Ross Hudgens runs Siege Media. They are literally the ONLY SEO company I recommend people to. They handle medium to large companies like Zillow, Shutterfly, AirBnB, Intuit, Casper, ZipRecruiter and way more.
Watch the full Ross Hudgens interview here:
Siege Media has been on the INC 5000 list for the last 4 years in a row. The reason I like Ross is that he does SEO that gets real results for clients, but at SCALE. Listen to the Ross Hudgens - Round 2 interview here:
We did a whole other interview with Ross here where we talked extensively about SEO.We’ve chopped up this hefty interview into little digestible clips, and put them on a separate “clips” we hope you subscribe on YouTube:▶️ Copywriting Course YouTube Channel▶️ Copywriting Clips YouTube Channel (new) The State of SEO (It’s getting more competitive, and Google is moving in):
- What is the state of SEO?
- Do content creators hate Google’s encroachment on their content?
What’s your current SEO strategy?:
- Current strategy?
- Has it changed?
- What do you hate?
- What do you love?
The basics of SEO (what actually moves the needle, and what content ranks):
- Make good content → Get a lot of links and attention to it.
- How much of SEO is just getting links.
- There’s a bazillion ranking factors. There's meta tags, description tags, title tags, page speed, read time, mobile friendliness, which do you think is most important? There must be a 90/10 rule.
- What results do you see with clients? Is it more worth it to invest in search traffic or social?
- Listicles, Calculators, Generators, Long Form?
- How long does it take to rank?
Starting a brand, you can go social media 1st, website 2nd, and ALWAYS email
- I’ve seen whole crops of creators thrive off social media, and have little to none SEO. This is a big shift from 10 years ago.
- Building a personal brand, do you still need a website first?
- Email is still the king though.
The story of changing from KK → CC (and some interesting findings)
Tools for SEO (Ahrefs, Copy.ai, BuzzStream, Hunter.io, AI writing uses):
- What SEO tools do you use?
- Ahrefs shoutout
- Have you been following the GPT-3 tools?
- How long does it typically take to rank something?
- Hunter.io for email finding, BuzzStream for sales outreach, PitchBox for sales outreach, Copy.ai for
- Future writing tools with AI
Video for SEO (The number of clients doing video is increasing big)
- YouTube strategy. Ya’ll do some awesome videos on Siege Media. I actually can’t believe your channel isn’t bigger. Is the amount of time you spend on this worth it?
- What do you get out of videos? Indirect or direct.
- Have your videos lead to clients?
- Creating tons of content from a single piece of content
- What percentage of clients do videos?
- Getting more interesting guests comes from
- My person podcast model is Lex Fridman
- Do you call it your business channel, or personal channel?
Lightning Round (quick 1 min timed answers):
- What is SEO?
- How can you rank something #1 in Google?
- What are the best SEO tools to use?
- How would you start a personal brand if you were just starting out?
Follow Ross Hudgens and Siege Media:🖥 Website: SiegeMedia.com🌇 Instagram: @siege_media🐦 Twitter: @RossHudgens▶️ YouTube: @SiegeMediaFollow Copywriting Course:🎦 @Kopywriting🎦 Copywriting Course Clips🌇 @neville_medhora🐦 @NevMed🖥 Join email list⇨ Become a memberTranscription:
Neville Medhora 0:00 All right, so I think we're ready to roll. Nice this so today in the studio we got we got Ross Hudgens of siege media. So what's up Brown? Not too much. Thanks for having so let me give a quick intro. You're an impressive character. So Ross Hutchins runs a siege media. They're literally the only SEO company I recommend. I said this last time too. That is true. They handle like I guess medium to large companies like Zillow, Shutterfly, Airbnb Intuit Casper zip recruiter and like a million more, check it out on their website. They've been on the Inc 5000 list for the last four years in a row. Correct. Nice. And the reason I like Ross and seeds, media, it's just SEO that gets real results for clients. And that scale, which is very, very difficult. It's hard enough to do on your own super difficult to do it for multiple clients, and actually make legit good content. It's not it's not tricks and stuff like that. I think you'll have like 110 employees. Yeah, right around there. God. Dang. Okay. And they're all remote now.Ross Hudgens 0:56 Yes, I had to make sure everyone was remote. Sorry.Neville Medhora 0:58 Okay. Because you previously had offices in San Diego, New York. Austin, all the cracks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cool. Welcome the show. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having me back. So. So the title is the state of SEO? What is the state of SEO? What do you even seeing what's going on? AndRoss Hudgens 1:15 yeah, I feel like SEO is increasingly gone. brand, and quality focus year over year, increasingly, it's just so more and more competitive, such that as more and more brands are kind of like getting adept at search and understanding, it's a channel that makes a lot of money. Google's figuring that out as well once making everything harder for a mid market to smaller sites. So I don't think Google's necessarily changed a ton. Maybe they iteratively have over time. But increasingly, it's these brands realizing they need to be doing search. So there's more of them in the search results, then also, Google just been better at picking up quality signals. So like, by nature, brands are quality, and se wants to reward brands and brands know that this channel is going to work and more of them are learning that. So overall, it's just getting harder and harder. I don't think there's like some super fancy new sauce out there. It's just getting more and more competitive.Neville Medhora 2:08 Every day, I started doing SEO like 1999 2001, right, kind of like the beginning era of the internet and search engines. And I ran a rave company now just like, say, like, glide up golf balls. And just by putting light dash up dashboard dot html, which all HTML sites back then. And then a nice title. I was like, number one, I was king of the world with SEO. Now. It's not quite that easy right now. Yeah. And is that just because like, bigger competitors are moving in.Ross Hudgens 2:37 It's part of a Google there was a phase there where Google realized that manipulation, and they set up processes in place to solve for that. So there are people that you could get a sitewide link that said, rave, Austin, or whatever, and you'd automatically rank really high. But that was a non naturally occurring activity, so Google could solve for that. So people that bought links or manipulated their way to show Google that I'm a brand, they could figure that out. It's like not, it is rockets. I mean, I can figure out that equation, but the effect effectively figure out the algorithm eventually to understand real signals versus manipulated signals. So that's where we are now. Now. It's just everyone doing more and more of those real signals, in my opinion.Neville Medhora 3:19 So I also noticed back in the day, like SEO was just it was a bunch of shady mofosRoss Hudgens 3:25 didn't have a great reputation reverser, maybe we still use ours, there's just kind of average. Now. I feel likeNeville Medhora 3:31 it was a bunch of shady people. And here's the thing it worked. Like if you if you you bought a bunch of spam sites, I'll link them to best wedding shoes or whatever. The works. Like you trick, the trick. The algorithm? Yeah. I don't really see that that often. anymore. The shady stuff worked out well, unless there's like, oh, underground thing I don't know about.Ross Hudgens 3:51 I think you're right, especially in competitive markets, the little less competitive, the spaces are maybe newer it is the fast, the more likely that can occur. I think it's also maybe a little less competitive in some international verticals, where people are ranking for things because there's not as many of those big brands they're playing. So if you're, if you don't have cnn trying to rank for something, it's just a bunch of five Joe's, it's the best of those five Joe's right. So that's sometimes part ofNeville Medhora 4:18 you know, kind of piecing it together. I know Neil Patel, who's like