Ep 251: The New SEO Reality On How To Get Real Results For Your Content Website with Raf and Rad

Jaryd Krause:

What if everything you learned about SEO is now useless and just doesn't work? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast. And today I'm speaking with Rad Paluszak, who is a website developer and software architect with 20 years’ experience. He has been a technical mastermind in the SEO industry since 2010. And now head up our BOB SEO team with another partner, Rafal.

Now, Rafal is the head of this organization, where he manages a lot of people. He's basically the main man of management and Rad is the mastermind behind SEO, where he specializes in international and technical SEO, machine learning and understanding, all that sort of stuff, as well as looking at SEO from a business and management's perspective.

And in this podcast episode, Rad, Rafal and I talk about what it would look like if you bought a $50,000 website and spent $1,000 per month on it and what results you could expect. And then some examples of what that could look like. We talk about how to budget and what to spend on your acquisition, buying an online business, and then what to spend on growth and ongoing costs for the best results for your online business.

We also speak about a certain important question and theory of how do you hire an accountant and tell them how they should save your money on taxes? It's a similar thing with SEO. A lot of people believe they know what inputs need to be made to grow their website.

And we talk a lot about deconditioning what you've learned about growing a content website, what it actually needs and what SEO you think works for growth versus where the landscape is at now and what your website actually needs.

We also talk about why website management, like buying a website and just giving it to a website manager, is a dying service, even though it can work for some websites. We also talk about what else it needs on top of management for growth.

And we discuss why you shouldn't only focus on SEO. That's the vehicle, not the destination. And why should you be focusing on the destination and how important it is to not hire an SEO based on “I just need more traffic” because more traffic is not the answer?

We talk about why you should be looking for more revenue and why your SEOs and your business partners, like what we do here at BOB, should work with you on growing the business and your revenue, not just traffic, because that's not really the answer.

There's so much value in this episode. I'm sure you guys are going to absolutely love it. We do talk about how we work as SEOs and how we grow people's sites. If you are interested in this, go to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services. There'll be a link to that in the description as well. For now, let's dive in. Enjoy.

Have you been lied to about how to increase organic traffic and grow your website? I too used to think that all you needed to do was add more content and gain backlinks, but this just doesn't work.

More content and more links alone are not the answer. Nor do you need to butcher your website with generic SEO changes you picked up on some crummy online tutorial, leaving you with a Frankenstein website that's slow and clunky.

And because I got sick of seeing great people with great websites struggle to grow them, I decided to do something about it. I created an SEO service, which is not just about publishing content and getting links. Sure, we offer that.

But first, we give you quick wins, which are SEO tweaks. We can make you a website that actually boosts your rankings. And then we lay out a killer SEO strategy to acquire more traffic and revenue that outranks your competitors with less content and fewer links.

We've thoroughly tested this service on many websites before launching it and have achieved incredible results, which you'll see on our landing page, which I'm about to share with you. Now, you can finally buy a business and give it to us to grow it for you.

To check out our SEO service, head to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services and book a call to chat with us to see what the best growth strategy is for you and your website. That's buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services. And a link will be in the description too.

I can't help but laugh because we have so much fun on our calls. We've actually just had like a half an hour chat off air, and Raf, you just made me laugh so hard and I just want to say I really appreciate that.

Raf:

You're welcome.

Jaryd Krause:

So, yeah, welcome back, Rad and Rafal. This is going to be fun.

Rad:

Hello, glad to be back.

Raf:

Yeah. Hi, everyone. Hi, Jaryd.

Jaryd Krause:

Hey, Raf. So we've got a few other podcasts that we've done and the very last one we did together was Episode 248, which was just a couple of weeks ago, and that was on more content and more links, which is a failing SEO strategy. And that's pretty timely, obviously, with what's been happening in the space.

But, Rad, you and I have had a bunch of podcast episodes, Episode 239 and Episode 220. I think it was another one. We've had a lot. So, guys, go back and you can search on the website for SEO and see all the podcasts that we've done together.

But today we're going to talk more about SEO and website management with us here at BOB. And I've got a couple of good questions to distinguish the difference between a few things and how we work. So this is going to be an open discussion between us.

The first question I do have, though, is a question that I got from somebody via email who's been following BOB for quite a while and consuming all the content. And the question was, if I buy a website for $50,000 and spend $1,000 per month on it with you guys for your SEO and management services for a year, what results should I expect?

