All Systems Go! Podcast – Episode 105

The Role SEO Plays In Automated Marketing feat. Kyle Roof

All Systems Go! Marketing Automation and Systems Building with Chris L. Davis
All Systems Go! Marketing Automation and Systems Building with Chris L. Davis
The Role SEO Plays In Automated Marketing feat. Kyle Roof
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Episode Description

Ep. 107 – Have you ever wondered how to better use SEO for your business and website? This week Chris is joined by Kyle Roof, the co-founder of Internet Marketing Gold, for a wisdom filled interview all about the simple approach to SEO. They discuss the role SEO plays in automated marketing and Kyle’s personal journey of having to learn SEO quickly to pay the rent. If you’re ready to learn the basic best practices that will give your content the greatest chance of ranking quickly, you don’t want to miss this episode.

  • [2:37] How Kyle went from a divorce attorney to SEO expert
  • [6:51] What led up to Kyle creating an automated SEO software, PageOptimizerPro
  • [14:28] What SEO is and how it works
  • [15:00] One large misconception about how Google ranks pages
  • [15:52] Kyle shares a fun competition story where he proved that Google reads in math
  • [20:27] How to use content, keywords and sections that will actually rank on Google
  • [24:37] Best SEO practices in Kyle’s opinion – including the 4 places you must place your keyword on a page
  • [27:42] How to create an outline for an SEO optimized webpage
  • [32:39] Why you should use supporting pages to boost your ranking
  • [35:24] What PageOptimizerPro software does and how it can help your SEO
  • [37:11] What investing in improving your SEO looks like

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome to the all systems go podcast where we invite startup founders and digital marketers to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems that scale. I’m Chris L. Davis, your hosts, founder of automation bridge where we train your marketer or place you with an automation service provider to do the automated marketing for you in on this episode, I have Kyle roof. And Kyle is responsible for the development and implementation of all SEO techniques used by the agency he co founded called the high voltage SEO and he owns the software tool page optimizer pro. He’s also the co founder of Internet Marketing Gold. It’s a global community of over 3000 SEO professionals who test improve cutting edge SEO techniques. Do you see the theme everybody we will be talking about SEO and the role that it plays in automated marketing. Kyle has also been featured in Ryan Stewart’s blueprint training. He’s been in the s the Search Engine Journal, authority hacker podcast and much more. Kyle, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Kyle Roof 1:51
Thanks so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Chris Davis 1:53
Yes, yes, I’m glad to have you on as well. Because again, I think that in all of the digital marketing, there is too to take place, SEO kind of gets up, put on the back seat. You know, I see people jumping in advertising, and all in joint ventures. And a lot of times SEO, which has been one of the most proven strategies over time in marketing online. So I’m excited to have you on to discuss the role that it plays with automated marketing. But before we jump into a tell us a little bit about your your business and how you got your personal journey, I should say how you got involved, or how you found SEO?

Kyle Roof 2:37
Sure. Well, in a previous life, I was an attorney. I did. I was a trial attorney. So I was in court every day, I did divorce Custody and Support and criminal defense. And I decided that I’d rather chew on shards of broken glass and do one more divorce. And so my wife, she’s also an attorney, also trial attorney, and she was very burnt out as well. And so we did what everybody does, and we packed up we moved to South Korea. And our our plan was just to be in South Korea for a year. And then we go back being lawyers that year turned into five years. And while we were there, we started a business with a Korean business partner. And it needed a very complex website. And it took me a long time to find a lot of developers that could do it. And I finally found this really great crew. And I was like, You know what, I bet I could general contract websites. And so that’s what I started doing. And that brought my brother in the company, and he does web design development. And we got I got the idea that we should move to India, because we were just using freelancers, mainly from India, and I was like, well, we could go there business and we could have him in one room. And then they would just work for us. And we’d get more out of them. And it would be more cost effective. And so that’s what we did. And we were told we’re gonna get a shakedown from the police, because that’s just kind of how it goes. And I wasn’t in India, at the time I was in the US, my brother was in India, and there’s knock on the door has the police. And, like, we need to see your business papers, and he shows them the papers. And these are the wrong papers. And he’s like, Okay, how much you need. And instead of asking for a bribe, they put him in handcuffs and throw him in jail. And so he’s talking to the chief of police. And the police goes, you know, these could be the right papers, I don’t know. But you have two choices. You can leave town tomorrow or two, you can sit in jail and wait for the magistrate to come and the magistrate will sort it out. And my brother said, Well, when does the magistrate come? And the chief of police goes, I don’t know. And so it really goes well. I think I’ll leave town tomorrow. So he runs back to the office gradually got we had a mixed use place. So the first floor was the business and the second floor were like apartments. So this point our employees have fled, no need to be involved in whatever’s going on. And we’re really gradually can we get them out of India, and we start hemorrhaging clients. Because we can’t do any fulfillment. We found out from our neighbor that as soon as we left the, the police came in and took all of our stuff, all of our computers, all the furniture, all the stuff that we put in there, and our landlord had a tenant in three days later, and in this mix use place. It was a six month deposit. Plus we just paid that rent. So the landlord got seven months worth of rent the in a new tenant, and the police department got all of our stuff. And so without any employees, my brother goes, well, I can take these four clients, you know, because he does design and development, and that is going to keep him afloat. And I don’t code. And so we had just started doing this thing I’d heard about called SEO. And I was, I was like, You know what, we built the website so that we could probably get like, an extra $100 a month, or something. And in order for me to, and we just signed a bunch of clients, and in order for me to pay the rent next month, I had to learn SEO that day, and, and get it done. And that’s basically what I did.

Chris Davis 5:37
And real quick, what What year was this? Where, where were you at? What is

Kyle Roof 5:42
2012 2013 Okay,

Chris Davis 5:44
got it. Alright, continue.

Kyle Roof 5:46
And yeah, so I started doing and, and turned, I was pretty good at it. And one big thing that I realized while doing SEO is, you know, if you search for like, Should I do this? Or is this a ranking factor? You’ll get like three yeses, three noes and three maybes. And I was like, well, that’s not gonna work. That’s not how you can learn anything within one realize, like, oh, people don’t share what I would, what occurred to me is they must be running their own test sites. And so then I started developing methods to test Google’s algorithm, how can we see what’s going on? How can we see if something is or is not a ranking factor? And then can we see if something is is a more important factor than something else. And through that, I was able to develop a method to test Google’s algorithm. And I have US Patent now on if something is not a ranking factor in a search engine, I think I’m one of the few people that actually has a patent in SEO outside of outside of Google. And I met my business partner kind of along this time, we then founded the agency high voltage, and then out of high voltage. running all these tests, were figuring out what’s going on with the algorithm. One of the big things understand SEO is that the secret is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you the sites that it likes, and it likes them for one or two things. They’re there on page, you know, the text that you see, or they’re off page. And those are often seen as like backlinks or other signals. But because they show you what they like, you can start to count things, you know, you can count what’s on the page. And so that’s what we started doing, what we realized is we can count how many times we use our exact keyword, how many times we use variations of it, or phrase match are very close synonyms, like attorney and lawyer. And then also contextual terms, terms that give context, meaning we can count those as well. And what I realized is that, you know, we can start doing math on this, and figure out how many times we need to put these terms on the page, but in very specific places, because not every place is equal. Google is looking at different places on the page in order to do that. And so we started doing that by hand. And it was terrible. We realized we should make this automated. And then. So that’s where page optimizer pro came out. It was first doing a Google script with it. And then I showed it to some friends, some SEO friends. And do you think this looks good? Would you like this? And they’re like, yes, well, we definitely didn’t want that. And so we put on the back of our website for about six, seven months, give away for free. And then we brought in a developer and got into Python and turned it into a real SaaS. And that’s now now it’s it’s common, it’s going really, really well and over 2000 agencies use it worldwide. It’s been a lot of fun.

Chris Davis 8:14
Oh, man, I love the story. There’s some in there, I want to revisit it in kind of double click on. But the the everything that you just said, and you you just glossed over you like yeah, there’s certain patterns and certain places for Google like these. This is the part of SEO because it’s a lot. It’s very technical, you know, and but these are the part the part of SEO that people get overwhelmed with. But I have to say this, the the most favorite part of your story for me, is hearing how you manually went through a process, prove that process out to not only be something that you needed, but you validated that other people would like in need. And then you automated it. And I talk about marketing and sales all the time, but that the approach of making sure it works manually first, before you automate is across the board, man. It’s across the board, whether you’re automating, like software, like you said, and essentially, it’s taking your brain and Google’s functionality and creating a tool that brings them both together and produces the output right for the for the end user. So I love seeing it. Yeah, very, very interesting story, man, I have to ask this. What was it you’re looking at your rent, it’s coming, man, and you’ve got to pay some bills. You’ve got some website, experience some some business, you’ve made some money. What was that thing that said let me do SEO and not anything else. What was this something that you kind of always had on the radar? Did you read an article what what was that?

