096-travis-bliffen

John DeBevoise:

Greetings everyone, and welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup. I’m your host, John DeBevoise. Search engine optimization, or SEO. What does it mean? How does it work for you, and when should you use it? Well, we called upon Travis Bliffen, who is the CEO of Stellar Search Engine Optimization, and he’s been doing this for a long time, and we’re going to ask him the vital questions as to how do you do search engine optimization and get the real numbers? Learn how to do it the right way? And what is the secret to organic content promotion? Well, Travis is going to be serving up this stellar serving of Bizness soup and search engine optimization are the key ingredients right here at the table on Bizness Soup.

Travis, welcome to this serving of Bizness Soup.

Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here, and hopefully we get to cover some great information.

Speaker 1: Well, we’re going to be covering… One subject is in acronyms. Of course, you come from an industry full of acronyms, from the US Army, and that’s SEO, search engine optimization. We’re going to be talking with an expert here, folks. Travis is an expert as to search engine optimization. What does it mean and how to look smart when you ask and talk about it? So, Travis, what is SEO?

Speaker 2: Well, I guess it’s probably the most effective way to generate business in the modern age, right up there with paid advertising. When you go to Google, you look for stuff, you type in, I’m looking for a Chinese restaurant nearby. Google pops up results. It’s nearby restaurants. Guess what? The first couple, they show up. If they’re close to you, got a good likelihood you’re going to go there, unless they’ve got terrible reviews, and then hopefully you’ll skip them. That in a nutshell is really what it is, when people use Google to search. And search engine optimization is primarily Google, but you can be optimized for really anything you can search. You could do optimization to show up better in Amazon, or to show up better in directories.

Speaker 1: What about YouTube and those areas?

Speaker 2: Yeah. YouTube, any other search engines. Pretty much anything that has an internal search engine can be optimized in one way or the other. The big one is Google. That’s where most of the money happens. That’s where most of the business comes from.

Speaker 1: They’re the ones that are listening, anyway. There’s no longer any privacy in this world. Everything is out there and boy, every now and then we’ll be talking about a subject and then suddenly, without going on the computer, we turn it on, and there is an ad for what we were talking about. And we’re always scratching our heads, going, how did that happen?

Speaker 2: Yeah, that one is a little creepy. Facebook is probably, in my opinion, where I see that in the most often. You can talk about almost anything and before you know it, boom, there’s ads everywhere. It’s a little odd, but I guess it’s just one of those trade–offs where everybody just… There’s a 50–page terms of service, terms of agreement thing. You scroll to the bottom, click accept, and there’s really no telling what all you’re agreeing to, but everybody does it. They say, well, I’m going to be on Facebook, so click the box and move on. It’s great for marketing purposes. It’s a little creepy sometimes with Facebook advertising, but I guess it’s just the reality of where we’re at today. Unless you just don’t engage on those platforms, then you’re sacrificing privacy for convenience.

Speaker 3: And we’ll get into that aspect of the searching and how it knows what we’re looking at. But as a business owner, I’m already in business, how do I get my business to be noticed more? If I’m not paying for the ads, how do I get up there in the rankings?

Speaker 2: If you know where to look, anybody else who’s already showing up for what you’d like to show up for, they’ve created a roadmap for you to follow. And so, if you know how to look at that, you know how to figure out what they’ve done, what seems to be working, if you look for common trends between people, then you can help formulate a plan. But the very simplistic overview of SEO is that you have to have pages that Google can crawl and understand. You have to have information that helps solve the intent of the person searching. So, if they’re searching for information versus to buy a product, it’s going to be a different kind of page they want to have. Different kinds of information they’re looking for. It’s very important that you understand what the person is trying to gain from their search.

And then beyond that, it’s about having trust authority and credibility. And that’s where link building comes in. Getting third–party sites to mention you and link to you. And if you have those three things and you do them in the right amounts and in the right order, that’s really all there is to SEO. It’s an extremely complex thing in some turns, and other tokens, it’s just a very simplistic process. It’s just about knowing where to find the right information, and how to formulate an effective plan. But that’s really all it is to it. Really not a lot different than very early content marketing, which goes back hundreds of years. If you have information that people need and you have a way to let them know you have that information, then you’re going to be able to bring them in. And through sharing information, you gain authority and expertise with those people, and they become your customers.