a very contentious figure in the SEO community, but whatever. Like, I mean, he has a lot of traffic, dude, results speak for themselves, wherever you think of him. I remember he was going really hard on like translating into Portuguese or something like that. And because he's just like, I guess Brazil has, you know, 100 years inApril? Oh,yeah. That's a translate to Portuguese. there's not as many companies like ziprecruiter focusing on the Portuguese Brazilian market. Exactly. So therefore, there's a Okay, that's really interesting.Ross Hudgens 4:49 So as part in that probably helps lift as us side as well. So if he, my thought, I think one of the things that's helping people win now is multiple methods of monetization. So Neil As an agency, he's also making money off affiliate sites. He has an agency in Brazil now. So he can monetize in these locations. And the fact that this other thing can be monetized it kind of lifts the other part as well. So he can make more money by spending $1,000 on this thing, then someone else in that same position would spend, they could only make, say, 500, because they're just an agency. That makes sense. Yeah. So by nature, his economics make it so he can spend all this money on translating on buying Uber suggests, which is a tool that he bought and redirected into his site. All of those things allow him that economic advantage that he can win with? Neville Medhora 5:38 Well, I think a lot of software companies to have done the same thing. So you have like top towel or something, for example. And they're a software company that or someone else Bad, bad example, into it, let's say into it's a software company, they make money off their software, so they can spend a million dollars a month on content marketing, and it totally makes sense for them. For sure.Ross Hudgens 5:55 Yeah, you're right. So there are economic advantages there SAS product probably can convert better, they're more profitable loused them out,Neville Medhora 6:02 I've honestly seen like, in terms of any competition of mine, it's it's a software companies I'm worried about. It's not like other operating companies, it's software companies, because they tend to make like the best content, from what I've seenRoss Hudgens 6:14 in because they have the most money to invest in, for sure. And they have high authority. So they, they can I think it's a real challenge for sure. On your kind of searches.Neville Medhora 6:22 So um, so as a consumer, okay, so as someone myself who goes to Google a million times a day, I've noticed that if I type in how to make an egg, they have their own content up there. So step one, get eggs up to whatever it is just like in the little search snippet that was that was calledRoss Hudgens 6:39 quick answer. feature snippet.Neville Medhora 6:41 Exactly. As a person that uses Google all the time. I love this. Like, all I want to do is my brain to know how to make an egg because I got an egg in my hand and a pan I don't know what to do. I'm trying to find the answer the quickest. I do not want to watch a 20 minute video about how to make an egg at this moment, maybe later when I'm bored. But I really love it. But But I hear a lot of people in SEO community complaining about it a lot. Because like your job is like I want to go how Google how to make an egg be the first result and then show people ads or get them to sign up or whatever. But now Google's kind of taking that content and kind of putting it right up there for their own benefit. Yes, they are. So it's consumer, I love it. What's the what's the thought in the SEO community about these snippets getting smarter and smarter and better and better.Ross Hudgens 7:25 We're not excited about it, for sure. But it's also you, you play the hand you're dealt. So actually one of our big processes is solving to get in those. So for people doing content marketing is very often a simplistic structure for your site. So if you're doing how to make an egg, you would want to have that beer, each one and then step one, crack the egg in, in h2, and then the steps the next step in h2 as well make it easy for Google to pull that out. It's kind of one of the things we now optimize for that just a kind of soft approach. People don't think about simplistic structure for their posts, but that's how a robot interprets it. So we're trying to solve for that to get into that, because it's, it's the finite click through rate we have so we might as well, we were trying to get our clients success. So we have to do that. But the good news is they have been encroached on FTC, I believe, was there snippets for taking traffic from people, there's anti monopolistic, I'm not huge on this, but still pay attention to it. Behavior against them for things like that taking traffic from publishers, I know it's one thing h refs is actually trying to do is they're going to have their own search engine, which will pay publishers for traffic for showing those things, which is a cool way of hopefully, doing the opposite version of what Google is doing in that situation. That's up.Neville Medhora 8:49 Yeah, I'm kind of conflicted about because I kind of love them asRoss Hudgens 8:52 it's good for users. So I guess you can't hate on that. You. I think one of the other things too is you understand what search results, you're actually going to click through rate on a dress or shirt you're wearing, they have a tool that actually tell you the click through rate by search. So that's a new factory added now to is we we look at what is the click through rate for this is even in the search volumes. 10,000 if the if this if it's a definitional search, like what is copywriting possible only 30% click. So we would rather rank for probably complex how tos and a cybersecurity vertical because no matter what they're gonna have to click, because you can't get that in a just a snippet. That makes sense.Neville Medhora 9:31 Yeah. I guess we'll talk about in the in the next next segment, but like there is like this compression of information that like, okay, I do watch 20 minute videos on how to make an egg because it's kind of fun. Yeah. But then also like, I want to know right now because I got my apron on and I'm trying to make an egg egg information super fast. So do appreciate Google doing that. I know there's FTC lawsuits over it. That's crazy. So okay, with all that said, your current SEO strategy for companies and yourself like, has it changed is it The same like,Ross Hudgens 10:02 Yeah, uh, we we've evolved our strategy. I think more and more today we're doing a few things. One is we're generally going more of market, I think not just because what does market mean? Like enterprise companies? fortune 500? Got it big US company? Yes, exactly. And part of the reason for that is that's who I see winning long term. So we want to, it's not that I don't want to help small and medium sized businesses. So we're in the business of helping people actually get ROI. And increasingly, Google's just showing that if you're not one of those serve that sector, you're not going to win. So one of the things we're doing in relation to that is passive link acquisition. So a lot of people were doing shady off page link building. And what we're trying to do increasingly is build link building engines for clients where they rank for something or several things, and they will organically acquire links.Neville Medhora 10:51 Are you talking about late sorry, passive link acquisition, you're talking about, like a generator, a calculator that just gets links by the nature of it? So that's a good example of it. Yes. Okay. What are other examples of passive soRoss Hudgens 11:01 there are trends posts will often be something bloggers are important, maybe Google and then cite, the cost to remodel your kitchen is one where people will look for that specific data points, often a single data point that someone's referencing, that's also a search that you would see in a quick answer, a person would grab that, but it can also be something very high fidelity, like a calculator that just gets linked to, it's kind of, we describe it as the ratio of searches to how often it gets linked to. Statistics posts are an obvious one where people are like citing data points and trends, so it could be like, copywriting trends, or copywriting statistics