Episode 63 – SEO with Brian G. Johnson

Brian J: Absolutely. I started off with a hope and a dream. That was it. I think that's where we all start. I have a notion that the internet was going to be huge and this was 1999-2000 and I was like, “It's going to be huge and I'm kind of doing stuff but I wasn't really.” I wasn't really serious, I wasn't really coming up with plans, following through, it was just kind of like a hobby. Then I would say two years later, 2002, I said to myself, “You know, Brian, this thing is not going away.” There is tremendous opportunity and you have an opportunity yourself to completely revolutionize your life, to work from home, to call the shots, to make enough money to be happy, to live in a house on the hill, to vacation – and at that point I started getting really serious and that's how I got started.

I started with two focal points, Brian: SEO and affiliate marketing. It didn't take me long, really, to start making game-changing, life-changing income online.

Brian B: That's incredible. We were talking before we got started. One of the things you said, “There's a difference between running a business and finding an opportunity.” I think that's huge. You want to expand on that just a little bit?

Brian J: Absolutely. For me, I think it's very, very important to understand what success means to you. That answer is different for everybody on this planet. For me, I look at very certain types of opportunities that I can participate in. I'm not looking to hire employees, I'm not looking to run operations where I have constant customer service, I don't want to answer customer service emails. I'm looking for opportunities that ultimately allow me to get paid a commission, a royalty, based on traffic sent and conversion. Basically I rank for keyword. Someone buys a product, I get an affiliate commission. Now, you could do that all day long and it's very simple. It's a simple model to make money online to achieve your goals and dreams.

There's a lot of people, they want to take that and turn it into a business. They want to hire 20 people, teach to 20 people how to do that, how to drive traffic, how to convert it for an income and so on, and for me that's never what it's been about. I like a simple life. Right now I don't have a lot of customer service that I need to worry about, I do live an amazing home, I do offer coaching, I do sell stuff online, but I structured in a way that it addresses that question that I ask, “What does success mean to you? How do you want your future to unfold?” For me it's always been about modeling opportunity that will allow me to drive traffic, make money from that traffic and make enough money where I could fire my boss and that's exactly what I did in 2003 – thanks to affiliate marketing and as I mentioned, Search Engine Optimization.

Brian B: That's incredible. That's exactly the segment that we're in here. We're talking about joint ventures, affiliate marketing – all those kind of things. You've really laid a great foundation for it. I appreciate it.

Here is the question. A lot of people don't know what SEO stands for. What is SEO?

Brian J: Well, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Simple as that.

Brian B: Yes. Why don't we kind of look at where SEO has been? Where did it generate, get started and what was it like a while back?

Brian J: A while back it was very, very interesting. The thing about the internet is it's always kind of like the wild west. Things are changing fast, rules are getting made up on the fly, new websites are springing up – just like I said, when I got started, it was 1999, there was websites like Altavista, there were websites like Yahoo! and basically there was another website that was just coming on board, it was called Google. The idea of these search engines was simple- people went to these sites, they typed in what they're looking for and then certain sites ranked better than other sites. Search Engine Optimization. The idea was very, very simple: how do I optimize my content to rank higher than other people so I'm able to get that click, drive that traffic? And just as I mentioned, that's when I started studying.

I'll tell you, the reason I started was again, I'm very opportunistic. I'm looking for the right kind of opportunity. Right now all kinds of people are going to jump on fulfilled by Amazon. I think it's Amazon FBA. That's an amazing opportunity, but it carries with it things like customer service. If you're selling 50 things a day, you've got customer service. I'd rather be an affiliate, build a list, drive traffic, make money and have less customer service so I'm not really interested in Fulfillment By Amazon. Anyway, that's what's really neat about search engine optimization and really having the forward thinking to answer that question, “What does success mean for me? What kind of business do I want? What kind of opportunity do I want?” And so on?

Where I got started was there were these different search engines and basically people started to dig in and try to figure out how to rank. Now the earliest search engines that I'm aware of is Altavista. When I got on the scene in '99, Altavista was pretty much the #1 search engine. It was driven primarily by on-page factors. What that means really is how you structured your webpage, the words you use determine how you ranked. That made it really easy to gain the search engine. If you wanted to rank for “lose weight,” all you would need to do is incorporate the phrase “lose weight” a ton o times in different parts of your page. In the title, in the description, image, all tags, in headings and you could spam the metakeywords. Which at this point, Google doesn't even look at the metakeywords but they're still there. You can still enter them in and people there starting out will always enter them in and they'll always ask, “What should we do with the metakeywords?” It's interesting because they don't make a damn better difference.

