Dive into the nitty-gritty of SEO success with Nick Rubright from Ranko Media. Discover how a year of behind-the-scenes experimentation can exponentially grow your site’s traffic. From industry-nuanced strategies to content that converts, this episode is an SEO goldmine — delivered with a dash of gaming fun and music band analogies!
Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.
- SEO growth can take about a year.
- Outbound reach is key for SEO.
- Effective link building is not quick.
- Content should generate links or sales.
- SEO is competitive just like gaming.
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Quotables:
- 27:05 – Nick: But I do, I mean I would imagine other marketing agencies struggle with the story of like that first three months being tough where it’s like an experiment and yeah, if clients come in and know that it’s an experiment, that’s the best client. Like when we had Twilio, they knew that it was an experiment and it’s like the client saying that is like super helpful. Because then you’re kind of like, oh cool, okay. They know that I’m just kind of experimenting and I don’t know a lot of things and you almost have like freedom to mess up, you know? And I think the reason my own projects do so much better than client projects is because I feel like I have that freedom to mess up. Hmm. And any of the projects I’ve grown to like a million visitors a month, I had the freedom to mess up and it wasn’t like, it wasn’t like the clients attributed the mistakes to me. They attributed the mistakes to like the campaign and they’re like kind of asking me like, okay, well this didn’t work, so what’s next? And those clients are the ones that are successful like a hundred percent of the time pretty much
Alex: Because you’re able to take risks and like you said, like it’s the 20% where where it works. So you need to be able to take a lot of risks to see where’s it gonna work in this industry. - 44:40 – We don’t care about getting traffic to this page. This is just some stat page, right? We don’t care about like links necessarily. We care about making money. So the way we make this make money is we go, you know, from this page that has all the links we link to our other resources on the website. So that could be landing pages or content pieces you wanna rank because you know they’re gonna make money. Like if it’s like, like if you’re plen, if you wanna rank for like best buyer intent data, yeah. Top intent data providers, you would, you know, build this stat roundup and link from that to this, you know, intent data providers list and pass the authority there and that one would rise as a result. You wanna do this a lot. It’s not like you do one and this one page gets a lot of links and then you’re good. That can work in some cases with like content heavy websites, right? But if you have a page that you’re really trying to drive authority
- 26:16 – Even though your market is like insurance or like gambling, right? The gambling niche is super competitive, but everyone’s paying for links. So it’s like, okay, just don’t do that and you can win. You know? Like if you just do digital PR the right way and figure it out. And that’s the thing is like once you figure it out, it’s like, like, okay, now we can just like print links. But the process of like that first three months is kind of a trial. And I think that the first three months of anything is a trial. Like even when I, when I hire a new employee, it’s like the first 90 days is kind of like, all right, we’re kind of fucking around and like trying to figure out how this fits into this, right? And this is burn money, you know? And then we get to a place in three months where we’re like, okay, now we have a lot of stuff that we can forecast off. But I do, I mean I, I would imagine other marketing agencies struggle with the story of like that first three months being tough where it’s like an experiment and yeah, if clients come in and know that it’s an experiment, that’s the best client. Like when we had Twilio, they knew that it was an experiment and it’s like the client saying that is like super helpful. ’cause then you’re kind of like, oh cool, okay. They know that I’m just kind of experimenting and I don’t know a lot of things and you almost have like freedom to mess up
- 37:53 – And not competing brands, right? So HubSpot’s not really a competing brands, but they have a blog so they’d be a good one to research close, right? I’ve written for close before and this has an audience of salespeople. Like you basically want to think like referral traffic, like if I get on this website, are people gonna click through like is it a clickable link? Because that’s how Google’s kind of looking at it as a vote. So you wanna get votes from these like authoritative sources and you can’t pay for these ’cause these guys care about their website and the guy running the website works for a company that, you know, they don’t sell links. That’s not their thing and they’ll, you know, probably get in trouble for doing that. Like they can get fired. So it’s not something. They just want interject real here real quick. It makes so much sense when we talk to our clients, we look at like buckets where their leads come from in terms of their partners. Like for example, they may have partners in other industries like attorneys or real estate agents or whatever it is, and they send traffic their way because in what they do in their business, they say, okay, you may need the service go over here. And this is exactly the same thing that’s happening here. Someone’s reading content here and as part of it, if they’re referencing your data, they, they care about that recommendation. Yeah. They’re essentially referring your business.
- 49:17 – And I learned that from Twilio, one of our clients. ’cause like one of the campaigns we did like an infographic campaign, it didn’t do well at all and we had to pivot, but they were like, well we can use this for other stuff. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And then they’re like, well we can have our sales guys use it or like, we can publish it on social media or share it on our blog or something. And I was like, dang, they make a lot of use out of this. So it’s not so isolated. Like they’re not like, I guess they’re milking the investment a lot.
Josh: Totally. Yeah. I think they’re getting like sales enablement out. I mean they’re literally getting, they’re milking the content to get as, as everyone should be. And I think that lowers not the risk. I don’t know if risk is the right word, but when you’re able to use it in different, you know, avenues, I think it just gets more value out of the, the project.