ve known him for, I don’t know, I wanna say at least five to seven years. I don’t know exactly. But anyway, during the pandemic, my SEO rankings for Bumblebee linens

02:29
got hit by a major Google update. And I actually don’t really enjoy writing content for Bumblebee Linens because it’s about handkerchiefs and linens. My wife quit her job I love. I can pump out content for years. when I write about hankies, crafts, or generating content in that matter, I don’t really particularly enjoy it. so, and our rankings had dropped, which obviously leads to lower business. So I actually reached out to Jeff to lend a hand.

02:56
And the result was that we actually increased SEO traffic by 4x in just six months, which in my opinion is kind of unheard of. Usually when you tweak things, doesn’t quite, you don’t quite get 4x results in six months. And so today what I thought would be interesting for you guys is I invited Jeff to just kind of come on and talk about some of the things he did and we did together in order to get that rankings boost. And with that, welcome to show, Jeff, how you doing? I am doing great, Steve. Thanks for having me.

03:26
Yeah, I can’t tell you how many spammy SEO people like I literally get like five emails per day from people who promised me the top results. The funny thing is I also get five about five per day from other SEOs selling me trying to sell me stuff. So you’re not alone. Yeah, and there’s stuff on fiber too. So those guys actually really give the real guys a bad name. Unfortunately, Something about the SEO industry, it had a feel like around 2010.

03:55
got a bad rap when back in the day you could spam your way to the top and then think right around 2010 was the turning point where Google got really good at detecting web spam and went on a penalizing spree and from so many people just got destroyed. You’d see sites that were 90 % SEO traffic organic dropping 20 to 30 to 50 to sometimes 90 % of the traffic overnight. So I feel like during that wave of penalties, just put a bad tip.

04:24
put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouth about SEO. Yeah. You would characterize yourself as pretty much white hat, right? Across the board, right? Yeah. Things that aren’t going to get you penalized down the road. Yes. Okay. All right. So I came to you, I don’t even remember what year was it, 2022 or 2021? I don’t remember. Yeah. Yeah. I think right around 2021. 2021. Yes. I want to say that Bumblebee rankings were the lowest points since…

04:53
I don’t even remember. I guess we could pull it up. But anyway, that doesn’t matter. So I came to you and I was like, hey, can you help me with this? And I wasn’t sure what to expect because I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about SEO. And I thought I’d just maybe walk the audience through your entire process, which is I now call the Oxford method, right? I love it. Yeah. that trademarked? Can I use that? Yeah. So walk us through the first steps. Yeah, I still remember.

05:22
I think, and I was just checking before you reached out, was like the lowest point in the last, I mean since like 2015. So it had taken quite the turn. And I still remember you’re very skeptical about SEO with good reason because you’ve seen the horror stories of sites. I feel like in the SEO industry you get one of two things. either hire the reputable agency that’s worked with all these brands and they have a fancy presentation, but then you…

05:50
The work happens, you get passed off to the B team and the quality just falls off a cliff and you get fancy reports but nothing’s really getting done under the hood. Or the flip side of that is you take the cheaper alternative and you go on Upwork or Fiverr and you get someone who says they’re really good and they do a bunch of shady things that get your site penalized and you kind of lost a lot of your investment there. So you were skeptical, we talked about it the first thing we did was see like is there even SEO opportunity, there is SEO a good channel.

06:20
for Bumbi linens and in a lot of cases it is, but there’s always some cases where maybe there’s not a lot of search volume that SEO is not a good channel for you or maybe it’s just way too competitive and the amount of investment might not make the most sense at that time. So we looked at your rankings together, we realized like, okay, there’s a lot of search volume for some of your keywords, especially related to handkerchiefs and linen napkins and things like that.

06:46
and you already had some good traction. Like you were on bottom of page one, top of page two, maybe bottom of page two for a lot of really good keywords. So it’s not like we’re starting from scratch trying to climb this big mountain. We already had, you know, we’re just in striking distance. We just had to push to the extra 10 % to start driving traffic. So, you know, first thing we did is we assessed like, okay, we’re good to go. And then we moved on to the planning stage. So once we kind of both agreed like, all right, there’s enough opportunity to justify it, let’s build a plan.

07:16
We looked at the technical side of the website just to get a rough idea of how much technical work we need to be done. We looked at kind of got a sense of your content you had in place and your blog. We looked at your backlink profile and we kind of flushed out before we even move forward a tentative six-month plan on what an SEO campaign would look like. And for those of you guys listening, pretty much anything in SEO can be distilled to four buckets. Technical SEO, that’s going to be maybe how Google and search engines crawls your website.

