#169 - Understanding Google's Algorithm and SEO Optimization with Spencer Haws

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In this episode, Andy Humphrey plays a recorded live event with Spencer Haws from the Seller's Summit conference, the importance of website ranking, and managing multiple businesses. Spencer delves into Google's algorithm changes, AI's role in search, and diversifying platform presence. He discusses the significance of internal link structure, creating a fast-loading website, and standardizing publishing processes. He also explores content strategies, optimizing content, and tactics to boost revenue.

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) Introduction and discussion about Seller's Summit conference (5:06) Importance of having a website and ranking on Google (10:18) Discussion on managing multiple businesses and focusing on nichepursuits.com (17:42) Understanding Google's algorithm changes and the role of AI in search (19:31) Diversifying platform presence and cleaning up old content for better SEO (23:16) Restructuring your site and the importance of internal link structure (25:17) Creating a professional and fast-loading website and standardizing publishing processes (30:31) Content strategy: what to publish, using Google search console for keyword insights (35:00) Updating content regularly for SEO and process of optimizing content (37:18) Optimizing your site to boost revenue and tactics for increasing revenue

KEY POINTS:

Spencer Haas shared his experience of scaling website traffic by publishing a significant amount of content, revealing that he increased his output to over 1000 articles in a year which led to a traffic boost from 100-200k views a month to 700-800k.
He emphasized the importance of updating old content and optimizing new content with a focus on internal linking and keyword targeting to improve SEO and Google rankings.
Spencer's approach to content resulted in substantial revenue growth, where display ad revenue alone began to cover the entire content budget, turning other income streams like product sales and affiliate marketing into pure profit.

TRANSCRIPT

Andy Humphrey: Hey, my friends. Welcome back to the Sprink Leonard Show. I'm your host, Andy Humphrey. This is episode 169 coming to you from the 10th floor of the Westin Hotel in Fort Lauderdale FL FLL. I'm not really sure what the second l stands for, with the airport code, FL4 Lawter Layle, Anyway, it makes me every time I I see the airport code code FL, it makes me wonder what it is or why.

Andy Humphrey: I should just Google it. What's the second l? Okay. I am recording this episode here at the hotel because I'm at a conference called Seller's Summit think I've actually recorded 1 or 2 other episodes here at the conference because I come every year. It's super fun.

Andy Humphrey: And if you are looking to, start your own, let's say, blog or physical product, or other kind of digital commerce style business, then, you might wanna check it out. Come down next year. Seller's summit. Dotcom Andy, learn. It's a fantastic conference for learning, meeting other new and successful digital marketers, which are often hard hard to, hard to come by.

Andy Humphrey: And it's pretty fun to get a room full of other other nerds, not just sprinkler nerds, but but nerds in other, categories, other product categories, other content categories, and it's fun to get together and see what happens when all of the brains start firing at once. So I'm here this week. I I had the opportunity earlier in the week. I flew to Atlanta, Georgia on Monday to visit with the site 1 ecommerce team a super great team. And, if any of you guys that I met this week are listening to this, I really think, you know, that, you will be successful delivering the future to the market.

Andy Humphrey: And I really do think that is the role of the site 1 e commerce team on the street level, the CX specialists is to deliver the future, to customers as it relates to commerce, how to order efficiently, etcetera. So congrats, say, one for building a fantastic team, and thank you for having me come speak at the event. It was really good. Andy I can't wait to see what what, what comes what happens this year from the team. And then, right after that flew down here to Fort Lauderdale, for the conference.

Andy Humphrey: And then just, just today, actually, met up with my, friend, more more new friend, but, we've known each other. Justin Richards. He's AKA, the sprinkler dude, So we had the nerd and the dude Andy, had a great, great lunch at this, like, apparently a famous Wings Plus, Restaurant Andy Coral Springs, and just talked about some technology tips tool tricks, just fun stuff. And Justin's got a lot of great energy. Keep it up, Justin.