Kyle Roof 9:54
Well, once I jumped into it, something that I realized is that it’s problem solving. And I really enjoy problem solving. And the idea is that while we’re here, we need to get to there. And every website you deal with is a different situation. It has a different history, people taking different approaches to it. And then they also usually have different like goals, like, what is this site trying to do? Or what do we need to do? And so you have different KPIs. And that is, so the, we’re here, and we need to get you there. And how can we do that, and that kind of problem solving really appeals to me, and I really, really enjoyed it. I’d also like, even though the business in India went down in flames, it was doing very well. And, you know, like, I came to a point where my wife was like, you know, should we give this up? Like, should I can go back and we’ll play. I mean, that’s, that is a nice safety net, gives them I’m still licensed. So I mean, I can what that was an option, should we just do this? And turns out, my wife said, No, she’d actually gone out that day and got a second job waiting tables, so that I could rebuild what we had. And, and she’s like, No, this is this is too good. You know, this is something that you’re good at, we can make a lot of money with this. And obviously, this is a setback, but I don’t want you to, to go back, you know, and so like, when I didn’t want to go back, but obviously, you know, you’re trying to make good decisions. Should we just is was this a pipe dream, and we should just let it go. And you don’t know you need to do it. And so that was a an amazing point in my life, having her make that decision that maybe my income won’t be there for a little bit while we kind of rebuild this thing and and then also then retool it so that we weren’t doing. I wasn’t doing web design development anymore. I was just completely done on on SEO at that point.

Chris Davis 11:40
Man, Kyle, I love this story, man. I’m trying not to get caught up in the story. And just the beauty in it. Any entrepreneur, I know this cow, any entrepreneur listening, when you said your wife got a second job and was like, No, you’re onto something, keep going. I know their heart just melted. Because that type of support, if you’ve experienced it, I’ve experienced it. If you experience it, it makes you appreciate who you have in your corner, you know that much more. And for those who have been fighting this fight without it is just like, Man, that is the difference maker a lot of times, but between those who tap out, you know, prematurely and those that make it man, so shout out to your wife, man, great. backbone support. I mean, everything man, right? Where would we be?

Kyle Roof 12:32
Not very far, not very well, yeah,

Chris Davis 12:34
in the other part of your story that I love man is that you’re, you continue to search for that, what that sweet spot was, and when you found it in SEO, it was okay to let go of the other stuff and say, hey, look, I’m just gonna, you know, zero in on this. And really scale it. So man, love the story. Thanks for sharing man, it really helps me understand just who you are, you know, in the company in itself. And it’s important for my listeners, because I always like to tell them get to know the people behind the software, or the company, not from like a personal like, hey, what drink this cow? Like, where does he walk in the day, you know, like, but understanding that you’ve got some skin in the game. And it’s your approach in a decade here. Doing it. Like, this is not just something that you read a book on, built a website and say, Hey, I’m doing this, like, you’re vetted. And you’ve got the battle scars, and you’ve been time tested. So love finding founders and entrepreneurs like yourself to come on. But let’s let’s let’s get into some good stuff. Because I get to learn today, by the way, everybody. Kyle is teaching me as I’m interviewing him, because I will be the first to admit I’m no SEO expert. You know, my blog right now has been the best decision I’ve ever made. It’s generated more money than I could ever account for all accidentally, right? Like none of it wasn’t, I never knew how to target a keyword. I never knew how to write something a particular way and get backlinks. I just knew what people were looking for in I wrote content and shared it and it worked. It could work a lot better. So I think I’ve done like some basics, right? But the marketer in me is like, what is the market saying, meet that demand and be scrappy with how you get it in front of people’s eyes? So now for the person who’s been eyeing SEO, maybe they don’t know what SEO is? Start from from the top? What is SEO, search engine optimization? And how does it work? How does it actually work, Kyle?

Kyle Roof 14:42
Sure. Well, I mean, search, you’re optimizing your pages, particularly so that a search engine will like the more that that’s that’s the bottom line. When a search engine comes to a page it tries to figure out what that page is about. And then it decides if it likes the page or not. And one large Miskin perception is a lot of people think that Google will do a value judgment. You know, the Google will say, like, you know, I read this, and this is good copy. And Google isn’t doing that, you know, and people, they get hurt. And they’re like, I’ll be I’ve heard this 1000 times where it’s like, you know, my page is better. You know, I’ve been in this industry longer. I have better sources. This guy that’s on page one, they don’t even do with what I do, you know, like, they’re, they don’t even do that thing. But somehow Google likes me. And they think it’s some sort of value judgment. And Google makes no value judgments. What Google does do though, is it does a lot of math, because Google is an algorithm. And even though Google is unbelievably powerful, one of the most powerful things of all time, one of the greatest inventions of all time, it is not a human being, and Google cannot read, like, like a human being with Google reads in that. And so the idea is that we need to give Google the map that it wants. And if we do that, we can rank pretty well. One prime example is that in 2018, I and myself and and high voltage we entered in a public competition to rank for a keyword. The keyword was rhinoplasty, Plano. So rhinoplasty is a nose job in Plano is just outside of Dallas. And it was a sprint nearly 30 days, and had to be a brand new domain. So you couldn’t have done any previous work on it. And then the idea was launch it and then whoever ranks the best wins. And at the end of the 30 days, we took fifth out of 27 professionals. Only nine I think, actually got a site to rank at all with another day, because that’s such a short amount of time. Think about that with 27 people, they’re pretty confident their skills nine got him. We were we took fifth. But about two weeks later, we shot up to page one, and people got pretty excited. About two weeks after that we were number one organic, and number one the maps. And people really lost their minds. And the reason they lost their minds is because we wrote the entire site and more MIPS them fake Latin text. But we did the math, we did the math on how many times we needed our exact keyword, how many times we need the variations, how did we do the contextual terms, and we copied and pasted them into the lorem ipsum into those sections on the page. And then we ranked number one. And so what we were showing was that, you know, you do need record copy, right, you need to have people do what you want them to do when they come to your website, so they convert in a certain way. But that is completely separate from rank. Rank is math base, because Google isn’t reading because Google if they were reading and be like, Oh, this is a page of lorem ipsum. There’s no way this would be on page one. But because we gave the algorithm the math that it wanted with those terms, it was quite happy with the page. And ranked number one, um, fun story on that. We were the pages up for several months. And then Search Engine Journal decided to do an article on it. And as like they did like some hidden expos and was like Google ranks site and Latin you can look it up the article still. In the original article, though, they posted my name and the website. And so about six hours after they were going live, Google D indexed the site. And then that morning, that next that next night from like 1:15am, to about 1:25am, Google D index 20 of my test sites, then this test sites had nothing to do with with the with the with the competition site, are completely separate. So Google just didn’t just did a punitive taking the site’s down, which at the moment was a lot of fun. But then it actually worked out pretty well, because I realized they just validated everything I was saying, you know that if I was lucky, or if I was talking nonsense, they would roll their eyes and moved on. But because I showed how you can actually learn about how the algorithm works. They didn’t take kindly to that.

Chris Davis 18:27
Yeah, yeah, don’t expose my exact algorithm.

Kyle Roof 18:32
Fast. For a couple years. To this past year, I put out a course on white hat SEO, believe it or not a white hat SEO. I don’t, I don’t violate Google’s guidelines on on real sites. Um, but so I, I’m very well versed in the rules. But I was given the rules, just another look, as preparing for the course. And in this one on one section of the No no list and the guidelines. It said, you can’t have content that makes no sense to the reader but contains keywords. And I was like, when did that rule come into play? Because I know that that wasn’t a rule. But

Chris Davis 19:06
it could have been because you were able to use the lead.

Kyle Roof 19:09
So what happened was I take I took the URL, and I threw it into the wayback machine so you can see what a webpage used to be. And before the competition, that rule isn’t there. And then a week after the competition, when my site goes live, the rule pops in, and then they punished me for my own rule three months later. So Wow. So because of Sumo did, Google wrote a Google rule for that. And so I think I’m one of the few people on the planet that has both a Google rule and a patent on SEO I don’t think there are too many people that can claim both

Chris Davis 19:39
you know, you’re like that like the Michael Jordan of SEO right. They started to make rules literally against Mike, Iverson, all of these top player when they started dominating, man, listen, you’ve made it when you have a rule after I guess. I guess I need to shoot for rule after me. automation space where? So congrats to that. And as you’re, as you’re talking, I’m just thinking, right? One of the things that one of the misconceptions that people get, when they do when they try to do SEO on on their own. One is they download like a plugin like Yoast, or think there’s another one I can’t remember. And as long as the green light is green, when I write an article, you’re good to go. You get SEO optimized. That’s one. But another is people think that SEO is people doing an intelligent search. Right? So they’ll think a key word like for me, marketing automation, could be a key word, but somebody is not necessarily going to type in teach how to do marketing automation, they may they may search something like how to send an email to a lot of people at once. Sure, right. So how does how does somebody how do you help people break out of that knowledge search? Like, they don’t know you exist? So clearly, they’re not going to search for a specific term of your business? Or what you know, because you’re too smart. They’re online looking for? How do I make money in send an email? Or how do I send emails that people want to open? How do I make money by not doing or whatever the case may be? How how do you help? Let me say this, how do you approach educating people on that, because that’s the main hurdle, or I should say a stumbling block that I see people fall over is because they don’t actually know what people are searching for even how to think like that?

