Long-time fans of the show might remember me saying that SEO was the first online marketing skill I learned and was also the first service OMG offered. 

We got out of the SEO game years ago, but I still love it. And I believe it's a massive area of opportunity that most eComm brands are missing. 

I first heard my guests speak at Geek Out in San Diego. Their talk was so good I asked them to come on the podcast. Kevin is the CEO of GR0, and Jon is the Chief Growth Officer. Both are wicked smart.

In this episode, we bust SEO myths and misunderstandings and talk about how they've helped eComm brands 10x their organic traffic through consistent SEO practices. 

Here's a look at what we cover: 

• The most common SEO mistakes or misunderstandings from eComm brands.
• Where in the funnel does SEO fit?
• How SEO is just storytelling in a lot of different ways.
• Content must haves when creating content for organic growth.
• Favorite SEO tools.
• How someone could get started with SEO.

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Mentioned in This Episode:

Jonathan Zacharias

   - LinkedIn ‍

Kevin Miller

- LinkedIn ‍

GR0‍

Clearscope‍

Semrush‍

Moz‍

HARO help a reporter out‍

Gainful‍

Genexa

Transcript:

Brett:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I'm so excited about our topic and my guests. We're talking SEO people. And for those that don't know, that's actually how I got my start in online marketing is search engine optimization. So I get to meet these two bright energetic gentlemen at Nick Shackelford's event in San Diego a few months ago called GeekOut. And I get to just geek out with him about SEO. And it was so interesting how a lot of what they talked about was kind of fundamental, stuff that I had heard a long time ago. But then also some new stuff and some stuff you shouldn't do that probably other people are telling you to do. And so we're going to bust some myths, we're going to get practical, we're going to get tactical, and we're going to have a lot of fun as well. So my two guests are Jon and Kevin. We got Jon Zacharias, he's the chief growth officer for GR0. And that's G-R-O or G-R-0, actually?

Kevin:

Zero.

Brett:

GR0. Yeah, they're being trendy here and I like it. So GR0. And then we got Kevin Miller with ... If you're watching the video, he's got that Welcome to Miller Time sign behind him, so very appropriate. Kevin Miller, CEO of GR0. So what's up fellas? How you doing? And thanks for taking the time to get on the show.

Kevin:

Doing great. Thank you for having us.

Jon:

Thanks for having us, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. So I can't wait to nerd out here on SEO, but first, and I mentioned we got our sort ... actually OMG's first service was SEO, but we fully got out of the SEO game like three and a half, four years ago for reasons we can get into throughout the show. But how did you guys get into SEO and why start an SEO agency? Because SEO is hard work. How'd you get here? Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah. In 2011, I was in law school and I was interning for one of my dad's friends in a wage-an-hour class action law firm. So we would essentially sue big businesses for not paying employees overtime. And I was realizing that all of the cases that we were getting were coming from Google. And so I became way more interested in generating leads than actually litigating the cases themselves. It was also way more valuable to be able to get the cases than it was to litigate them. Lawyers were a dime a dozen, but if you could get the cases for lawyers, you could essentially walk into any law firm that you wanted to and make your own position. So yeah, I became obsessed with it and I started my search engine optimization career in 2011.

Brett:

That's awesome. So yeah, that really makes a lot of sense, right? You can always train someone to argue the cases in court, but to rank on Google and get the cases in the first place, that's a special skill that not many attorneys have, that's for sure. So Kevin, what about you man? How did you get here? How'd you end up an SEO wizard?

Kevin:

I was working at Google and I was on the AdWords team. And so I was learning about the whole ad side of the business and I found it interesting that they never talked about SEO and the organic side of the business. And I was very intrigued by that and it just kind of piqued my interest. And I was always interested in understanding what it takes to go from zero to a million organic visitors a month and like build a website that can do that. And I had a job at this place called Open Listings in Los Angeles about five years ago when I moved here and I met Jon and he was an SEO expert.

And my responsibilities were exclusively SEO, but I didn't know that. I only knew the paid side. So we talked about 20 times a day about SEO-related tings. And over a year of doing that, I became an expert through like doing courses online and talking with him, it gave me both sides of the learning, like the textbook SEO and then the practical SEO. And I became fascinated with that, I thought it was really interesting that the companies that earned ... you had to earn it. You couldn't directly buy it and I thought that was intriguing.