Andy Humphrey: Great to to spend some time with you in person Andy look forward to to learning more together in the future, maybe collaborating on some things. And, we'll see where it goes. What I wanted to share with you on this episode is a short well, it's not short. It's probably 45 minutes of something that I recorded. Here at the conference, a speaker, his name is Spencer Hass, and he he'll he'll tell his story but he is the owner of niche pursuits.com.

Andy Humphrey: So if you would like to learn about how to start your own blog, your own content site, your own website. That's, that's what he does. He's a fantastic resource. He has a software tool called Link Whisper, among others that you can take a look at. And he spoke today about how to rank your website number 1 in Google, and he ran multiple experiments over the years producing almost a 1000 blog posts in a single year.

Andy Humphrey: And one of my takeaways is that he is not he did do an AI experiment which you can find on YouTube if you're interested just Google, Spencer Haas or a niche pursuits Andy you'll probably find the experiment that he ran doing, building building traffic and content using AI. But, it wasn't he didn't really recommend AI. He told his story about actually using real human, man or woman power. To write articles and his exact strategy. It's like 8 steps to building a content website that ranks on Google.

Andy Humphrey: And I thought this was relevant because websites cross all product categories. It doesn't really matter if you are a landscaper, if you are an irrigator, if you sell tennis gear online, if you are a doctor, if you are a lawyer, if you are an accountant, it it doesn't matter. Everybody needs a website. Everybody needs Everybody needs to rank. And so I thought that this would be very applicable for landscape and irrigation people, not just the contractors, but everyone in the industry, if if you wanna improve your website and you wanna learn a little bit more about SEO, that's what this episode is is all about today.

Andy Humphrey: And so I recorded it just on my little DJI wireless mic, recorder. It's actually a lavalier mic. But it it worked decently well. And then I actually use some AI tools to clean it up a little bit and make it sound better for everybody. Andy I think that it does sound good.

Andy Humphrey: It does not sound great, but it doesn't sound bad either. So I hope you enjoy this episode hearing from Spencer Haas about how he ranks number 1 in Google. I think my biggest takeaway is he does spend $200 to $250 per, let's just say, per episode, per article that he is writing Andy for the, experiment or the business that that he used in the experiment, he now makes anywhere from $25,000 to $35,000 per month in revenue generation coming from, you know, various traffic sources and affiliates and things. And so he spent 6 figures Okay? So 100 that over a $100,000, he spent writing, having the team write all of these articles.

Andy Humphrey: So I think I'll end it here because I know his his talk is 45 minutes, and we're already moving up here to 7 or 8 minutes. So thank you so much for listening. If you have a moment, please share this episode with a friend, and this episode might be worth sharing if you have friends in other industries because they can learn a little bit more about SEO and how to rank number 1 on Google. So with that, we'll roll the intro and get right into the episode. If you are an irrigation professional, old or new, who designs, installs, or maintains high end residential commercial or municipal properties, and you wanna use technology to improve your business to get a leg up on your competition even if you're an old school irrigator from the days of hydraulic systems, this show is for you.

Spencer Haws: Alright. Thank you, everybody, for, letting me be the final speaker, I guess, of the day for, solar summit. I'm I'm really excited to be here. Like Tony said, this is actually my third, maybe 4th time, to be here at summer summit, so really excited to be back. So by rings of hands, how many people out there love this Google?

Spencer Haws: By the new Andy? How many people hate Google? I have almost as Andy hands. She'll notice that I've raised my hand both times. Because it's very much a law paid relationship with Google.

Spencer Haws: But today, I'm gonna be talking about a system for creating content at scales ranked number 1 in Google search. Now, just if I were if this presentation were to be a YouTube video. This is the thumbnail. I've been used. So you should be very excited to watch this because it's gonna be very good, very entertaining, just very exciting.

