89. $180K/Month: How to Dominate Google with SEO

0:00With ChatGPT making the rounds on the internet, many say it's just a matter of time before SEO dies. unless you're Kyle Roof, in which case SEO is alive and well. GPT and generative AI can help you do SEO a little bit faster, but if you're a bad SEO, it's just going to help you do bad SEO faster. If your website was a storefront, you have people walking by, SEO can increase the foot traffic. The first thing is, can Google find your website in the first place? And there are aspects of SEO that help that happen to encourage Google to find your site. Once Google can find your site, can Google crawl your site?

0:33can it get through your site and get to all the pieces of your site effectively and easily. You can't teach Google anything. So do the search for the term that you want to win, look at the pages that Google is rewarding, and then that's the page that you need to give Google. Let's learn how to dominate Google SEO and print heaps of cash while doing so. Kyle, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. So let's get started with, you know, when did high voltage SEO start? How did you get to where you are right now? Yeah, sure. So it was 2014 or thereabouts. I'd been working with my now business partner on some projects.

1:08He was hired by this company in Australia to be their CMO. And he gave me all of his remaining SEO clients. And then about two months later, they fired him. And it wasn't anything that he did because a few months after that, they went bankrupt. But after he was fired, he came back and was like, so about those SEO clients that I gave you. And we had worked together for a bit on these projects. And so both kind of came to the realization, why don't we just start an agency? And so that's what we did. We formed an SEO agency kind of starting with those clients. Incredible. And what would you describe as high voltage's kind of competitive advantage?

1:39What makes you different from SEO agencies, which, you know, if you want somebody who's really not great at SEO, you can probably find one super cheap somewhere on the internet. What makes high voltage different? In 2015, I spoke at my first conference speaking on stage, and it was a very high level conference, And there are only about, I'd say, 40 people or so in the room, real high-level group. It was a kind of conference where you could talk to the people presenting. It was real intimate, kind of a back and forth. And the topic that I was seeking on was how to run SEO tests, how the method that I had developed for running tests.

2:11And I really thought it would be collaborative in the sense of, okay, this is what I'm doing. And then other people would share what they were doing. And about five minutes into the talk, I realized quite quickly, nobody is doing this. No one's doing this at all. Like people are doing some things, but not in this particular way. And that's when I realized we had a huge edge that we could then put out that we actually run SEO tests. And the line that we used back then that was really helpful to land clients was, you know, talk to the agencies that you're looking at, ask them what tests they're running right now.

2:38And if they don't have an answer to that, that means they're going to test on your site. You know, they're learning on your site. And we were really able to distinguish ourselves as this is a scientifically backed method. This is math based and kind of differentiate ourselves that way that it's not, you know, magic and pixie dust and stuff like that. that there's real science behind what we're doing. Now, I also want to ask about your partner, your co-founder and getting things started. Now, first to establish for our listeners, you did not know each other in person when you first started working together, right?

3:06Yeah, that's correct. That's correct. He actually hired me for a job off of like freelancer or something like that, or Elance or whatever it was called way back in the day. He posted a job and I responded to it. That's kind of an incredible story because like obviously founding with a partner is different from being a solopreneur in that moment and probably an extra layer of challenge when you're not necessarily like in the same place. Can you talk about how you kind of work through those challenges? One of the things that you really need to do is define roles as you aren't going to be going to an office together and staring at each other.

3:37And you can't just kind of pop over and say, hey, you really need to define who is doing what, who's responsible for what things so that that way, you know, all those things will get done. Otherwise, I think it's really easy for things to slip through the cracks. Andy, my business partner, is really good at processes. running a business is one of his special skills and how to systematize that, which is also, I think, a huge thing that you do when you're running a remote office is you have to have really strong SOPs in place, not just for the consulting that you're doing, but also how you're running the company and how you're getting things done.

4:05And Andy really does that very well. I was more on the SEO side, developing the techniques and the strategy. And then as we grew, kind of overseeing the implementation of those things, I'm also sort of the face of the company. So I do the podcasts like this one and I go on stage and I speak and I go on the road and stuff like that. And so we quickly able to identify where our strong suits were and then enabling that person to do that. Whenever we have like disagreements on something, if it is on the business side, I know that Andy has heard my objection or my thoughts on what we're doing. And in the end, I will defer to his judgment because he does that well.

4:35When it's on the SEO strategy side, if Andy disagrees with something, he would voice that disagreement or offer the suggestion. But then at the end of the day, if it really does come to an impasse, that was on me, you know, and he would defer to my judgment. And in doing so, you really created a really nice partnership to be able to grow out this SEO agency. And even though we really didn't meet face-to-face for about a year and a half. And as you started the business, how did that differ from your previous life as a freelancer? And what was that transition like for you? Wasn't too different. My life as a freelancer was not that long, actually.