Brett:

Yeah, you can't just buy, you have to earn it. And once you get it, it's not a forever thing, right? You can still screw up and Google can ding you and you can lose your rankings. But if you keep doing the right thing, it just grows over time and it snowballs, and the compounding effect is huge. And a couple things I'll point out, one, you said you kind of got addicted to it or you just fell in love with it. I was the same way in the early days. I remember when I first learned SEO, I helped one of my early, early clients rank on page one for the term brochures. Now I used tactics at that time that are not recommended today and it didn't stay on page one for very long. But it was cool what they did. I was like whoa, this is really fun, this is really interesting.

But then the other thing I'll say is we're more focused on the ad side of things, but we've seen this time and time again and there's research done on this. If you can rank both organically and in the paid results for certain terms, your clickthrough rate goes up, your clickthrough rate on paid and your clickthrough rate on organic goes up when you can be in both spots. So very synergistic, SEO in paid. And so really excited to kind of dive in. So what I thought would be good is let's start with either some SEO mistakes that people make or just some SEO misunderstandings because I think there's a lot of misinformation out there, a lot of misunderstandings. But help us out. Where are we getting it wrong and where are we misunderstanding things?

Jon:

Yeah, the first biggest misunderstanding that I see all the time is the strategy itself, right? So let's say you're selling pool floats, like these things that float in the pool, right? Obviously ...

Brett:

Works like a unicorn, the unicorn floats or the lounging floats or whatever. Yeah, got it.

Jon:

Got you. So you're selling those, right? Obviously, you know want to be number one when somebody Googles pool floats, right? But the biggest mistake that I see is when people build their entire strategy around one or two or three different keywords. And this is honestly something that Kevin kind of taught me, the much better way to do it now and the way that we always do it is diversification. So we go after hundreds of long tail keywords, wherein the aggregate if you add up all of the search volume, it's a 100, 200, 300x what the smaller one terms are. Our strategies still do involve including going after that big word, right? But the whole point is that if it doesn't work, we're not dead in the water, right? We've won a lot of other little battles out there that start to compound in the client's favor. And so I think the biggest mistake I see is the strategy itself.

People primarily try to just change their title tags and then send backlinks to the page and hit it over and over and over again until they go to number one. The problem with that is that even if you do get number one when Google does an update, you could get burned, right? They can burn those links and then you have nothing. So there's been situations where people invested a million dollars into SEO and got nothing, right? So we make sure that no matter what happens, that never happens to any of our clients and to the sites that we own and operate ourselves. We make sure that we go after so many small battles that no matter what happens, the client or our sites are going to rank for hundreds of keywords in the number one position and going to have a plethora of traffic for years to come.

Brett:

I love that. And I think if we kind of unpack that a little bit or even go high level a little bit, it's not being just myopically focused on a few keywords, it's really being focused on a customer, and answering questions, and entering a conversation, right? And getting traffic. And there really is beauty and strength, and lot of money to be made in that long tail rather than just a few keywords. So really good stuff, Jon. Kevin, how would you follow that up?

Kevin:

I would say one mistake that I see people making is they want to rank for a certain keyword or they want to write on a certain topic, and they believe that writing about 500 words is sufficient. What I've learned is that that used to work in the old days of SEO. But now if you really want to rank number one or two or three for a term that gets searched, it's got to be a thousand or 1,500 word piece of written content that thoroughly answers the question. If you just answer a part of the question, it's just not going to be substantive enough to have staying power on page one of Google. So that's one big mistake, people kind of dip their toe into the world of content marketing and they go through basically all of the steps.

They figure out what they want to write on, they understand what the title tag should be in heading one and they write it, but they don't really put their full effort into it where you need to internally link to other pages in a way that makes sense. You need to have images on the pages, you need to cite your sources, you need to cite who the author is. And it needs to be 1,500 words that is a better answer to that question than what's currently in positions one through 10. So that's a big, big thing that I think people just fall short. They just give minimal effort and they expect it to work and it yields zero results.

Brett:

So kind of the minimal effort or not thinking deep enough about strategy and then also not going deep enough on execution. And so talk about that a little bit, why a thousand to 1,500 words? Why does that have staying power or maybe a 500-word article does not?