Spencer Haws: I'm gonna share some of the results that I add to increase the traffic to my website from Google by fighting their media finder soon. But just to give you a little bit of background about who I am. Who's called, I am the founder, owner of Mitch pursuits.com. It's log. I started back in 2011 because I had just put my show from building niche websites.

Spencer Haws: I had built previous to 2011 dozens dozens dozens of small niche websites that targeted very specific keywords that ranked in Google Andy I was able to make enough money from those niche websites that I was able to, with my job, I was making more money than, I was making Wells Fargo Bank the time of the background nowadays. And so ever since 2011, and I hone theintroduces.com, we're gonna blog about digital marketing, building into websites, affiliate marketing, Now probably YouTube channel, a podcast that have been running for, 10 years created a a few software products as well. Along the way, but I've always had sort of this, SEO focused content at that way forward. So I've been very involved in this world for a long time. So, I wanna take you guys back just a couple of years in my business, Andy maybe you can emphasize with me where I was.

Spencer Haws: I had a lot going on in my business. So I got a blog that I had started called omniard.com as a niche website that I had started as a public case study. I had documented the entire process for my blog readers, for my audience. And so I was very involved in building that site Andy growing it Andy sharing the results of that case study. Andy as well, I owned I had actually acquired a summit with a partner, called mom.dotcom.

Spencer Haws: So believe it or not, 2 dads owned a mom blog, and we Andy that for a number of years. So I was very involved in that, operation as well. Andy that since 2012, I'm on a blog called runnersold.com. I am a runner. I've done several verathons Andy, so I was involved in in that running that website, as well.

Spencer Haws: And then, as I mentioned, I've started the number of software products. So I had a software product call table labs that I had created the idea that I picked programmers such as to own the sales and marketing for table labs. Andy, of course, why not start a second software product? So Link Whisver is another software product that I started a few years ago, was growing rapidly, and that was requiring a lot more and more of my time as well as sales were growing to that business. And then, of course, I've been running the niche pursuits podcast for over a decade now.

Spencer Haws: I was doing all the interviews, the weekly episodes, and that required a lot of my time. As well. And so maybe as you think about some of this, maybe you guys have several things going on in your business as well and lots of different accounts. But, oh, yes. Also, I am a Ameriabot runner, so I'm gonna make free time, which I had tons of.

Spencer Haws: I was training for a mirror on running lots of miles This is the main reason. The finish line at the Boston marathon last year, in April, of 2023. And, What you may notice in this picture is that I put on a few pounds since this picture. I stopped throwing after this marathon. I have lots of injuries.

Spencer Haws: That's a law story, but I'm in a recovery mode for the last 12 months. So, oh, yes, I also have a fan out, married, about the 4 kids, 2 of which are moving away to college in September, studying to you. And so, you know, that requires lots of my time. And so one night I was laying all of this out to my wife. I was explaining, I have this business and this business and this business.

Spencer Haws: I feel like I just don't have any time to focus on any single one of these businesses. Peggy, I'm all over the place on scatter. How can I figure out how to focus deepwater my business to truly scale what's important in my business? And I as I was laying there Andy visiting my wife, and sort of laid out on my 12 months and I asked her this question, I laid there Andy I was thinking, you know, waiting for her response, as I'd listen, all I hear is a quiet store. I took my one to sleep explaining all of my business problems.

Spencer Haws: So my goal here today is to hopefully not put you to sleep. But to keep you awake, actually hopefully energized about your own business Andy maybe there's gonna be a few things here that I share that you can apply to your business to hopefully scale and grow your business. Okay. So I thought about how can I be part of my business? Again, this has gone back a couple of years, but here's what I did as I had sort of this crisis moment.

Spencer Haws: Well, I sold Andy yarn.com, the mom blog that I have. Well, we sold that Table Labs, the software company that I've had, I sold that as well. Runner's goal, the blog that I've forever, I decided to outsource all the content and essentially let it sit. It wasn't integral to my business, so it became a hands off approach. Link whisper.com, I had a growth marketer in 2022, and he's been able to take a lot off of my plate to help grow that business.

