Ross Hudgens runs Siege Media. They are literally the ONLY SEO company I recommend people to. They do content for companies like Zillow, Shutterfly, AirBnB, Intuit, Casper, ZipRecruiter and way more.

Here's how they do it. I got some VERY interesting insights from this interview!!

Watch the full SEO interview:

Ross' company 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. Most crucially, Ross focuses most effort on creating legit GOOD content….which in my opinion is very hard to do at scale.

We've chopped up this hefty interview into little digestible clips, and put them on a separate "clips" we hope you subscribe to on YouTube here.

You also can watch the individual clips here:

The basics of SEO: “Make Content, Get Links.”

• Is SEO just: 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 SEO? Is it more worth it to invest in search traffic or social?

Copywriting vs Content Writing...what's the difference?

• Do you think about Copywriting, or is it more Content Marketing?

Cold email outreach strategy using AIDA for getting backlinks:

• Half the battle is promoting your content. For this I know ya’ll cold email a lot.
• Do ya’ll use AIDA heavily in your outreach?
• What percentage of these emails get read or responded to?
• What kind of emails work best? Shorter, medium, or long?

How long does is take you to make content? “36 hours per post and 10 people!”

• There’s only a handful of AMAZING places like NerdWallet, HubSpot etc that do content at scale.
• How long does it take you to write a piece of content?
• How many people "touch" the post before it's done?
• SEO people, planning people, writing people, images people, video people, technical people, animation people, promoting people.
• How many people are involved in getting a single piece ranked?
• How to go through with a client and rank.

SEO tools: Ahrefs, SEM Rush, Hunter.io, BuzzStream, Google:

• What SEO tools do you use?

How long does it take to rank on Google? "6-12 months. Maybe 2 years."

• How long does it typically take to rank something?

Do you update old content to get higher rankings? “Freshness Distance.”

• How important is re-doing content?
• I recently changed domain names. Any suggestions on how to go through all content and update it?
• How do you make re-doing content more fun? I was thinking about doing “Collaborative Copy.” Or Core Content Month after switch.

“The Content Mill Experiment.” Is it better to crank out content or have 1 great article?:

• The Content Mill Experiment story.
• Nowadays, would you have lots of content going out, or just 1 GREAT piece every once in a while?

Is social media affecting SEO and Google? Are they connected?

• 20 years ago you searched on Google to find something. Now on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok….stuff finds you.
• I’m seeing a lot of taking your big articles, and turning them into multiple smaller pieces of content for social. Is this a thing ya’ll do with clients?

Is making videos worth it? “One new customer can be worth $300,000.”

• 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?

Local SEO? "It’s so easy for local business to rank."

• Do you ever focus on this?
• For local companies like a plumber, you don’t need to make “how to become a plumber” kind of content necessarily. Just update hours, add images etc.

Follow Ross Hudgens and Siege Media:

🖥 Website: SiegeMedia.com

🌇 Instagram: @siege_media

🐦 Twitter: @RossHudgens

▶️ YouTube: @SiegeMedia

Follow Copywriting Course:

🎦 @Kopywriting

🎦 Copywriting Course Clips

🌇 @CopywritingCourse

🐦 @NevMed

🖥 Join email list

⇨ Become a member

This was a super interesting conversation, and I hope you learned as much from Ross as I did!

Sincerely,

Neville Medhora - Copywriting Course