Kyle Roof 21:40
Sure, well, so a very important principle is that when you optimize for a primary keyword, such as in your example, marketing automation, if that’s your primary keyword, you don’t just when that keyword, web pages rank for more than one term, healthy web pages are ranking for hundreds or 1000s of terms, and many of which aren’t even on the page. So what that means is Google is associated that primary with all of the secondaries. And so what you want to do is you want to optimize for that primary, you want to do the math for that primary. But if you do the math that primary you can, when all of those secondary terms, and then the ones that are most important to you, you want those sections on the page. So like that the how to send mass emails, or you know, a lot of emails, that could be a section on that page, if it’s a related term. But the key is to figure out if they’re actually related. And so how you do that, as you do your search for marketing automation, there gonna be sections on the page in Google that show up. One is the people also ask. So that’s the little questions box, that means that those questions are related to your primary keyword. And if there are ones that are super important to you, put them on the page and answer them. The other thing is, as we scroll to the bottom, you’re gonna see these related searches, those are searches that people have done, when they’ve done also your primary keyword search, the ones that are really important there, you want those on your page as well. And that’s a that’s like a first step. But the idea is that then that’s going to create sections on your page that can rank for more keywords. And that’s how you get those pages that rank for hundreds or 1000s of keywords. Is is is those sections. Now something that’s really encouraging. Let’s say you’re just starting out, right, and you’ve got a site and you’re you you want that marketing automation, but you realize you’re going up against HubSpot, and you know, all these other, you know, huge sites and you realize there’s no way I can get on page one, should I still do that page? The answer is yes, you still have that page on your site, still optimize it. But you can do extremely well, with all those secondary keywords. And a lot of them have more intent, because they’re more specific to somebody’s actual needs. And they’re they’re often very buyer intent or very conversion tend to, you know, the longer tail phrase type turns. So they’re lower in volume. But the people you get on the page are the people you want. So creating that marketing automation page that you may or may not win, where you can win all those other terms with the different sections. And you know, they’re related because Google showed you that they were related, and they’re good to get on the page.

Chris Davis 24:02
Yeah, yeah. And it becomes like a blend of the technician, right, as well as the writer. And you need to know how to format the article. But you also, you know, need to understand the techniques behind it that Google wants while satisfying the reader. And I see what you mean. Now when you say Google shows you what it likes. Yeah, like it does show the question that people have AD. It’s right there. Yeah, it’s right there. So what are some of the best practices when it comes to SEO that that you would say,

Kyle Roof 24:42
Sure. And you don’t need my tool for this at all. By the way. These are the things if you take your target keyword so that marketing automation, you want put it in four places on the page. These are the top workplaces is Group A, these are the strongest places on a page, the Google’s looking for terms and you must It’s mission critical to put your target keyword in those places. And that is your title tag. That’s the title that search engine see. Sometimes it’s called a meta title. That’s what they call it a Yoast, the title tag, the h1, the h1 is the title on your page that humans see. It’s at the very top of the page, within paragraph tags, that’s just the body content. And then you want it in the URL. So you know, your comm slash and they want your target keyword in there. If you put your your your target keyword in those four places, you’ve probably done 60% of SEO right there. That’s the, that’s the dirty little secret of SEO. They don’t overthink it. People really try to overthink it, but put your keyword in those four places. One, one caveat, if you’ve got a page that’s old, it’s established, and it’s doing pretty well. Don’t change your URL, because if you change your URL, like to put that tar keyword in, you’re giving Google a brand new page and you’re resetting the page. So only do this on a brand new page or page, maybe you just built not that long ago, that isn’t doing very well yet. That’s then you could change it, put the keyword into yours. But otherwise, if you’ve got an established page, leave it as is but make sure you’ve got your target keyword in those other three places. After that, use those different sections that we talked about the people also asking the related searches and build an outline from those related concepts, because we know Google thinks that they’re related to your target keyword. And if then you just answer the question or provide the information needed for each section, your counts for SEO, and doing the math are gonna be really close. You, that’s gonna get you almost where you need to be. So you may or may not need a tool like page optimizer Pro, because you’re gonna be really close with the math Anyway, you’ve properly answered the questions, you’re getting all the terms on the page that you need, you’re gonna be right there, then if you are in more of a competitive niche or something want to go after, then that’s the time for page optimizer Pro to come in. And you can start to do SEO tweaks because then you can get the math exactly where it needs to be.

Chris Davis 26:54
Oh, man, it uh, it almost sounds too good to be true. Right? But let me or let me say too simple to be true. Let me ask you this keywords? How does someone go about identifying the keywords for article because to my under before, before, this is back way back when I would try to put multiple keywords in an article and like make this the greatest article ever. But what you’re saying is, you’re going to have a list of keywords for your business, just in general, take one per article, and optimize articles per keyword and use Google to understand what people are asking for, for that keyword to understand how to outline that article.

Kyle Roof 27:42
That’s right. That’s right. And because then that’s going to give you the sections on the page. The example I give when I teach is like if you had one thing about a Roman numeral outline, you know, your sixth grade teachers own great teacher that taught you how to do that and told you, you need to do this before you right, they were correct. And you know, you didn’t do it right, and you wrote a crappy essay, it’s the same thing with websites, people don’t outline, they just start writing a web page. And if you don’t take the time to outline, you end up with a crappy web page, it’s gonna take it’s gonna take a lot more work in the end. So think about that Roman Rowling. So your title, you know that h1 is on the page, that’s, that’s, that’s your h1. So your Roman numeral one in your outline, like your Roman rollin, that’s your h1 on the page. And you got that like the sections are A, B, C, and D, those are your H TOS those are subheadings in SEO, and those create them the sections on your page. So you kind of want to do it that way. But the example I get when I teach is if let’s say you’re talking about like how to make tacos, you know, if that was your your Roman numeral one and your h1, you probably have two sections on there. hardshell tacos and soft shell tacos, right? Or maybe street tacos, you’ve got like three sections. But as soon as you start talking about burritos, that’s a whole other page. You know, it’s even though it’s still within the concept of Mexican food, it has to be on its own page, because this is our tacos page. And so anything that you’re adding to the database just has to be related to that concept. Otherwise, it doesn’t belong on the page. So when you think about like those list of terms, you most people will have a pretty decent idea of like the top terms for their particular industry. The terms that everybody wants, where they usually get into trouble is not having a page for each of those terms. And then not finding those related concepts to get on the page to talk about, you know, those people also ask them the related searches. So you want to make sure that for each of your main concepts, you have one page on your site that’s for them. And then the terms are clustered according to if they’re related to each other. And that’s what’s going on each page.

Chris Davis 29:38
Oh man, this is this is so good because I have to admit, it took me like I started outlining articles not for SEO just to keep like to compartmentalize my brain because I will find when I start to write, it just kind of goes all over the place. So it benefits you to keep your eyes Ideas singular. And then allow Google to tell you what it is people actually want to hear. It becomes more like an interview. You know, like, as you’re saying this, it’s like Google interviewing me. Yes. Like, Hey, these are the questions that people are asking for, for this particular keyword. What would you say? Yeah, right. And that changes the entire approach. And I feel like, cow, I feel like that’s one of the main misconceptions and missteps that people make with SEO, is that they write articles humans want to read. And they feel good about those articles. But when you start to factor in the technical aspect of this, nobody wants to write an article that nobody is going to read. You want people to find this. And Google is actually they’re not against you. Right? They’re actually trying, because good content makes their search engine that much more valuable. So they, they want you so when you say you’re white, you’re white hat, you’re showing us what Google wants us to do. It wants us to put your put your keyword in your h1, so I know when to put it in front of people when they search.