And obviously, the answer is that it depends on so many factors. I already emailed this person back, mentioning that it depends on the website you buy, the niche, the monetization, the environment, Google, your competitors and all that sort of stuff. So it depends on a lot. But when somebody comes to us with those sorts of questions from an SEO perspective, Rad and Raf, how would you guys go about answering them?

Raf:

We're hearing a lot of similar questions. A lot. And this is a valid question. When you're thinking about investing and you obviously just want to know, you want to forecast at least what kind of return on investment you're going to get.

So as you said, well, we also ask questions like, okay, how old is the site, what niche is it, and what's the history of the site? So we analyze the site before we say anything. So we try to forecast every time and try to give you information about what you can expect.

And in many, many cases, we say, like, “If you have $1K a month, meaning that you have $12K to invest over the year, and very often $1K is not enough to really grow every month at scale.” so we'll put together a different strategy.

We say, “You don't need to work fully; add a couple of blog posts and a couple of links or whatever every month, because that might not get you where you want to be. But instead, we bring you a strategy when we can, for example, implement something bigger every third month, so you invest $3K over the quarter. But you're just going to pay us for one month and we're just going to implement something a lot bigger.”

But the main reason here is that Google doesn't care about little changes and little things. Google is suffocating on content, suffocating on information. So what we want to do is just hit Google hard, meaning give them something on your site to digest. It's going to take them time, but they're going to really evaluate your site differently. And that can bring you actual revenue.

And we've been testing this for a couple of good years now and the punch really works best. So it would be ideal, of course, to have the ability to offer the punch to Google with information, whether that's entire sections or hubs of content or a magnificent number of links from great sources every month.

But if this is not possible, we can do it less often, but that will give time to Google to actually digest, analyze and then give us the results and our common practices as well to show something to Google to give them a bit more to digest.

Let them do what they need to do and just revisit that two months later into the retrospection of what kind of results brought and then modify the further approaches.

So it is actually a self-learning method and Google is learning about your site a bit more and it can actually give you a lot better results. So that's usually how I approach that. And we tested this approach, and it really works best with smaller budgets.

Rad:

From my strategy perspective, I just wanted to add to what Rafal said about the budget being overall 12K. It's a really good approach to framing that idea because it also depends on the ambition that the client has. So let's say, okay, I'm earning $1000 from the site a month.

I want to reinvest everything and go with that. Okay, now if we spread it out over 12 months, there is a chance, not just a possibility, and I would say a pretty high chance that this site will—in one way or another—be affected by an update that will happen within these 12 months. So it's actually better to invest, like Rafal said, a little bit more at once at the beginning than to wait and keep investing that $1,000 every month for 12 months.

Now, the reason for that is actually something we're looking at in Google's own self-assessment questions for the helpful content update, where one of the questions is What is the purpose of the site?

Is the purpose only to gather traffic from the search engines? And if we take a client on, we actually go through that self-assessment more or less and specifically look at this question.

And if the answer is, “Well, the site's main purpose is because it's a content site, to actually earn money through ads and, ergo, gain traffic from the search engines to do that,” well, we try to find a way to diversify that, find a way to implement some added value to the site.

And sometimes we go crazy and implement a directory of bloody sports clubs on the site, or a directory of some companies, or a directory of X, Y, and Z reviewed or at least rated companies, or some other stuff like the whole hub about passive income, for example.

So there are a few things that we look at, but we also look at the additional value that the site might offer. So we no longer have to answer that the purpose of the site is to gather traffic from the search engines.

And for that, we sometimes need a bit more resources at the beginning, because, if you think about it, that investment makes your site more proof of any upcoming updates that will definitely happen within the 12-month window.

Jaryd Krause:

That's exactly what I was going to mention as well. I think most people are fighting Google and playing a game against Google, but if you get on their side and give them what they want, you can be on the winning side.

Because when a Google algorithm update happens, there are people who lose, but then there are other people or websites that win. By investing in your site earlier, before it happens, you can put yourself on the winning side.

And I think it's really important to understand that maybe your budget in this instant example is like $12,000. And what that might look like is, okay, maybe let's spend $6,000 in the first two to three months, and then maybe once we find out what's working, we can decide to spend the rest of the budget moving forward and see what that looks like.