07:46
Page optimization, that’s making sure keywords are the right places and your title tags, your meta descriptions, your content. Then we have link building, which is making sure other websites are linking to you, which is a very important ranking factor. And then content, making sure we have content in the right places, whether that’s category descriptions, product descriptions, or blog posts. So the strategy we built for Bonebillinons, we had to assess the website through each of those four buckets.

08:11
and have a plan that would, wherever it was falling short, we need to have a plan in place to make sure it was gonna be 10 out of 10 in each of those areas. Yeah, and the one thing that I remember, I harped on you for a while, was like, okay, is this really gonna make a difference? And I think the philosophy, and I wanna put words in your mouth, was that you do all these things, you don’t know exactly which one will have the most effect, but collectively you do them, and if it leads to a positive result, then great.

08:39
Yeah, and that’s exactly the case. There’s gonna be SEOs out there that might be overly confident and say like, oh, I know if you do this, you’re gonna get this result 100%. I know if you do X, you’re gonna get Y result 100%. But from doing this for over a decade, Google responds very differently to the same change. I could do the same change for your website. You might have a huge impact on rankings. I could do the same change for another website. Maybe it’s only a minor impact.

09:07
and vice versa, maybe this other Google responds really well to this one change on another website versus yours. So the kind of the strategy we take is let’s do all the things that we know are going to have a positive impact. We won’t know exactly which one’s going to be the exponential growth and which one might be more minor. But we know if we do all these things in conjunction, that’s what’s going to increase rankings, that’s what’s going to increase traffic, and that’s what’s going to get you more revenue. Yeah. And I remember

09:32
One thing for anyone listening out there who actually wants to rank in search, I think step one is really to get your house in order. So let’s talk about some of the things that we do for Bollingby Lens, to get the house in order, so to speak. getting the house in order, a lot of that just refers to technical SEO. In short, you want to make sure that Google can crawl your website. They have their spiders going across the web, and if they can’t get to your pages, your pages aren’t going to rank very well.

09:59
Once they get to your pages, we want to make sure they’re indexable. Is Google going to actually index the page so it can rank? So there’s some technical things we looked at. It was kind of funny. You and I were both puzzled. There were some URLs that Google was accessing that made no sense, these weird parameter URLs that none of us had really, really, like you can’t, we couldn’t visit on the website. We have no idea how Google’s getting to it. But sure enough, they had their ways. They’re accessing some really weird URLs that was wasting the crawl budget.

10:28
We want to make sure Google is only crawling the most important pages, so we went ahead and blocked those. We also noticed you had a bunch of, I think your entire, like all your product pages were duplicated. You had a duplicate version generated by one parameter that was getting indexed. So had a big duplicate content issue that we uncovered. We also noticed that the top nav was, before it was this kind of mega menu style that

10:52
was linking to so many category pages and it was maybe even a bit convoluted and we simplified that down a bit just to, it was more SEO friendly. And then we also did a lot of internal linking. We found that from all the blogging we done over the years, they weren’t referencing the products and categories as well as they could be. So also doing some internal linking just to make sure we got all those great content pieces you’ve created sending SEO value where it needs to be. So let’s just say for anyone listening out there,

11:20
Most of the changes were actually pretty minor. The only major one was changing that mega menu, like in terms of actually having to edit the code in your theme and that sort of thing. I think the mega- change. Right, correct. The other internal linking and stuff doesn’t cause any cosmetic changes. I remember that menu actually took me a little bit to do once we figured out what it was, but do want to explain just kind of the philosophy and why simplifying that menu actually helped SEO? Yeah, the best way to sum it up,

11:49
If you have, so your top navigation that lives on every single page in your website, if you have 100 links in your top navigation and then you go from 100 links to 50 links, since you have fewer links, you have more link juice or SEO value going through each link. So each of those links got twice as valuable because there’s half as many. So in Steve’s case, we pretty much cut the number of links in the top nav in half. So there was lots of…

12:15
kind of more niche category pages, maybe accessory pages that weren’t as high of a priority that might not be, we probably didn’t need to link to them from every single page. So by just having the most important pages in the top nav, they’re all benefiting from way more SEO value and link juice flowing to those, which helps them to rank a lot better. I think for any one store, 20 % of your products are going to make up 80 % of the revenue. And so I had all these categories from stuff that we had done just because I’m trying to rank individual category pages. And so

12:45
What we did is Jeff helped me with the analysis and we determined like the money categories, made those front and center on the menu. And then the other categories which were lesser, I put them all on like a sub menu, which was only one link on the menu, just to be perfectly clear to anyone trying to do this. Yeah, we, you know, a lot of times you can use like a see all link. So maybe you have your category page, you list your most important subcategories, but if you have 50 subcategories, it wouldn’t make sense to have all 50 in the top nav. So maybe you list your top five or 10,

13:15
and then know that you have see all and they can see more. And SU aside, we’ve actually found this exercise can help with conversion rates because people can find what they’re looking for way faster. They don’t have to sort through as many links. So there’s also some usability benefits as well to this type of change. I totally agree actually. In retrospect now, like the changes that you suggested, make it much easier for people to find handkerchiefs and napkins, which are our bread and butter for our entire site. So that was on the technical side.