Brian B: Really.

Brian J: That's how the thing has evolved. Years and years ago, it was as easy as writing out a document, formatting it in a certain way and if you could spam better than your competition, you would rank better. Really what happened was Google came along and they just saw that the internet is a huge opportunity. There needs to be a search engine to really provide great results for people so people can find what they want quickly and easily.

We need to be very aware of people spamming the search engine to gain the system because there's going to be tremendous amounts of money at hand. Basically, Google started really looking at, “How can we make a search engine algorithm to determine which sites are going to rank and how can we do that in a way that's harder to gain than what's currently on the market?” Which is basically if you can add more keywords than your competitor, you're going to outrank them. Actually what they did, Brian, is they used the way authors site other authors in books. Basically authors often times, they get into a technical subject and they will site authors that they've been inspired by, authors that they've learned from, they'll take information from authors and their books that they believe and deem to be worthy and they will site them. Think of a site almost as a link. Google thought, “If we start analyzing how websites link to each other, how one website links to one website, that could almost be considered a citation how an author would site another author and it could be considered a vote of confidence in that particular webpage.

At that point, Google started talking about links are important and they rolled out an algorithm that was totally dominated by links. They created their own catchphrase or their own algorithmic programming based on page rank which was an extension of links. On one level you have links. Links make up the whole foundation and a level above that, you've got page rank. Basically what page rank is, is it's a measurement of not only how many pages are linking to one website, but the credibility of each of those webpages.

One of the things that I've been mentioning for years and years, and people are talking about it now like it's new but really it's never been about how many thousands and thousands of links you can throw at a webpage – it's been more about how credible are the links that are linking to another website and more authority will increase ranking.

So instead of trying to get 10,000 links, I would focus on getting three or four really great links from really big websites and that would help me to rank really well. That's the beginning of the Google algorithm years ago. It was based on links, it was based on page rank and the more page rank you have, the better, and the more links you had, that was probably better, too. But also more important, I believe and a lot of people are in agreement, was the quality of the websites that are linking to you.

Brian B: You bring up a couple of really great points. One is that with the old days, I really think what killed the search engine keyword stuff was – and I hate to put it this way but it's true, it's the porn industry using the word “sex” everywhere. Then you had these guys coming in and in order to rank in Google better, they would say, “plumber aurora,” “plumber [batavia].” They would keep keyword-bathing the heck out of a website to the point where the website was unreadable by human but was often found by a search engine. Then the other thing is – you get this and I know every business owner gets this – you get phone calls from SEO companies all the time that promise that they can get you on the first page of Google but that's not the case anymore, is it? That's what we're talking about now. Where are we now?

Brian J: Exactly. I get those calls, too and I find it ironic. It's like, “Why are you calling me on the phone if you're a search engine optimization specialist?” Makes zero sense and that was the beginning and just like you said, Brian, these webpages and this like descriptions, “plumber New York City,” “this kind of plumber,” “that kind of plumber,” just repetitive, repetitive and that was the old. Really what's happened over time is what I like to talk about as the trust matrix. One of the things that is driving rankings today is these updates that happened about three years ago. Panda was the beginning, and then we have Penguin, and then we have Hummingbird and basically I see these Google updates as the gatekeeper.

The way it works is no matter how many links you have, if you can't get past the gatekeeper, if your site is being penalized because Google Panda sees things it just doesn't like, you're going to have great on-page content, you can have great links from other websites linking to you and you can do everything right. But for whatever reason, if Google Panda said, “Something is funny. We don't like it.” You're not going to rank. Basically one of the things that Google Panda has been doing and Google Penguin, is they're trying to reduce this web spam that I'm talking about.

It's my personal belief that over the last – again, three or four years, the algorithm has begun to make a shift where it's going away from robots controlling which sites rank. This is really critical to understand if you're curious about how to rank in Google. Again, years ago, the entire algorithm was controlled by a robot and a robot is like, “We're looking for keyword density. We're looking for keyword repetition. We're wondering how many other sites are linking to the particular webpage. We're looking at what kind of words are being used in the links that lead to the webpage.” And it was just a huge mathematical equation. If you got most of the equation, you could just feed the robot and you would rank. That was how it would work for a long time. The robot would change, it would get a little smarter, but it was always a robot. As long as you're able to get what's most important to feed the robot, you'd be able to rank.