5:07It was more like I kind of started doing it and then was into the agency. Communication is absolutely critical. And so we have an internal policy that if somebody has sent you a message on one of the front of the, on your team, you need to respond within 12 hours, kind of regardless of where you are on the planet. And if it's a client, it has to be responded to within one business day. And so kind of making sure that that communication is happening makes it a lot easier in order to kind of transition. And that's what I was already doing in my freelance roles anyway. I had that level of communication.

5:33And so we just kind of made sure that that continued and then things really weren't too different. And what might you say are the advantages of founding an agency versus working as a freelancer? Because, you know, sometimes those can kind of feel like two sides of the same coin, but there are certainly pros and cons of each. And I'd love your thoughts on that. There are certainly people that it's a one-man band, right? And they're calling themselves an agency when really it's just more like one person and they're coordinating some VAs. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think the reason that you would do that rather than just kind of calling yourself a freelancer is credibility.

6:05If you want to land, I think, larger clients, you'll need to be an agency. I don't know. I don't think it's quite as easy for a freelancer unless they're specializing as like a consultant. You know, I will come in and I will work with your team to, you know, build it. I've seen that done successfully and them being very upfront that they are just one person because that's all that they're doing. They're not doing any fulfillment. But otherwise, I think if you want to grow and you want to land larger clients, I think you will have to become some form of an agency or present yourself as an agency.

6:36Reminder for our listeners that learning from the experts is one way to avoid making costly mistakes with a new business. You can find that kind of expert advice on the UpFlip Hub, which has advice and insights from real-world business owners that you can apply to start or grow any business. Kyle, coming off that little ad read there, I'd love to hear a little bit from you about what mistakes you might cite that you made early on in the business and what lessons you learned from them and that our listeners could learn from them as well. I think one of the biggest things identified, hiring the wrong people.

7:06I think you can tell early on if somebody is a good fit or not. and if they aren't a good fit, it's only a good thing to get rid of them faster. The longer they stay around, the more they're going to drag down their team members. They're going to cause problems here and there. It's going to be harmful for your business. And so once you identify that somebody isn't the right person for that position, you need to either find them another position or they need to not be in your company anymore. And even to that end, I was fired by our HR department from hiring. Like, you're not good at this. You know, the people that you bring in are not who we need.

7:39And they're right. They were 100 % correct. And so knowing your own limitations in that too, like, you know, we need to hire A players here and who on our team can do that, can properly evaluate who we're looking at and make sure that they're going to be able to produce in the way that we need them to produce. And me acknowledging that I was not that person on the team was a big movement forward for us. And the people that we've had in charge of that subsequently have done an amazing job. That your HR department was able to fire you from hiring people and you and your co-founder being able to so clearly define roles indicates to me that as a company and perhaps as a person, you have cultivated a culture of good feedback and honesty with each other.

8:22How have you gone about doing that? Or is that something that's been sort of innate to you as a person or did you have to learn it? I think it's one of those things you have to treat people like people. And if you do that, you're going to get it in return. And so acknowledging somebody else's strengths, when you also talk about their weaknesses, that's not a negative. That's like, hey, you are best used here. So you do this. I will work on that because I think I can do it pretty well. So, you know, if you have conversations like that that are treating people as they are, I think you can do pretty well.

8:52I don't know that we ever sat down and really had that conversation, like how to do that sort of communication. It did seem to come naturally. I would also say it's a lot easier to have conversations when things are rosy, when things are like just starting off and your things are good. Have the harder conversations then rather than letting them sit and fester. And then when it's an actual problem and then you have to have that conversation, it goes a lot worse. So set like boundaries, I'd set rules, I'd set however you want to handle things. And you want to set that as early as you can so that when times are a little tough, you already have that in place and you know what to do or what you're doing.

9:23And then one last question kind of here about the operation of the business. I'm curious if somebody is listening and they are interested in starting an SEO agency, what are some of the expenses that they should be planning for expecting as they both get started and then grow the company? One of the really nice things about doing an SEO agency is you don't have a lot of expenses until you have a client. It's pretty cool that you can basically run a company extremely lean until a client comes in and then you kind of can grow the business as you gain clients and your expenses go up kind of in proportion to the clients that you acquire.

9:59The initial startup cost is extremely low. I mean, you don't have to have an office. You can work from your kitchen table with your computer and Slack and those types of programs are free for a certain number of users. So you don't really have those expenses until you actually have a decently sized team. So a lot of those tools that you might end up paying for later will let you grow or they charge based on seats. And so that's just presumably as you're bringing in people for those seats that you are bringing on more and more clients. That is actually one of the sexier things of running an SEO agency is that you can do it with very little capital outlay to start.