Spencer Haws: The niche pursuits podcast I hired a podcast post. Now originally, hey. I've been the voice of this podcast for 10 years. People are gonna stop listening to the podcast, certainly, if I stop, you know, hosting every episode. Well, the reality is is that the person I hired is better than an AM Andy people enjoyed the podcast even more.

Spencer Haws: And so it was it was a good move, to remove my podcasts. Andy so finally, this left me with niche pursuits.com, the original blog that I had started when I quit my job in 2011. I finally felt like, hey, I've got some time where I could focus on this and try to scale it. So I tell you this whole story to get to the point of where I finally made this radical decision, made all these changes in my business, Andy I created this system to scale my content on enter pursuits.com Andy hopefully get all this sweet traffic from Google. And so, I'll take you over a period of about 12 months where I implemented a lot of these changes, and it's now been about 2 years So you can see a lot of results.

Spencer Haws: So I don't know if you're gonna read this, traffic graph, but this is basically the history going back all the way to 2012 or 2013 here, on this chart, but you can see that my traffics and intro suits sort of fluctuated between about a 100,000 to 200,000 page views a month. Right? That's just kind of where it lived over the years. Going up and down. And I wanted to grow it much faster.

Spencer Haws: I wanted to achieve much bigger heights. And so when I did start implementing some of these changes, you can see that in about mid 2022, here, you can start to see the traffic grow, quite rapidly. And as a heads up, the metrics on this graph are actually weekly. So I took my, traffic from about 100 to 200,000 a month to about 200,000 visitors a week. And so overall, my traffic increased before I was getting about 150 to 200,000 page views a month.

Spencer Haws: Now my site is getting 700 to 800,000 page views a month. I did get an emailing of the page view a month mark. In 1 month, I had a ton of traffic coming from Google to scrap it 1 month, but, typically, it's looking sort of this this bandwidth, here. And if you okay. Before I jump into the tactics, which I promise I'm gonna get you, I have 7 steps of how you can implement these strategies, the sentiment, I thought it would be important to add sort of this quick note, this side note about Google.

Spencer Haws: At the beginning, I had to reach her Andy this love hate relationship. Google, is like any platform with algorithms is always making changes. So how many of you out there heard of the Google helpful content updated? Okay. A good number of them.

Spencer Haws: Right? This is a big update that came out in September of 2023. It hit a lot of independent bloggers really hard. A lot of people lost significant portions of their traffic, and it was suddenly devastating to a lot of these bloggers. My site wasn't hit, fortunately with that, but it is a big risk.

Spencer Haws: There are these updates that come out. In March, there was the Google March for update that again was another big update that a lot of sort of independent smaller bloggers solar traffic decline. And there is new, technology. Right? We've got AI or Google is very much embracing AI.

Spencer Haws: And so they got what's called a search generative experience. If you do a search on Google, you've probably seen that AI summarizes the answers at the top. Google is now calling it, AI overviews. They announced this on Andy, It's now called AI overviews, and it's rolling out to everyone within the United States, I guess, right now, this week, Andy so more for people who are going to start seeing these AI interviews, overuse. And so we don't have a full impact of that.

Spencer Haws: Will that start sending less traffic to your website? Because now people can just get the answer with this AI, overview. I think that's a likely conclusion but, we don't doubt how many searches this will impact. Alright. So I say all of this to sort of make you well where of the platform risk, with any platform like Amazon, like Instagram, like TikTok, like YouTube, including Google, there is platform risks.

Spencer Haws: So I wouldn't put all of your eggs in lawn basket, Google is one sort of error when you're quiver if you try to get traffic to your website. But if you are not, implementing any sort of SEO in your business, I definitely would recommend it. And if you wanna go down that path, this is the presentation for you. 7 Okay. So here's what I did to sort of 5x my traffic in a period of about the pipelines.