13:44
And then do you have any more to add on that? Technical SEO is always the most kind of complex, development heavy side of SEO. It’s very nuanced. It’s kind of the one area where I would recommend talking to someone who knows how to know what to look for because the issues of your website is going to be different from the needs of the issues with your closest competitor. But in short, you just want to make sure your site can be crawled, indexed, and there’s no kind of duplicate content issues or other issues that could impact your rankings.

14:14
Okay. What’s the next pillar? Next is page optimization. So, you know, we page optimization, there’s kind of a few main components where we want to make sure your keyword is in the title tag of the page. And if you’re not familiar with what a title tag is, it’s going to be that if you search a keyword in Google, you got those 10 links and that blue link, that’s the title tag, it lives in the code, it tells search engines what the page is about. And it’s one of the most important ranking factors for the page itself.

14:45
Then you have the meta description. Those are the two lines of black text below the title tag. Now meta descriptions aren’t necessarily a ranking factor. You could have your keyword in there 20 times or not at all. It’s not going to make a difference. The way I like to describe meta descriptions is just there for click through rates. It’s essentially the ad copy for SEO. So if you’re doing Google ads, you might have seen how having really compelling ad copy can have a huge impact on click through rates. Well, the same is true with SEO and meta descriptions.

15:12
have your unique selling points in the meta descriptions. If you have a call to action, you’re going to get a lot more traffic and a lot more clicks than those ranking even above you in some cases. And then the other element is the header tag. That’s the title that’s on the page itself that users see. And then the last thing that we focused on was in the content. We want to make sure the keywords in the content. So those are the four places. If we’re trying to rank for wedding handkerchiefs,

15:38
we want to make sure the keywords in all those four places, title tag, meta-scription, header tag, and the content itself. But before we even touched a single page, we got really strategic with prioritizing, which pages actually do we need to optimize? mean, some e-commerce sites might be on the smaller size. Maybe you only have a dozen or a few dozen products. But for a lot of people, their e-commerce site is going to be hundreds, if not thousands or more pages on the site.

16:08
So one of the biggest pitfalls we’ve seen is a lot of times people spend their time optimizing pages that don’t really have that much SEO potential. It’s either too competitive and they’re never, you know, they’re not going to rank well to begin with or it’s just so it’s low search volume and even if they rank number one it’s not going to drive traffic. So we spend a lot of time first prioritizing every single page on your website to see which pages can actually drive the most traffic and revenue.

16:35
and then kind of starting at the top and working our way down and doing a batch every single month to make sure your pages are optimized. Can we talk about that process? Because I think that’s something interesting. Because most people just say, hey, I want to optimize every page, which is impossible to do, really. So can you talk about the Oxfordization formula for deciding? Because it was all in a spreadsheet, but the formulas were like we never really talked about the formulas. Yeah. The proprietary Oxfordization formula, patent pending. what we did.

17:04
we looked at every single keyword the website was ranking for. And there’s kind of two main data points for every keyword we’re looking at. We want to see what’s the search volume, how many times per month are people searching for this keyword, and we wanted to see what rank is it currently in. So for example, if a keyword’s ranking position 60, it’s so far from being at the top of search results and driving traffic that it’s not going to be that big of a focus. But if you have a keyword that’s bottom of page one, maybe position seven or eight,

17:31
If we just give that keyword a little push and it starts getting top three, it’s gonna drive a whole bunch of more traffic. So if we’re talking about the low hanging fruit, you really wanna focus on keywords where you’re ranking middle to bottom of page one. Those are your high opportunity keywords with just a little SEO push. If you can get them into top three, it’s gonna start driving noticeably more traffic and revenue. So that’s what we did. We looked at every single keyword the site was ranking for. We looked at what position is it in?

