Video Transcript:
Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drone. Welcome to GSD Daily, number 66.
So today we are going to talk about SEO. Search engine optimization. This is going to be search engine optimization week, which I'm pretty excited about because we have been getting a lot of questions about organic traffic and what should be done from a content marketing standpoint, how to optimize for organic traffic. All of that kind of stuff. So this is going to be an exciting week.
We haven't necessarily done too much as it relates to SEO. We've talked a lot about content marketing. We've talked about how to turn live streams into blog posts and how I do the content marketing piece, but we haven't necessarily done a tremendous amount on the ways that you can utilize content marketing online, and how Google picks it up and how you should write your meta descriptions and what you should do with keyword phrases and all that stuff.
So that's really what we're going to get into. For those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn. I'm the creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in three things: creating offers, building sales funnels, and marketing automation. And those things combined to build the foundation of any business online. So that's really where our skill sets revolve around. This organic traffic piece is more along the lines of the automation part. So once your offers are built, once your sales funnels are built out, then you need a traffic source. You need a fuel source to grow and scale and sell to people because, at the end of the day, people are who you're selling to.
So there's that buyer psychology and all that other stuff that we talk about on this show daily. But at the end of the day, you sell it to people and people use search engines to search for things. To solve their problems, or to help solve their problems, I should say. So, at the end of the day, that's what you're doing. And that's what you're trying to position your site and your content and your offer to. You want to be in the place that they are searching so that your offer, your business, stands out to them when they are in the heat of the moment and they are ready to make a buying decision. They're actively looking for a solution. You are there. You're there to help them do what they need to do or help them solve the thing that they need to solve.
So that's the idea. That's why search engine optimization is so important. First of all, it's a very, very high-quality buyer. People know that there are paid search results and organic search results. They tend to prefer organic traffic results. How many times have you searched for something? And you immediately bypass the ads at the top of Google and go immediately to the organic rankings? The first couple that doesn't say 'sponsored'. I would bet that most of you do, to some degree or another.
So this week we're going to talk about getting in those search spots. How to get more traffic organically. There's a caveat to this. So all traffic costs something. Organic traffic content costs a ton because you're going to be writing content or you're paying somebody to write content, but you're still paying somebody for, inevitably, hopefully, to get traffic down the road. Or you're investing time in writing articles and creating content that you're hoping is going to get ranked and then bring in traffic down the road.
Now, this is not an exact science because of Google's search engine algorithms... It's a black box. So they update these things 20, 30, 50 times a month. So they roll out the big updates every once in a while, traffic gets all moved around. Your spots get recalculated and everything settles. And then a couple of months down the road, they do another update and then everything moves around. But the goal is to have enough keyword phrases in the top couple pages of Google, to give you some good stability, long term, and then work on maintaining those ranks and bettering those ranks. So we like to do an organic and a paid traffic strategy. So what it does is it reduces your reliance on paid traffic, but it doesn't necessarily just involve organic traffic.
So paid traffic is instant on, and organic traffic is, you create it and then hopefully down the road, somebody shows up because of it. So what we like to do is we like to do live streams that get transcribed. We boost those live streams with paid traffic. We advertise our stuff with paid traffic. And then the content brings that long tail traffic for the content that was created. So that's just part of our mantra, part of our strategy, is to mix the two well. To do good organic and to do well from a paid traffic standpoint, so that when you turn off your traffic, like around holidays, you're going to turn off your cold traffic and just run retargeted ads. Well, that way you're not sacrificing all of the traffic. You still got a bunch of organic traffic that is still coming to your website.
So there's a lot of SEO strategies there. We're going to talk about a lot of that stuff. But first, what we're going to do is we're going to dig into some of the actionable SEO strategies that are going to get you organic traffic. Now, this was an article written in 2019. And so this is part of our SEO strategies. So for those of you who are just tuning in now, part of the reason I do these GSD dailies is to update old blog posts and old content, because things change, but they change this much.
So for this particular example, when you see 'Planning your SEO strategy for 2019'... First of all, 2019, having it in a title phrase is great when it's 2019. Because people search for SEO 2019, but when it's 2020, that's not so good, right? So I usually don't do dates. I didn't write this article. Good content, but personally, if I'm going to write something, I write it for the long tail and not for even like a year-long hit. I will write it for something that can still be getting traffic in 10 years.
And these update SEO strategies... This is what we call content optimization. So basically when a blog post starts getting a lot of traffic, then what we do is we update it, and then it pushes it even further up the ranks in Google. So this, what you're witnessing, is me updating this blog post. Because what's going to happen is this GSD daily now is going to be posted right at the top. And then we're going to add all the transcript for this blog post down below here, or down below at the bottom of the post. And it's going to turn this, probably 2000 word, blog post into 6,000 words, 6,500 words or so, once the transcript gets added. And it's going to be multimedia content. There are pictures in here. So ultimately it's just going to rank a whole lot better than what it is, even right now.