Kyle Roof 31:21
People try to like, lever it, we’re like, Well, Google wants something unique. And now Google can’t cool can’t figure it out, like Oh, needs help. Yeah, Google, like, this is what this page about, make it obvious. Like on your page, we were talking earlier about your page, the acuity versus Calendly, Calendly, Calendly. That’s perfect. Because that’s exactly what people would be searching for, like, I’m looking at this tool, I’m looking at that tool. Which one’s better? Now, that’s how people are searching. And so you’re giving, I know, that page is actually ranking pretty well, on yours. I think it’s number eight or so. It’s because you made it obvious what the page is about. And so Google didn’t have to think about it. It’s it’s a search that people are doing, and you wrote a good page. Now, there’s some SEO stuff we could do to tweak about it, we can talk about that another time. Absolutely. You know, your your concept was 100% on point and you you really hit the nail on the head earlier, when you mentioned about, you know, you you kind of think about what are people searching? Know, what are people actually looking for? And that’s, that’s, that’s the right approach, you need to think about? What is somebody actually what information people need, you know, like, related this concept, what would they be searching for, and that’s the kind of stuff that you want to tackle. One thing you can do, which is a good technique is so within that people also ask, right, sometimes you’re gonna see some on there, and they’re good questions, but they don’t quite fit on your target page. Just doesn’t quite work with the flow. Maybe it would kind of take away from conversion points, or it’s like, yeah, it’s adjacent, you know, it’s like, not quite there. It’s just just one off, those are still excellent to use. Anyone use those as supporting pages. So what you do within your blog, or wherever you can create a page quickly, is just have that question on there. So just put that in the title tag and your h1? And then answer the question 500 words to kind of words, nothing huge. But those are longtail phrases, what’s gonna happen is they’re going to rank quickly. And they’re going to help your website start to rank for more keywords, because websites that rank for more keywords do better. So if you like you and I had, let’s say, we had a site sites that were very similar, and they were the exact same in terms of the size, how old each site was the backlinks, like everything’s equal, but your site is ranking for 20,000 keywords, and my site is ranking for 2000. Every time you launch a new page, you’re going to do better

Chris Davis 33:33
than I hope. So it’s that the high tide rises all boats.

Kyle Roof 33:39
So then if you can launch these little pages, and they start ranking for keywords, what happens is that all the boats all rise from your site, everything starts to do better, and then you start linking them. So the little pages that are now I mean, you know, they’re only getting a few clicks, right? You know, because the search volume on there was 10, that’s fine. But you’re ranking for that term, you’re on page one, you’re starting get impressions, you’re getting clicks, and then link from that page to one target page. And now you’re passing juice and authority up to that target page from your own site. And it will decrease your reliance on backlinks, which will decrease your susceptibility to Google updates, and decrease traffic volatility. And it’ll be just the slow growth as you continue to build out and you’ll become a topical authority on whatever you’re writing about.

Chris Davis 34:26
Oh, man, this is Kyle. I’m trying to I’m trying to stop I really, because I can go on for days with this. But you know what this reminds me of? And I think that there’s themes all across marketing. When you talk about this, it’s just like deliverability, right? Like if you’re doing a good job, keeping a clean list, maintaining good engagement with your with your existing email list. Every new person that joins your list now inherits that good reputation that you built and you increase the chances that they now receive your emails in their inbox in it avoids the spam folder. Well, the same thing here is, if you’re following these, this tutelage for every article, you’re just adding keywords, the amount of keywords to your entire site. So no article starts from scratch. That’s it picks up from where your entire domain or your entire site has has generated and created for them, man. Wow, thank you. So, in closing, I do want to ask you about the page optimizer Pro, I think you’re the software that you’ve created, what it now that people have a better understanding of SEO and the importance of it, what exactly does your software do for them?

Kyle Roof 35:40
So what we do is we look for a competitive edge. So like I said, that secret is hiding in plain sight. But when you start getting to the math, sometimes that means with the competitors that are on page one, you want to do a little bit more than them. Sometimes it means you want to do exactly what they’re doing. And sometimes we want to do a bit of less. And what pop does is it looks for those edges. Like where do you need to do a bit a little bit more, where should you do about the same where should do a little less so that we can give a page to Google that Google will like more than your competitors. So we aren’t like giving like page one averages. You know, we’re not giving best practices like, Yoast is a fine tool, but it’s just giving best practices. And so you get the green dot and but that’s everybody gets the green dot. And it doesn’t matter what your niche is, you know what was going on. As long as I’ve done that one thing, everybody gets a green dot, but every keyword is different. Every niche is different. The math is a little bit different. For for all those things that you want to do that process every time are you going to get the actual numbers. And so that’s what pop does for us that you put in your target page, the keyword, your location in the language, and then we give you a brief that kind of gives a rundown of, of all the terms, the important terms that you need and how many times you need to get them in in those very important places. You know, your h1, your title, in the subheadings and in the body content?

Chris Davis 36:51
Got it. Great man. So, Kyle, people have listened to this, hopefully they’re willing to give SEO informed chance in their marketing. You know what? No, I’m not going to in because there’s one more questions I want to add, I want to ask you, and what would you say? What would you say to that individual that says, Look, I just spent $20,000, on Facebook advertising or some kind of advertising online, it didn’t really generate much. I know that SEO takes years. It just takes years. Are you telling me Kyle? I’m the listen? Are you telling me how that my money could have went longer? Or? Or? How about this question? How much further could that $20,000 investment go in SEO with respect to advertising, not trying to say advertising doesn’t work, not trying to pin them against each other, but give people perspective on what they could expect in an investment of SEO, if they’re in comparison to what they would usually see. Because I see these companies charging anywhere from seven to $10,000. To get started, at the end of the day, you’re spending anywhere from 20, some up to $50,000 a month to get their ads in front of the right amount of people, it is making a return. What does that investment in SEO look like?

Kyle Roof 38:11
The investment is probably a lot of content, at least that if if I had the money to spend that, that’s where I would put it because you want to get that content out there that is going to rank. But a good chunk is going to go into research as well. Because it’s not just the it’s not just putting up pages for the sake of pages, you want to put a page that actually will rank quickly. And that comes down to figuring out like what your site’s actual authority is like what kind of terms will Google trust you, and then there’s little trial and error and there, launch some pages, see how they perform, but you can figure out actually what your current authority level is, and then start pumping out content to then raise it up. So essentially, you can start doing SEO without SEO, it’s really more of the research and in creating the content like that, um, so what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna kind of have two different types of content, you’re gonna have that those smaller pages, and they’re going to rank quickly. And you’re gonna have those longer pages that are going after those more difficult things you’re spending more time at, you’d use a tool like page optimizer Pro on them. So you kind of like doing a balance of two things that you can start to get some quick wins. But then while those other pages, you’re right, could take four or five, six plus months to really do anything significant. At least you’re getting some traffic in the meantime. To your point, though, I’m not pitting them against each other, you’re 100%, right. You shouldn’t just have one channel for for traffic, you should have Google ads, you should have some sort of social media platform, and you should have some SEO going on. And they can work in tandem. And one of the best ways is if you spent all that money on paid ads, you probably know what titles people like. You know, like, when you think about like, you probably got some click through rate data. People like this concept more than that concept. You can shape your SEO around that. That’s that’s invaluable information. Because the worst thing is, and this happens quite a lot. You invest in SEO, you get to page one, it took six months you spent 2000 a month so your 12,000 and then nobody likes it. You know, like nobody, nobody clicks on it like Nobody likes that. No, this is a terrible product or like, you know, the the line the app, just nobody engages with. So you’re there, but you’re still not getting the return. Something that ads can do for you is show you it gives you that proof of concept. Will people click on this? Do they like is that resonating with them is a little description resonating as well? And then will they convert like I want them to convert? And whether that’s a sale, an email or some other conversion point? Are they actually going to do it? Because that’s what ads can do for you. So it can, once you dial in, like yes, this is exactly what we want, then SEO is a great play, because then you can get those long term, basically evergreen results, and not have to be dependent upon paying Google every time.

Chris Davis 40:38
Got it got Oh man, this is it’s highlighting the strategy. This is what’s making me excited is there’s there’s an entire strategy to this thing, right? Social paid SEO. And as you mentioned, they can all work in conjunction with one another. If you understand I’m all about efficient execution. So instead of just pouring money, creating articles, you can now use all three to strategically create that shortest path from question mark to customer. Man, this was great, this was great, Kyle, we’re gonna we’re gonna continue this conversation in the community. Because I want to have some screen share going where you can actually walk through in at least everybody in my in my pay community can see the exact steps that you’re taking. Yeah, because I believe every business, I’m training digital marketers become out to become automation service providers. They’re helping businesses scale by automating their marketing and sales. This is a critical piece. This is a critical piece for traffic to come into that site, so that they can convert and they can take them on this customer journey. So I’m looking forward to that, man, thank you so much, Kyle, if people want to get in contact with you find out about your software, what’s the best place that they can go to do sod

Kyle Roof 42:00
Kyleroof.com that’s that’s the easiest one and on there, they can see the stuff on my agency. There’s stuff about page optimizer Pro. There’s also about internet marketing gold where my courses are at