Spencer Haws: So my first step was to clean up all the content. Now, even if you can't read this, this is essentially a screenshot of Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides a ton of information that you could jump into. You can look at all of your old blog posts Andy you can see how much traffic those are giving, whether it it might be category pages, pages, or it might be individual blog posts. And, in my case, I had lots of articles that had been been written years and years ago that was essentially getting no traffic.

Spencer Haws: Andy so I started to clean all of this up. I would there there's a few keys that you wanna look at to decide, do I wanna remove this? Do I wanna update this, or do I wanna redirect it to a different blog post? If it has any links from external websites pointing to it, you probably want to keep it or redirect it. If it doesn't have any links, pointing to it, and it's not getting any traffic in my example, I looked for articles that were getting less than about 10 visitors a month.

Spencer Haws: It had no links getting less than 10 visitors a month. I'm probably just deleting power. Just removing it from my website and moving on. Unless it was sentimental to me where I felt like I could really update this content and make it way better. But that is important for step 1 is to clean up your old content.

Spencer Haws: Now look at all the website clients over ten years old, maybe move to a website that's a few years old. Along the way, you might have broken links as well. This is just a screenshot from a linguist Bert, which is my tool. You can use any tool to find, broken links to your website. You find those links that are giving four or four pages, and you can remove those or fix those very quickly.

Spencer Haws: Either with Lakeless work or just manually do that, you wanna do that to show that, hey. Who will have an active website? I'm not sending people, to broken pages. So it's really important that you take this first step to go ahead and clean up your blog, clean up that all the content, that is on your website. Okay.

Spencer Haws: Step 2 is that restructure your sites that you can optimize it for maximal success. Okay. So I over the years, I created, like, 2 dozen different categories on my website. And when I looked at that, I realized there was a lot of categories that weren't relevant anymore. And so, I went through Andy I actually deleted a lot of categories and changed the categories the individual blog posts were in.

Spencer Haws: So I paired it down to about 10 or so categories that are now on my website. This just, again, it makes it a lot easier for Google to crawl on your website and kind of see what really is important And so, to have a more minimalist structure, is is a good idea. So if you have lots of pots or categories, on your website, look at how them might be able to reduce that number. And then again, I use the link whisper to look at the internal link structure of my website. This tells me which pages are orphaned pages.

Spencer Haws: Don't have any internal links pointing to them. Which these, you know, have only 1 or 2 internal links Andy maybe be more, because, again, that is what Google is looking at that sort of the backbone of your own website is the internal links, the structure, of hyperlinks pointing to individual blog posts. Andy, again, there's lots of tools that you can use, but you need to be looking at the internal links and figuring out, okay, if I don't have any internal links pointing to this article, But Will is gonna have a hard time of finding this. I should probably build an internal land. To that page, the the Google will crawl it more often Andy might even rank it higher within search agents.

Spencer Haws: This is one of the few types of links that you have a 100% control over is these internal links And, with Link Whisper here, you can get a full report of how many inbound internal links each of your articles has, and you can then go ahead and build those links. You can, add those individual links. Linkrow score will go out. It'll crawl your entire butt side. It will find the related links for you and actually build those up for you as well.

Spencer Haws: There's other tools that do this, or you can do it manually, but the important part here is just to make sure you have this good internally structure of your website, and that's gonna really help you print out your site, overall. Now the other thing that I did because I had 100 Andy 100 of posts is I figured out where my content gaps were. So if you've written a couple of articles on one particular subject, you know, here I have sort of a drop shipping pillar Right? I've written a few articles about drop shipping, but to really become a topical authority, I realized, hey, I need to be writing other articles, more general topics, maybe. What is drop shipping?

Spencer Haws: How to start a drop shipping business? AliExpress drop shipping? If I could show Google that I'm an expert in, a dozen different up these these keywords to have the total topical cluster together, that's gonna help each individual article rank better. And so, for me, it was a pretty manual process to basically just go through and and kind of use some keyword tools and think through Alright. What keywords am I missing?

