This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat – founder of wanderlustworker.com, the premier online destination for all things inspirational and transformational.
I appreciate you tuning into me wherever you are. I’m feeling a little bit better today from my wisdom tooth debacle. I wanted to talk with you today about something that I mentioned yesterday, and that was about organic traffic. In yesterday’s podcast I talked about if you build it, they will come. But not really, they won’t just come – and how do you actually get people to come?
People have been asking me to do this podcast episode for a really long time, so I hope that you guys enjoy it. Thanks for all the messages and the notes, I really appreciate it. I have written – I don’t know, maybe over a dozen SEO books? Built a bunch of SEO courses, like, “Unlimited Traffic Secrets.” A bunch of courses on Udemy also as well about SEO.
I know a thing or two about SEO. My SEO books have been some of the best-selling SEO books of all time. I don’t say that to impress you, just to kind of impress upon you that I understand SEO pretty implicitly. I know what it takes to get people to see whatever it is that you’re trying to get them to see.
If you are unfamiliar with SEO, or if it scares you, that’s okay – because it doesn’t need to be familiar territory, because you don’t know SEO. If you don’t know something, it often scares you. SEO really boils down to one thing and one thing only – and that is delivering value. It doesn’t matter what platform you are ever on, you have to deliver value. Even into the future, the way that you will get eyeballs – the way that you will get people to see whatever it is that you want them to see, is to ensure that there’s value there.
If you are trying to game the system, do link building or do some like advanced crazy stuff that you think is going to rank you quickly, it’s not going to work. It might work in the short term, in the interim. I know a guy who was running a substantial operation kind of using these Virtual Private Networks. Basically blog networks that were posting links to each other, and he would buy links there – and it’s very short-lived. That stuff doesn’t last for a very long time.
The thing is, if you want longevity, if you have – I hope that you have a serious business that you’re in for the long term, and you’re not just trying to do some very, very short term opportunistic marketing. Because it’s not what it’s about. That’s okay to go out there and build courses and build websites. Build webinars, whatever it is that you’re building. But you want – if you want serious traffic, and you want that traffic to be organic traffic – not just paid traffic. Paid traffic you can turn on and turn off. It’s really simple. If you want organic traffic, you have to have valuable content.
How do you actually go out there and build valuable content, and how do you get people to see it, to find it? It’s not as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be. And so there are a few rules. You could go out there and you could read Google’s Webmaster Rules, and you could read a bunch of stuff. But I’m going to give you the skinny, I’m going to give you the lowdown of what it takes to get people to find your content.
First thing that I want to explain to you is the distinction between keywords. What is a keyword? Most people don’t even understand what a keyword is. A keyword is not just one word, it can be multiple words. It can be a phrase. It can go to five words to ten words even, like as a sentence. But a keyword really isn’t that – ultimately five to six word range. The longer the keyword, the further people are in the buying cycle.
So let me repeat that. The longer the keyword, the further along people are in the buying cycle. Let me give you an example. If I just search for “shoes,” or “men’s shoes,” or “blue shoes,” I’m looking for information. I’m not ready to buy. I’m just looking to collect information. But if I search for “best men’s shoes under $100,” I’m further along, aren’t I? I’m more ready to buy. They call these long tail keywords.
Long tail keywords, the prospect is further along in the buying cycle. Long tail keywords are also less competitive. There’s more competition for “blue shoes,” or “shoes,” than there is for “best men’s shoes for less than $100.” Or even more so, “cheap men’s shoes,” “cheap men’s sneakers,” or, “cheap men’s running shoes,” or whatever you want to call them, “for less than $100.” The longer that goes, or if you add a brand to it, it becomes even longer. The longer the long tail keyword, the further along people are in the buying cycle. That’s really, really important to note and to remember.
When you build content and you build that content towards whatever keyword you’re building it towards, you have to also be conscious of how much value that content actually delivers. You have to be very, very conscious of how much value that delivers. The way that you do that is to ensure that you build long form content. You should also use media in your content.
For example, if I make a two minute video and drop it into a 2000 word article. That two minute video basically helps to extend the article. It’s not a summary of the article, it’s an extension. Because you want people to stay on the content for a long time. The longer they stay, the more value that search engines like Google think that there is. Because they’re taking a longer time to consume the content.
Just imagine if you clicked to a piece of content, and you click away right away because it was no good – there’s no value there. Google’s not going to think there’s value there. Of course it takes it on the aggregate. Making longer content, and not just gibberish longer content. I’m talking about real valuable longer content, is going to keep the visitor more engaged. When they’re more engaged, they stick around and they’re there for many more minutes.
I believe on Wanderlust Worker, I have an average page time of almost six minutes since the inception of the site. Yes, almost six minutes. That’s a really long time to be spent on a page. If you want to ensure that you have a lot of value there, or if people are going to be engaging – you can’t just build short content. You can’t write a 500 word piece of content. Nobody’s going to stick around. Even if it’s good, it’s not going to take that long to read.