17:58
We looked at the monthly search volume. We kind of created this formula and a weighted average to factor in keywords that are higher ranking. Let’s give them a higher opportunity score. Keywords with higher search volume, let’s also give those a higher opportunity score. And we did it for every single keyword. We added all up on a URL basis. So if a URL has 100 keywords ranking, we’d add up the score for each individual keyword to kind of get an aggregate page score. And then from there, we could just prioritize it with some Excel magic to see

18:26
which page has had the highest opportunity score and we’re worth pursuing first. And there’s one component that you didn’t mention, was revenue for that site, right? Cause it’s all about money for an e-commerce store. That will get you traffic, luckily, almost every e-commerce site that we’ve seen have e-commerce tracking in place. It’s really easy to go into analytics, see the conversion rate, the average order value. So we pulled in the average order value and conversion rate for every single

18:54
category, every single category page, product page, blog post, et cetera, and then matched all that up so we could extrapolate, say, okay, these are the keywords that we know not only are they gonna bring in lots of traffic, but these are actually like high value pages that are converting well and have a higher ticket and higher AOV. So that level really helped us be strategic and focus on the pages that are gonna move the needle and drive more revenue. Yeah, because there’s a lot of pages that you’ll find on your site that might be really high traffic, but they actually aren’t really generating much revenue.

19:24
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20:47
Yeah, there’s top of funnel blog posts and there’s bottom of the funnel blog posts. Yeah. So it’s important to do this exercise, which is actually something that I hadn’t really done before. Like in the past, I just focus on optimizing my category pages because I knew which ones were converting. But yeah, it was very interesting to do that analysis across like all the keywords to figure out what to go for. You also taught me to use this tool for the content. I before we had

21:14
work together, I actually didn’t have as much content on the category pages. This is a struggle for lot of e-commerce stores, right? Most category pages are just a listing of products. You want to walk the audience through what you did for the category pages on my site? Yeah, so one ranking factor that we’ve seen, Google’s even confirmed this. Sometimes you can listen to Google’s spokesperson at the time and they’ll kind of give you some nuggets. And basically what they said is if you have a category page with a list of products,

21:42
you should have at least some content to give Google more context of what that page is about. They’ll see the products and they’ll see the title of the page, but there’s no content explaining what the page is about, who it’s for, the benefits. It’s gonna be more difficult for them to give you good rankings. And we see time and time again, if you have a category page with no content on it and you just add 200 to 250 words, that…

22:08
In almost all cases, we usually see rank improvements for just that simple change. Sometimes people go overboard with this. There’s definitely correlation between rankings and word count. So people just literally drop a blog post on their category page. That’s really not the way to go. That’ll actually work against you. And we’ve heard from Google’s staff multiple times that

22:33
If you have too much content on a page, is supposed to be unique, a category page has a transactional intent. Someone’s looking to make a transaction and purchase something. If you just drop a blog post on it, now it’s going to be more of an article informational intent and that you’re not going to rank as well for transactional keywords. So that’s why really, you you want to keep it short and concise, just 200, 250 words. And that’s what we did for Bumblebee linens. We made sure all the top category pages had around 200, 250 words.

23:00
Any pages that were a little short or shy on content, we added some additional ones. And kind of the framework or blueprint we recommend when you’re writing a category description is first and foremost, talk about the benefits of the product. Talk about who it’s for and the use cases. Talk about the price and then talk about the attributes of it. So for example, if you’re selling gaming laptops, you can talk about

23:27
the know that what were the specs the speed that the benefit whatever whatever can change from product to product so you know with with handkerchiefs you can talk about the material and how that impacts price and the last thing is just give a little bit of information about you know shipping and reach returns you be in short you’re giving someone all the information they would need before making informed purchasing decision and you should look at that lens you know we we didn’t add anything like

23:52
What is a handkerchief? No, instead, if someone’s searching for it, they already know what it is. You want to give them the information they need to go from knowing the product to purchasing the product. Yeah, and there was tools that you used, I remember, allowed you to use certain keywords that were used associated with the actual main keyword that we were trying to rank also. Yeah, there’s a great tool I recommend called Surfer SEO.

24:15
I’m not affiliated with them, so whether you use them or not, I’m not incentivized, but it’s a great tool that I use personally and I’ve had a lot of success with, and it’s actually kind of become the gold standard of content optimization in the SEO industry. Basically, how this tool works is you put in the keyword you’re trying to rank for. So let’s say we want to rank for ladies handkerchiefs. We’d put that into Surfer. Surfer’s going to see all the sites ranking on page one already. It’s going to pull their content and analyze all their content.

24:42
And what it’s gonna come back to you with, it’s gonna say, hey, here’s all the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, that your competitors are using in their content that you should use in your content. So does all this advanced statistical analysis to see what keywords the higher ranking competitors are using that you’re not using? And in a lot of cases we found incorporating those keywords into your content and making your content more comprehensive and robust can have a really noticeable impact on rankings and traffic. absolutely.