Chris Davis 42:08
to. Great, great. Well, thank you so much, Kyle, for jumping on the podcast, man. I greatly appreciate it. Thanks for having a lot of fun. Yes, yeah. Absolutely, man. And um, again, everybody who’s listening, this this episode right here, I hope you may have to listen to this one a couple times. Because there’s a lot. There’s a lot in here. Make your notes in at least check out page optimizer Pro. I think that every year that this podcast has touched, you’re already interested or doing some form of marketing online, do not go uninformed anymore. Get strategic use everything that Kyle mentioned, I know enough of SEO to understand you weren’t just throwing out lofty, fluffy stuff. These are real strategies that work just by going to google seeing what they’re saying. And formatting your article is enough. So again, I can’t thank you enough listeners, please. Please don’t just listen. Act on this one. Please act on this one. Your leads. Thank you, and so will Google. So Kyle again. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Thank you Take care. Yep. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome to the all systems go podcast where we invite startup founders and digital marketers to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems that scale. I’m Chris L. Davis, your hosts, founder of automation bridge where we train your marketer or place you with an automation service provider to do the automated marketing for you in on this episode, I have Kyle roof. And Kyle is responsible for the development and implementation of all SEO techniques used by the agency he co founded called the high voltage SEO and he owns the software tool page optimizer pro. He’s also the co founder of Internet Marketing Gold. It’s a global community of over 3000 SEO professionals who test improve cutting edge SEO techniques. Do you see the theme everybody we will be talking about SEO and the role that it plays in automated marketing. Kyle has also been featured in Ryan Stewart’s blueprint training. He’s been in the s the Search Engine Journal, authority hacker podcast and much more. Kyle, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Kyle Roof 1:51
Thanks so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Chris Davis 1:53
Yes, yes, I’m glad to have you on as well. Because again, I think that in all of the digital marketing, there is too to take place, SEO kind of gets up, put on the back seat. You know, I see people jumping in advertising, and all in joint ventures. And a lot of times SEO, which has been one of the most proven strategies over time in marketing online. So I’m excited to have you on to discuss the role that it plays with automated marketing. But before we jump into a tell us a little bit about your your business and how you got your personal journey, I should say how you got involved, or how you found SEO?

Kyle Roof 2:37
Sure. Well, in a previous life, I was an attorney. I did. I was a trial attorney. So I was in court every day, I did divorce Custody and Support and criminal defense. And I decided that I’d rather chew on shards of broken glass and do one more divorce. And so my wife, she’s also an attorney, also trial attorney, and she was very burnt out as well. And so we did what everybody does, and we packed up we moved to South Korea. And our our plan was just to be in South Korea for a year. And then we go back being lawyers that year turned into five years. And while we were there, we started a business with a Korean business partner. And it needed a very complex website. And it took me a long time to find a lot of developers that could do it. And I finally found this really great crew. And I was like, You know what, I bet I could general contract websites. And so that’s what I started doing. And that brought my brother in the company, and he does web design development. And we got I got the idea that we should move to India, because we were just using freelancers, mainly from India, and I was like, well, we could go there business and we could have him in one room. And then they would just work for us. And we’d get more out of them. And it would be more cost effective. And so that’s what we did. And we were told we’re gonna get a shakedown from the police, because that’s just kind of how it goes. And I wasn’t in India, at the time I was in the US, my brother was in India, and there’s knock on the door has the police. And, like, we need to see your business papers, and he shows them the papers. And these are the wrong papers. And he’s like, Okay, how much you need. And instead of asking for a bribe, they put him in handcuffs and throw him in jail. And so he’s talking to the chief of police. And the police goes, you know, these could be the right papers, I don’t know. But you have two choices. You can leave town tomorrow or two, you can sit in jail and wait for the magistrate to come and the magistrate will sort it out. And my brother said, Well, when does the magistrate come? And the chief of police goes, I don’t know. And so it really goes well. I think I’ll leave town tomorrow. So he runs back to the office gradually got we had a mixed use place. So the first floor was the business and the second floor were like apartments. So this point our employees have fled, no need to be involved in whatever’s going on. And we’re really gradually can we get them out of India, and we start hemorrhaging clients. Because we can’t do any fulfillment. We found out from our neighbor that as soon as we left the, the police came in and took all of our stuff, all of our computers, all the furniture, all the stuff that we put in there, and our landlord had a tenant in three days later, and in this mix use place. It was a six month deposit. Plus we just paid that rent. So the landlord got seven months worth of rent the in a new tenant, and the police department got all of our stuff. And so without any employees, my brother goes, well, I can take these four clients, you know, because he does design and development, and that is going to keep him afloat. And I don’t code. And so we had just started doing this thing I’d heard about called SEO. And I was, I was like, You know what, we built the website so that we could probably get like, an extra $100 a month, or something. And in order for me to, and we just signed a bunch of clients, and in order for me to pay the rent next month, I had to learn SEO that day, and, and get it done. And that’s basically what I did.

Chris Davis 5:37
And real quick, what What year was this? Where, where were you at? What is

Kyle Roof 5:42
2012 2013 Okay,

Chris Davis 5:44
got it. Alright, continue.

Kyle Roof 5:46
And yeah, so I started doing and, and turned, I was pretty good at it. And one big thing that I realized while doing SEO is, you know, if you search for like, Should I do this? Or is this a ranking factor? You’ll get like three yeses, three noes and three maybes. And I was like, well, that’s not gonna work. That’s not how you can learn anything within one realize, like, oh, people don’t share what I would, what occurred to me is they must be running their own test sites. And so then I started developing methods to test Google’s algorithm, how can we see what’s going on? How can we see if something is or is not a ranking factor? And then can we see if something is is a more important factor than something else. And through that, I was able to develop a method to test Google’s algorithm. And I have US Patent now on if something is not a ranking factor in a search engine, I think I’m one of the few people that actually has a patent in SEO outside of outside of Google. And I met my business partner kind of along this time, we then founded the agency high voltage, and then out of high voltage. running all these tests, were figuring out what’s going on with the algorithm. One of the big things understand SEO is that the secret is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you the sites that it likes, and it likes them for one or two things. They’re there on page, you know, the text that you see, or they’re off page. And those are often seen as like backlinks or other signals. But because they show you what they like, you can start to count things, you know, you can count what’s on the page. And so that’s what we started doing, what we realized is we can count how many times we use our exact keyword, how many times we use variations of it, or phrase match are very close synonyms, like attorney and lawyer. And then also contextual terms, terms that give context, meaning we can count those as well. And what I realized is that, you know, we can start doing math on this, and figure out how many times we need to put these terms on the page, but in very specific places, because not every place is equal. Google is looking at different places on the page in order to do that. And so we started doing that by hand. And it was terrible. We realized we should make this automated. And then. So that’s where page optimizer pro came out. It was first doing a Google script with it. And then I showed it to some friends, some SEO friends. And do you think this looks good? Would you like this? And they’re like, yes, well, we definitely didn’t want that. And so we put on the back of our website for about six, seven months, give away for free. And then we brought in a developer and got into Python and turned it into a real SaaS. And that’s now now it’s it’s common, it’s going really, really well and over 2000 agencies use it worldwide. It’s been a lot of fun.

Chris Davis 8:14
Oh, man, I love the story. There’s some in there, I want to revisit it in kind of double click on. But the the everything that you just said, and you you just glossed over you like yeah, there’s certain patterns and certain places for Google like these. This is the part of SEO because it’s a lot. It’s very technical, you know, and but these are the part the part of SEO that people get overwhelmed with. But I have to say this, the the most favorite part of your story for me, is hearing how you manually went through a process, prove that process out to not only be something that you needed, but you validated that other people would like in need. And then you automated it. And I talk about marketing and sales all the time, but that the approach of making sure it works manually first, before you automate is across the board, man. It’s across the board, whether you’re automating, like software, like you said, and essentially, it’s taking your brain and Google’s functionality and creating a tool that brings them both together and produces the output right for the for the end user. So I love seeing it. Yeah, very, very interesting story, man, I have to ask this. What was it you’re looking at your rent, it’s coming, man, and you’ve got to pay some bills. You’ve got some website, experience some some business, you’ve made some money. What was that thing that said let me do SEO and not anything else. What was this something that you kind of always had on the radar? Did you read an article what what was that?

Kyle Roof 9:54
Well, once I jumped into it, something that I realized is that it’s problem solving. And I really enjoy problem solving. And the idea is that while we’re here, we need to get to there. And every website you deal with is a different situation. It has a different history, people taking different approaches to it. And then they also usually have different like goals, like, what is this site trying to do? Or what do we need to do? And so you have different KPIs. And that is, so the, we’re here, and we need to get you there. And how can we do that, and that kind of problem solving really appeals to me, and I really, really enjoyed it. I’d also like, even though the business in India went down in flames, it was doing very well. And, you know, like, I came to a point where my wife was like, you know, should we give this up? Like, should I can go back and we’ll play. I mean, that’s, that is a nice safety net, gives them I’m still licensed. So I mean, I can what that was an option, should we just do this? And turns out, my wife said, No, she’d actually gone out that day and got a second job waiting tables, so that I could rebuild what we had. And, and she’s like, No, this is this is too good. You know, this is something that you’re good at, we can make a lot of money with this. And obviously, this is a setback, but I don’t want you to, to go back, you know, and so like, when I didn’t want to go back, but obviously, you know, you’re trying to make good decisions. Should we just is was this a pipe dream, and we should just let it go. And you don’t know you need to do it. And so that was a an amazing point in my life, having her make that decision that maybe my income won’t be there for a little bit while we kind of rebuild this thing and and then also then retool it so that we weren’t doing. I wasn’t doing web design development anymore. I was just completely done on on SEO at that point.