Another strategy, and this is the key strategy that I tell people when they're acquiring a business, is to not spend 100% of your capital. For example, if you have $100,000 that you can spend on a business and, say, you've got $120,000 in your bank account, this is not financial advice. This is just an example that could work for you and may work for a bunch of people.

Say you've got $120,000 to $130,000 in your bank account; you're doing awesome. Absolutely. And you know that you want to invest in that. Don't spend the 120 or the 130. Maybe spend $100,000 on an acquisition if that's right for you.

And then, with that $100,000 going towards an acquisition, maybe spend $80,000 on acquiring the business. And then you've got a budget of $20 grand that's not coming from income from the business to reinvest in it and give it a leg up for growth.

And I find that if you're going to buy or acquire something, typically you're going to want to grow it. And typically, you're going to want to set yourself up for success to give that website or that online business, even if it's e-commerce or anything like that, the best chance at winning.

So then put that budget towards growth. And normally, growth, as I say, is achieved through risk minimization strategies by minimizing your risk, i.e., doing SEO things or whatever it is in your business. That's also a growth strategy at the same time.

So I'm glad that you really mentioned that, because give it a good kickstart at the start. And yeah, this is going to come to—I'm aware that we haven't given a specific answer to the question. They want to know what results they can expect.

But when this happens, we kind of need to put a bit of money into the site to sort of see how it fares and what that investment looks like in the environment of our competitors in Google to see how it has fared to start to see if we put X amount in, we're likely going to get X amount back. And that's a very rough figure. But first, we need to get a little bit of data.

So let’s keep on with the discussion of the expectation of results. What would you guys mention to people? Because I know they want a number, they want an ROI, which is really hard for us to give. How would you guys answer that?

Raf:

Well, every discussion is different. Obviously, we have a process, we have data analysis, and we have a lot of experience in that. But nevertheless, every site is different. Because every site, first and foremost, might be monetized in the same way, but monetization varies as well.

And the way I operate around that, and the way I communicate always is like, “Hey, even if you put 12K, you might not double or triple your revenue from your ad streams. But it doesn't mean that your site won't be making more money.

If it's going to keep growing, and we'll see the first indicators of sites growing in the first two to three months, it's not like you need to wait an entire year to evaluate your investment. It's usually a lot quicker than that and you will see the site growing.”

By site growth, I mean traffic or keyword visibility, because that's the first indication that SEO strategies are actually going well. So the money might not follow in the same month.

But what we're trying to do is go beyond standard ways of monetizing the site, which are ads and some affiliate links that people are using. We're trying to expand that, meaning we have a number of programs in your niche for better monetization, for better cookie value, for example, for affiliate income.

So Amazon is not always a perfect solution. It's usually the worst solution, to be honest. Because if they’re listening, they're way too greedy, in my opinion.

Jaryd Krause:

I agree.

Raf:

Hey, Jeff.

Rad:

Hello Jeff. All the best.

Raf:

So there are better solutions in your niche. So we can find that for you. Obviously, the ultimate decision is yours. We come to you and say, “Hey, we think this ShareASale program offers 40 days of cookie value, and it gives you 5%.

It's perfect for you, in your niche. Let's do that.” So we're trying to find ways to monetize the site. We're looking at newsletters; we advise on that. We have a number of tools that we can recommend.

If you purchase your site, and this is your first site, you might be hooked to the idea that, “Hey, ads, and that's my money from the site.” But if you start looking into that from different perspectives, with our help, then you understand that you can make a lot more money, even if your traffic won't go double in 12 months. You might just have 25% extra traffic in a year, but you might have 100% more revenue.

Because again, this is not just about the SEO game. It's about the revenue game. And we understand it, but we also need you to be a partner in this and just look at the ways that we propose, like having a discussion with us and implement those things. Because there's an amazing number of ways that you can make money from your content site beyond ads.

And ads are also intrusive. And Google has been actually issuing penalties for way too many ads on the site. I don't remember how the update was called.

Rad:

Intrusive ads updated, I think, historically, and then they stopped calling it anything.

Raf:

Yeah. Perfectly framed.

Rad:

Yeah. You got the Rad’s Google encyclopedia.

Raf:

It's good to have you. So, yeah, people are surprised sometimes when they jump on board with us and we say, “All right, put your Mediavine to balance instead of heavy or whatever the higher plan is, because no one actually can see your content and you're not helping the user.