is, as reference points. Oh, interesting. I never heard that searches over links. That's an interesting formula. To play it, there's some that are pretty obvious. But that will hopefully help you find low difficulty things. Because it's obvious to search for blind calculator, most of that's going to show up to everybody. And you might still get passive links, but it'll be harder to find, but low search volume ones that you link to a ton, that's where the goal is at the end of the rainbow,Neville Medhora 12:06 and anything you kind of hate about the SEO industry, or love or any like, stuff like that going on. Uh,Ross Hudgens 12:13 I don't know if this is just unique to our industry. But there are a lot of negative people in our industry, I find like a lot of haters. Why Why do people hate an SEO industry? No, maybe it's just the nature of Twitter generally. Do you think it's just nature of Twitter? Generally? Yeah, I guess. So. There's always like some degree of hate. But there, there might be a degree of what we talked about with Google is like, it breeds kind of negativity when you're getting crushed by Google on kind of a cycle. Yeah, traffic updates are depressing.Neville Medhora 12:41 Okay, I'm on both sides of it. Because one, like I do create content. And like, if I don't get a click, because Google gets it, like, I'd rather have it, of course, at the same time, how much do I pay for my search engine results? Oh, yeah. $0? Do I have to do it? No. Does Google have to give me Do they owe me something? No, it's just like, you got to play the game. So it's kind of like, it's like people hate on Facebook. But it's like, oh, sorry that Mark Zuckerberg put out a completely free worldwide interconnected node network for you to use and get a bunch of traffic and share with your friends and get updates from them. It's like, you don't have to be on it. You don't have to do it. They don't have to do it. You're not paying for it. So I don't know. I'm kind of like ambivalent about it. Like, I would like it if I got a bunch of free traffic for no reason. But like, I understand like, it's a competitive market. You got to got to do it agreed. Also, search traffic is still by far the number one most desired type of traffic. I think so it's just like month after month. If like, if I don't post four months on my site, I still get all that traffic, it doesn't go away. Whereas if I don't post on Twitter for four days, I get zero views. Right? You don't have to be on the tread. Yeah,Ross Hudgens 13:47 yeah. It's there's a reason it's the number one channel for so many people.Neville Medhora 13:52 Yeah. So if I look up your site on a dress or something like the shadows a dress and wear the T shirt. They like you have like something like $30,000 with the free traffic a month. Just come into your your stuff. That's That's a lot of Yeah, a lot of free traffic for sure. That's pretty awesome as me Yeah. So I don't I don't know why people so bitter. Sometimes they just got to understand Yeah,Ross Hudgens 14:13 when you have it all wiped away it can. People do feel entitled to it. But most of the time when you dig in this people didn't deserve it compared to the alternative. As you mentioned, the better example of how to make an egg is now ranking number one.Neville Medhora 14:24 Well, let me let me let me jump around for a second and go to the story of copywriting course with two K's two copywriting course with two C's. So speaking of getting wiped away, sometime last year, I acquired the copywriting course calm with Keynes and how we always spelt it. It was kind of a joke. And I always said like copywriting is like rearranging words and stuff like that in copywriting with Ks was rearranging words of different types of media, so images, videos, to convey information. It's not just words, sometimes a picture is better at conveying things than just words. And so the real reason I made a copywriting course with case was I couldn't get the domain at the time. Okay, that was the reason. And so I thought it'd be funny we just make a case. things have happened in the world where the abbreviation kk, and especially because we have a big community, we call it the copywriting course community spells an acronym that people don't like. And this is a pure coincidence. And so companies would be like, yeah, there's kind of a problem. And, and so I acquired the domain copywriting course, with CS, I think I paid $13,500 for it or something like that. Really nice lady sold it to me. But the thing was, she was using it for an affiliate site. And it was like, just redirecting stuff was like copywriting course.com, slash whatever product and they were of whatever reputation products. Anyways, there was a bunch of links to it actually had like a pretty good domain rank already not as good as ours, but maybe half that. So pretty good. So we switched everything over. And we started getting some of our traffic back, because we were getting roughly 400,000 visits a month before, and it just dropped massively. We expected that for a few weeks, but then it never came back. So like month to month three, were kind of like, okay, what's, what's going on over here? So we start to get really worried by month eight, we're just like, okay, there's something really, really wrong here. So we talked to everyone, we paid some high end people to look at it. And they actually kind of discovered a small flaw in Google, which was, which is very interesting. They're just like, wow, we've ever seen this. But anyways, what we ended up doing long story short, we ended up doing was disavowing all the links that came to that website before us, and there's some good ones, some really high quality links that we kind of wanted. And we're like, we're just gonna get rid of all of them. Sure enough, our traffic came back. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. So now we're starting to climb again. And we got our rankings back literally, like the next week, and every week, it's started going higher and higher, not back to its original path. That site had no traffic cameras, it looks so there was a lot of like, especially when you look at some of the bad sites like there's some real crazy words and stuff it was ranking for, like all the sex stuff, porn stuff, like in an insane way, it's kind of disgusting looking at actually, just like the worst side of the internet. We're linking to the site for whatever reason. Okay, so let's uh, disavow all that kind of stuff. So yeah, for a while I was a little kind of like fucking Google, like, goddamn Google. They don't they don't know what they're doing blah, blah, blah. We're telling them in Webmaster Tools like this is this is us. We are the legit site and everything like that. So I was bitter. not bitter. But yeah, kind of bitter for like a bit. And then I got back in. I was like, I love Google, again, where people so mad at them. It's kind of it's a cycle. Yeah. Have you seen people do site changes and just like lose all their traffic ever?Ross Hudgens 17:34 Yeah, it definitely can happen if you do not all but a huge dampening. For sure. For situations you just mentioned, like you haven't penalize site, you're redirected over that doesn't go swimmingly, it just has to be so perfect. Well, letNeville Medhora 17:47 me share something interesting to learn though. So we have a lot of sites that are pages that get a lot of traffic, but don't necessarily get a lot of conversion. And they were kind of like fun, calculate me like a roast generator and stuff like that. So it's like, it was fun. It was fun. And of getting a lot of traffic. And the thing was, we noticed like that traffic like doesn't convert at all. I'm talking like 10s of 1000s of pages a week or visits a week, like doesn't convert one bit.Ross Hudgens 18:13 That's an ironic thing about so many sites, I think we look at our competitors see their highest traffic site pages, and we do those first. And then they almost never convert. Yes, the same for us like our traffic has been dwindling on search right now. And our revenues going pretty doing pretty well. And now there's no correlation at all, because we rank for like most popular keywords that just some random person is searching like, what is the most searched keywords on Google, we lost that traffic, how to find someone's