Kevin:

Most topics that people might want to talk about or answer today, they require more thorough of an answer. So for example, if I Google protein powder and that's what I sell and that's what I want to rank for, there's a lot of questions that are related to that such as what does protein powder do? What's the best one for me? Should I take it every day? In what dose should I take it in? What are the pros? What are the cons? Are there any side effects and everything in between? So when you're thinking about that, those are the things that people want to know when they're Googling protein powder. If you just answer what is it, it's not sufficient enough.

Brett:

Right.

Kevin:

There's other articles that are going to talk about all the other implications. So we've just learned that you have to answer all of the next questions that people might have as it relates to the parent topic.

Brett:

Because what Google's looking for, and if we kind of go back, and this is what was cool about your talk and thinking about SEO is that the fundamental thing that Google is trying to do has not changed. It has never changed. It's always been the same. They want to classify the world's information and make it accessible to everybody. And they want to deliver really, really relevant results to whatever people are searching for. And so Google's looking at ... they're looking at things like time on site and does someone click on an organic link and visit that site and then come back and keep searching like they didn't get their question answered. So there's some things Google is looking at that's going to indicate yeah, people are not happy with this response, right?

Kevin:

Yeah.

Brett:

And just over time, Google has identified hey, you got to be thorough. Be thorough in your answer and that's what satisfies the user. And if it satisfies the user, price satisfies Google and then you're in the money.

Jon:

And then that leads specifically into Google releasing their natural language processing API. So we can actually scientifically figure out how thorough and how semantically superior an article is to another article very easily. So for example, if one of our clients wants to rank for protein powder, we write the article and then we grade that article against every other article that's ever been written that ranks on the first page of Google for that keyword. And then that's how we figure out we're missing a section about how often should I take it and Healthline has that section. We're missing a section about what is the best dose and WebMD has that section.

And by the time it's all said and done, we're creating content that really is like the best piece of content that's ever been created on that subject matter. Now that has two benefits, right? The first benefit is that it helps you get to the top of Google faster, right? Because Google's algorithm can figure out that it is a very thorough detailed piece of content written on that subject matter. But more importantly, it helps you stay at the top of Google for longer. And the reason why is because Google has an algorithm update basically called RankBrain. And what RankBrain does is exactly what you were just talking about. It looks at the bounce rate of the articles. It looks at the engagement of the articles.

And it determines okay, this article shouldn't be number one because 90% of the people that are looking for the dose of protein powder are bouncing off of it so clearly it's not answering the question. Theoretically, and again there's a lot of nuances to how to do it right. But theoretically, if you use the natural language processing API, the bounce rate should be the lowest. And the reason why is because you're answering all the sub-questions within the master question that consumers want to see. Now the caveat to that is the design has to be right and there usually has to be a very nice table of contents at the top so people can easily consume the information when they land on the page. But as long as you have those elements, there's no reason why you shouldn't have the lowest bounce rate for that subject matter.

Brett:

That's awesome. Love it. So kind of walk me through the process if you would guys and I know, and this is a very complex subject. And this is a complex service to execute on, but what does the kind of strategy look like for you guys? So you take on a client, we can stick with protein powder if that's a good one or we could go with auto parts or like whatever sounds fun to you to talk about. How would you map out that strategy, kind of where would you start and what would you do next?

Kevin:

It really depends on, we have to meet the client where they're at. So we have to first analyze what have they written on, how built out is their website from an SEO perspective, do they have a good diversified link profile or not? So all that really matters when we're trying to figure out what the strategy is. But most of our clients come to us in like the earlier phase of their life. They might be two years old, received a little bit of venture funding or their bootstrapped, they've reached part of a product market fit and now they're trying to grow a channel that they haven't tried before. So typically what we'll do is we'll look at all the topics that consumers search for that relate to their product or their service.

So in the case of protein powder, we'll do a content calendar that identifies 50 to a 100 different distinct blog posts that we can write that relate to protein powder. Believe it or not, there are that many questions around protein. And our goal is to make them a subject matter expert on proteins. That if anyone is searching anything related to protein on Google, they run into our client no matter what. And so those are all the small battles that Jon talked about. And then what we do is we have a very strong press outreach program. So we get our clients written in the news at a frequency that's probably 10 times higher than any PR firm if you can believe it.