Now, I'm just going through this. So let's see, 'Planning your SEO strategy for 2019.' Google does have a 60, 70% market share. So when you're optimizing for organic traffic, you want to optimize for Google.
Now, there are two different schools of thought when it comes to SEO, there is what is considered black hat. And there is what is considered white hat. So the black hat is all of the weird things that can be done to rank. But black hat SEO strategies, although it is effective for the short term, is never effective for the longterm.
So over the years, there's been lots of black hat SEO strategies. Duplicate content, invisible text, and stuffed keywords redirecting the user to another site or a page. All kinds of stuff. Kind of deviant stuff that you wouldn't do because you have a legitimate, real business, a business that you want to grow in scale.
So you're going to be over in this white hat realm over here. So the white hat realm is relevant content. So having well-labeled pages, having images, having relevant links and references, good HTML, unique page titles, meta descriptions. All of that stuff. all good stuff. So don't even worry about it. Just note that the black hat exists. Every once in a while you'll see something in black hat SEO strategies that might be used.
When Google released an algorithm update three or four years ago, there was an interesting thing that people were doing, which was, they were basically... They had a timer. Not a timer, but they had like a WordPress plugin that they made. So it looked like there were people who were commenting on a blog post. So it was scrolling down the thing and then reloading the page and all kinds of other stuff. So it ended up being interesting on that front. And so ultimately what ended up happening was it worked for a little bit, not for very long. Google came around and updated their algorithm. And it didn't necessarily work too much after that.
Let's see. Okay, there we go. Now, some additional stuff. So, a time for action. SEO strategies are constantly evolving. So you always want to make sure to be further ahead than everybody else. Content is the indomitable king.
So I'm going to share my screen. My cam link here decided it didn't want to work anymore. All right. So share screen, application windows. This is why we have redundancy, right? There we go. All right.
So content is king always has been. Quality content is a key area of focus. You want to make sure that the intent of your content is something that is going to serve your users. Serve your readers. And then you want to also give them somewhere else to go. So you want to make sure that the article is between 1500 and 2000 words, which sucks.
I mean, it sucks writing that. It does. 1500 to 2000 words is a lot of content, but the easier way to do it is to do a live stream like this. Record 15 minutes of content, and then it's going to be about 2000 words. Then you can pare it down to 1500 or whatever. But if you record it and transcribe it, it's going to be a whole lot better than spending six hours in front of your keyboard banging something out and just spending an entire day writing one blog post that may or may not get traffic. It's easier to do a video, transcribe it, throw it out there. And if it ranks, awesome. Figure out what to do with it next. But if it doesn't, that's fine too. You only spent 15 minutes on it or 25 minutes, if you posted it.
You want to make sure to have attention-grabbing titles and descriptions. We talked about split testing titles last week. I think it was last Monday or last Tuesday. We talked about using the Thrive Themes Headline Optimizer plugin so that you could see what titles pulled the best.
So rather than talk about it, let's go look at that again. So just to bring it top of mind. All right. So this is a plugin called Thrive Themes Headline Optimizer. And basically what it does is it lets me split test blog post headlines. So the last time we looked at this, it was... We had a couple of blog posts. I had just deactivated a bunch of them. So here you can see that our average engagement rate is 42% for today. Now, if we look down through here, these are all the blog posts that I'm split testing currently.
So, here's one. How to maximize sales funnel conversion. I look for basically anything that has more than a hundred visitors. Because that lets me know that it's a little bit further along in terms of testing the validity. So this doesn't. Here's one. 'Four sales funnel SEO strategies for automated selling'. This has 78. So we're going to just go in and see what headlines are responding the best. This is the actual blog post, but overall, this 'Automated selling with these proven sales funnel SEO strategies' is getting 29.17% click-through while the original, which is 'Four sales funnel strategies for automated selling' is only getting 18% engagement rate. So all things considered, this last subject line sucks. This one right here, 'Automated selling with these proven sales funnel strategies' is by far the winner.
So just a little simple software, a little simple little WordPress plugin. It is paid. You do have to pay for it. But I can single-handedly say that since I installed this thing probably four months ago and started actively split testing headlines, or subject lines, we have probably increased our traffic 20% just because of this. Because your better subject lines bring more search traffic. They bring more social traffic. They bring more engagement. So what you're able to do is you're able to see exactly what somebody is looking for. Somebody interested in here.
And check this one out. So How to maximize sales funnel conversion. So we're just going to click on this one, 'How to maximize sales funnel conversion'. All right. So let's go look at this result. Let's see what these are. Check this out. So engagement rate over time. Look at that red one. So green. Wow. Check this out. So green is the original. 'How to maximize sales funnel conversion'. This thing is an absolute dog compared to the red one, which is currently the winner. So the red one, 'A guide at to sales funnel conversion'...