25:11
So on the content side, did you have anything else to add before we move on to the next pillar? I think just real quick with blogging, like you had already done a lot of blogging and we actually chose not, we strategically chose not to do any blogging for your site. And the main reason for that was there wasn’t a lot of high converting keywords that we could go after. Really there’s only top of funnel keywords like what is a handkerchief? What are handkerchiefs made of?

25:36
Which we knew could drive traffic but wouldn’t drive revenue So since we were trying to optimize for your return on investment We decided not to do blog posts and focus more on the pages that can actually drive revenue, right? Which in my case are the category pages exactly. Yep Okay, so we talked about technical content optimization. What is the third pillar? We talked about we talked about technical page optimization content and then I think we’re under the fourth pillar the link

26:04
Yeah, link building, link building, which incidentally is the question that I get asked the most. And you had some pretty good strategies. A lot of these strategies before we talk about them do require some amount of legwork and outreach. But let’s talk about them first. And I’m very curious what your process is for doing this. Yeah, so there’s dozens, if not hundreds of ways you can build backlinks and just kind of backing up for just a second.

26:32
The number of links going to your site and the quality of those links is one of the most important ranking factors in Google. Google’s ranking algorithm is always changing, Google’s even said backlinks is one of the top three ranking factors in their algorithm. you could have the most perfectly optimized page with the best content, but if you don’t have enough backlinks, you may not be able to rank very well for that page. So it’s important to get other websites to link back to you.

26:59
And you have kind of more of your traditional like brand PR approach and a lot of these strategies we incorporated for Bumby Linens. From working with e-commerce sites, kind of the most important one strategy we found is one, doing product reviews. Essentially what we did is we just found relevant bloggers, we sent them some product and had them do a review of that product. In the write-up on their site, they take photos of it, they link back to it.

27:27
So that worked really well, just doing some product reviews and sending those to bloggers. A second thing we did is guest posting. This is probably the most common and consistent link billing strategy. And part of the reason for that is it works really well. Basically, you find relevant blogs you offer to write an article on their website. then, know, it’s not, Steve, as you know, having a content calendar and trying to keep up and create fresh content all the time, it’s not easy to do. So oftentimes, bloggers will open up their blog.

27:55
and just say, maybe we can have some other people contribute to take the load off their plate. So we found relevant blogs like the Wedding Space and built a relationship with them, wrote an article, linked back to some of most important category pages. So that was the second strategy is guest posting. Third thing we did, which is kind of more unique of a PR play is scholarships. So we created the official Balmvey-Lennox scholarship. yeah, we had a, I believe it was $1,000 cash prize for. It was $500.

28:25
$500 is a thousand word essay for a $500 cash prize. And it’s not like we had to offer $500 for every university in the country. It was just a one time $500 scholarship. And we were able to promote that to hundreds of universities. So we actually were able to obtain a lot of backlinks from some really authoritative .edu universities, which had a lot of trust and a lot of authority and get help with rankings. And then the fourth thing we did,

28:53
was we basically turned your discount codes into backlinks. So we created a discount for the military and veterans. We created a discount for first responders, a discount for nurses, a discount for teachers, and a few other different, what we call linkable audiences. And so we had all these discount code pages up. if you look, there’s aggregated lists of discounts for nurses, discounts for veterans.

29:20
And we found all these lists, we reached out, we said, hey, we’re so glad you have this. We also have a discount that’s gonna be great for these groups and these communities. Would you consider including our discount in your list? And sure enough, they were. We got lots of backlinks from some of these websites, one of which was military.com. Which is huge, actually. Yeah, very authoritative. And that wasn’t the only one. There’s quite a bit of other heavy hitters.

29:46
And I actually, Steve, if you want, I have the outreach stats if you’re curious for a quick rundown. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so before you do that, I just want to say that I think of the multiple strategies you just mentioned, I think guest posting is probably one of the most tedious. And whenever you see one of those spammy SEO agencies out there that say they can guarantee you thousand backlinks, it’s not just the backlinks. They’re going to spam you with low quality backlinks, which could potentially hurt your site.

30:14
These are all, using these strategies that Jeff’s talked about, these are all real links that have high domain authority that will really benefit your site. This is why you have to watch out for those spammy SEO agencies that promise all these things, because all they’re doing is they probably just have a bunch of dead sites that they’re just linking to everybody. Yeah, there’s lots of like, what we call private blog networks where they create their own site just for getting backlinks.