And so we get the CEOs, founders, heads of marketing quoted in major, major news outlets, and that in exchange for the quote and the expertise that they give just to a journalist article, they get a dofollow backlink to their homepage. And that dramatically changes the trust levels and the trust signals that Google looks for in a certain website that helps us rank higher for all the keywords that we're trying to go after. And then the third piece of what we do is technical SEO. So we make sure the site is super fast. We're doing onpage optimization to make sure that every single page on the website is unique in like what it's titled and what it's about and make sure it has really good content. So those are the three things we do. We do content creation, backlink building, and onpage optimization. And that's what a complete and thorough strategy really is.

Brett:

And then you really have to have each of those right because if you're missing any of those components, you're not going to be successful. The technical SEO is off if the site is really slow, it doesn't load well, has issues, Google is not going to rank that because they want a good user experience. If you don't have that backlink profile, if there's not news outlets and other people linking to your site, Google's not going to trust it, right? And if there's not the content, what's Google going to send people to, right? What are they going to rank? So love that breakdown. Anything you would add to that, Jon?

Jon:

Yeah, like Kevin said, every engagement starts with a strategy, right? I mean it starts with a strategy. And basically in that strategy we got to figure out what keywords they already rank for, what keywords they want to rank for, whether those keywords that they want to rank for are going to show up in the form of a product page or a blog page, that type of analysis. The number one mistake that I see in SEO campaigns is that like a company that wants to rank for protein powder is so excited about ranking for protein powder that they have five blog posts on their website about protein powder and they all compete with each other, and then they're confused as to why none of them rank. So a lot of it is originally doing some of that technical work and then building out that content. We use a hub-and-spoke model.

So the whole point is that a hub page would be protein powder, everything you need to know, right? And then all the spokes would be blog articles that would link back internally on the client's website to that hub page. And then when you hit those spokes with backlinks through the transitive property, they hit the hub and the whole site goes flying up. So for example, you hit how often should I take protein powder with a backlink from Men's Journal, right? That blog post shoots to the top of Google, that blog post links back internally to the hub page, protein powder, that page shoots to the top of Google.

Brett:

And explain it just a little bit. So I totally get the visual hub and spoke. The hub, that's a piece of content as well or that's like a product page? What's usually the hub?

Jon:

It can be either. It can be either, but usually we like to marry them together. So one of the biggest tricks is that we'll add a 1,500, 2,000-word blog post to a product page. And that way, it captures any possible intent that a user is looking for. If they're looking to buy product, covered. If they're looking for information, covered. And so it gives it the best possible chance to rank and then also creates that master kind of like landing page as well.

Brett:

So you're creating a super PDP, super product detailed page, almost like. And in some ways Amazon's product detail pages are this way, right? It's got the buying information up front. And then as you scroll down, good pages, usually have tons of A+ content, FAQs, like all kinds of information there. Is that kind of what you're building sometimes for that hub page?

Jon:

Exactly.

Brett:

Yeah. That's awesome. It's so interesting. And so I want to talk a little bit about storytelling. Because you guys made a really interesting comment when I heard you speak in San Diego about, as you were just storytelling in lots and lots of different ways. And maybe one way we could kind of relate it, we just had our internal quarterly summit with team OMG about a week ago and we were talking about just the way people shop. And so I was talking to the team and saying hey, what have you bought recently and what was that process like? So we kind of understand even just looking at how we shop for things.

And Rob on our team, shout out, Rob, was talking about, he just bought some noise canceling headphones. And just asked him how long the journey took, and he said it was about two weeks, right? And so he read articles and watched videos, and looked. And it wasn't a huge purchase, it like 70, 80 bucks, something like that. But he wanted to get the right pair of headphones and it was kind of fun for him and he took the time to buy it. So throughout he was asking all kinds of questions and looking at reviews, and looking at that product versus this product. So talk about that a little bit. What do you mean by good SEO storytelling and how does that storytelling weave into someone's shopping journey?