10:35Maybe the only thing you might be doing might be advertising, but there are still a lot of ways you can do that at minimal cost as well. So that was, I think, a reason that we were able to start an agency is because it didn't take a lot of cash to get it up and running. Now I want to shift our focus of the conversation a little bit for the other subset of our listeners who maybe don't want to start an SEO agency, but obviously have a lot of questions about SEO. And since we have an SEO expert here with us, I'm going to take the opportunity to pose some of those questions. So just to begin, for those that maybe are only familiar with it as a buzzword, why is SEO important for business owners?

11:08If your company has a website and you're not really doing any optimization, and this is for most businesses, obviously not all of them. most fall into this category. If you've got a website and you're not optimizing it, it's really like having a neon sign in your basement. I mean, it looks pretty, but it's not doing anything for you. You want that sign to be effective to draw in clients, that's where you have to optimize the website. And that's really what SEO can do for you is get your website out there. I think one of the things about SEO is that it's really, I like to think of it as like a storefront.

11:36If your website was a storefront and you have people walking by, SEO can increase the foot traffic of people walking by your storefront. They'll increase the foot drag of people seeing your website. It can't necessarily get them inside the store and it can't necessarily force them or make them buy anything more than they would have anyway, but it can increase the number of people that are going by. And if you look at the numbers, like let's say for every hundred people that come by, 10 go into the store and one will make a purchase. If we can just increase the number of people walking by and all those numbers remain the same, you make more money, you become more profitable.

12:08And so that's really, I think the objective of SEO is to get more eyeballs on your website because then just if the numbers hold steady, you're going to do much, much better. That's a really, really useful analogy. Thank you for sharing that. Can you give us some of the core principles of effective SEO? What should people be looking at in their SEO strategy to make sure that it's going to be effective for them? There are really four parts to that. It goes under find, crawl, index, and rank. Rank is number four. And a lot of people think of SEO and ranking as the same thing, and that's not the full picture.

12:39The first thing is, can Google find your website in the first place? And there are aspects of SEO that help that happen to encourage Google to find your site. Once Google can find your site, can Google crawl your site? Can it get through your site and get to all the pieces of your site effectively and easily? And then once Google can crawl your site, can Google understand what your site is about? Can Google index your site? Can Google say like, okay, I see that this page is about this thing, and I'm happy to put it into the index. And then once it's in the index, that's when a ranking comes in where you want to do things to optimize the page so that Google will like it more.

13:09And that takes signals that Google can find on the page and perhaps outside of your site. That's the fourth step of it because you can do all the on-page work, all the off-page work. But if Google can't find your site to begin with, it doesn't matter. So you really need to make sure that you've got those four elements that you're keeping track of those things or checking those things. And then whoever's providing your SEO for you is discussing those as well. Because again, it doesn't matter if you, it doesn't matter how great your on page or your content is, if Google's not going to index it, you know, so making sure that you're hitting those four principles really kind of comes out.

13:40That's what core SEO is. You know, there are certainly people that have listened to that, have discovered, okay, I need a lot more help than I maybe thought that I did. where should they turn initially to start learning a little bit more about SEO? What are some like knowledge resources that they could go to that they can then better understand to then probably either go much deeper or bring somebody into the company to work on their SEO? Where should they turn first to learn more? Yeah, that's a great point because you do want to have like the terminology. You want to know what you're talking about.

14:09You want to know the basic concepts there. It's kind of like, you know, you take your car to the mechanic. I don't, I'm completely beholden to them because I have no idea what's going on in the engine. And they could tell me my slipper widget is broken. I'd be sure. I'd be like, okay, why not? That must be a thing. And what's nice about SEO is that while there is a lot to it, you can wrap your head around a lot of the concepts so that you can at least be knowledgeable about what can be there or what should be done. Some of the major tools out there like Moz or Ahrefs have really good beginner guides.

14:39I'd start there. They're free resources. They are in kind of written form and also video form. And I think that's going to give you a lot of the basics, at least give you the terms. And I don't necessarily agree with everything they're going to talk about in terms of strategy, but that's not the point. The point is you'll know what those terms are, what you should be looking for, what you should be considering. And a lot of the information they provide there, I think, can do that for you without really any expense, just the time of going through it. And they're not very long either, as I recall.

15:04I haven't looked at them in a while, but last time I checked it, they're pretty digestible. And I think that will at least give you the playing field. This is what we need to be looking for. This is what we need to do. And you'll have the terminology so that when somebody's talking to you about what they're doing and why, you'll know what those terms mean. And one of the beautiful things about SEO and a digital marketing world is the vast amount of data that we can end up with at our fingertips, but maybe it can also then create a lot of noise. What are the key metrics that somebody should be looking at to understand how effective their SEO is being for them?