And if you look at the HCU (Helpful Content Updates), your content needs to help people and how's it going to help people if people can't see it? Very unlikely, right? ”

So that's why we sometimes come up with those hard solutions. But again, working towards ROI. And finally, answering the question, I'm really behaving like a Polish Prime Minister answering questions about the economy. So answering the question directly is that, yeah, we measure ROI; we work towards ROI.

And I've seen projects that doubled their net profit in a year. And I saw a number of projects with just a 20% increase. It really depends on how you're going to work with us and what kind of freedom you're going to give us to monetize your site better.

Jaryd Krause:

Let's talk about freedom. Let's talk about freedom there. Do you have something you want to add, Rad, before I talk about freedom?

Rad:

Yeah. I just wanted to frame it again using an example. So we've had a proposal out over the last couple of days that was actually a post-update recovery strategy. And if anyone listening or watching us is wondering, because Rafael said or I mentioned also that we might come up with a crazy idea of implementing that huge thing on the site, that it might cost an arm and a leg,.

So that proposal, for example, was over a period of, I think, four months. The first month was the most expensive, around 3K. But in doing so, we are actually rebuilding the whole site. So basically, redesigning, implementing new templates, moving the site over, and doing the migration.

And on top of that, we are working on connecting this site to the APIs and gathering data to implement that additional migration. So this is just to give you an example of what you can expect at a certain price point.

Jaryd Krause:

That’s a pretty damn good price point to rebuild a site; start doing it for three grand. Just knowing the space, it's damn good.

Rad:

Yeah. I mean, I would have to say that it obviously will depend on the site and the size of the site. So the bigger the site, it might get more expensive. But I just wanted to give an example so people know roughly if they can afford that or actually the opposite; they don't think, “I can't afford it.” And that's it for me.

Okay. So let's start with the conversation. Rafał said it depends. We have to analyze the situation. But usually, it's not as scary as you might think. And having said that, we also don't position ourselves as the cheapest.

So you can probably find and do something cheaper. It's just with us; you're getting a complete package and people who are focused, not just on giving you the strategy or executing the strategy and that's it. We're actually focusing, like Rafał said, on bringing you that value that you need. And the value that you need is usually the revenue from the site.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. It's very different if you go to a website developer and say, “Hey, can you redevelop my site?” And then you go to an SEO and say, “Cool, I just got it redeveloped.” Typically, an SEO is going to be like, “This thing's slow and it sucks. It's worse.

It might look good, but it does not perform.” So that's something for people to understand as well. You guys are looking at it from a very, I would say, holistic perspective for revenue growth and performance. And also thinking about user experience and all of those things included.

Now, this is where I want to talk about freedom and flexibility, because sometimes I know for myself, coming into the space. As I came into the space and started buying websites, I went to membership, then e-commerce and then to the content.

And through a lot of the things that people are listening to, other people's podcasts, and just all the media out there, we sort of start to get conditioned into how things are supposed to work in the space and believe that we need to post X amount of articles a month, we need to get X amount of backlinks per month, and it needs to be within these criteria and stuff like that.

There's that conditioning that I have noticed that when we have onboarded clients, they're like, “No, it needs to be done this way.” And that is a limiting belief from what I have found, and I know that to be true to myself.

Sometimes I go to a professional and say, “Hey, I want the house painted this way because I want it painted that way.” but they've got this whole career behind them of knowing what would look better and how to do it better. And what's going to get me what I actually want in a different way? And similar to SEO, what do you guys do?

So maybe let's give a few examples of the flexibility that you guys need when people come to you guys as professionals to end up getting to the point where they're like, “Okay, cool, that makes sense.” And how important is that for you guys with getting performance for people?

Rad:

Yeah. So maybe I'll let Rafal take it, but I'd like to start with an example. Obviously, I won't disclose the site. However, we've had this client who actually came to us conditioned exactly like you said.

who was obsessed with “Oh, I need this, however many posts a month and however links” and was constantly chasing us and he was constantly on our case with the implementation every other day, asking, “Oh, why is there no new posts coming on the site? Why is this not done? Why is this not done?”

And where we usually work is in the way that we drive the strategy, and it works best for the clients. In this example, we were a bit stuck with constantly responding to the needs that the client set for us. And that was going on for a few months when eventually Rafal said, “Hey, look, stop this.