Chris Davis 11:40
Man, Kyle, I love this story, man. I’m trying not to get caught up in the story. And just the beauty in it. Any entrepreneur, I know this cow, any entrepreneur listening, when you said your wife got a second job and was like, No, you’re onto something, keep going. I know their heart just melted. Because that type of support, if you’ve experienced it, I’ve experienced it. If you experience it, it makes you appreciate who you have in your corner, you know that much more. And for those who have been fighting this fight without it is just like, Man, that is the difference maker a lot of times, but between those who tap out, you know, prematurely and those that make it man, so shout out to your wife, man, great. backbone support. I mean, everything man, right? Where would we be?

Kyle Roof 12:32
Not very far, not very well, yeah,

Chris Davis 12:34
in the other part of your story that I love man is that you’re, you continue to search for that, what that sweet spot was, and when you found it in SEO, it was okay to let go of the other stuff and say, hey, look, I’m just gonna, you know, zero in on this. And really scale it. So man, love the story. Thanks for sharing man, it really helps me understand just who you are, you know, in the company in itself. And it’s important for my listeners, because I always like to tell them get to know the people behind the software, or the company, not from like a personal like, hey, what drink this cow? Like, where does he walk in the day, you know, like, but understanding that you’ve got some skin in the game. And it’s your approach in a decade here. Doing it. Like, this is not just something that you read a book on, built a website and say, Hey, I’m doing this, like, you’re vetted. And you’ve got the battle scars, and you’ve been time tested. So love finding founders and entrepreneurs like yourself to come on. But let’s let’s let’s get into some good stuff. Because I get to learn today, by the way, everybody. Kyle is teaching me as I’m interviewing him, because I will be the first to admit I’m no SEO expert. You know, my blog right now has been the best decision I’ve ever made. It’s generated more money than I could ever account for all accidentally, right? Like none of it wasn’t, I never knew how to target a keyword. I never knew how to write something a particular way and get backlinks. I just knew what people were looking for in I wrote content and shared it and it worked. It could work a lot better. So I think I’ve done like some basics, right? But the marketer in me is like, what is the market saying, meet that demand and be scrappy with how you get it in front of people’s eyes? So now for the person who’s been eyeing SEO, maybe they don’t know what SEO is? Start from from the top? What is SEO, search engine optimization? And how does it work? How does it actually work, Kyle?

Kyle Roof 14:42
Sure. Well, I mean, search, you’re optimizing your pages, particularly so that a search engine will like the more that that’s that’s the bottom line. When a search engine comes to a page it tries to figure out what that page is about. And then it decides if it likes the page or not. And one large Miskin perception is a lot of people think that Google will do a value judgment. You know, the Google will say, like, you know, I read this, and this is good copy. And Google isn’t doing that, you know, and people, they get hurt. And they’re like, I’ll be I’ve heard this 1000 times where it’s like, you know, my page is better. You know, I’ve been in this industry longer. I have better sources. This guy that’s on page one, they don’t even do with what I do, you know, like, they’re, they don’t even do that thing. But somehow Google likes me. And they think it’s some sort of value judgment. And Google makes no value judgments. What Google does do though, is it does a lot of math, because Google is an algorithm. And even though Google is unbelievably powerful, one of the most powerful things of all time, one of the greatest inventions of all time, it is not a human being, and Google cannot read, like, like a human being with Google reads in that. And so the idea is that we need to give Google the map that it wants. And if we do that, we can rank pretty well. One prime example is that in 2018, I and myself and and high voltage we entered in a public competition to rank for a keyword. The keyword was rhinoplasty, Plano. So rhinoplasty is a nose job in Plano is just outside of Dallas. And it was a sprint nearly 30 days, and had to be a brand new domain. So you couldn’t have done any previous work on it. And then the idea was launch it and then whoever ranks the best wins. And at the end of the 30 days, we took fifth out of 27 professionals. Only nine I think, actually got a site to rank at all with another day, because that’s such a short amount of time. Think about that with 27 people, they’re pretty confident their skills nine got him. We were we took fifth. But about two weeks later, we shot up to page one, and people got pretty excited. About two weeks after that we were number one organic, and number one the maps. And people really lost their minds. And the reason they lost their minds is because we wrote the entire site and more MIPS them fake Latin text. But we did the math, we did the math on how many times we needed our exact keyword, how many times we need the variations, how did we do the contextual terms, and we copied and pasted them into the lorem ipsum into those sections on the page. And then we ranked number one. And so what we were showing was that, you know, you do need record copy, right, you need to have people do what you want them to do when they come to your website, so they convert in a certain way. But that is completely separate from rank. Rank is math base, because Google isn’t reading because Google if they were reading and be like, Oh, this is a page of lorem ipsum. There’s no way this would be on page one. But because we gave the algorithm the math that it wanted with those terms, it was quite happy with the page. And ranked number one, um, fun story on that. We were the pages up for several months. And then Search Engine Journal decided to do an article on it. And as like they did like some hidden expos and was like Google ranks site and Latin you can look it up the article still. In the original article, though, they posted my name and the website. And so about six hours after they were going live, Google D indexed the site. And then that morning, that next that next night from like 1:15am, to about 1:25am, Google D index 20 of my test sites, then this test sites had nothing to do with with the with the with the competition site, are completely separate. So Google just didn’t just did a punitive taking the site’s down, which at the moment was a lot of fun. But then it actually worked out pretty well, because I realized they just validated everything I was saying, you know that if I was lucky, or if I was talking nonsense, they would roll their eyes and moved on. But because I showed how you can actually learn about how the algorithm works. They didn’t take kindly to that.

Chris Davis 18:27
Yeah, yeah, don’t expose my exact algorithm.

Kyle Roof 18:32
Fast. For a couple years. To this past year, I put out a course on white hat SEO, believe it or not a white hat SEO. I don’t, I don’t violate Google’s guidelines on on real sites. Um, but so I, I’m very well versed in the rules. But I was given the rules, just another look, as preparing for the course. And in this one on one section of the No no list and the guidelines. It said, you can’t have content that makes no sense to the reader but contains keywords. And I was like, when did that rule come into play? Because I know that that wasn’t a rule. But

Chris Davis 19:06
it could have been because you were able to use the lead.

Kyle Roof 19:09
So what happened was I take I took the URL, and I threw it into the wayback machine so you can see what a webpage used to be. And before the competition, that rule isn’t there. And then a week after the competition, when my site goes live, the rule pops in, and then they punished me for my own rule three months later. So Wow. So because of Sumo did, Google wrote a Google rule for that. And so I think I’m one of the few people on the planet that has both a Google rule and a patent on SEO I don’t think there are too many people that can claim both

Chris Davis 19:39
you know, you’re like that like the Michael Jordan of SEO right. They started to make rules literally against Mike, Iverson, all of these top player when they started dominating, man, listen, you’ve made it when you have a rule after I guess. I guess I need to shoot for rule after me. automation space where? So congrats to that. And as you’re, as you’re talking, I’m just thinking, right? One of the things that one of the misconceptions that people get, when they do when they try to do SEO on on their own. One is they download like a plugin like Yoast, or think there’s another one I can’t remember. And as long as the green light is green, when I write an article, you’re good to go. You get SEO optimized. That’s one. But another is people think that SEO is people doing an intelligent search. Right? So they’ll think a key word like for me, marketing automation, could be a key word, but somebody is not necessarily going to type in teach how to do marketing automation, they may they may search something like how to send an email to a lot of people at once. Sure, right. So how does how does somebody how do you help people break out of that knowledge search? Like, they don’t know you exist? So clearly, they’re not going to search for a specific term of your business? Or what you know, because you’re too smart. They’re online looking for? How do I make money in send an email? Or how do I send emails that people want to open? How do I make money by not doing or whatever the case may be? How how do you help? Let me say this, how do you approach educating people on that, because that’s the main hurdle, or I should say a stumbling block that I see people fall over is because they don’t actually know what people are searching for even how to think like that?