You want to focus on more than 2000 words. There have actually been studies where the number one position – or even page one is between 1800 and 2600 words. On page one of any Google search. So it was like an average of like three million or ten million searches. I can’t really remember. But the longer content also gets shared more often. There are studies that have been done that the longer the content, the more shares it gets.
I think it was by 09:03 Ookla, or – I can’t really remember off the top of my head. But it just makes sense. You read a great piece of content, a long piece of content – that gave you the answers, that helped you with like some tutorial to solve something. You’re going to share it. You’re going to drop it on Facebook or wherever it is that you’re sharing your content on Twitter, anywhere else.
That’s also a metric. Because shares are just links. Of course, those are good. But when those shares come from – for example, other websites in your niche. So other websites – let’s say you’re in the fashion industry, if you have other fashion blogs linking to your content organically – I’m not talking about buying links. Don’t buy links – totally wasting your time. I can’t tell you how many emails I get every single week asking to buy links on my site.It’s just – it’s ridiculous.
That’s very powerful, and if that link comes organically – like within content, it’s extremely powerful – and Google notices. Understand that if you want to master organic traffic, you can’t look for a short cut. If you have a marketing person or a marketing department, you’ve got to understand this. As somebody who understands SEO implicitly – implicitly, take it from me.
It’s really about building out great content. At the end of the day, like I said – it’s about value, right? But you want to target the right keywords. You have to do the keyword research. There’s a bunch of tools to do keyword research. You used to easily be able to do it through the Google Ads Keyword Planner. It’s not as easy anymore, especially if you’re not an advertiser. Google has been skewing the results. You’re going to see something like a competition that would say like medium or hard or something like that. But that doesn’t really count, that’s competition for the ad.
For example, I remember searching how much competition there was for like “Justin Bieber.” There was like no competition, but that’s because nobody is creating ads for Justin Bieber. But if you try to advertise for “make money online,” there’s a lot of competition. That’s one of the hardest terms to rank for, “make money online.” Which I have ranked number one for, for a really long time.
I had a Forbes article that was number one there, and I believe now it’s an Entrepreneur article. Maybe by the time you listen to this, I don’t have anything up there. That’s just how Google works. Other content outranks content from time to time. But I haven’t been in that number one slot for a few years between the Forbes and Entrepreneur article.
That is another thing that I want to talk about is, when you have the power of a domain that has a lot of authority. Now authority is a domain that’s been around for a while and it’s been linked to, and there’s a lot of activity. I’m not talking about a domain you bought ten years ago you did nothing with. There’s no authority there still. Doesn’t matter. It was never active.
Google’s not stupid, it knows the difference. When you use the power of an authority domain – and this is something that I teach in some of my courses. If you really want to geek out about it, I’d suggest picking up one of those courses like, “Unlimited Traffic Secrets,” and you can really geek out about like the content marketing strategy in detail – exactly what you need to do.
That’s really – at the end of the day, you use these authority websites only after you build great content on your website. What I do, or what I did in the beginning – I don’t need to do it anymore. Because links are just coming in as soon as I post content, because there’s a lot of activity there. The blog audience is in the millions now. I believe it’s five to eight million people per year. I know that’s per year, not per month. I’m hoping it’ll soon be per month.
I really think that content marketing strategy’s probably the best strategy that you can wield. If you go out there and you build great content for your site, and then build equally great content on authority sites. Authority sites that I use are LinkedIn Publishing, for example, medium.com. Medium.com is one of the best domains that you can use. Other platforms too. I go on Quora and I answer questions – or I used to answer questions on there a lot. Because Quora’s a powerful domain, and you can link kind of traditionally. On most platforms – for example, HubSpot and other platforms of yesterday – couldn’t really do the traditional links.
The organic traffic is really, really powerful. If you do it the right way, you have to have links that go out to content that would help people. You should cite your sources. I try to keep like a really high reading level, so I try to make it university or up. That’s like a college reading level or higher, and Google just loves that for some reason. I like to put in a lot of facts and statistics, and like link to those facts and statistics when I do.
When you cite your sources, Google likes it and people like it. Because people like to investigate when you’re making a claim. If you’re stating a fact about something to back up some sort of opinion, then it’s – people want to research that. I’ve used that strategy heavily, and it always works. If you want to master this game of organic traffic, and you really want to kick out more about it – go pick up one of my books or a course or something like that.
Hopefully you’ve found this information useful. Again, if you did – I would really appreciate you like, comment, subscribe on iTunes. Tell your friends about it. I’ll be dropping more gold nuggets about SEO, but I only have a limited time here. I’m trying to keep the time format. Until next time, I will speak to you guys soon.