email address. It's kind of like someone trying to find their long lost lover. That's not someone who wants content marketing 98% of the time, those are our two biggest terms. And most the time when is high traffic. There's a reasons high traffic because especially in b2b verticals. It's not qualified. Not every vertical but if it's in b2b verticals, very often you want the low traffic terms. Yeah, that'sNeville Medhora 19:09 interesting. Like we lost all the traffic and I was associated a site I was proud of that we had, like, you know, it's when we actually have to have low on WP engine or host they forced us to go to an enterprise level thing because we have so many traffic between our two sites swipe file and copper in course, and it was kind of like it sucks because that pay a lot more money. But it was kind of like it's kind of cool. Yeah, like they were kicking us off the basic servers because they're like, Dude, come on your way to a traffic. So I equated that and then our traffic dropped by 99 or 98% or something at least the organic search did and our revenue still went up. I was like, Huh, what exactly is all that traffic worth for a little bit it does it does help with signups I did notice signups go down by halfRoss Hudgens 19:52 what I wouldn't be long term top funnel that that's not gonna measure right away.Neville Medhora 19:55 Yeah. Also, I think like if you're in a content, business, like having Traffic is like a little bit of a sign of like, like, I know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, doesn't hurt. I was hesitant to talk about SEO during that time, because like, if someone looked at our href, they're like, well, this guy, yeah.Ross Hudgens 20:10 Look at our hrs right now, it's actually not good at all, but really won't care at all. Because of matter. We kind of went that we were like our audiences, enterprise customers, they're not searching even basic content marketing terms, that's not a director of content marketing is not searching, what is link building, you know what link building is. So like, why in to the point previously, and certain martic markets, you just can't win. It's kind of ironic that us as a content marketing agency, I'm pretty confident we could win for a lot of terms, but we're up against hrs, who has much more incentive to rank for those things, and more of that audience is qualified, they can monetize more directly for that term than we can for your part of the audience. It is very expensive to rank for those things.Neville Medhora 20:56 So let's, let's talk about the basics of SEO. I think I've asked you about this before, but it's still like, it's kind of just like, make good content and get a lot of links and attention to it. Right? Is that like the basic formula?Ross Hudgens 21:09 Yes, and be qualified for the topic and search the, like, the keyword you're trying to rank for has to be a good result for that thing, like how to make an egg? Is it structured correctly for that and does get a lot of links? In matches user experience, then you can rank? Got it in sense.Neville Medhora 21:28 So how much of SEO is still just getting likes?Ross Hudgens 21:33 It's a big percentage are talking like 90%? I think is good, white hat is a huge part of that for sure why it happens, you can't get bad links and still rank. So that could be the people could misinterpret what you say, and then go get a lot of crappy links and think they can rank Okay, so don't go on Fiverr and buy like 10,000 links, you can surely engineer a real website to generate a lot of links. Yes, that's the quality ranking factor.Neville Medhora 21:59 Got it? Okay. So you want a link from a high ranking thing? Okay. Of course, it just seems like from the day that the PageRank, white paper came out from Google, if the exact same algorithm, almost Okay, I know they do a lot of small little things. They have a lot of fancy ways that they get rid of spam and stuff like that. But ultimately, it seems like if you get the most amount of top ranking links, a high ranking links to a piece of content, you will be number one in the search engine, I think the mathematical certainty, right?Ross Hudgens 22:26 Yes. No, no, you could be it depends on the key, like one page can rank for a ton of different keywords. So if one is a slight, if they match the user intent for one set of that term, one term, and the other one does not, it's very possible to lower less link to page can rank higher, based on the signals of say a million people search, how to crack an egg or how to make an egg. If a lot of people are bouncing or not clicking that highly linked to asset, it'll get re ranked by Google. Hmm, that makes sense. So the user experience signals based on bouncing back to the search result, or maybe you search it again, because that first one didn't give you the right ratio of salt and pepper. I don't know,Neville Medhora 23:08 where do you find out about these things? Just like Twitter, like following people areRoss Hudgens 23:15 definitely good to follow a lot of people that are SEOs if you're interested in SEO and content marketers as well, but it my general recommendation, and I think this is good marketing, is pattern matching is you search things a lot. You look at the factors of what's ranking? Well, you try to do some analysis of what doesn't rank well against that, and why that's kind of how you come in assumption of this is how something is in the featured snippet. And this how it's like, what is the calm the factors that are co occurring on all these pages that you search? It's the structure of the page is the links. When you combine those elements, then you learn just through kind of repetition.Neville Medhora 23:53 So this is I'm asking this selfishly, but I'm sure other people content that gets ranked, like let's say, like listicles, there's like calculators, generators, long form articles. Is there any of those that specifically that do better, or that you go for more, just depends,Ross Hudgens 24:11 I would say, kind of going full circle here, it's user intent should tell you that. So search something, and then what their search result is telling you is what you should do. So if you search, how to make an egg, which is common thing we've been searching, you're gonna see video of that, you need to have video to rank for that term. Because Google is showing videos on the search results. But if you search something like flower quotes, you'll see a ton of images from like Pinterest on there. So you need visual images that are quotes as well as actual words in order to rank for flower quotes because the search engine result page is telling you that. So in terms of actually generating links, and interest listicles do very well. Yes, on average. So that's good people like listicles they like structure. That's good. back to that quick and bestNeville Medhora 25:00 thing to do in Austin, that's going to be a listicle. Right?Ross Hudgens 25:02 Yes, for sure. So you'll see your search that you'll see like 15 2025. And that'll be indication that you should also make a list of goal how to cook an egg is going to be a video I assume, could be mixed. So it'll probably mixed intent where you'll see videos, but you could, people will also want that written version because I don't necessarily want the video, but some users will. So to best solve for that you'd ideally, ideally have every kind of mixed media format that Google is telling you people want. So video, images, words, for that video specifics, youNeville Medhora 25:37 kind of have to have like, like you have to video, you have to do everything now. Before it used to be you just make one page. But now it seems like you're gonna do everything omni channel marketing, I guess it's called.Ross Hudgens 25:48 It depends on the vertical for sure. Like if you're in recipes, yes, you need to do video if you're in b2b copywriting. I mean, I think it's good for you for thought leadership, but to actually rank for stuff. I don't know is as often needed. Hmm.Neville Medhora 26:02 Let's talk about that. Um, so with social media, social media Euston. I know like for the longest time didn't rank at all and search engines still doesn't, which is kind of confused by I don't know why they have sometimesRoss Hudgens 26:16 on new searches, I think they bring in Twitter, but that's bad.Neville Medhora 26:19 Did you bring in tweets? Yeah, you're right. for that. I mean, like, if something like if I hear an explosion or something like almost Twitter? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's where you go, like, you're not, you're not looking for a old link on Google. I'm always surprised that they haven't, like done something to that effect. But um, I've seen this whole crop of creators kind of, like thrive off social media, and they have little to none. SEO, like, like, have, you look at their href. And it's dismal. You're like, this person's not a competitor, but on Twitter, or some of their channel, they might be huge. Now, that's a huge shift from like, 10 years ago. So you know, a huge 10 years ago, like, you know, roommate safety's blog was popular, you can tell if you had a lot of traffic, he was probably big. Now, some of these sites kind of confused me, because I'm like to have no traffic, very few links. But on social, they're huge. Is this like something that's happening that you're seeing more and more? I'm certainly seeing it.Ross Hudgens 27:12 Yes, for it's completely, I used to recommend to our team early and seems like build your own personal website. Now, I can't recommend that for like personal branding reasons, you can do that so easily without having a website on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. If you're trying to build a website from scratch, I don't know of the route is going to rank on search, I don't think the route is to just start doing that it's probably to do what you mentioned, is build a brand first. Like I think of Mr. Beast or something, he probably could now build this really powerful SEO thing, if he cared enough to do that simply because of the brand he's built on this other site. But if he'd gone search first and then tried to go that other direction, most the time, it doesn't work. So I would try to build a brand and then leverage that brand to rank on search. If you're going the other direction, you're probably like thinking about search a little too directly. And you ironically, won't rank on search, because you won't build a brand. You need the brand rank on search that in my Yeah.Neville Medhora 28:10 I mean, I just remember like, like back in the day, you would build a blog, and it would take years of writing. And then maybe you can sort of connect to people, random people to find you. Whereas you can have one follower on Twitter and start connecting with Elan Musk, if you want. Yeah, it's kind of like a game or change. Yeah, it's just different. Also, I look at twitter. It's like, it's not different than a blog. Okay, what do you do on a blog? Like you go on some platform, you type something, and it posts on a website? Well, I mean, that's what Twitter does. Right? It just does it for you. And then under format. Yeah. And then and then I remember, like the gold standard of like a post to see if it was popular used to be like comments, right? Yeah, well, now you can just like directly comment on someone's post. So it's like, it's the same thing. But it's a little micro blog. That's just to be frank, it's better.Ross Hudgens 28:52 Yeah. And LinkedIn almost allows you to go long as long form as an oral blog post would go.Neville Medhora 28:57 And I guess there's medium to some degree, although I've never found that to be super social. Whereas like Facebook is LinkedIn is Twitter is? Yeah, so it's almost like if you want to build a personal brand, just start with a social media thing. Then once you get big start the personal website, maybe or some sort of website often.Ross Hudgens 29:15 The I think a common recommendation is to build a list. Like that's one route as well. So use social to build a list and then it could go towards building a website as well. That's the variable I would maybe add to that. I still do you still see like email being the big granddaddy of everything or not email marketer. I mean, isn't a huge for you specifically? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean company. If you talk about to own channel like emails, really, thing we can get, hopefully guarantee is pretty owned, that that can be taken away from us despite Google during the promotions tab. Like it's gonna be ours. So that's one reason people invested so heavily.Neville Medhora 29:54 And every big company I've been part of or something, let's say like some like, talk about like apple. Sumo or something like that, it's when it was, like 100,000 subscribers, you're just like, okay, we'll make this much money off these 100,000 subscribers. It's like, well, what if we get to 200,000 subscribers? It's like you double your money. So it was just like, okay, let's grow the email list. That's what it seems we're actually thinking of doing something like that right now. We're trying to figure out like the one metric that brings all boats up. And it sounds like it's, I wish it was a different one. I wish it was. I wish it was like grow my YouTube bigger. It's not it's the email the size. It's just that simple. It seems.Ross Hudgens 30:31 Yeah. Right. That's how Brian Dean backlinko grew as well, like he would did so much manual link building and then suddenly his list size got so large, because he invested so much in that that he I think he that was one reason he stopped needing to do it because he just hit Publish. People saw his content. And he didn't agree he doesn't even really care about Twitter, even though he has a big audience here because his list is like it's just multi mini multiples more click through rate.Neville Medhora 30:56 It kinda reminds me of something recently, I saw with like political stuff like Andrew Yang ran for like the governor of New York or whatever. He's like 2 million followers. So people thought because everyone else had like 10,000 followers, the other candidates, but it was like other people that just totally beat him. And one of the guys had a great quote. And he was just like, people, social media doesn't vote people with social security vote. And remember thinking like most people would look at like Andrew Yang's giant Twitter list and be like, he's clearly going to win. But they're totally missing the forest for the trees, whatever that quote is for the audience. Yeah, the biozone is, it's like this. It's like, do you have a big email list? You're probably gonna win.Ross Hudgens 31:34 Yeah, yeah. It's kind of what most people are on email in some form, no matter the audience.Neville Medhora 31:39 Well, that that was that was a saving grace. That's what I like. I mean, because I don't think email gets enough love, especially nowadays, because there's other more like fancy platform, you know, tick tock, what are the hot new thing is, but when we last went from 400, something 1000 visits, you know, a month to 400. And we still grew larger. I was like, Oh, it's because the email list. It's literally because the email list that is my distribution platform, like I don't make a lot of sales off Twitter or anything. But I make them all on the email list.Ross Hudgens 32:07 There's so much power to just like resetting your mind from a vanity point of view around traveling. And like you even looking at our lead numbers. I was just vanity trying to increase that and like only, like, 1/10 of these are even qualified. So why am I caring about this? So many people do?Neville Medhora 32:26 Cool. Um, let's talk to them more technical stuff, tools for SEO? What SEO tools do you personally use? I mean, I got on a href. Sure. I use href. All the time. Yes. That's a huge, super excited about their, their, their search engine. And that's not necessarily plug. I'm like, genuinely excited. This is not what other search engines are right now. Like, you got DuckDuckGo. But there's nothing that really, I haven't used it all that much. But I am excited that href has all this link data and they're doing something with it. Because I have noticed the quality of results on Google kind of get a little bit annoying sometimes. Sometimes we'll search stuff and I'm like seeing like 19 ads. And I'm like, I don't copywriting searches. No, no, not all copywriting searches. Just anything. I found for the first time at starting about a year or two ago, that I started looking at the Google search results and being like, okay, you're