30:41
And if you get links from those, they’re just not gonna help you at all. link building is the one part of SAE that you to be the most careful, whether you’re gonna do it yourself or hire somebody, you have to make sure they’re building good links that actually gonna move the needle. If you see someone saying, we’ll give you 100 backlinks for $6, turn and run because chances are it’s gonna do more harm than good. Actually, before you get into the stats, can you just, when you’re going for a backlink,

31:11
Can you tell me just some of the things that you look for on the site to make sure that there are a legit site that’s actually going to be linking to you? Yeah. So few things we look for is like, there an actual person behind the site? Do they have an About Us page? Do they have any contact information? We also look at the SEO metrics. What’s the domain authority or domain rating of the site? Is this valuable in Google’s eyes? And we’ll also look at the traffic. Is this actually driving organic traffic? Is it ranking for keywords?

31:40
So there, what I just described is probably where most link builders stop is like, okay, like the site has, it’s very authoritative, it’s relevant, let’s get a backlink. But there’s a few other checks that we like to do just to make sure it’s gonna provide SEO value. Another one is we’ll look at its traffic year over year. Because in many cases you have these kind of fly by night blogs that come up just for the purpose of selling backlinks.

32:05
and they get penalized pretty quick. if we see that a site’s traffic dropped like 50 % or more year over year, we won’t touch it because it’s a good indication that it’s been penalized by Google. Another check we do is we want to see what other types of sites is this blog going to link to. And we use a tool called hrefs where we can see all the other domains the site’s linking to. And if it’s linking to things like casino, crypto, CBD, some of these would kind of work.

32:32
Questionable niches we won’t reach out to it. It’s kind of clear that it’s just a link farm and the link to anybody So we want to make sure the site there’s a person behind it has good SEO metrics It has been penalized by Google and it’s not just linking out to anyone and everyone Yeah, and it’s more than just domain authority also because some people will just buy expired domains and then use that as like a Yeah, that can be very easily. Yeah, so anyway, okay So all this stuff that you just talked about requires lots of outreach

33:02
And that’s actually one of the reasons why I asked for your help because I don’t got time to do this outreach, right? Yeah. So yeah, let’s let’s talk about some of the stats. Yeah. So like Steve saying, lots of grunt work that went into this. So in short, we got 135 backlinks from all those strategies that I mentioned to get those 135 backlinks. We contacted over 4000 websites and it’s not just sending emails.

33:31
first prospect, you have to find the email or find the blog. And then once you find the blog, you got to figure out, what’s the best email address to contact for this blog and digging around to find that information and then trying to personalize it as much as you can. So there’s a lot of heavy lifting. So we found those 4,000 blogs. We reached out to all of them. Of those 4,000, about 2,400 actually opened the email. it was a decent response rate. We had a 57 %…

34:00
or sorry, decent open rate, 57 % open rate on those emails. Of the 4,000, we had 16 % that responded to our emails. We had about 685 responses. And then of those 685 responses, that generated the 135 backlink. So if you’re just reaching out to a blog cold, you’re not going to have the highest success rate. You have to give them a good reason to link to you. And a lot of this is a numbers game. You just got to keep finding.

34:29
relevant prospects that are likely to link to you. And there’s a lot of legwork that goes into finding these sites, reaching out to them and getting those links published. So what was the final percentage of outreach versus actually links gained? Single digits, right? Yeah, 3 % of the sites we contacted ended up linking to us. Right. So that means to get three backlinks, you got to reach out to at least 100 sites.

34:54
that depending on the strategy you’re using, but for all the strategies we were using, that was the average across the board, 3%. So of the four strategies, let’s repeat them again. there was product review, product reviews, guest blogging, guest blogging, and discount codes. discounts, okay. So if you were to just pick like the highest percentage, which one would that be? From what we saw, we got the highest percentage from scholarships and discount codes.

35:23
And discount codes, okay. And then the product review is a little harder. And the guestbook is probably the hardest, would you say? I’d say product reviews are the hardest because not everyone is interested. You have to hope they’re interested in the product that you want them to review. I see. Yeah. Okay. You left out a little nugget also on the scholarship page, which was now that you have this powerful page that everyone’s linking to, you want to sculpt the juice, so to speak. Yes. We have a little trick up our sleeves. So we had this scholarship page.

35:52
that lived on bumblebillens.com and it had attracted all these backlinks from some really authoritative .edu websites. So what we then did is we simplified this page so that you know there’s no top navigation, there’s a minimal footer, there wasn’t really any links on this page, it’s just talk of the scholarship and we went in and added links to some of your most important category pages and what this did is it took this super powerful page and now channeled and funneled all this SEO value and all this link juice

36:21
to just two or three pages that we really cared about. So that we saw actually had a pretty noticeable impact on rankings and we got a good lift from that strategy. I am curious though, I don’t know if you have the stats for this, but do know what your percentage was for reviews specifically versus guest posts versus scholarship and coupons? We definitely have it, but I don’t have it on hand right now. I’d just be curious, because some of these people…

36:47
listening and they’re gonna be like, I can’t do all this stuff. Like if I were to just choose one strategy, what would I go for? I always say if you’re do just one, I like product reviews most because if I take my SEO hat off for a second and I kind of look at the bigger picture, product reviews is the one strategy that can also has the best chance of driving traffic, brand awareness. So you get kind of multiple benefits of this, especially if like, let’s say you’re an Amazon seller, this is something you could do.