Speaker 3: Wow, easy for you to say. Let’s go back a few sentences here, and not to mention decades, but let’s understand about SEO. It means search engine optimization. It’s being able to have content that can be searched. And right now it’s just strictly words, so this show would be transcribed, and if people are looking for your company, which is Stellar SEO, then they would be able to find that through the transcripts that are on my website, and would be out there for Google to search, or as you put it, crawled and find it. How do I write something that will get my audience or my listeners or myself up there in the rankings? How do you write that content for SEO?

Speaker 2: That’s another one of those things where your competitors can answer that question extremely well. And Google can answer that question also. If you’re trying to show up for best business podcast, and you go to Google and you search best business podcasts, you’re going to see the 10 pages Google likes the most. And in going through those, looking at those pages more closely, you’re going to start to notice trends. Is it a certain type of page? Is everybody on the first page, have a 10,000 word guide about how to make the best business podcast? Are they all major podcast sites? What kind of things do you notice? What kind of things are overlapping between all of those results? Then they have to go back and look and say, now what am I missing? What don’t I have that all these people have in common?

And that’s really how you do it. If you start with that framework and then you add your own expertise into the mix, if you know nothing about having a business podcast and you write an article about it, it’s probably not going to be as good or actionable as somebody who runs a business podcast. But you can still use that same framework approach to set up the foundation, general guidelines, things you should mention, if you need to have images and videos, how long it should be. And so that’s the approach we take for everything, is we just use a competitor analysis model. By looking at what Google has already rewarded, what they already like, you can get a good jumpstart on what you need to be producing yourself.

Speaker 3: All right. So with that in mind, do I write press releases that can be then also published for search engine optimization on Google? Are there particular ways in which to get that message out? And is there a duplication of effort, or do I have to write it out each and every time?

Speaker 2: The SEO industry use press releases a lot just to generate links. And it doesn’t work very well anymore for that purpose, because there’s a handful of syndication networks. You write a press release, they publish it on two to 500 sites, and then they just blast it out. SEO value of that is pretty minimal these days.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Speaker 2: The one exception to that is if you’re trying to rank locally in the Google Maps spec, and there’s actually been some cool studies that show that it can be used effectively for local SEO, but if you’re doing a press release, you should forget about SEO, unless you’re a local site, and you should be doing a press release to get in front of the right audience. Just like appearing on, think of a press release like appearing on a podcast. You would appear on a podcast that would have an audience that might have an interest in what you do, because they could become referral traffic to your site.

They could contact you directly from it. Same thing with a press release. If you have something to say, and you can share it to sites that have an audience that will care about what you’re saying, then it’s got great value. But the value isn’t necessarily SEO, it’s just visibility, getting people to your website. As an SEO tactic, it’s not really very effective. And so it goes back to what it used to be, in which case press releases were to generate attention among a certain audience by leveraging the pre–built audiences of other websites.

Speaker 3: So it’s like what I tell everybody locally, like the restaurants in any community, if you’re a local mom–and–pop small business, you write a press release, it gets published in the local paper, and those are oftentimes more effective than the paid advertising that you put in there as a background story. Everybody loves a good story. Based upon what you’re telling me here, you’d send the press release out to the local paper, they publish it. It’s going to go digital. Does that then convert into the opportunity for SEO if it’s on the newspaper’s website?

Speaker 2: Yes. If you’re a local business, like in the example of a local restaurant, and you send out a press release and it gets on the local newspaper and the local news channel, then that’s going to give you some SEO benefit. And obviously, greater than the SEO benefit from something like that, is you’re going to get the visibility from being pushed out. Whatever the distribution of the newspaper is, plus their online readership. And that, sometimes, is instant. You’re going to get instant results from that, because people see it, they hear about it. They like the story, they come and check it out.