Kevin:

I think in the example you gave, that's a multichannel storytelling because they're looking at things that are owned by the brand. They're also looking at third-party reviews on Amazon and other review websites. So the comment that we had made at the GeekOut event was kind of referencing that you've got to just be great at storytelling across the board. So like other things that we do at our company is we do storytelling on LinkedIn. So owners of companies and brands will tell their brand story there so that we can hit people on a different channel. But yeah, the storytelling also comes into play with what you share on social media and what you put into your ads.

And basically like we want to be the company that helps you tell that story and create the content, and then you can repurpose that content on other channels. And so that's kind of how we think about it. We tell the story with blog posts, we tell the story with copy that we write on your homepage. We tell the story with copy that we write on your product description pages. And then you can use that content and repurpose it for social channels, LinkedIn and other mediums to help get that message out to other audiences, and meet them kind of where they are. Because not everyone's going to come to the same channel to consume information about your brand.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. I think sometimes we over complicate things. And certainly there are a lot of technical nuances and execution here is not easy. But I love what Google said a long time ago where they said hey, what if the best ads are just answers to questions, right?

Kevin:

Yeah.

Brett:

What if the best content is just telling a story and answering questions, right? It's simple. Think like Rob who's trying to buy the best set of noise canceling headphones or think about Doris who's getting into workouts and what's the best protein powder like what questions are they asking? What are they looking for? What do they need to have answered before they make a purchase? And you're really just trying to show up every possible place you can with a good story and a good answer so I love that.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Brett:

You kind of talked about this a little bit, Kevin. But just curious if you guys want to pack anymore here, what are some content must haves? So we're creating one of these blog articles, we're creating this content. What are some things that we have to have here? So we know it needs to be a 1,000, 1,500 words, what else needs to be there?

Kevin:

You have to have clear authorship by someone who has demonstrated that they're an expert in the space. So if I'm selling like a supplement, I want to make sure that the person writing the blog is a registered dietician and has experience in the creation of that supplement, and knows the ingredients inside and out. It can't just be a marketing manager talking about a kid's vitamin. It needs to be someone who works with kids, potentially the dietrist or something like that who has experience and know how there. That lends credibility to the content but it also sends a trust signal to Google that this person is who they say they are, and the information has reason to be credible because they have a degree in this and they've worked in it professionally.

Brett:

So authorship is important. Actually, maybe just a quick side story to kind of underscore this. I heard you guys talk about when you were on stage Dr. Axe, right? Was it Dr. Axe who used to get a ton of traffic and then Google's like no, not a real doctor, no traffic for you type of thing.

Kevin:

I think Jon was telling that story. Yeah.

Jon:

Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. So basically that just underscores Google's not just looking for good content, but looking at who's writing the content and can we trust this person, right? And so don't be like Dr. Axe, I guess is the moral of the story there. But what do we, how can we improve on that expertise or become an authoritative person so that Google says yes, I trust this author?

Kevin:

You have to link out to a third party resource that backs up and proves that you are who you say you are. So for example, I could write on my own blog that I own that I'm an MD, but I'm not an MD. So if you link out to a third party website that shows my profile on ucla.edu, then that proves to Google that I am who I say I am, and I have the authority to write on a medical topic. So I think that's how you do it and it's one way to do it. And it makes it very clear to the reader that I should trust this information. That's pretty much the most popular and easiest way to do it for a lot of companies.

Brett:

Awesome. So we got to have 1,500 words, 1,000 to 1,500 words. We got to have authorship or expertise there. What else seems to be in this content?

Kevin:

I think great imagery needs to be in the content. Again, it helps tell the story. So typically really good blog posts have one or two infographics that illustrate a concept that you're talking about verbally. It appeals to a lot of people who are visual learners and helps them feel engaged. And so that's a nice to have, it's not an absolute must. But I love content that has that, I think it's very engaging. It enhances metrics like time on site. The longer you stay on the page, the better a signal it sends to Google so that always factors in. No one knows exactly how much it factors in because we don't work on the web spam team at Google. We're not one of those engineers, but we know that Google ...