But then the game started to change. What's really interesting is today, what controls the robot is human visitors and signs to the robot that humans like the webpage, that a lot of humans like the webpage. Basically, if people don't like your site, then you're going to have a very hard time getting past the gatekeepers aka Google Panda, Google Penguin and so on, and they're not interested in how much page rank you have or how many links because if people leave as soon as they hit your site, then Google could say, “Something is funny because we sent people to the site and they all leave. So we're not going to send more traffic. We're not going to rank this page high because everybody leaves.”

At that point what we need to think about is, “Is it truly possible that humans are now powering the robot? That the robot is collecting intelligence based on the people that are actually on webpages? Is that even possible?”

Brian B: Yes, it sounds like The Matrix.

Brian J: Well, the more I dug in and started really thinking about it, there's a couple of things. Number one, Google Chrome. This is a browser that's used by a tremendous amount of people and they're surfing all day long. If you go to Google and you searched for “weight loss” and you land on a site and you go, “That's spammy” and you hit the “back” button. I'm not saying Google is using Google Chrome to basically collect data, but if they were right there, that would be enough information that they could use to program the algorithm to decide what sites rank.

All of a sudden, Google starts looking at, “How long do people spend on your site? If they spend a longer amount of time, they probably like your site. How many people return to your website? If nobody is returning, they probably don't like your site. How deep are people going to go into your site? Are they going to visit three pages or 20? If they visit 20, wow, that's crazy. That's a real authority site.” These are some of the things that I personally believe are what's factoring in today as far as what is going to rank in the search engines and what's not going to rank in the search engine.

What's really interesting about my book is I think people think trust and that's true, it's all about trust, but it's about trust on a bunch of different levels. Number one, it's trust that you develop with another person. Whether it's a client, whether it's a customer, whether it's a visitor from Google. It's you establishing trust with another human being. However, what about the website you create and how that establishes trust with people that visit it? Ultimately, if you flip to the back cover, you see a box and inside the box it says, “listening, liking, trusting and buying.” These are all the things that people go through in the buying process. They first listen. They listen to someone, they decide if they like them. If they like them, they might listen to them again and over time they begin to trust, and that trust leads to a purchase. This is kind of what trust funnel is really all about. If people dig in, they might think it's really important to build trust with people. It's really important to build trust with people.

Brian B: Amen, brother.

Brian J: It's the whole damn ball of wax. The computers, the people, everything is really hinged and focused on trust. I look at the cover again to my book and I remember getting the proof back for the cover. Inside the funnel thing was – I can't remember what icon was most prevalent – but I said no, that's not the right icon. You don't have the Facebook icon front and center. You have the like button front and center. Think about all the search engines or all the websites you visit today. Brian, name the 10 most important websites on the web today, the websites that have the most traffic. Go.

Brian B: Oh, boy, that's a good one. Amazon, eBay, I don't know. There's lots of them.

Brian J: Okay. Amazon, everything is driven by humans – reviews, content, video reviews, thumbs up, how much they like a book – it's humans voting on whether they like a product or not. Ebay, same thing. How about YouTube? If you go to YouTube, you could find a button just like the “like” button, thumbs up.

Brian B: Yes.

Brian J: Humans are watching videos on YouTube and the algorithm that YouTube is based on how long someone watches your video. It's not a damn keyword. That's 2003. It's like if people don't watch your video, Google doesn't rank your video high. Again, it goes back to trust. If you go to Reddit, Reddit is a really big popular site. The whole site is based on what people like – listen, like, trust, buy.

Brian B: I love that. That's fabulous. The other thing, too, I think that we covered a lot of Google properties but the one that every business should have is analytics. That's where you get the feedback of how you're doing so that you can actually make the changes and work that trust funnel a little bit better, and it tells you a lot of different information. We're not going to jump into that today because that's a whole another podcast. The thing I'd like to know is where are we headed? What's happening with search engine optimization?

Brian J: It's funny. I got an email. In fact I'm going to go to my email right now and as I was reading, I looked at this email from Yoast. You know Yoast, it's the SEO plugin and they're having a conference. They say, “One of the speakers at the Yoast conference is Marcus [Tandler] and we're really proud that he'll be speaking and we wanted to show you a bit of a warm up and that is his presentation he gave at TEDx Munich. Blah, blah, blah, he will explain how Google is now using machine learning and why he thinks links currently a major factor in the ranking process will soon become irrelevant.” This is kind of really what I've been talking about and sharing about for a year-and-a-half. Links are important and what's sad is that so many people are playing the game like it's 2003. What's more important is creating a site that people really engage upon. People come and they'll leave comments. They click like buttons, they revisit your site, they sign up for your newsletter and basically these signals can be read by Google and basically this is what they're determining as far as rankings go.