Speaker 3: Everybody loves instant gratification. And that’s what you were talking about. You put it in the newspaper and the day it comes out, you could have instant results. What about SEO? What is a reasonable period of time? If I say, this episode here with you today, who is Travis Bliffen from Stellar SEO? Travis, if I get the information out or onto the web, what is a reasonable period of time for the SEO to take place for people to find you and me on this show?

Speaker 2: That’s a good question. And it’s not really one with a straight answer, because the authority of the platform on which it’s published is going to make a huge impact. If this podcast got pushed out on Forbes and Inc., and Fast Company, and Business Insider right now, it would probably show up later today or tomorrow. If it got pushed out on a brand new website, might not show up for six, 12, 18 months, depending on who’s in front of you. It has a lot to do with the preexisting authority that you have. It also has a lot to do with what it is you’re trying to be visible for. If it was “podcast interviews with Travis Bliffen,” that’s going to show up faster than it would be for “business podcast“, right? Because there’s more people competing for one than there would be the other term.

And those are all things that go into how long it takes. As a general ballpark, six to 12 months is about the timeline in which SEO generally starts to work and be effective in a lot of cases. But there’s always exceptions. If you just need to have a very small improvement, a couple months, and you could have a very small improvement. If you have a brand new website and you’re in a very competitive space, you could be at it for 18, 24, 36 months. It just really depends on who your competitors are and what they’ve done.

Speaker 3: What about consistency? I’ll give an example. This podcast has been going almost a year now, and we will have, pretty soon, our hundredth episode going up. If you Google the program or my name, we come up and take up the entire first page, along with a minister who happens to share the same name, kind of like an inside track. That type of SEO is tremendous, and I don’t know what I did to get it, other than consistency and pushing out podcasts and the distribution of the content of the show, as well as the transcripts and all of that. Is that reasonable to expect that type of SEO in the first year that I, or my listeners have been in business?

Speaker 2: Yeah, it is, and especially for what I would call branded searches. People searching for your name, the name of your show, the name of your company… Branded searches are usually the very first ones that show up. Because unless you pick a really popular name, there’s not a lot of overlap. As you mentioned, there’s yourself and one minister that have that name. It’s an example where there’s less competition for that particular name than there would be “business podcasts,” right? There’s millions of people with a business podcast, and there’s only one person with the name of your business. And that’s where the number of people competing for it really makes a big impact. For branded searches, for variations of your own name, things like that, those generally show up pretty quickly, three, four, or five months. Sometimes they can take a little bit longer.

Speaker 3: That makes sense, because when you’re looking at business podcasts, that’s a shotgun blast, and so you’re going to get a lot, but when you narrow it down to a rifle shot such as Biz Soup, then I come right up at the top in what you’re calling a brand. And I am branded in that capacity with Biz Soup, and have been for quite some time, so that makes a lot of sense. How do I get people from the shotgun to the rifle?

Speaker 2: The funny thing about that is showing up for branded searches, you see two different things happen. One, somebody gains visibility for all kinds of really broad keywords. We’ll go back to business podcast, say you’re ranked number one for business podcast.

Speaker 3: As it should be.

Speaker 2: And so say you rank number one for that. Over time, over repetition, six months, 12 months, 18 months, people are going to start to associate the name of your podcast with that. And so you’ll have a certain amount of people that now decide, okay, I’m going to search for them by name. And so by being visible for business podcast, you’ve gained visibility for your brand, brand recognition. And so over time, people will start to search for you by name, and it will be that. Now, the other side of this, the other thing that people do is, they do a lot of other advertising, TV commercials, radio paid advertising. They just blanket. Think big companies, how they operate.

They do all of those things. And in doing those things, they make people aware of their brand name. And so what you’ll start to see is people go and they search for them by name on Google because they know of them from somewhere else. That’s really the two ways that people build brand recognition online is that. But the big thing to remember is, if you’re trying to gain visibility, if you’re trying to gain traffic from search, from Google, then unless you’ve done the other steps to make your brand name well–known already, then you’re going to get a lot more traffic from searches that are not branded than you would from people searching for your name. So in your case, business podcast would probably generate more traffic than Biz Soup, for example, because there’s going to be more people searching that way that are not familiar than there would be the other way.