Kyle Roof 21:40
Sure, well, so a very important principle is that when you optimize for a primary keyword, such as in your example, marketing automation, if that’s your primary keyword, you don’t just when that keyword, web pages rank for more than one term, healthy web pages are ranking for hundreds or 1000s of terms, and many of which aren’t even on the page. So what that means is Google is associated that primary with all of the secondaries. And so what you want to do is you want to optimize for that primary, you want to do the math for that primary. But if you do the math that primary you can, when all of those secondary terms, and then the ones that are most important to you, you want those sections on the page. So like that the how to send mass emails, or you know, a lot of emails, that could be a section on that page, if it’s a related term. But the key is to figure out if they’re actually related. And so how you do that, as you do your search for marketing automation, there gonna be sections on the page in Google that show up. One is the people also ask. So that’s the little questions box, that means that those questions are related to your primary keyword. And if there are ones that are super important to you, put them on the page and answer them. The other thing is, as we scroll to the bottom, you’re gonna see these related searches, those are searches that people have done, when they’ve done also your primary keyword search, the ones that are really important there, you want those on your page as well. And that’s a that’s like a first step. But the idea is that then that’s going to create sections on your page that can rank for more keywords. And that’s how you get those pages that rank for hundreds or 1000s of keywords. Is is is those sections. Now something that’s really encouraging. Let’s say you’re just starting out, right, and you’ve got a site and you’re you you want that marketing automation, but you realize you’re going up against HubSpot, and you know, all these other, you know, huge sites and you realize there’s no way I can get on page one, should I still do that page? The answer is yes, you still have that page on your site, still optimize it. But you can do extremely well, with all those secondary keywords. And a lot of them have more intent, because they’re more specific to somebody’s actual needs. And they’re they’re often very buyer intent or very conversion tend to, you know, the longer tail phrase type turns. So they’re lower in volume. But the people you get on the page are the people you want. So creating that marketing automation page that you may or may not win, where you can win all those other terms with the different sections. And you know, they’re related because Google showed you that they were related, and they’re good to get on the page.

Chris Davis 24:02
Yeah, yeah. And it becomes like a blend of the technician, right, as well as the writer. And you need to know how to format the article. But you also, you know, need to understand the techniques behind it that Google wants while satisfying the reader. And I see what you mean. Now when you say Google shows you what it likes. Yeah, like it does show the question that people have AD. It’s right there. Yeah, it’s right there. So what are some of the best practices when it comes to SEO that that you would say,

Kyle Roof 24:42
Sure. And you don’t need my tool for this at all. By the way. These are the things if you take your target keyword so that marketing automation, you want put it in four places on the page. These are the top workplaces is Group A, these are the strongest places on a page, the Google’s looking for terms and you must It’s mission critical to put your target keyword in those places. And that is your title tag. That’s the title that search engine see. Sometimes it’s called a meta title. That’s what they call it a Yoast, the title tag, the h1, the h1 is the title on your page that humans see. It’s at the very top of the page, within paragraph tags, that’s just the body content. And then you want it in the URL. So you know, your comm slash and they want your target keyword in there. If you put your your your target keyword in those four places, you’ve probably done 60% of SEO right there. That’s the, that’s the dirty little secret of SEO. They don’t overthink it. People really try to overthink it, but put your keyword in those four places. One, one caveat, if you’ve got a page that’s old, it’s established, and it’s doing pretty well. Don’t change your URL, because if you change your URL, like to put that tar keyword in, you’re giving Google a brand new page and you’re resetting the page. So only do this on a brand new page or page, maybe you just built not that long ago, that isn’t doing very well yet. That’s then you could change it, put the keyword into yours. But otherwise, if you’ve got an established page, leave it as is but make sure you’ve got your target keyword in those other three places. After that, use those different sections that we talked about the people also asking the related searches and build an outline from those related concepts, because we know Google thinks that they’re related to your target keyword. And if then you just answer the question or provide the information needed for each section, your counts for SEO, and doing the math are gonna be really close. You, that’s gonna get you almost where you need to be. So you may or may not need a tool like page optimizer Pro, because you’re gonna be really close with the math Anyway, you’ve properly answered the questions, you’re getting all the terms on the page that you need, you’re gonna be right there, then if you are in more of a competitive niche or something want to go after, then that’s the time for page optimizer Pro to come in. And you can start to do SEO tweaks because then you can get the math exactly where it needs to be.

Chris Davis 26:54
Oh, man, it uh, it almost sounds too good to be true. Right? But let me or let me say too simple to be true. Let me ask you this keywords? How does someone go about identifying the keywords for article because to my under before, before, this is back way back when I would try to put multiple keywords in an article and like make this the greatest article ever. But what you’re saying is, you’re going to have a list of keywords for your business, just in general, take one per article, and optimize articles per keyword and use Google to understand what people are asking for, for that keyword to understand how to outline that article.

Kyle Roof 27:42
That’s right. That’s right. And because then that’s going to give you the sections on the page. The example I give when I teach is like if you had one thing about a Roman numeral outline, you know, your sixth grade teachers own great teacher that taught you how to do that and told you, you need to do this before you right, they were correct. And you know, you didn’t do it right, and you wrote a crappy essay, it’s the same thing with websites, people don’t outline, they just start writing a web page. And if you don’t take the time to outline, you end up with a crappy web page, it’s gonna take it’s gonna take a lot more work in the end. So think about that Roman Rowling. So your title, you know that h1 is on the page, that’s, that’s, that’s your h1. So your Roman numeral one in your outline, like your Roman rollin, that’s your h1 on the page. And you got that like the sections are A, B, C, and D, those are your H TOS those are subheadings in SEO, and those create them the sections on your page. So you kind of want to do it that way. But the example I get when I teach is if let’s say you’re talking about like how to make tacos, you know, if that was your your Roman numeral one and your h1, you probably have two sections on there. hardshell tacos and soft shell tacos, right? Or maybe street tacos, you’ve got like three sections. But as soon as you start talking about burritos, that’s a whole other page. You know, it’s even though it’s still within the concept of Mexican food, it has to be on its own page, because this is our tacos page. And so anything that you’re adding to the database just has to be related to that concept. Otherwise, it doesn’t belong on the page. So when you think about like those list of terms, you most people will have a pretty decent idea of like the top terms for their particular industry. The terms that everybody wants, where they usually get into trouble is not having a page for each of those terms. And then not finding those related concepts to get on the page to talk about, you know, those people also ask them the related searches. So you want to make sure that for each of your main concepts, you have one page on your site that’s for them. And then the terms are clustered according to if they’re related to each other. And that’s what’s going on each page.

Chris Davis 29:38
Oh man, this is this is so good because I have to admit, it took me like I started outlining articles not for SEO just to keep like to compartmentalize my brain because I will find when I start to write, it just kind of goes all over the place. So it benefits you to keep your eyes Ideas singular. And then allow Google to tell you what it is people actually want to hear. It becomes more like an interview. You know, like, as you’re saying this, it’s like Google interviewing me. Yes. Like, Hey, these are the questions that people are asking for, for this particular keyword. What would you say? Yeah, right. And that changes the entire approach. And I feel like, cow, I feel like that’s one of the main misconceptions and missteps that people make with SEO, is that they write articles humans want to read. And they feel good about those articles. But when you start to factor in the technical aspect of this, nobody wants to write an article that nobody is going to read. You want people to find this. And Google is actually they’re not against you. Right? They’re actually trying, because good content makes their search engine that much more valuable. So they, they want you so when you say you’re white, you’re white hat, you’re showing us what Google wants us to do. It wants us to put your put your keyword in your h1, so I know when to put it in front of people when they search.

Kyle Roof 31:21
People try to like, lever it, we’re like, Well, Google wants something unique. And now Google can’t cool can’t figure it out, like Oh, needs help. Yeah, Google, like, this is what this page about, make it obvious. Like on your page, we were talking earlier about your page, the acuity versus Calendly, Calendly, Calendly. That’s perfect. Because that’s exactly what people would be searching for, like, I’m looking at this tool, I’m looking at that tool. Which one’s better? Now, that’s how people are searching. And so you’re giving, I know, that page is actually ranking pretty well, on yours. I think it’s number eight or so. It’s because you made it obvious what the page is about. And so Google didn’t have to think about it. It’s it’s a search that people are doing, and you wrote a good page. Now, there’s some SEO stuff we could do to tweak about it, we can talk about that another time. Absolutely. You know, your your concept was 100% on point and you you really hit the nail on the head earlier, when you mentioned about, you know, you you kind of think about what are people searching? Know, what are people actually looking for? And that’s, that’s, that’s the right approach, you need to think about? What is somebody actually what information people need, you know, like, related this concept, what would they be searching for, and that’s the kind of stuff that you want to tackle. One thing you can do, which is a good technique is so within that people also ask, right, sometimes you’re gonna see some on there, and they’re good questions, but they don’t quite fit on your target page. Just doesn’t quite work with the flow. Maybe it would kind of take away from conversion points, or it’s like, yeah, it’s adjacent, you know, it’s like, not quite there. It’s just just one off, those are still excellent to use. Anyone use those as supporting pages. So what you do within your blog, or wherever you can create a page quickly, is just have that question on there. So just put that in the title tag and your h1? And then answer the question 500 words to kind of words, nothing huge. But those are longtail phrases, what’s gonna happen is they’re going to rank quickly. And they’re going to help your website start to rank for more keywords, because websites that rank for more keywords do better. So if you like you and I had, let’s say, we had a site sites that were very similar, and they were the exact same in terms of the size, how old each site was the backlinks, like everything’s equal, but your site is ranking for 20,000 keywords, and my site is ranking for 2000. Every time you launch a new page, you’re going to do better

Chris Davis 33:33
than I hope. So it’s that the high tide rises all boats.