Spencer Haws: How can I show that, I am on top of an authority in this subject and to build out more content, for that particular topic? Okay. Step 3 is that, you want to create a professional looking website. Now as simple as this sounds it really is extremely important. 1, you wanna make it look professional, but 2, you wanna make it extremely fast.

Spencer Haws: You want it to load quickly for visitors so they don't leave your websites, upgrade to ports code. And I will simply say that you should make it extremely mobile friendly, more and more traffic are using mobile devices. So if you do get a website redesign or if the only place that you're looking at your website is on your laptop, you should probably pull up your mobile phone and see how it actually looks and interacts because most likely, most people are using, their phones to actually navigate your website. So if you do meet our redesigned agent, extremely, mobile friendly. Okay.

Spencer Haws: Step 4, and this is a big one. Standardized your publishing processes. So, this is just a screenshot from my SOP I don't expect you to be able to read everything on here. But if you go to introduceus.com/contents0p, You can get this for free. There is no email required.

Spencer Haws: This is just you go to an immediate download if you go to this link. I don't need your email address or anything like that. But this will get you my spreadsheet. This will get you this will show my Trello board. This will get you it's it's a full pdf of my entire process.

Spencer Haws: Basically that I'm used. But I have a lot of details, because I hired a lot of writers and editors, and you need to write out specific instructions for those writers for tone of voice, what type of content to include? Who's the target audience? A lot of these things that you need to initially tell your writers, your editors, what they need to be doing because otherwise they're gonna just kind of write whatever they feel like. And it might not be optimized for Google properly.

Spencer Haws: So you need to have very specific, processes in place. So the way that I do it is I basically I have a spreadsheet. I hired, you know, over a dozen riders, this I'll, share here in a second because they did lose a lot of content. They have a spreadsheet that they go over to. I put all the keywords that I want them targeting, and then they go and they self assign they write their name down down next to the keyword that they want to write about.

Spencer Haws: They start writing that article based on my standard operating procedures, and then they follow this trello board process where they basically write a helpline out when it gets approved, by an editor or myself, they move their trial card over, or they start writing that article, Andy then it moves over to the editor, then it moves over to a graphic designer to do any featured images. And then, and then the sort of final spot check by myself Andy, then it gets published Andy, tire, you know, process in place to make sure everyone is following the the same process. And then the final step, when we get published on every single article, we make sure that it has an internal link, at least one internally pointing to it. So multiple internal links would be great, but at least one. And then also every article that they write will make sure, hey, within that article, if you're leaking out to 1 or 2 other within our website.

Spencer Haws: So that there's a process in place so that I'd be here down the road. We don't come back and look at our content and go, oh, we have a 100 blog posts Andy there's no internal links pointing to any of them. Now what are we gonna do? Well, if you set up the process from day 1, you don't have that big problem and that big job that you need to handle. Later down the road.

Spencer Haws: Okay. Step 5 is to publish tons of content, So when I decided I wanted to go big, I thought, you know what? Let's not hold back. Let's really go big. Right?

Spencer Haws: And so I actually did make a YouTube video on this, this really is my thumbnail, for that YouTube video if you wanna watch it, but you know, I tried publishing a 1000 blog posts in 12 months, and here's what happened. Right? And that sort of gave you the whole process that I set up. For that, but it was my goal in 2022 to publish a 1000 blog posts. I thought, you know what?

Spencer Haws: Let's just go big. Andy if I'm getting traffic from Google already, what happens if I just scale this thing? Why not? Let's see what happens. And so just to give you an idea of how many articles a year I've been publishing, this goes back a few years.