Speaker 3: Yeah. All right. And now that we know what it is and how it works for us, how do I go ahead and start planning and put together a program or a link? What are the first three things I need to do in order to create this content that is going to qualify and get me up the ranks in SEO?

Speaker 2: The very first thing you have to do is figure out what your target is, what you’re trying to be visible for. And that can be confusing in some cases and pretty straightforward in others. If you have a Chinese restaurant in New York city, you would probably want to show up for Chinese restaurant in New York City. Or if you’re in a particular borough, you might want to show up for Chinese restaurant plus that borough. If you have a thousand different products and a lot of different options, there’s going to be multiple things you want to show up for. So the first thing you have to figure out is what terms that people actually search for are most related to what I do? In your case, something like business podcast, small business podcast. Things like that. Those will be relevant terms. Once you identify those, then you have to go to step two and you have to look at who’s showing up for that already.

And that’s when you go back to that process I mentioned where you start to look at and analyze what are they doing that I’m not? Then you can break that down to very small levels. What’s their page title look like? How much content do they have? How long have they been in business? All those considerations, you go through all those things and you of come up with a here’s where I’m falling short checklist. The next step is you have to go and you have to start solving those differences. You have to fix that. If you don’t have content, and you don’t have authority, and you don’t have any of those things they have, then in order to go from not visible to visible, you have to close the gap up. That’s really how you go about it.

No matter what industry you’re in, if it’s really easy or really difficult, where you’re starting from, if you go through those three checks, you’ll always be able to come up with a plan that will help you move up. The last part is figuring out, do I have the budget and patience, and is it worth it? If you found out it takes a million dollars to rank for business podcast, then you’d have to ask yourself, what would it take for me to make back a million dollars from ranking for this keyword? How long would that take? Do I have that budget? That’s the last consideration before you get going, is should I do it just because I can? In some cases, you’ll figure out that that really doesn’t make sense. There’s not a payoff.

And that’s when you go back to step one and you say, okay, business podcast is too expensive. It takes too long. I don’t see the value there, but what if I look at instead, small business podcast, or business podcast for startups? Those are faster and easier to rank for, and there is a payoff there. And that’s where a lot of people, honestly, go wrong. Agencies mess this up. People who do it themselves, they don’t take that last consideration in. They just say, man, there’s other people ranking for this. I better rank for it too. But guess what? If they figured out a better way to monetize it than you have, you might be wasting money not to make it back, and they might be making a great return. Step number four is where I see people go wrong way too often.

Speaker 3: When it comes to picking the person like yourself to do my search engine optimization or SEO, I am solicited, as I’m sure so many people are. If you have a website, I get calls nearly every day on people who can do search engine optimization, and they’re the best. They’re unsolicited calls. I don’t know what are smart questions, and I’m thinking that the questions that I’m asking them are the dumb questions. What’s the difference when somebody calls me and says, hey, I can do this for you, how am I showing them that I’m an idiot when it comes to SEO, or I’m a genius?

Speaker 2: The first thing I would say when you get those, even we get them. We get emails and calls from people trying to verify our Google My Business listing, trying to sell us the best SEO services, $99, $49. It’s ridiculous. The first thing I would ask them is if you are so great at producing inbound leads, because that’s what SEO really does, is it gets people to call you and contact you that are looking for what you do, right? That’s the whole purpose. I would say, why are you calling me on the phone? Why didn’t I find you? That’s probably the first consideration, is why are you cold calling random people, trying to get them to get your pitch? There’s plenty of people searching online right now for SEO and link building that you don’t have to call anybody.