Brett:

Google keeps that organic algo pretty top secret.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Brett:

So not, I mean you really couldn't know, but you also have to look at, and I remember this kind of applies, this old good ad advice if you look at an advertorial or something like that. You want to make the content approachable where someone wants to consume it. So that switching from left to right and having text on one side, image on the other, and then you switch and stuff like that. Because sometimes people scan, right? They'll scan the blog post and see like what all is here. And it may be an image that causes them to pause a little bit and dig in and read there, and then they go back and read the whole thing, right? So yeah, you're trying to get that engagement and that time on site, which makes it...

Kevin:

Yeah.

Brett:

Cool. What else?

Kevin:

On the content side, specifically.

Brett:

On the content side. Yeah, what else on the content side do we need?

Kevin:

What we do, which Jon was talking about is we semantically grade all of our articles. And what that means is we have softwares that we use. There's the primary one is called Clearscope. It's a third party tool, it's available and we run our blog post through it. So you write your blog post, you put it in this piece of software, you tell the software you want to rank number one for protein powder. It then scans the top 10 results on Google and it says, it identifies how thorough and how well written your article is relative to what's currently on page one of Google. And it says hey, the top pages that were written by Healthline and other formidable competitors have these sections that you missed.

If you want to be considered to rank on page one, you've got to add this, this, this and add even more. So it helps us understand what gaps we might have in our article, and that's like the next level part of SEO that we do. And then you keep writing and you keep adding more information until you rank and your article ranks in A+, at which point, we deem it eligible to be published on your website. We don't publish any articles that don't reach an A+ rating. So that's the next thing that we do that I think is relevant to the content conversation that we're having right now. And I've seen a direct correlation of A+ content in the Clearscope tool with ranking really high on Google, so we follow that.

Brett:

Awesome. I love that. This is actually a good segue into what are some of your favorite SEO tools. So Clearscope is likely at the top, near the top of that list. But Jon, what else would you add to that list or Kevin?

Jon:

Yeah, we like Semrush, Ahref, you mean just for semantically grading or in general?

Brett:

Just in general. Yeah, just in general SEO tools.

Jon:

Yeah, I love Semrush. Kevin loves Ahrefs. It really all depends. But we've noticed that there's different tools that are good for different reasons. For example, one primary metric that is super important, is the keyword difficulty because you need an accurate understanding of how difficult it is. And it's interesting, like on Semrush, it'll say that protein powders 95 out of a 100. On Ahrefs, it might say it's a 30 out of a 100. And so we've kind of created a proprietary formula that we use a combination of different tools to get down to a real blended keyword difficulty. So we actually understand across the board how difficult is this keyword to rank for. I also like Moz for domain authority. I think it's very accurate for domain authority. Years ago, as you know Google, back in the day, I was explaining this to people, Google used to actually show you what a pages' rank was.

Brett:

Yeah.

Jon:

So you could go into the old version of search console, put in a URL essentially, right? And then Google would show you this is an eight, this is a seven out a 10. Then they killed that because it created a lot of opportunity for manipulation, right? And they killed that, and then now we're just left with Moz which is the next best way to gauge how strong a domain's authority and a pages' authority is. Ahrefs and Semrush also do now have that tool in them, but I still believe in the Moz one, it's been around for the longest

Brett:

Moz is kind of the OG in that space for looking at page rank, yeah. Which little fun fact ...

Jon:

Exactly.

Brett:

... that only maybe some people care about, page rank was partially because it was ranking the authority of the page, but also partially a pun on Larry Page's name. Because Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Brett:

So there you go. But now yeah, nobody knows what page rank is. Only Google knows, but Moz is probably going to get you there close enough. Moz is measuring the right things to at least be a proxy on how authoritative is this particular page. So love all those tools, fully, fully agree. Cool. And I know you guys got to be careful, as do we with this talking about clients, but any kind of favorite case studies or just quickly of hey, this is what the process could do for you if you commit to it? And I also want you guys to talk about HARO, right? Help a Reporter Out. So actually answer that first. So Help a Reporter Out and then any case studies that you guys can dive into?

Kevin:

Yeah, so we're the first people to productize HARO, meaning you could hire us and we will write on your behalf, and get you featured in the news. So it's a highly complex system. It took us like 18 months to figure out how to do it in a way that was efficient. If you don't respond to the journalist within 10 minutes, you're dead. You'll never get written out in the news. So most people want to pay us for it because we have people on staff that are doing this all day and night that are sitting at their computers at the second that the queries come out. So it is a service that has worked really well for us. We act, it's effectively as a PR firm. And like I mentioned, we do it more efficiently than most PR firms because we are meeting the journalists like where they're at. They're asking for a quote and an expert and we're giving them that quote and that expert within 10 minutes, so.