Spencer Haws: Right? I was publishing anywhere between 50 Andy 200 ish articles a year in 2021. It looks like it went really big and had, you know, 225, articles that year, so you can kinda understand Andy, how much content I had to publish you on the site? Well, in 2022, I didn't quite hit my 1000 blog post in a year, but you can see I significantly scaled, like, 4 x, what I had done, the previous year. I think I ended up at late I don't remember what it was.

Spencer Haws: It was 878 articles or something like that. I fallen just short of my goal. But I'm happy to report that in 2023, I did more than a 1000 articles. We actually published 1325 articles in 2023. And so I was able to scale it even bigger.

Spencer Haws: And so huge jump in the number of armored pulls that I published. And as I shared previously, the the results in traffic fall almost in lock status. I 4 or 5 x pipe article output, I 4 of Webex, my traffic, my blog. Right? And so I was able to do that.

Spencer Haws: Again, had to hire, Oh, over the coming years, definitely a couple dozen writers, couple editors, an outside manager, an entire team that has followed this entire process. I didn't write more than maybe 5 of those blog posts myself. Right? These were all written by other people that I'm managing all this. This is not me writing, the articles just to be clear that in previous years up to 2021, I did write every single article on my block for over 10 years.

Spencer Haws: Okay. So, maybe one of the big questions that you might have is well, what type of content should I publish on my blog? Now I'm gonna give you just two strategies here that, that can produce significant results. The way the the license that you need to get into is that Google is basically already telling you what type of content you should be publishing. Right?

Spencer Haws: So this is a screenshot of, Google search console right? This is just an example. So you can go to your Google search console. You can see which pages are getting traffic, on your site, and then you can dial that in and see which keywords are actually bringing traffic to that page. And so I've just highlighted one of these keywords, Andy it's not become an Amazon product tester.

Spencer Haws: I believe it's what it's called. Andy so the the page that the school search console is for is actually, the title of the article is not how it can come in Amazon product tester. I just happen to be ranking for that keyword. That's just one of the keywords each article in Google, if you didn't know, we'll opt to rank for a 1000 or more different keywords variations. Right?

Spencer Haws: And so this is a variation that it was ranking for, and it wasn't perfectly aligned with the topic of the actual art. And so Google is sort of telling me, hey, you kind of have some authority for this out of becoming an Amazon product. Sister. And we're sending traffic to this other article, but if you wrote an article called how to become an Amazon product tester, I bet you'd rank number 1. And so that's what I did is wrote an article titled how to become an Amazon public tester.

Spencer Haws: I ranked number 1, and I now get traffic for that. How did I find that keyword? Well, the Google told me, right? So use your Google search console. You have thousands of keywords in there that you're already ranking for, that I bet a lot of them are not specific to the article that you've already written.

Spencer Haws: I hope that makes sense, because it is a very powerful strategy that I use a lot, the other, way that you could look at this is sort of finding keyword veins. Right? And again, it's essentially Google telling you paid you should write more content about this subject. So this is just a screenshot of, Google Analytics, and I just highlighted some keywords all related to basically chatgbt Andy AI, content production. I have tested out a few of these types of content, like Hey.

Spencer Haws: I've been writing articles with chatty PT, etcetera. And I started breaking and getting traffic for that. And so my could have stopped there said, I wrote 2 or 3 articles about, you know, producing content with Chat GBT, but, no, I scaled them and said, hey, there's, like, dozens dozens of variations and related keywords, right, all related to Chat GT or using AI. That became a full new sort of vein of keywords. Goo again, Google was telling me, hey, you kinda rank for this subject you should write dozens more keywords about this subject.

Spencer Haws: So, as simple as that sounds, most people don't do that. They write 1 or 2 keywords and then they move on. If you are getting a little bit of traction in Google, double down on that. If it's working, doubled down on it. Almost guaranteed to get non traffic from Google because they're signaling to you, Hey, we like what you're doing there to more of it.

Spencer Haws: Okay? So that's just 2 keyword strategies, that I used a lot of. Okay. Step number 6 here is, to update content regularly. When you have thousands of articles on your website, This becomes even more and more important.