Speaker 3: So that would be a smart question as to why are you calling me and not going through my website?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Why didn’t I find you or know about you? We specialize in link building as a company, so if you look for link building, we show up. We’re there. If people are searching for link building on the internet, they’re going to find us. They’re going to call us. I don’t have to call anybody and say, hey, do you need us to build links to your website? Because they were like, I need link building services, I’m going to look for them online. And guess what? I see Stellar SEO everywhere, so I’m going to call them, because they’ve done what they’re telling me they do.

That’s the first thing, is how you find them. And that’s not just… there’s some very large reputable companies, and they have an outbound sales team. And so it isn’t an instant, if somebody calls you, that it means they’re not doing well, but you should be looking. Are they practicing what they preach? Are they actually visible? Are they using SEO for themselves? Are they using digital marketing for themselves?

Speaker 3: Wait a minute, wait a minute. What’s the difference? You said, are they using SEO or digital marketing? And you just kind of glassed over that, like I knew what I was hearing there. What is the difference between those two?

Speaker 2: Sure. So SEO is specifically improving your organic visibility. It’s unpaid search results. Now, search engine marketing, or SEM, is paid advertising. If you see display ads, or you see the ads at the top and bottom of Google, or you see paid advertisements on a lot of different platforms, that would be search engine marketing. To throw into the mix, you have content marketing, which isn’t necessarily SEO–driven. It’s people producing content to share across social platforms, online, wherever, to get people to read the content and come to their site. If you take all those things and you lump them together, they would just be different ways of digitally marketing yourself. Think of digital marketing as a combination of tactics or strategies you can use to get people that are on the internet to find your website and contact you. SEO is just one of those. It’s one source of that.

Speaker 3: Okay. So I get this phone call that’s unsolicited, and now I’ve understood. I’ve already cleared the table, and they’re gone. Let’s say that I contact your company, Stellar, to say, you know what? I need to up my presence online in a good way. What are some of the things that I should have whenever I’m talking to you or anybody else about what is it that I need that first call?

Speaker 2: If you go online and you search questions to ask your SEO company, there’s lists everywhere. People make them and other SEO companies go and they search those. They know what questions are coming. They coach their people on what to say. It’s just going through the motions. There’s not generally a lot of value in that whole procedure. What we believe is you should be basing your decision on what they’re asking you, right? If you contact me and you say, I want to move up and I say, hey, that’s a great plan. I’ve got this silver package, it’s $999 a month. It’s exactly what you’ve always needed. Just sign up and we’ll get to it. I don’t have the first clue what you want to move up for, what you’ve done previously, anything, right? And so that’s a huge red flag. How am I going to make a recommendation about what you should do to solve your problem when I don’t even know what your problem is?

One of the best things you can do on your side is think about what are they asking me, and how are they understanding what it is that I do? And if they’re not asking those kind of questions, then you probably should call around to some more people that are, because the very first step in a good SEO plan is to set a target, set an end goal. And from there you can work backwards and you can find out a ton of great information, but it all starts with asking those questions. So, far more important than a list of cookie cutter questions is, ask yourself at the end of the first call or at the end of the second call, however the process works, how much do I feel they know about me? If I called them back and said, tell me what I’m trying to accomplish, help me understand what I do, whatever, how well could they answer that? The very best SEO plans I’ve ever seen built started from a very thorough understanding of what the person trying to accomplish.

Speaker 3: If I was to get you on the phone to qualify you and say, I need to build my business, I’d be looking at my website, and I would hope that you would be able to, without explanation from me, tell me what it is I’m trying to do, and then build in a program that would help my business get better exposure with perhaps changes on my website, or what you would be doing in addition to what I’ve already got.

Speaker 2: That’s pretty close. The difference is the without explanation part. Because I could look at your website and I could see three things that you do. You may know that internally, one of those things you enjoy doing the most, you do it most efficiently because you’re very well versed in it, and it’s the most profitable for you of those three things. And I might talk to somebody else, and they may have a completely different one of those three things that’s the one they most enjoy, and are best at, and make the most money from. Obviously, you can look at a website and you can gain a lot of information about where a website stands by looking at just the data that’s there, the information that’s there. But the other part of it is, you have to understand the human element. A good example that comes to mind are plumbers. Some plumbers, they love to do water heater replacements, and installations.