starting to get a little bit tricky. I wonder if you ever use like Alibaba or any the Chinese search engines? I haven't not that much. But they they they're open about it. So find like they're open that like, yeah, the first couple of results are sponsored. And we don't tell you that their ads, like they're, they're totally transparent about that. But with Google, I always thought like, you know, they used to have like their ads on the side and green. So you knew it was an ad. I liked that. But now they're starting to kind of disguise it a little bit more. And they turn the Add button from blue to black, so you don't see it. I'm kind of excited about their search engines. So what other SEO tools are you using out there besides h refs,Ross Hudgens 34:01 we use hunter.io for email finding that's is really good UX for our team. We like that a lot. buzzstream is our outreach tool where we manage our entire relationship database. So it drops the big one we do usually what is buffering do, it's a relationship database. It will also is basically we can send emails as a team and then see, Joe already contacted this person, so we don't pitch them and spam them got that and we can see that relationship status and see we contacted them six months ago. They were happy therefore they're probably more likely to receive our pitch. If you're doing outreach in any kind of scale, but stream is great. Pitch box is another one as well have been looking at the GPT three to GPT three tools. haven't found a great supplement for our work specifically. I can see a few use cases. But it just hasn't. I just were Trying to write for enterprise clients. So it's kind of just hasn't stuck there yet.Neville Medhora 35:05 It's pretty. So I'm, uh, I love that kind of stuff. So GPT three, for people who aren't familiar is a language learning model at open AI made. So basically they scour a big portion of internet and reads all of Wikipedia. And the larger you make these models, the more it learns. And so now you can say like, how do you cook an egg? And it'll spit out the answer. It knows just read so much. And so it's getting pretty good. And it gets better every year, which is kind of wild to think about that incremental improvement. And the whiz bang factor on some of these services is really high. So like, I used copy, I personally, there's like conversion, there's a bunch of them. They all use up three as their underlying technology. And now everything so Amazon is or Microsoft's thing, they're all making their own version of these natural language learning things. And the cool thing is, at first you say, like, write me a blog post about copywriting. And it'll just do it. And it's really amazing, because people are just like, holy crap, like, that's a computer doing that. But then, in the real world, there's actually more limited applications for it. So I've noticed as for making a blog post, like you actually don't want just a blog blog post nowadays, blog posts about like how to do copywriting is not that interesting, a general one, it's more like, I became a copywriter and made a bazillion dollars. Here's how I did it in four weeks. That's the more interesting story. So it can't do that stuff for you. But it can write you a long article, which is kind of neat.Ross Hudgens 36:27 Yeah, there's potentially some short cut applications. And that's kind of where we've been sort of thinking about it. For sure, like, can it help with speeding up research, I feel like that's been commonly brought up.Neville Medhora 36:39 And I use it for idea generation. Okay, so let's say I'm lazy, haven't had a caffeine in the morning. And I'm trying to come up with a bunch of headlines or something, and I can't think of anything, I throw it in like copy AI or something like that. And it comes out with a bunch, you know, half of them suck, but half are pretty good. And so I'm like, Oh, I like that. And I'm gonna put that one compared with that damn, done. Nice. So that's where I've found it to be really good. Also product descriptions for products. If you have a store that sells 10,000 skews, and you need product descriptions for each, it's really good for that. That'sRoss Hudgens 37:09 the situation on search that I think it has some value Where have you have like 9 million city pages, say, you realistically the marginal value of a human rights and all those is pretty low, or at least like having the Human Rights like Shakespeare, like having this as kind of a shortcut that maybe humans still edit probably is a pretty solid application of that tool. But if you're trying to rank for how to make an egg, and there's been millions of those posts made the marginal value of being better than all of those other ones, it's not just getting the post, it's making it the best. And that's kind of where I have a little issue. Leaving, given handing the keys over to that tool today, but definitely worth keeping an eye on.Neville Medhora 37:52 Yeah, I mean, that's going to be something big, but it's just it's gonna like slowly, like, like build it random question, how long does it typically take to rank something now, it used to be like, I'd be able to rank pretty quick on stuff. And now it's a it's a bit of a harder endeavor, from the time that someone says, I want to rank for best fake plants, how long does it take you to rank generally,Ross Hudgens 38:12 that might have something to do with the encroachment of the brands there. So it depends on how many high authority brands are in the space. So we are lucky to have some high authority brands as client, they can rank in three to five months, page one for something maybe faster, sometimes you'll pop for a second and fall off and come back just from like a freshness signal. I think it's reasonable. Like we have a client who's not number one in authority, we typically tell them, four to six months, could take you to rank see momentum, and then hockey stick six months. Plus, if you're a startup that's like 20 to 30 dR points away from the people doing best, normally would say more like, you'll start seeing momentum, it's six, and then it will start pacing and building towards 12. Really Damn, takes a long time. But that's why people don't do search.Neville Medhora 39:03 That is a long time. Or the people that have the money in patience to do it. So free. So let's talk about somebody that like kinda was a, I don't know how much anymore because YouTube's grown quite a bit, but let's talk about video. It used to be that if you're let's say you, you know, best fake plants or whatever, you just throw up a video on YouTube. You're right number one like that day. Yeah, but that was like the ultimate hack, like just make a video out of all your posts, and that would probably rank number one. Now people cut on that this thing called YouTube is big second Injury Lawyer services and all that stuff right. Now you do some awesome videos on search. And I think we talked about in our last video, and like I can't believe your channel is bigger, and you'll do some pretty like impressive interviews and stuff on that. What do you think of video is like that is that now like part of what you do for a post. So if you do like the best b2b software list or something like that you also do a video for every time or sometimes they're not all the time orRoss Hudgens 39:59 ever. You It's really the sea serpent tent for it. So if you Google that search, and you see video on the search, you should do video. If you're not seeing it, you shouldn't do video, in my opinion, you could go to page two, and sometimes you'll see video on page two, which might mean it's a good supplement. And in general, it's not gonna hurt but videos expensive to do and do well, especially so don't think that just adding video which I think some people do think you just add video and you start ranking. That's, that's not going to warn it. So I would look at the serpent tensor decide whether or not you need video.Neville Medhora 40:31 So I'm assuming when you start seeing video going on nine years, nine years, okay, so nine years ago, I'm guessing there wasn't a lot of video work being done cracks at all, any very little, very little, for sure. Now, what percentage of your clients are using videos for their content?Ross Hudgens 40:48 A good percentage, we actually don't do that that