When we get into like, “What's determining rankings?” It's really hard to say, but here is what I will say beyond the shadow of the doubt. If you adapt this mindset, forget about links, think more about engagement and creating content and create it very systematically. There are so many things you can do with your website – you encourage people to like, to share, to comment, visit more pages, you can lay your site out in a lot of different ways. By doing that, you can be strategic based on where the algorithm is heading and that is how people interact, engage with your site and that, my friend, is exactly where I believe we're headed.

Brian B: Brian, that's some incredible stuff, man, but there are still people making mistakes with SEO. They're overdoing this, they're doing that. What kind of mistakes are you seeing from businesses?

Brian J: I think we talked about it. Let's just highlight it, just head home. Number one, people are playing the game like it's 2003 and they're creating content so focused around the SEO for the search engine that they're really leaving out the most important component – that is the human being behind the screen that's landing on the webpage if you're able to give them what they want. I would say the biggest mistake people are really making is not having a focus as far as what people want and providing value. If you start from that core place of, “I'm going to create something that really adds value to people” and you're able to deliver that, people will come back a million times to your website and what will happen is Google will see that and that will help you to rank better.

Brian B: I think a lot of people are getting bad advice, too. They're reading the wrong articles, there's not a lot of people talking about what you're talking about, which is absolutely 100% spot-on. I think people are still getting bad advice and reading bad articles and things like that. What do you think?

Brian J: There's absolutely no question. That's why I get so heated and passionate. I go off about people are playing the game like it's 2003. When I say people, that's some of my peers and it's a drag because it's like there's so much information and you have to be really careful as far as who you trust, who you follow and who's getting great results. Then I think to think about is that these shortcuts, these tactics like SEO, build links, it's like they're short-lived, they don't really work. If you just start with a simple place of adding value, you'll do well. In fact that brings me to a line in my book and that is if you're ever in doubt, if you're just not sure what the best way forward is, one simple question will always steer you in the right path and that is, “Does this add value and is it to be trusted?”

It's weird like if you're looking at a piece of software and it's a little bit tricky and you know that, you just like, “Can this be trusted?” “Well, not really.” But if you pass, you might be foregoing some great results you can get for a month, but what happens if your site gets canned? You got to start all over again. Nobody wants that. Just, “Can this be trusted? Does it add value?” If you can answer yes to those questions, you're good to go.

Brian B: So what are some of the best practices that you could tell people? I know we've covered a lot of them, but what are you telling your coaching clients, your clients, the people that you're working with about SEO? Is it pretty much everything we covered or are there any other tips you can offer?

Brian J: I was thinking, how can we really send people off with stuff they can leverage? Let's make this really, really actionable. I remember the last time I was on your podcast, I went through my six-step formula for ranking in Kindle. I thought it would be cool to go through my 12 steps for ranking in Google. So number one, begin with 100% unique content that's never been published to the web. It's just that. It's never been published. It's like, “Can I publish it here and there?” No. You publish it once and you're done. It's a little bit more work but it works.

Step number two, 1,000 words minimum. If you look at the analytical data based on the top 20 websites for competitive phrases, you'll find that the articles at the blog post, they are long. They are 1,000, 2,000, 3,000-words long. That may sound like a lot of work and it's a bit of work. Here is what I would say if that kind of scares you. You can do 300 words all day long and get zero results, and never get anywhere, and do work, and get zero result. Or you can do the smart way and get much better results. 1,000 words.

Step number three, identify the target, long tail keyword phrases via Google. Basically step three is when you start creating an article, a blog post and basically you can incorporate these 12 steps anytime you publish. If you published a video, you can incorporate them; if you publish to a blog, you can incorporate them; if you do an article – step three is just understand and find a search term that people are searching for. When I say long tail, what that means is a keyword phrase that is probably four to seven words long. It's very descriptive. It's not “weight loss,” it's “how to lose belly fat” combined with “weight loss.” It's very, very specific. When you target that kind of phrase, there's fewer other websites that are targeting that same phrase and that's going to give you a better chance to do well.

Number four is incorporate the long tail keyword phrase and do the WordPress host or page title. Simple, you can go to your blog and there's a thing called a post title, or a page title and you stick the long tail keyword phrase right there, that's step four. Then when you do that, you create a permalink. A permalink is basically the URL of where your article, blog post can be found and when you post inside a WordPress, there's a thing it says, “Permalink.” You just want to make sure that your permalink contains the keyword that you're targeting. That's step number five.