Let's refocus our campaign because what we're doing now is you're getting deliverables implemented, the site is growing, but nothing is happening with that. Let us reevaluate. Let us get back to you.”

We did that. We came up with a crazy idea. Again, one of those differentiating things that is of additional value on the site. Well, after we implemented that, I think by the time this podcast goes live, this is already a published case study on your website, and you'll see a great, at least, 9x growth that we gained with that strategy that we eventually reclaimed ownership of when the client gave us this freedom of implementation.

So this is just an example, but I'm trying to drive it in the direction that we are happy to maintain the site and execute the strategy as you're telling us to. However, if you've signed up for SEO with us, let us execute the strategy that we developed for your site.

And this has a much higher chance of bringing you the desired outcome or even extending expectations for the strategy that you would have otherwise. So, yeah, sorry, Rafal, I kicked in. I know you wanted to take that one, but I really wanted to share that example because it's a great example.

Raf:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually a very good example. But obviously, freedom and independence are what we're fighting for. But for real, yeah, Braveheart, brave SEOs in such a difficult world.

Let's imagine that you are an investor, and this is not your first site You've done it before and you know the niche and everything about it, including why you know how to monetize. You just need SEOs to go and implement, modify, give you a second pair of eyes, whatever.

This is also us. Come to us and you can drive your strategy. We'll help you develop your strategy. We won't interfere with that. We can give you just our opinion on the strategy if you know what you're doing.

And that's a management, a service management or SEO management service when you tell us what you need and want, and we can give you those content links, optimization services, whatever. Fine. And I think that in this kind of situation, it works best. And this is also freedom for us. We don't put a strategy together. The strategy is yours. We can roll out your strategy. Fantastic.

But usually, like most cases, people actually think they know because they've learned a little bit about SEO, but it's usually the first or second, the third site. And they don't really know as much as we do. Just for a simple reason, we've been doing this for just about 16 hours every day for the past 10 years.

So we kind of know a lot about it. So the best way, then, is actually from the investor perspective to come to us, fill out the brief, have a consultation with us, and tell us what you know about the brand, about the niche, about the history, about whatever you know, and what your expectations are.

And we measure expectations against your budget, against your niche and against your competitors. And then we're going to put together a strategy that might be crazy and adventurous, but it's going to be suited for your budget, for your niche or for whoever you compete with. And then we roll the dice. And we're going to be reporting to you on a different level.

And we're not going to be reporting you like, “Hey, every day we're posting our article or we're planning this and that.” There’s no need to be nitty gritty here because you'll know the strategy, you'll see the strategy and our common goal will be first, traffic, and then a return on your investment.

So we're going to be reporting to you differently on a monthly basis, explaining where we are with the projects. So what kind of key result, KPI, if you want to, we hit or how far off from the objective are we?

So those kinds of relationships actually save you money and give you more as an investor. We don't spend time actually answering all your questions or updating you every day. We don't need to hire anyone for that. But this money is not going to our pockets.

It’s actually going to your site. So we're funding more analysis, more content, more APIs or whatever we need to use for your site. So the money goes into your site. And it's money well spent. We already know the strategy. So we're running the strategy with every single penny that we can get.

And what Rad was mentioning was a perfect example. One of quite a few examples already. When we started in the site management position, someone came to us who was kind of new to the SEO space but for example, experienced software development or other technologies, so a knowledgeable person. But SEO is a different game.

So it's not like you can work in very strict sprints and just delegate work and then expect results. It’s just going to create a bit of a mess because then the agency will be looking at, “Okay, so this person just needs deliverables, not actually the ROI reporting, basically.”

So you just need a certain number of articles, whether that's good or bad, because you think that's right. And I understand people learning that from many influencers and many publications on the internet when they first touch SEO. But what really works best is trust.

So if you trust us, we'll treat your site as our own. And however that sounds and how many people actually say that, we really feel that, and we really do that. Your site is our own. So we look at your site on a daily basis from your perspective, not an agency perspective. So you're not hiring someone from whatever; you're actually building your team around your site.

And if you trust your team, trust us. You're going to get results or you're going to get information that something is not doable because the situation has changed. And your investment is at risk. And then you'll receive an honest conversation from us like, “Hey, I think there was a significant problem with the site you just purchased.