It’s a quick service, it pretty painless, and it’s got a great profit margin.

Speaker 3: Sure.

Speaker 2: But if you’re a commercial plumber and you also have a water heater installation page, you’re probably going to get more money from commercial installs than you are the water heaters. So the person who primarily does water heaters is going to want to really promote that, and that’s going to be more important. The person who does commercial jobs in addition to is probably going to lean to the commercial side. And so that’s where the understanding the person, understanding the business, besides just looking at the raw data, becomes extremely important. Because every business is going to have certain things that they just like to do, they’re better at, and are more profitable for them than the other things they offer.

Speaker 3: What if I was to take my existing plumbing business and I’m specializing in the commercial side of it, commercial/industrial, and I set somebody up, it could be a family member or an employee, and I promote the heck out of the water heater installation, or more perhaps the tankless water heater. Would I be better off promoting it independent of the big picture and just have more of a rifle shot, or here’s John’s plumbing, and here’s the division in the tankless water heater?

Speaker 2: With those, a lot of times when there’s a really close overlap like that, like plumbers, then you can promote both. And some people will say, we want to promote all three services, all two services equally, because we have different teams that do them. It’s not a thing where you have to do either/or. It’s just more about the understanding of what it is, because maybe you call me and you say, I’ve set up my cousin with the water heater installation portion of it, but he’s not really very good at it, and so we’re really just trying to pacify him and give him something to do, so let’s not get too many of those, because we have to send out a team member to help him every time he goes out. Right?

Speaker 3: Yeah. You don’t want to have to send out a rescue squad every time he starts doing work for you.

Speaker 2: Exactly. And these are the kinds of things that it seems a little silly, but it makes a huge impact on your SEO strategy. Those are the kinds of things that you have to learn in that initial process to make sure that you’re guiding somebody down the right path. That’s where I think, really, the magic happens is knowing of all the things you could possibly do for somebody, which thing is going to be the best for them. That’s really what you have to figure out. From there, it just becomes a process of going through the framework we use to figure out how to get them there for it. But the very first thing is, if you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t really build a plan to get there.

Speaker 3: Everybody has what we call secrets. Thank goodness social media wasn’t around when I grew up, but there are secrets to, as you call it, growing your SEO organically. What is organic content promotion? Share some of those tips, tools, and techniques here, because they are secretly held by so many but me.

Speaker 2: It’s tough. There used to be a lot of really interesting tricks and things you could do, shortcuts. Over the years, Google has worked really hard to close up those shortcuts and those hacks and those tips that could give you an unfair advantage. So now, really the biggest tip, or the biggest trick, and it isn’t a trick, but so many people don’t do it because it’s very time–intensive, it’s labor intensive, is taking the time to understand what’s already working. In almost any industry, you can find somebody who’s doing a really good job at promoting themselves through SEO. If you look at several competitors who are really doing a really good job, you can save yourself a lot of trial and error, a lot of mistakes, a lot of time by looking at what they’ve all done, that’s in common, and start there. Because that could be the 20% that gets 80% of the results.

If there’s a tip or trick that really everybody should know it’s that there’s so many free training courses and SEO everything. It’s just everywhere. Everybody who’s ever read a book on SEO has made a training course. Don’t just use those, because what they’ll tell you is a lot of guidelines that are in theory, very good. They’re practical, they work. And if you did all those things would probably get there, but guess what, it’s going to take you a lot longer, and a lot more money, and a lot more hassle than if you look at what the 20% is of those things that really makes the most impact.

Forget about just following a generalized rule of thumb, and just look at who’s doing a good job. Look at everything you possibly can about their website, about their business, about the reviews, about how good are the images they have. Does it look like every image on their website for everything they do was designed by a graphic designer? Make notes about that. Figure out what they’re doing really well. That works for SEO, but it’s worked in business probably for long as businesses have existed, is understanding your competition, understanding what they do really well, and then understanding what you could do better.