37:13
pretty easily. If you have a product that doesn’t know it’s not too high ticket something you can give away for free you know reach out to some bloggers offer to send it to them for free to do a review and not only we get back things that help with SEO but who knows maybe also get some brand awareness some referral traffic and and oftentimes you can even get direct sales from this if the blog has a big enough following.

37:36
I have some other questions that I commonly get asked and I’m curious what your answer is. One of the questions I commonly get asked is, do I need a blog in order to do a good job with SEO for an e-commerce store? The question is maybe, but not as often as you think. And let me elaborate a little bit. Sure. There’s this misconception that you have to have a blog. You have to keep creating fresh content. If you don’t create fresh content, your rankings are going to slipped.

38:06
Basically what happened is years ago Google had this freshness update where if you have a blog post and you update it and you make a bunch of changes and Google sees that change, it’s going to get kind of a nice boost in rankings because it’s fresh content. But the misconception is if you’re creating articles on your blog over here, that fresh content is not going to help your rankings of your category pages and your main pages over here.

38:35
So that’s kind of the big disconnect. And I like to talk about the value of blogging with the typical customer journey, where you have the awareness stage, you have the interest stage, you have the purchase stage. And there’s a bunch of different variations. We’ll kind of simplify it to three stages. If you’re blogging with content that’s in the top of funnel awareness stage, that would be things like, what are handkerchiefs? What are handkerchiefs for? What’s the history of handkerchiefs?

39:01
If someone’s searching those keywords, they’re not really looking to purchase. They’re just looking to learn. It’s very informational. we could create the content, but it’s not going to, and it could rank well and drive traffic, but it’s not going to drive revenue. And how are we supposed to give Steve a positive ROI if it’s not driving revenue? There are some middle of the funnel keywords that your blog post you can go after. So any content with like best versus or for will typically convert better. So for example, you know,

39:31
best handkerchiefs. If someone’s probably doing some research, they know they want to buy it. Now they want to find the best one. That’s going to have some conversions or linen handkerchiefs, linen handkerchiefs versus any other material out there. Those types of versus comparisons. They’ve narrowed down to two types. Now they want to purchase one, but they’re not sure which one or four talking about the use case, like handkerchiefs for everyday use. If someone, if you have a blog post of that,

39:59
someone probably wants to find a handkerchief for everyday use. we did the research. We didn’t really see any high-volume keywords that we could create in the middle of the funnel range, so we opted out for it. So if you’re trying to decide, do you need to do blogging, it might be worth doing some research to see what are some middle of the funnel keywords that you can go after, and will those drive traffic? So every blog post has a goal, and just make sure you have a clear idea of

40:28
why are you blogging, don’t just do it because you think you’re supposed to. If you’re doing it, make sure you know why you’re doing it. Yeah, I would say if you’re hiring someone to do something for you, you always want to focus on the ROI. Because you could rank for keywords, get their email, and convert also that way, which is the traditional model that a lot of websites take. But when it comes to just focusing on what’s going to make you the most money, that’s going to tend to be your category pages.

40:57
or

41:28
chat GPT put this on everyone’s radar where now the AI is pretty advanced when it comes to content creation. From what I’ve seen, using chat GPT, also known as GPT 3.5, the content produces, oh yeah, before. The content it produces was, I’d say was on par with your standard overseas generalist writer. Maybe you have someone in India, the Philippines,

41:59
You know, the content was kind of roughly at that level. Of course, there’s going to be some overseas writers that are incredible and probably might be better than a lot of US writers. if we’re saying on average in general, was kind of at the depth and the grammar and the spelling was perfect. But as far as like structure and flow, I’d say it’s kind of on par with like a generalist overseas or not. I say non-English native speaker.

42:28
But then GPT-4 came out, I believe it was like a week or two ago. This was like the next version. And I’ve done a lot of testing with that and I’d say it’s at the point now where it’s as good as your average US generalist rider. A industry expert’s always gonna be better and they’ll be able to add some insights, but if you just have a generalist rider that you’re hiring that writes about every niche, the content is pretty much good enough.

42:54
to go hand go side by side with anyone I don’t think I think most people could not tell whether an article is written by GPT-4 or a US writer. So the question is is it good enough to not use human writers?