much. Because it's so important to do locally is it to do it cost efficiently, you have to do it locally, because it's so expensive. So we do it mostly as a supplement. A lot of clients will do it, it tends to be more lifestyle, one of the concerns with it is it's hard to attribute it back to revenue, because you have to go to the site is going to create direct brand lift. Like for us and b2b, it's pretty obvious to see SEO, a lot of attribution of like, saw your videos like them a lot on LinkedIn or YouTube. But for flower brand, it's kind of harder to connect back. And when you need some direct attribution, it's harder to invest five figures and a video for that reason. Hmm,Neville Medhora 41:32 so what what's the number you would say for percentage of clients that do video? Maybe not directly through you, but maybe on their own? or something?Ross Hudgens 41:39 Totally, maybe 1%? Oh, well, people have channels. So there's between doing video as a strategy versus a random one off tactic. Yeah, that's probably higher 5060 that are just randomly data video, some point Channel Live. But that's different from like repetition like you're doing right now. To me, that's different.Neville Medhora 42:00 And I'm assuming for the platforms that they're using. I'm assuming YouTube is primary. Yes, for sure. Like it's a good to Instagram, stuff like that you're reusing it is important to see the values like taking this video cutting it up into clips for YouTube, and then we're doing like a lightning round at the end. I'll do those on YouTube shorts.Ross Hudgens 42:19 Maybe on you could put that on your blog posts on Yeah, I think that's still smart to get watch time up. You can pendens does make your posts but even for sure.Neville Medhora 42:29 Interesting. I mean, one, one interesting conversation I had with a bunch of people is like the clout behind it. So if you have a lot of followers, it's easy to get somewhere like the access goes up. So for example, I could say we currently have like 60,000 followers or something. So you come here to take your time to do this other than me being your most best friend in the world. It's just like, there's some benefit for you to come here. Right? Yes. So I think like as you grow, grow Higher, higher, you get easier get bigger and bigger people. So you know, like, almost anyone would say yes to a Joe Rogan or something with all his followers, because it's like, it just makes obvious sense, right? So I'm seeing like, there are like, kind of weird benefits that you get from having a larger channel or someone sees your channel, you have a lot of numbers, and I know it's a vanity metric or whatever. But it is a way to judge someone. Yeah, a blue checkmark, 100,000 plus subscribers, whatever. Those are all ways to say like, Okay, well, they're not some bum off the street. This is a legit person. So I'm trying to I think like social media definitely, like those are strong indicators that someone is somewhat legit. Maybe not every time IRoss Hudgens 43:29 agree. I guess the question is, sometimes you can do those things. And some, I see the Raw brand building. But at the same time, when you do Rob brand building like that, you can also dilute your positioning in some way. You can go generalist and go wider. Like we've thought about that with some of our videos, we could do that. But it's the same thing of like ranking for most what I mentioned those articles that drive no qualified traffic. It's, it would dilute positioning, potentially, and maybe people get confused about what we do or things like that. Like, I don't know how often if you go general with these interviews, will you get less copywriting? I'm not sure. I don't think so necessarily. But that's just one thing to consider. Anytime someone goes broad. Yeah, INeville Medhora 44:12 don't know. I think there's like a balance, especially with like, these these podcasts and videos and stuff. It's just like, I love talking about contents and everything, but it's not my whole life. Right. Yeah, there's other stuff. Yeah. So I think the general thing is kind of like I don't know there's a ratio but I heard this somewhere. I'm just telling me it was like you make three videos for the company and then one for yourself or something along those lineRoss Hudgens 44:32 people that probably makes you more interesting. So that's that is a good I would agree that creating some kind of ratio of focus and then bounce out will actually make you performing better.Neville Medhora 44:43 Yeah, my personal podcast hero is Lex Friedman. I'm having him recently. Lex is awesome. I'm just glad like there's humans like him on the planet. And I think he always like focuses on he talks about like love and very positive and thing isn't dystopian future. It's always like a positive spin on it. Right? Even though he's like a, you know, dystopian kind of Russian guy, but like he's kind of like the one I'd like to model I listen to Joe Rogan and stuff a lot. But I think his is like a different skill set than I have. Whereas Lex, I admire him because he started the artificial intelligence podcast. He was an artificial intelligence professor at MIT. But then he was like, I don't only want to talk about this, like, there's more that I like than just this. And so you change it to the Lex Friedman podcast, which to most of us, we probably would have followed it either way, like, doesn't really matter. But he was just like, that was a signal that like, I'm going to talk about other stuff like jujitsu, blah, blah, whatever. He's interest. How long ago did he do that? I think was about two years ago. I'm totally not I get that routed,Ross Hudgens 45:40 but it was he came into my thoroughfare or my mind like last four months or so I hadn't heard of him and then probably saw exactly that. He was just a name plus interesting people I like listening to he started off with artificial intelligence. That's what he's known for. I started listening to it. I love it now.Neville Medhora 45:55 And I like I totally just like, I don't know if it's like emulation is the best form of flattery. I totally just like everything I'm doing with this. I 100% just copy Lex Freeman. I'm sure he probably also copied from Joe Rogan, whatever. But I look at his channel and whatever he does, I do so we're in a tie though. I can't have the same clothes every day Lex. That's too much. No, but I completely 100% blatantly just ripping him off. That's it. So I don't know, I thought that was kind of cool. How he changed that. So this is originally just about like, only content stuff. And I don't think I'm gonna go as broad as he does. But at the same time, I was just like, that is inspiring that he has other things on there. The just like artificial intelligence again, like that's the same thing. It sounds just like boring. Do week after week,Ross Hudgens 46:37 for sure. And that if that's everyone is more complex than that. If this is just you, that makes sense. And that's one thing I thought about my channel. Like if I had a Ross Hudgens channel, I think that would be bigger, like you have is this nevel madora is your YouTube channel. kind of all over the place is like cabretta. figuring it out? Yeah. Like people want to subscribe to person.Neville Medhora 46:58 Yeah, it helps to think social media is so short of that. Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe we talked about this last time. But like, I'm sure siege media has like a Twitter account, right? Yes. How many followers have only a couple 1000? Couple? 