Spencer Haws: Content decay is a thing. Information within your blog posts get outdated. They need to be updated to make sure they're current Andy Google loves freshness. So, Google loves to see things that have been recently published, Andy one way to do that is even if you wrote the article 2 or 3 years ago, is to make a few updates at a new paragraph, make sure everything's current, Andy when you republish that or hit update, Google sees that, it gets a little bit of boost in within rankings. Right?

Spencer Haws: And so this is just Again, my spreadsheet, just to say that I'm very specific about the process that we use, we talk where it's ranking in Google before we do any updates, what keywords it's ranking for. We go through. We make updates. We use tools like market views or surfer SEO. These are tools that are specifically designed to help you update your content.

Spencer Haws: They tell you keyword opportunities that maybe you're missing, within your your article, sub keywords, secondary keywords that you can add to your content. So we go through, we do that, and then we hit we hit update Andy publish that content in your document. That entire process here. And so, those are a couple of tools that you can check out if you want, artwork use, server SEO. There are others.

Spencer Haws: And then Of course, after we publish every single article we drill through, we do an internal link sort of audit. We look at that. Say, hey, does this be new internally since we published it a couple of years ago? Should we actually remove some internal links that are relevant? I use linguist for, of course, to do that.

Spencer Haws: It makes it really fast, really easy to add. Those new internal links to old content that you published previously. Okay. Step 7 is to optimize your site to make more money. That's the bottom line.

Spencer Haws: Wanna make more money from the website. And so I went through, I added a lot called the action boxes whether it's in the sidebar or little slide ins, if it's mobile, we want to show that, hey. If you're reading an article about the script, here's a a link or an offer, or here's a way that you can go find rapidly easy. Now if you have your own e commerce store, of course, figure out ways to have those those buy buttons make it really easy for people to go and start that checkout process so they can buy the product. This is a big deal.

Spencer Haws: It's really increased the revenue of my business, by adding a lot of these specific buttons. Call the actions, making a lot easier for people to buy. Now the business model for namespursuits.com it isn't all just affiliate links. Right? I want people to get on my, email newsletter.

Spencer Haws: And so at it, different landing pages, different ways that people could sign up for the email newsletter because I've gone from, you know, a 100 to 200000 pages a month to much, much more, And so for something a lot more people are now joining my email list because I'm making a lot easier Andy wants to put it on my email list, they can either buy my products or I refer them to to other places. I could show that audience once they're among, the email list. And so, one way that I make money, you know, from my website is they get on my email list. I hope they get all when they buy link whisper. My software tool, that I have, and, that site my business has done very well, but it all sort of started with all of this additional organic search from Google and getting a lot more eye draws to every single month, it makes it a lot more easy for me to sell Haimler products.

Spencer Haws: Okay. And then here's just a screenshot because Way traffic had increased so much in the beginning of 2020 3. I had never had display ads on my website ever, but I was kinda like, well, I'm just kinda getting a lot of chat. Maybe I should just put some ads on my website. And this screenshot for mediavine, shows that I can't even quite read the numbers myself, but it's making, you know, 25 to 30000 a month.

Spencer Haws: Now just in display ad revenue. And so all of this traffic, is essentially all paid for Andy then some just with display ad revenue. Right? And so that's paying for my entire content budget. My entire team to run all of this thing.

Spencer Haws: And then everything else I make on top of that with my email list, with Link Whisper, Joe, any other products that I sell, That's all pure grainy. It's all pure profit, essentially. Right? So just understanding the power of what additional traffic can do, whether it's coming from Google or other places, it could be really, really big about forwarding business. And then, oh, yes.

Spencer Haws: I do have a Shopify app, for Link Whisper. If anybody is interested in that, that's, you know, that's just another router to stream on top of everything else that I should do. But that is pretty much it. Thank you all so much for letting me go through my process, for scouting my content. I have a time for questions.

174 episodes

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