Speaker 3: The secret is not so much a secret as the secret is right there in front of you. You just have to take a step back, look at it from someone’s entire picture. You go to their website. Perhaps they are familiar in your industry. Look at what’s working for them and just do a Google search on them, a little SEO of your own, and find out who’s ranked top and take, say the top three, and see how they compare with you. And then just basically copy or take pages out of their website. Cut and paste, sounds like.

Speaker 2: You have to make your own, but think of it as they’re giving you [crosstalk 00:30:23].

Speaker 3: Well sure, you don’t want to plagiarize, I’m just simplifying it here. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I have seen people plagiarize too, and I don’t recommend that. It’s not a great plan, but there was a time for local SEO when people would just copy and paste pages and they would rank them above the original site. It’s been done, but…

Speaker 3: It’s like using it as a template. You create with your own words, but you see what’s working for them. And then in your own words, you can use that same flow and put it to work for your search engine optimization for your business.

Speaker 2: That’s right. Because if they’re already showing up, they’re having a lot of success from it. Google obviously likes what they’re doing. Once you’re in an industry for a while, you’ll notice over time, okay, Google is making an update. Yesterday, Google released a big algorithm core update, and some of the people who ranked yesterday won’t rank today anymore. Some of the people who didn’t rank yesterday are ranking now. If you spend a lot of time in an industry, what you’ll start to notice is, okay, these two sites, they dropped off and these two sites improved. Now let’s go back and see what the two improved sites are doing that the two dropped off sites didn’t. And then what overlaps with the sites that didn’t move? Over time, you’ll start to pick up on a lot of little signals from any industry you’re in as well.

And that’s just way more effective than following the templated approach. What it really comes down to, the reason why there’s so many training courses, so many hacks and tricks and all that stuff is a lot of people don’t like to put in time and work. They’re looking for a magic bullet. They’re looking for a shortcut. I’m pretty sure that’s why the diet pill and magic workout industry has been so popular for so long. If people were like, I could go to the gym and workout every day for years, or I could order this magic fat burner and that’s going to do the trick, right? People want the same thing with SEO. They’re like, what’s the magic bullet? And so everybody who wants to make an SEO course says, buy my course, I’ve got the magic bullet. You’re never going to believe it. It doesn’t work, but people they’re like, okay, risk versus reward. It’s $19 for the course, but maybe it’s the magic bullet. I’m going to buy it.

Speaker 3: Marked down from $1,000, you can now have it for $19.99. But wait, there’s more!

Speaker 2: Yes. Order today and get our free email template series. Yeah. No, That’s what you see. Just don’t do it. I guess that’s really it. I wish there was something that was a lot harder about this, but what it really is, is don’t take shortcuts. Agencies take shortcuts, people take shortcuts. It always comes back to bite you in the end. Google gets you over time. And we’ve seen that for the past eight years, people just getting hammered by Google for some shortcuts they took, or their company took. Don’t do it. Because long–term, it’s not going to pay for itself, and it is not going to work out well.

Speaker 3: Google happens to have a few buildings full of people that are designed, and their sole purpose is to keep you from doing the things that you want to do to get around their systems there. You don’t sue people with more money than you, and you don’t go up against an army with one soldier.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That’s it. Look at what Google tells you they like. That’s why it works so well, is there they’re telling. You’ve got a lot of really smart people at Google, and they’re like, all right guys, here’s the ticket. Here’s what we think is people want to see. Give us this and we’ll probably show it.

Speaker 3: Travis, you spent some time in the Army, you came out of the Army around a decade ago, you created this company. What was it that, when you got out of the Army, that says, you know what, I’m going to start a business in SEO. What was that a–ha moment that made you do this?

Speaker 2: Actually, I got out of the Army. I got a job for the Illinois, I lived in Illinois at the time, the Illinois Department of Corrections. So I worked there. Pretty good gig. After a little while, they closed down some of the facilities. Typically, everybody’s story is they closed down facilities, I got laid off, and so I started a business. I didn’t even get laid off or anything. I just got put on midnight shift. Did not care for that at all. That’s not good. You can’t be staying up all night and sleeping in the daytime. It just don’t work very well, at least not for me. After a little while of that I’m like, okay, something’s got to give, something’s got to give. So I stop one day, I pick up a magazine, and this is obviously a while back.