1000? How many do you have? 10 30,000. Yeah, so 10x? Maybe, right? Yeah, you are going to be more interesting than siege media. Is there? Yeah. I think that that might, I think maybe never would be more interesting than a copywriting course or something like that. People want to follow like a person not like this vague brand.Ross Hudgens 47:28 For sure. You still need that company account. But and there's risk to that. If you're like, of course, you're running a company, that's fine. But for the app of the people interested in a company that might not be as exciting.Neville Medhora 47:42 Yeah, it's weird. It's just kind of it's kind of shifting and like there's different examples, different things, but like, I think like your personal brand is far more perfect than they used to be back in the day, especially in b2b,Ross Hudgens 47:51 I think, but you can go broader. I mean, I guess Yes. Is going b2c?Neville Medhora 47:57 I guess so. But I just find like this fascinating, morphing kind of loot, I don't think they're right or wrong answer. It's just kind of like what other people are doing since Yeah. Okay, so let's, uh, so the future of SEO? Like, where do you see this going? Like, you've been in this game for a long time. Remember, you worked with Susan Patel, like, even before you started? siege media, one of our other good friends. You've seen the SEO industry change massively? Like, where do you see it going? AnyRoss Hudgens 48:24 trends you're seeing, or I think it's that just flywheel of getting more and more difficult. Like, that's where it's going. We've been investing, we talked about passive link acquisition a little bit. We're doing more and more UX design recently, because it's just what is that quality bar, it's getting higher and higher for clients of what's necessary, like we want work with clients unless they have like a good content experience. And sometimes that's kind of a forcing function is to build that for them. So it's just gonna get more and more competitive. I think both from the brands that are in the search results. There's, it's getting, there's less and less examples of prominent brands that haven't at least tried to rank on SEO, as the market is super mature, you have to be like, they're an example is people just not seeing this huge channel that's possible for them. But it's we're getting there in the maturity stage where almost everyone is there. And that's why a lot of those medium sized companies are getting blanked out. So it's a quality play you basically, I think it's fair to say you, you have to go absolutely all in on the channel or you're, you're gonna lose,Neville Medhora 49:30 so Okay, so this leaves me in an interesting conundrum. Like, is it possible for a newbie to rake in some of these things? I know for some weird thing, it's it's interesting, like, like, I remember when like Bitcoin and stuff was coming up. That's kind of a new field. And now it's probably like, kind of entrenched again. But like for like best b2b software, it's probably the same results like over and over the next 10 years, or 10 years, but like, a long time, is it possible for a newbie to rank or what would you suggest for like a smaller medium company that's like, like, can't compete with it. It can't compete with Zillow. What do you what do you do? You,Ross Hudgens 50:05 you could do a little market analysis of that a lot of those people are journalists, it's kind of going back to that being positioned correctly, I think there probably are positioning exercises within a lot of these verticals where someone can stand out with the right positioning, to be able to rank for those things, it'll still take you a long time. But if you can compete through that, you'll stand out eventually. And these are still companies that have products at the end of the day. So if your product is great to start, a lot of SEO can come out of that. So if you see weak products in the marketplace as well, which is like two sides is bottom funnel, which is effectively the product and then there's top funnel like what is copywriting, you can often rank if you're a great product, just keep that's what h refs did is downstream now they rank for everything content marketing.Neville Medhora 50:51 That's sweet. So let's do this last thing is going to be a lightning round. So these are one minute timed answers. And I go to time you and I gave these here so you can somewhat prepare, because it's kind of a hard, hard ask. And so I'm going to time you and I'll ask a question. start the timer. You go. Okay, so lightning round with Ross Hudgens. Over 110 plus person, SEO company seeds media. Alright, so let's go. So what is SEO,Ross Hudgens 51:19 woman search engine optimization is a process of trying to get something ranking higher on Google. So the example I give my mom is if she Google's shoes, we help people rank higher for shoes when you search that so you buy from them instead of someone else. Nice. All right. Next question. How can you rank something number one on Google Search first be an expert for that thing. So if you're, you're you're a chef, and you want to rank for how to cook an egg, you need to start by being an expert. That's pretty good starting point. Hopefully you have a website at the same time as saying that you search for that search, you see what's on the search engine result page, if you see videos, that means you need a video. If you see images, that means you need images, if you don't see either, and you just see a listicle that's a good example that you might just need a list of the top things to do in Austin instead. So then do that in depth research using our expertise to apply your specific function to it. Ideally, it's better than those other results based on your specific expertise. Put it on your website, make it look good, ideally, better than the other results on that search engine result page, and then reach out to people that might link to that asset to get it covered. Hopefully, it is the best thing for that search engine result page. And when people start linking to it, Google will see it as the most authoritative and you'll rank well,Neville Medhora 52:42 that was actually pretty good. I'm impressed. Wow, I thought I would like stump you with that one or something like this My job? Yeah. Okay. So what are the best SEO tools that you use?Ross Hudgens 52:55 h refs is good for a there's only one tool that I would pay for it'd be a traps, it's good for link research, SEO research, PPC research, as well as sem rush is also great. For all of the above, it's very comparable. Moz has a great link only index majestic has a good link only index, we use buzzstream for the outreach and promotion side of, of SEO, I think that is important. We use hunter.io for email finding as a piece of that. There are other great tools like clear scope that will recommend common terms that occur co occur on search engine result pages to make sure you're talking to about the best copywriting blogs, you have mentioned nevel or it would be a weird result. So that's the kind of thing that it picks upNeville Medhora 53:38 interesting. And then I'm going to ask you so instead of rank, we're just starting out because that's kind of like that other thing. I'm gonna ask you, how would you start out like a personal brand like nowadays? So like? Sure. Alright, so how would you start a personal brand as a total newbie, you don't have anything website? No, nothing?Ross Hudgens 53:58 What would you do? Get a job at a reputable company that does that thing first. So for example, if you want to do SEO, you could get a job at Shopify and immediately be seen as repeatable for SEO because you work in shower, Shopify, then go to the most relevant social media networks and share information about that thing, whether it's video, video, art, design, images, etc. That will give you credibility within the lens of that in house job that you have. You'll build momentum and people following and liking your content by doing that through repetition on a weekly basis. Eventually, you'll build some audience, you'll eventually be able to leverage that to quit your job, start a full time thing with whatever it is using that previous expertise, compounds, you can leverage that and to build a website ranking things and now you can retire.Neville Medhora 54:50 Nice. That's a pretty good answers. Ross Hutchins, thanks so much for joining. How can people find you and watch your stuff? We'll see your stuff.Ross Hudgens 54:57 Yeah, just fine. Find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. That's Where I'm doing my personal brand thing and check us out on cG media.com Nice. Neville Medhora 55:05 Do you have a YouTube channel? Yes also post also post on that. Ross Hudgens 55:08 Yeah, YouTube sees media and we're posting relatively frequently a little bit less but we make make Neville Medhora 55:13 shockingly underrated channel by the way. Thank you. I think you'll have way less subscribers than you deserve. So also Russ has just received me thanks for joiningTranscribed by https://otter.ai
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