And we need to talk about it. Maybe it does not need SEO. It just needs a new template and a new front.” So we're going to be honest about it if you give us the freedom to make decisions and communicate freely about what is best for your site and your business needs, basically.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Love it. I love that explanation.

Rad:

I think there is just one more sentence to that. I've been thinking about what we said so far about redesigning the site and Rafał said that an honest conversation about what the site really needs is coming from us and this is how we work.

I just wanted to really emphasize that if you've been learning about SEO but not doing it yourself and you don't have that much experience with it, you'll think that comparing it, for example, to software development, where you can assert that certain things definitely happen in software development,.

So if you put this code in, you have this outcome. In SEO, it's sometimes not the case. In SEO, sometimes you check all the boxes off, but then the expected result is slightly different from the actual result.

So that's one thing that's really important. And I felt like this was worth highlighting and really making a statement about that. And another thing is that, again, especially for less experienced people in the SEO industry or SEO world, things that a website needs that are part of SEO are sometimes really unexpected.

And I mainly think about what I said earlier about, and Rafał said about, the new template on the site. You would think, “Oh, why would I need a new template? Does Google have eyes and look at my site and how it looks and if it's pleasing?” Well, not exactly. But indirectly, yes.

So Google can actually render the site, see all the elements or know where all the elements are. Google gathers information on user behavior through, for example, a user experience report from Google Chrome. So it knows how people behave on your site and if they are pleased or not with how it looks and what usability it delivers to them.

So there are certain things that you would say, “Oh, how is that even a part of SEO? Why are you guys even talking about how my site needs that?” But the reality is that it all boils down to making the site better.

And I know it sounds like a catchphrase or something, but a helpful content update didn't come from the idea that, “Oh, we just need people to read the content and be happy about it.” It comes from the idea that the actual purpose of the site is there. And so we're looking at many different things to deliver that purpose.

Jaryd Krause:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's back to that example of if you're hiring somebody who knows what they're doing and has done it for 16 hours a day for over 10 years, that's a lot of experience doing it. And learning SEO in theory is not the same as doing it because you learn so much from the doing versus the theory.

You can't learn to ride a bike from reading a book or through theory. You can only learn to ride a bike by getting on the bike, falling over multiple times and working out what works and how to ride the right way. And that's what you guys have done.

So I want to touch on SEO growth and website management. Now here's where I see there can be a problem for a lot of people that want to buy a website and then want to find somebody to just manage their website. Management is management. It's not growth.

And sometimes people have management with growth packages put on and they will have, “All right, we can manage your site. We'll go through and update all the plugins and we'll make sure some bugs are fixed and whatever is going on.

And then we'll also give you four links a month and two articles,” or whatever it is. And that's basic and that doesn't work anymore, typically, depending on what the content is. There’s so much more to growth than just that, which is basically management and what a lot of people are offering.

Now, I want to talk about, as you guys say, the differences between management and SEO. Because as we've progressed and as we work with clients, you guys are already basically doing management for people's sites;

Some of it's just development, which is not typically always SEO and just needs to be done as a platform as a foundational base to work on as an SEO. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we help people with website management and SEO and the difference between those two and the blend, I guess, as well.

Raf:

Yeah. It's very much the blend that we actually propose. Because, well, the way I approach things is that your site needs to be healthy, needs to be secured, needs to be available, and all of that. So we need to take care of your site from this perspective; it needs to be faster and so on and so forth.

So we very often come with a management package that we put together for you if this is what you need and it consists of some links and some content, but this is a very standard approach. And I am happy to offer that. And sometimes for some niches, it still works.

But what's really best here is that we can propose a mixed, hybrid approach, as you said. Okay. Foundation, which is a secured site, fast site, whatever, that needs to be there every month, all the time. That’s your standard plan.

But on top of that, we use our skills to put you on a growth plan, meaning that we find new ways to grow your site. We still have an ongoing AI revolution. So there are plenty of things that we can use, and programmatic SEO is also one of our strengths. So we can really create another strategy for your growth.

So we can combine those two things and say, “Okay. Basics are covered. Fine. They're very often needed. But here is an additional growth plan. And this is what the growth plan actually can bring you in six months or 12 months.

So I think those two elements are actually needed if you want to grow your site, if you want to really start making more money from this business and if you want to secure the business from future helpful or unhelpful, ridiculous updates, because they're on the horizon, I think. So thinking about, “Yeah, I want management plus growth,” it's actually the best way forward, in my opinion. What do you think, Rad?