Brett:

Yeah.

Jon:

And what's so cool about it is that it's not just HARO though, there's a lot of them. So we monitor like over 10 different services and then also have built thousands of relationships with reporters directly. So that's why we're so effective with that service, but definitely started with Help a Reporter Out.

Brett:

Yeah, which is great. Because you just got to understand that there's tons of reporters out there that they're trying to meet deadlines, they got to crank out content, they need quotes, they need things. And so you can be there to answer their requests and really crank out a ton of those references and backlinks. But you got to be Johnny-on-the-spot, as you guys mentioned and so that makes it a little bit difficult.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Brett:

But yeah, any quick case studies? What can this do for you? If you do this, if you commit to it, if you hire someone like you guys, like what can this do for you?

Kevin:

We used the example of protein powder, I have approval to use the name. So our client is gainful, they're venture-backed personalized protein company. I actually went to college with the CEO and founder. And when they came to us, they were getting about 20,000 unique visitors a month and now they're doing about 250,000. So we're seeing 10x growth in about ...

Brett:

10x, beautiful.

Kevin:

... 18 months and it's all from non-branded keywords. The other example is a company called Genexa, which is a venture-backed children's pharmaceutical company. Their tagline is they provide clean medicine. So you can go to Walgreens, Rite Aid, any of those places and get medication for your kids, cough medication and things like that. They've written hundreds of articles just in the same style that Healthline has and their non-branded keywords have exploded. They're doing hundreds of thousands of unique visitors from zero. So they just committed to the plan that we set forth and they did it over an extended period of time, and that's what it takes. So those are two brand name case studies that I like to talk about because they just did such an amazing job and they continue to reap the benefits. Every day that goes by, they're earning more trust with Google and they're continuing with the plan that we laid out and they're getting tremendous rewards from it.

Brett:

Cool. So Kevin as we wrap up, I got basically just two more questions, but how should someone shape their thinking, right? A lot of us are used to paid traffic where craft an ad, create the campaigns, flip the switch, we get traffic right now. What kind of commitments should someone look for? Like when do they start to see some wins? When do they start to see big wins? When does this really start to snowball? How long should someone be committed to SEO? I know the real answer's probably forever, but.

Kevin:

I believe that you start to see small wins around the 90-day mark. You start to see big wins around the eight, nine-month mark. But people should be committed to SEO for at least a year.

Brett:

Yeah.

Kevin:

When you commit for a year and you really do the strategy, then when you look at the next year, it's a no brainer that you want to double down on what you've done.

Brett:

Yeah. And then you're like okay, this thing is really gaining momentum, let's just pour more gas on the fire. Absolutely. So guys, this has been fantastic. I have more questions. I could talk SEO a lot longer, but we are out of time so let's wrap up. But if someone is listening and they're thinking cool, sounds awesome, don't want to do any of this myself, we'd rather talk to you guys. How can people get in touch with GR0 and what are those steps look like?

Kevin:

Our website is gr0.com and on the site, it links to my personal website, Jon's personal website, in our LinkedIns and emails and all that, so you can get all the information from there. But I would just go to our homepage, gr0.com.

Jon:

Yeah, there's an intercom set up on the homepage. Just write in and we'll get right back to you.

Brett:

Awesome. Fantastic, guys. Any final words of SEO wisdom or any parting thoughts as we wrap up?

Kevin:

We just thank you for your time. This is fantastic to talk with you and we're happy to elaborate with anyone who wants to talk further.

Brett:

Awesome. All right, guys, I really appreciate it. Thank you. I'm already like formulating in my mind what part two could be like as we go deeper on SEO, but check out gr0.com, G-R-0.com. Thanks fellows, been a lot of fun.

Kevin:

Thanks, Brett.

Jon:

Thanks, Brett.

Kevin:

And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What do you like about the show? What are some topic ideas? We're doing this for you, so let us know. And also if you love the show, leave that five star review on iTunes, it helps other people discover the show and it makes our day. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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