Kyle Roof 33:39
So then if you can launch these little pages, and they start ranking for keywords, what happens is that all the boats all rise from your site, everything starts to do better, and then you start linking them. So the little pages that are now I mean, you know, they’re only getting a few clicks, right? You know, because the search volume on there was 10, that’s fine. But you’re ranking for that term, you’re on page one, you’re starting get impressions, you’re getting clicks, and then link from that page to one target page. And now you’re passing juice and authority up to that target page from your own site. And it will decrease your reliance on backlinks, which will decrease your susceptibility to Google updates, and decrease traffic volatility. And it’ll be just the slow growth as you continue to build out and you’ll become a topical authority on whatever you’re writing about.

Chris Davis 34:26
Oh, man, this is Kyle. I’m trying to I’m trying to stop I really, because I can go on for days with this. But you know what this reminds me of? And I think that there’s themes all across marketing. When you talk about this, it’s just like deliverability, right? Like if you’re doing a good job, keeping a clean list, maintaining good engagement with your with your existing email list. Every new person that joins your list now inherits that good reputation that you built and you increase the chances that they now receive your emails in their inbox in it avoids the spam folder. Well, the same thing here is, if you’re following these, this tutelage for every article, you’re just adding keywords, the amount of keywords to your entire site. So no article starts from scratch. That’s it picks up from where your entire domain or your entire site has has generated and created for them, man. Wow, thank you. So, in closing, I do want to ask you about the page optimizer Pro, I think you’re the software that you’ve created, what it now that people have a better understanding of SEO and the importance of it, what exactly does your software do for them?

Kyle Roof 35:40
So what we do is we look for a competitive edge. So like I said, that secret is hiding in plain sight. But when you start getting to the math, sometimes that means with the competitors that are on page one, you want to do a little bit more than them. Sometimes it means you want to do exactly what they’re doing. And sometimes we want to do a bit of less. And what pop does is it looks for those edges. Like where do you need to do a bit a little bit more, where should you do about the same where should do a little less so that we can give a page to Google that Google will like more than your competitors. So we aren’t like giving like page one averages. You know, we’re not giving best practices like, Yoast is a fine tool, but it’s just giving best practices. And so you get the green dot and but that’s everybody gets the green dot. And it doesn’t matter what your niche is, you know what was going on. As long as I’ve done that one thing, everybody gets a green dot, but every keyword is different. Every niche is different. The math is a little bit different. For for all those things that you want to do that process every time are you going to get the actual numbers. And so that’s what pop does for us that you put in your target page, the keyword, your location in the language, and then we give you a brief that kind of gives a rundown of, of all the terms, the important terms that you need and how many times you need to get them in in those very important places. You know, your h1, your title, in the subheadings and in the body content?

Chris Davis 36:51
Got it. Great man. So, Kyle, people have listened to this, hopefully they’re willing to give SEO informed chance in their marketing. You know what? No, I’m not going to in because there’s one more questions I want to add, I want to ask you, and what would you say? What would you say to that individual that says, Look, I just spent $20,000, on Facebook advertising or some kind of advertising online, it didn’t really generate much. I know that SEO takes years. It just takes years. Are you telling me Kyle? I’m the listen? Are you telling me how that my money could have went longer? Or? Or? How about this question? How much further could that $20,000 investment go in SEO with respect to advertising, not trying to say advertising doesn’t work, not trying to pin them against each other, but give people perspective on what they could expect in an investment of SEO, if they’re in comparison to what they would usually see. Because I see these companies charging anywhere from seven to $10,000. To get started, at the end of the day, you’re spending anywhere from 20, some up to $50,000 a month to get their ads in front of the right amount of people, it is making a return. What does that investment in SEO look like?

Kyle Roof 38:11
The investment is probably a lot of content, at least that if if I had the money to spend that, that’s where I would put it because you want to get that content out there that is going to rank. But a good chunk is going to go into research as well. Because it’s not just the it’s not just putting up pages for the sake of pages, you want to put a page that actually will rank quickly. And that comes down to figuring out like what your site’s actual authority is like what kind of terms will Google trust you, and then there’s little trial and error and there, launch some pages, see how they perform, but you can figure out actually what your current authority level is, and then start pumping out content to then raise it up. So essentially, you can start doing SEO without SEO, it’s really more of the research and in creating the content like that, um, so what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna kind of have two different types of content, you’re gonna have that those smaller pages, and they’re going to rank quickly. And you’re gonna have those longer pages that are going after those more difficult things you’re spending more time at, you’d use a tool like page optimizer Pro on them. So you kind of like doing a balance of two things that you can start to get some quick wins. But then while those other pages, you’re right, could take four or five, six plus months to really do anything significant. At least you’re getting some traffic in the meantime. To your point, though, I’m not pitting them against each other, you’re 100%, right. You shouldn’t just have one channel for for traffic, you should have Google ads, you should have some sort of social media platform, and you should have some SEO going on. And they can work in tandem. And one of the best ways is if you spent all that money on paid ads, you probably know what titles people like. You know, like, when you think about like, you probably got some click through rate data. People like this concept more than that concept. You can shape your SEO around that. That’s that’s invaluable information. Because the worst thing is, and this happens quite a lot. You invest in SEO, you get to page one, it took six months you spent 2000 a month so your 12,000 and then nobody likes it. You know, like nobody, nobody clicks on it like Nobody likes that. No, this is a terrible product or like, you know, the the line the app, just nobody engages with. So you’re there, but you’re still not getting the return. Something that ads can do for you is show you it gives you that proof of concept. Will people click on this? Do they like is that resonating with them is a little description resonating as well? And then will they convert like I want them to convert? And whether that’s a sale, an email or some other conversion point? Are they actually going to do it? Because that’s what ads can do for you. So it can, once you dial in, like yes, this is exactly what we want, then SEO is a great play, because then you can get those long term, basically evergreen results, and not have to be dependent upon paying Google every time.

Chris Davis 40:38
Got it got Oh man, this is it’s highlighting the strategy. This is what’s making me excited is there’s there’s an entire strategy to this thing, right? Social paid SEO. And as you mentioned, they can all work in conjunction with one another. If you understand I’m all about efficient execution. So instead of just pouring money, creating articles, you can now use all three to strategically create that shortest path from question mark to customer. Man, this was great, this was great, Kyle, we’re gonna we’re gonna continue this conversation in the community. Because I want to have some screen share going where you can actually walk through in at least everybody in my in my pay community can see the exact steps that you’re taking. Yeah, because I believe every business, I’m training digital marketers become out to become automation service providers. They’re helping businesses scale by automating their marketing and sales. This is a critical piece. This is a critical piece for traffic to come into that site, so that they can convert and they can take them on this customer journey. So I’m looking forward to that, man, thank you so much, Kyle, if people want to get in contact with you find out about your software, what’s the best place that they can go to do sod

Kyle Roof 42:00
Kyleroof.com that’s that’s the easiest one and on there, they can see the stuff on my agency. There’s stuff about page optimizer Pro. There’s also about internet marketing gold where my courses are at

Chris Davis 42:08
to. Great, great. Well, thank you so much, Kyle, for jumping on the podcast, man. I greatly appreciate it. Thanks for having a lot of fun. Yes, yeah. Absolutely, man. And um, again, everybody who’s listening, this this episode right here, I hope you may have to listen to this one a couple times. Because there’s a lot. There’s a lot in here. Make your notes in at least check out page optimizer Pro. I think that every year that this podcast has touched, you’re already interested or doing some form of marketing online, do not go uninformed anymore. Get strategic use everything that Kyle mentioned, I know enough of SEO to understand you weren’t just throwing out lofty, fluffy stuff. These are real strategies that work just by going to google seeing what they’re saying. And formatting your article is enough. So again, I can’t thank you enough listeners, please. Please don’t just listen. Act on this one. Please act on this one. Your leads. Thank you, and so will Google. So Kyle again. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Thank you Take care. Yep. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends

Today’s Guest

Kyle Roof is responsible for the development and implementation of all SEO techniques used by the SEO agency High Voltage SEO and the SEO tool PageOptimizer Pro. He is also the co-founder of Internet Marketing Gold, a global community of 3000+ SEO professionals who test and prove cutting edge SEO techniques.

Want to Be a Guest On the Podcast?

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About the Show

On the show, Chris reveals all of his automated marketing strategies he has learned from working in fast growing marketing technology startups so you can put your business on autopilot quickly and without error.

Discover how to deploy automated marketing, sales, and delivery systems to scale your business without working long hours to do so.

Chris L. Davis - Chief Automation Officer

YOUR HOST

Chris L. Davis

Chris is an Electrical Engineer turned entrepreneur who is the Founder of Automation Bridge, an international speaker and facilitator, and startup consultant