I pick up a magazine and I flip through, and there’s a list. It’s best businesses to start. High–profit margin businesses, something like that. I’m scrolling through, scrolling through, I see SEO in the list. I start reading about it. And I’m like, it’s pretty interesting. Before that, I didn’t know anything about it. I had never considered running a business. I never considered being in marketing. Definitely never considered being in the SEO industry. I just saw it on the thing. It sounded extremely interesting, and so I started learning more and more and more about it. For about 12 months, I just worked extremely hard at learning everything I could, setting up some of my own websites to test out different stuff that I had read, and that’s how I got into it.

Somewhere along that journey, I went onto a freelance website. I think it was called Elance at the time, and now it’s Upwork. I could write content pretty well, so I was just doing some freelance gigs to get some practice writing, blog posts, blog content. One person I picked up, it was a tanning salon. They had a couple of locations. I wrote a bunch of blog posts for them. They really liked them. After a while, I said, I’m newer to SEO, but I’ve been working at it for several months now, I’ve got a pretty good grip on it, would you like to give it a shot? Do you want to try us out? He agreed. He didn’t pay me very much at all, but it was a good experience. That was our very first client ever was this tanning salon. So we were able to get his website ranked in a few months, and it stayed ranked for a really long time. That’s how I got into it.

But before that, no previous experience in any of the things that you typically might have, if you’re going to start and run a business. Really sharp learning curve there, all came from a magazine article. That’s probably the best $6 I ever spent. that’s how I got into it. it’s just nothing. There was nothing before that point that would ever lead me to believe that I would be in such an industry.

Speaker 1: I talk about all the time, that a–ha moment, when you realize that something that you’re doing or that you’re around can be done better, and I’ve done it. Everybody does it. you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You certainly didn’t go out and create your own Google, you just learned how to put what I call that spoke in the wheel. Make it turn smoother, faster, further. And with each spoke that you learn to put in another one, and another. What you’ve done is that you said, here’s something interesting, and you learned about it. You put a spoke in the wheel, and then you decided at some point to say, you know what? Stellar SEO is now open for business. Bring it on folks. That was what, 2012?

Speaker 2: Yep. That was it. It took a little while and I’m like, all right, it’s go time. I resigned from my job, opened up a business, and the rest is history. You don’t realize if you’ve never started and ran a business, how many things you have to learn. There’s so much stuff. You figure out, here’s what I can learn. Here’s where I have to get somebody to help me, because it’s just not…

Speaker 1: Isn’t it funny where we end up? Oftentimes we end up where we never had any plan or vision of being there, but yet here we are.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It really is. You just don’t know what’s coming until you do it. And then it happens so fast too.

Speaker 1: As I’ve talked about all the time, when you start a business, nobody knows everything. You play off of your strengths and you hire your weaknesses. Every time that you made a mistake, oftentimes you just don’t know it, but there’s a government agency who will come along and remind you of how you did it wrong. Some of them can be very expensive mistakes, especially when it comes to employee relations, human relations, taxes, withholdings, insurance, and all those evil necessities of businesses. That it’s very difficult to be an expert in everything, so know where your strengths are and then hire your weaknesses and surround yourself as we do here, at Bizness Soup, and as our guest, Travis Bliffen has done, right here from Stellar SEO. Travis, I could go on all day, I think, talking about SEO, but I got to call this one to an end.

And I want to thank you for being a part of this serving of Bizness Soup, Travis from the company, Stellar SEO. If you’d like more information, you can find it at the one source business is and has available, and that’s at bizsoup.com, where you can find anything and everything when it comes to business, because it’s where business comes for business. Travis, thanks for being on this serving of Bizness Soup.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.

096-travis-bliffen

096 - Travis Bliffen

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