Rad:

Yeah. Well, I think for me, the main distinction is—and by the way, again, like you already said, we're happy to run with it. Management is when you know what you want with the site. Maybe you need a little bit of advice, or maybe you've even bought an audit from us and then you're thinking about implementing it yourself.

So you don't want to sign up for a full campaign. But then you actually turn around and say, “Hey, you know what, guys? You can actually implement that, but I only want some elements of it. I'll take care of the others.”

And this is management. We will ensure content is implemented, it looks pretty, the site is good and dandy, it works great, it's optimized, we're maintaining it and we're implementing some other things that you asked us to, but it's more just a driven approach that we're executing. When you have all this strategy and you want us to just get it done, it's fine.

But Rafal, as you said earlier, it stems from a classic approach to SEO. Deliverable based, strictly deliverable based. And I liked that you said that it works in certain niches on certain occasions. I think it depends a lot on the site.

And I'm going to, again, repeat myself, saying that if the site already has additional purposes beyond just earning through traffic generation, that probably might work on this site because you're basically just decorating what's already built, if I could put that in context.

However, if you're site isn't built out yet or it hasn't got any additional value other than informative content, which for Google itself isn't really the additional value because everyone nowadays can offer informative content, then you would need something that is more than just classic SEO, the classic deliverable-based SEO.

Um, where you're just looking and checking off the boxes. You would need the growth strategy and that is the growth element of that campaign that we offer.

Raf:

It's good to say the word about a growth strategy. Maybe to really emphasize that a little bit more because the growth strategy is not necessarily more articles, i.e., content. The more content, the merrier, of course, you need content and no question about that.

But the growth strategy really could be transforming your car parts’ informational site into a car parts’ e-commerce based on drop shipping methods or affiliates. So the growth comes from thinking outside the box, finding the box and making your site something different than just the content side.

Also, by the growth, what we think is that—and this is the idea that we tested and it's working and we're seeing that across the board that used to be a blog. It used to be a blog. You had 500 articles. Fine. In most niches, not all of them, this time is over, and the future looks like the blog is just a part of the site.

You need engagement. And people do not engage with long forms of content. And obviously, you can enhance the content by adding AI videos, other videos, audio files, diagrams, quizzes, etc. And that's super helpful. And this is also what we do. Content enrichment is one of the best ways right now to actually save the content you've already bought.

But the growth that we understand is actually, as I said, creating an e-commerce site or an eBook shop on your website, transforming content, and reusing your content in different ways to make sure that people stay on your site for longer.

And Google says that directly as well, the engagement score, they do have—even new Google Analytics—the engagement. They even call it engagement. And that comes from social media as well. I remember when Facebook was transforming.

First, they were all about likes. So, like Google, it's all about traffic and keywords. Yeah, the more, the merrier; more keywords are fantastic. Let's bring it in; you rock. And that was fine.

But then, as Facebook was suffocating on the number of pages and people, Google was also suffocating on that. So there's a lot of data to digest and people's behavior is also changing. So Facebook introduced an engagement score.

They started boosting sites in their organic search results and organic feed through engagement. Because they understand that they make money on ads. So if you stay longer on Facebook, then they make more money.

So if you really think about it, this is precisely the same approach that Google uses right now. They want people to love Google. So they need to find great content and this content is what people engage with. So let's imagine that you're having a recipe site.

Someone is reading recipes on your site about, fantastic, whatever. And they need to close your site and go to—I don't know—Walmart Online or whatever else there is, and just purchase everything separately.

And that's a hassle, right? People don't want hassle. So what we do for you when we spot such a thing by looking at engagement and bounce rates and all of that on your site is say, “Hey, let's create an affiliate shop on your blog.

So people can actually jump from reading the recipe directly to the basket and basically have even all the elements in the basket, all the essential elements for this particular recipe.”

And that's the engagement you want. First, people stay a couple minutes on that—even longer, maybe. Then they can purchase it, and you can make affiliate income from it. And your investment is 100% secured by future helpful content updates—maybe not all the other updates like Core or whatever—but helpful content updates. Because your content is actually helping people cook something for this occasion from A to Z.

And I really want people to start thinking that way. The intent. Because when I'm thinking about it, everything falls into place and starts with intent as well. Google started with Hummingbird, and even before that, it started recognizing intents and that was a game changer. And now we’re seeing more and more of that.