15:37Healthy websites will gain keywords and impressions. That means they will grow in terms that Google is ranking that site for, and then the number of people seeing those pages, those are impressions. It's actually the opportunity to click into the site. Those are the two, I think, biggest indicators that your SEO is doing a good job. You are increasing in keywords and impressions. We do measure things like clicks, and we do measure things like ranking position and stuff like that. But a lot of those things don't really tell the story about how effective the SEO necessarily was. But I think the two growth factors that you can look to and you should be monitoring are, am I gaining keywords?

16:16Am I gaining impressions? Because if you're not, if you're flat or you're going down on both of those, that's a sign that there's a problem. And so somebody maybe recognizes, hey, I've got a problem. I'm going to implement an SEO strategy. I'm going to hire a company to come do that. What kind of timeline should they have as an expectation to start to see results and improvement from whatever changes they make. Internally, well, in our company, we have a proprietary algorithm that we put together that gives an estimate on how long it will take to win certain terms. And that starts from a one to two month sort of situation and goes to 12 months plus.

16:49A lot of it is dependent upon how many competitors there are that are going after that particular term. So you can look at this by doing what's called an all in title search. So you write all title and squish it all together, no spaces, and then colon, and then put in the search term that you're interested in, whatever product or service you're selling or that thing that you want to show up in Google for. And then Google will show you how many results have that term all in the title. And if it's like 20, 50, that's a great number. So that's not a lot of people going after that particular term.

17:18When you get into the tens of thousands, that's a problem. That means a lot of people are very interested in that and you have to beat all of them, or at least you have to be a bunch of them in order to show up on page one. So when you look at terms that have a fewer amount of results as an all-in title, that's something you can probably do in a month or two. The competition is not overly aggressive towards that term. There are not a lot of people going after it, but if you see it's in the tens of thousands, that could be a term you're never going to win. And so that's maybe a way to gauge the terms you're interested in and how likely you are of winning them or not.

17:47So this is going to bring us to a section of our show that we call our Fan Blitz Questions. These questions come from our YouTube community and listeners, you can go join the YouTube community by going to youtube.com slash upflip and you can post questions to future podcast guests. Kyle, some of these questions are very specific and I'm sure you could talk about them for a very long time, but we're going to give you about 10 to 15 seconds to answer each one of these and or point the listener to a resource. Are you ready? Quick question on the rules. Is it 10 seconds in total or 10 seconds for each one?

18:16For each one. Okay, okay. A little loud buzzer will go off. So if you take 15 or 20 seconds, we'll allow it. What will I win? What will I win? Just the love and adoration of our listeners. That's all I need. That's all I need. Right. Right. So to kick this off, we got a question from Brad King looking for best advice for establishing informational database sites. So this isn't an SEO tip, but something I would consider doing is like a Chrome extension or a plugin or an app. And if you can add some sort of gamification aspect to it, people love useful tools. And a really good way to have people share your website is to have them using your tool and they're going to tell other people about it.

18:52So I would look to do something like that. Next one is from AB, who wants to know how you can get blog content to rank on top of search results that Google mostly pushes e-commerce products for. So this is a great question. And the answer is you can't. You can't teach Google anything. So do the search for the term that you want to win. Look at the pages that Google is rewarding, and then that's the page that you need to give Google. And if it's a long form article, that's what you got to do. People come to me all the time like, I'm trying to get my product to rank and I can't get it to rank. And then you do the search and there are no products on page one.

19:21And so there are 500 word product pages going up against a 2 ,500 word long form article. You're never going to win. So look at the search, see what Google is rewarding, and then Google that page. This next one's from Darian, who works for an education company offering Lean Six Sigma training and certification tips on nurturing leads, new email subscribers to deals. So something that we've done is like a free video series that's educational. So I can see in this situation like five mistakes everyone makes with Six Sigma or is Lean Six Sigma right for you kind of a thing and make it educational and informational so that one people know you know what you're talking about.

19:57You've thought about these kind of things. And by the time they reach back to you after they've gone through that series, that means they're really warm. Like they saw your series, they liked it. Now they want to buy from you. So that's something we've used effectively and perhaps could be used effectively here. Chris Tria has a villa that's on Airbnb, recently put it up also on Facebook and Instagram. How can I increase ranking on Google and on those social media platforms to increase visibility without paying for ads? So I know Airbnb results will appear in the SERP sometimes, and I think Facebook does as well.

20:29Probably the only thing you can control there is your title and the description of the property. And so if you can write a title that is keyword rich and keyword focused, and the same thing with the description, if you're getting terms in there that people would search for, that's what I mean by keyword rich, that might give you an opportunity for that to show up in Google. I'm not sure there's too much else you could do. Last one here. What would you tell your previous boss? You know what? I've never really had a boss. The bosses that I've had were in transition jobs, like waiting tables while I was in college or bartending when I was in law school.