Number six is begin the SEO title with the long tail phrase. If you're targeting “weight loss” and “lose belly fat,” well you're going to incorporate those keywords in the SEO title. It's not really that hard. Number seven is to begin a description, the meta description again with some of the keywords that you're targeting in the long tail phrase. You identify the long tail phrase and you incorporate that phrase throughout the article and that's what we're talking about now.

In step eight, we're going to incorporate the long tail phrase and the first 50 words of the post. If you're trying to rank for a “lose belly fat” and “lose weight,” then you're going to incorporate those words in the first 50 words. Very simple. Step nine is including the long tail phrase and an H2 or H3 tag. That's just a heading. In the WordPress menu, you can access whether you want the text to be paragraph style and if you want it to be formatted for a whole list, or a number of list, or if you want an H1, H2, or H3 tag and you can just incorporate the long tail phrase into an H2 or H3 tag and that's step nine, that will help you.

Step 10 is incorporate the long tail phrase in an image and anytime you add an image, you have the chance to incorporate. Literally you click on the thing, there's a little box there that says, “What should the title be?” That's the old image. You'll incorporate the long tail phrase in that and then you could link from other pages on your site using some of the words in your long tail phrase. In other words, if you've got a blog about weight loss and you've already got 50 posts on the blog and you're talking about building muscle, belly fat, losing weight on a couple of other post, you can go to those post and then you can strategically link to your new post and make sure you're doing that by using some of the words that are in your long tail phrase, and that will basically create a link that will help you rank better.

Then step 12 is something most people don't talk about. It's including a call to action in the post content. I've gone ahead and I've mentioned an optimized call to action. What that means is basically if you've got an article and you're blogging because you're hoping to get clients, then you should always be encouraging people to do stuff. At the end of the day, marketing boils down to asking people to take action on your behalf, “Hey you should sign up to my list.” “Hey, if you've enjoyed this article, feel free to share it with your friends.” “By the way, if you've enjoyed this article, I've got a full course on weight loss and building muscle, and you can learn more and buy by clicking the link below.” Tell people what kind of action you want them to take and by optimized call of action, I like to make sure I'm doing it in ways that get better results. I want to give you a quick tip, but I know we're probably running late – include a video right above the call of action. You're going to have a short video and it can literally be used on a couple of different post.

I can remember when I did for Kindle and I basically created a video. It was 10 or 20 seconds, “Hey, it's Brian G. Johnson and if you like this information on rocking your Kindle marketing, make sure you sign up by using the link below and I'll give you some free additional training you're going to want to grab.” I would include a video and right below the video, I'd have an optimized call to action where people could sign up to my list and I grew my own list. Do it in a way that really gets people's attention. Video is great.

Another example of an optimized call of action is you can put a sign up form for your email list in your sidebar. However, statistically, people ignore those. The reason they ignore them is because it's in your sidebar. People are not there for your navigational structure, they're there for your content. Instead, you want to grow your email list, include a call to action and an opt in form in the middle of your article or at the very end just like I mentioned, “Hey, it's Brian G. Johnson, I hope you like this information on Kindle marketing. If you'd like more, I've got a free course I'm going to get you. Just add your name and email address below and I'll send that over.”

I started doing that, Brian and my opt ins went from five or 10 a month to about 200 a month.

Brian B: Wow, that's incredible, man. That's a huge jump and that's some great advice.

So Brian, you've got something to share with people about how to maximize everything that we've talked about today. What's that?

Brian J: Yes, absolutely. My book Trust Funnel talks about all of these things. It talks about where we've been with SEO, where we're going, how to plan and prepare for today as well as tomorrow and folks can grab my book Trust Funnel at Amazon, at Barnes and Noble – I'm pretty proud of it. It's actually one of the top-rated books in web marketing out of all of Amazon. If you go to Kindle web marketing, you will see my book is one of the top-rated books and it's got over 80 reviews. People can grab a book and I know if they dig in, they're going to find some information that will help them to move forward and improve their results.

Brian B: Man, I've read it. It is fabulous. There are so many nuggets in that book and you are such an incredible marketer. Just the way you marketed the book blew me away. It's been fabulous. Hey, Brian, thanks again for coming today. If people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Brian J: I'm all over the internet. You can find me at Marketingeasystreet.com, search for me on Facebook. Those are some great places you can find me. I'm also on YouTube, again Marketingeasystreet. Plenty of options for people.

Brian B: Hey, brother, thanks again for coming on then. This has been just outstanding information. I know my audience are just going to eat it up. Thanks again for joining us, man.

Brian J: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Very much appreciated.

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