So they can recognize what kind of intent that person has. And if you fulfill the intent in search results, then your content fulfills the intent and Google Analytics can notice. Well, Google can notice by all other means and forms as well that the action has happened on your side and that someone is happy with your content.

Rad:

Yeah. So, Rafal, I actually have a perfect example for that. I've been analyzing a site recently and what happened was that the site lost 80% of traffic. So it's a bloody disaster. Everyone would probably cry if that happened to them. But what I've noticed is that the traffic, yeah, it's lost.

However, in the rankings, they didn't move that much. What happened was that this site being a content heavy informational site lost sometimes three, sometimes five positions, sometimes still ranking in on the first page, but not as high as it used to. So if you're looking purely at ranking, the damage wasn't that great. The damage was actually in the traffic.

And what I started noticing on this site was that a lot of keywords were taken over by e-commerce sites. And well, Google does that sometimes. It changes the user's intent. It drives more traffic towards e-commerce, and I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but we've been seeing the opposite of that over the last few years, just before Christmas, just before Black Friday, where Google was actually reversing it and pushing the e-commerce sites down. Who knows why, but you might hint at the ad revenue.

Anyway, going back to my example for a content site, it's a disaster. So, first of all, you've lost most of your traffic. Secondly, you've been taking over sites that are totally out of your league. So, what do you do? Do you pump more content into the site? Of course not. Because it's not going to work.

And that's one of the perfect examples where the actual strategy would be to make this site look more like an e-commerce site. And you can do that by connecting it to ShareASale or Awin APIs, pulling the products, showing them on the site and then actually earning the affiliate commission off of everything.

So by implementing this strategy, you're actually increasing the chances of recovery because you're more competitive because you are also an e-commerce site now. On top of that, you can actually earn additional affiliate commissions from the e-commerce section that we've created.

Jaryd Krause:

Love it. Guys, for everybody listening, listen to this. Listen to what Rad and Raf are saying. They're SEOs and they can do the deliverability and the management, and they've done it for a long period of time, but their results come from thinking outside the box.

They care about SEO, but that's not the goal. They focus on what your actual goal is. And that's growth and more revenue. And they're using SEO to do it. So SEO is a vehicle with the goal of generating revenue and growth.

So when everybody is thinking about SEO, I think a lot of people get bogged down in like, “Oh, I just need to get more traffic and I just need to get more rankings.” And that can be a helpful thing, but is that always going to equal more money as well? And the answer is no; it doesn't always equal more money. More traffic is not always the answer and better ranking is not always the answer.

I think so many people get lost and forget about what the actual goal is ROI, money in their pocket and getting their money back from their investment. And the way to do it is through SEO and they become so focused on the vehicle that they can't think outside the box.

And I'm just so grateful for you guys coming on and sharing your minds and your collaboration and how outside the box you guys are with the intention of working on people's sites, sitting in their chairs, wearing their shoes, knowing that they're going to want more revenue for their business, not just more traffic. So, yeah, I'm really grateful for you guys coming on.

Rad:

Of course.

Raf:

Thanks. Yeah, it was really great to share our approach to that. I know it's uncommon for SEOs to approach that because, obviously, that comes with expectations, responsibility and ownership. And if we take the ownership, yeah, we do take the ownership 100%. And we're seeing that it really works best.

So, yeah, this is what we propose. But again, if you know your strategy and your niche, we can also help with just the pure SEO side of things. And it's going to be spot on. That's what I guarantee for sure.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Guys, everybody is listening. Thank you for listening. There'll be a link to work with us. We call it an SEO service, but really, it's a growth strategy. buyingonlinebusiness.com/seo-services. There'll be a link in the description.

And, guys, this has been a pleasure. I just absolutely love chatting with you guys both. Even just before our call, we had a great chat. And yeah, I'm looking forward to many more of these. So thanks.

Rad:

Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

Raf:

Thanks very much. Thanks. It was great and fun. See you.

Rad:

Cheers.

Jaryd Krause: See you. Hey, YouTube watchers, if you thought that video was good, you should check out this video here on the 2 Best Types of Websites Beginners Should Buy. Or check out my playlist on How I Made My First $100K Buying Websites and how to do due diligence. Check it out. It's an awesome playlist. You'll enjoy it.