43:11
That’s the goal, that’s the big question. it’s kind of, you have to think back enough for a second, how scary is it that we’re actually having this conversation? Like how many writers could lose their jobs because of this? It is kind of scary. And the model that we’re going to is, I like to paint the analogy of it’s basically what calculators did for mathematicians. know, mathematicians didn’t disappear, but you didn’t need as many because you have this device that can save them lots of time.

43:39
So kind of the model we’re doing is we’re having our writers and we’re having our editors use this technology to assist them and be more efficient. You never want to just go to chat GPT, have it spit out a blog post and then post it. You’re still going to be some manual review and you want to enhance it and make it stand out. But this technology is getting adapted like wildfire and chances are if your competitors aren’t using it now, they’re going to start using it soon and can just scale their content production methods. So you got to look at how you can incorporate this.

44:09
as a way to scale your content production while maintaining quality. I’m going end this podcast with kind of like a bombshell question. What are your views on the future of search with AI? I think, you know, right now the saying is if you don’t know something, just Google it. I wonder how long it’s going to be until people say, just chat GPT it or just AI it because now it’s answering so many questions.

44:37
It’s unknown, but if I look at the direction, feel like these large language models and AI systems like chat GPT, they provide a really good user experience for people search for information and it’s getting better and better. So even if it’s not a hundred percent now, it’s going to be just as good as Googling in the very near future. And what I think that’s going to do is the sort of top of funnel keywords, like what is a handkerchief? What are they made of? What are the history of handkerchiefs?

45:05
I don’t think you need to go to Google to search for that anymore. I think you just can ask ChatGPT, get your answer right away, and it’s going to save you time instead of clicking on a bunch of different articles, scrolling down to find the part of the article, maybe cross-referencing a few others. You now have this, this can do it for you. So I think that’s going to prevent a lot of traffic. So like a lot of top-of-the-funnel traffic is not going to be there. You’re going to see, I feel like you’re going to see declines and search volumes. So especially for content sites.

45:34
I think middle of the funnel might be a little less, it might be little more sustainable. Things like comparison sites, reviews, that you kind need more media. Maybe you want to see a table comparison or images or videos. I think those are going to be safe for the foreseeable future. But if chat, GPT and other large language models start incorporating media and photos and can actually like watch a video and kind of summarize it for you, I think it’s only matter time before those are.

46:04
are going to be impacted. what about specifically e-commerce? E-commerce is kind of the one area that luckily I’d say is safe. If you’re looking to make a purchase, you actually have to go to that site, make a purchase, that you can’t really automate that away or AI that away. Although, Steve, I might have something that you haven’t heard of just yesterday, And this is on just yesterday, OpenAI, creators of ChatGBT, just announced they have plugins.

46:34
They’re creating all these plugins that you can augment chat GPT with. So they have one for like kayak.com where you can say, find me flights for this and it’ll pull in all the kayak.com data. Um, they, one of their initial plugins that has already been created is with shop for Shopify. So it’s going to be interesting if you can now use chat GPT to purchase, um, directly without even having to go to the Can’t wait to play with that. Yeah. I joined the wait list immediately. Yeah. Nice.

47:03
That would change the game then. That’s the, so I guess this technology is changing so rapidly that it’s, whatever prediction I try to make today could literally be outdated in a week. All right, Jeff, we talk about a lot of stuff in this episode. If anyone needs help with their SEO, whether it just be putting together that plan, which is a good portion of it, or just help with link building, where can they find you? Yeah, you can just go to our website.

47:32
180 marketing.com 180 marketing and my email is just Jeff at 180 marketing.com So you know shoot me an email be great to hear from you guys And please stay away from those spammy SEO agencies that promise you a thousand backlinks and number one rankings In a month or whatever they are. I get them every day agreed. Yeah cool Hey, Jeff, thanks for coming the show always you always drop value and I appreciate you Awesome. Thanks Steve. Appreciate this was fun

48:02
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Like I said, Jeff is my go-to guy when it comes to SEO and he is a wealth of knowledge. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 475. And once again, I want to thank Getita for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you sell on Amazon FBA and you like free money, you can get over $400 in free reimbursements when you sign up for Getita over at mywifequitterjob.com slash Getita. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash G-E-T-I-D-A.

48:32
I also want to thank Quietlight Brokerage. Quietlight is my go-to place when I want to buy or sell a business. I’ve known them for over 10 years, recently sold a company through them, and I trust them 100%. If you want a free valuation for your business, or if you just want to get some free advice, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash quietlight. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash q-u-i-t-l-i-g-h-t. And if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com.

49:00
and sign up for my free 6-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.