Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Good morning everyone and welcome to the Unscripted SEO podcast. And today I have with me David Bell. And David, you have been doing SEO for a good minute with USA Mobile Drug testing for you and that's your site, right?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Dope. And we were talking earlier how you have had notable success not just with traffic and rankings, but with actual bottom line growth because of SEO. And I was really intrigued by that and I would love to dive into that.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: So absolutely, it's a good place to start. So my PR guy was Spartan Media, Jeremy Knoff, known him for 16 years and he originally came on and built our first site that when I took over the company back in 2012 and he rewrote our site.
What was really funny is the founder at the time says, I don't really care what it takes, I want to outrank everybody. Right? He's an older gentleman, somebody who comes from pre-80s, pre Google, pre everything and you know, expected to have 8,000 pages with 8,000 things on each page. So the people thought, hey, the more you know, the, the more you know, right. The reality is it's a huge distraction. So.
But I got really good advice early on and we learned the hard way USA Mobile Drug Testing decided we're going to go out and we're going to link build, we're going to add content, we're going to do everything we can. Good and bad practices at the time and as a result went from outranking the department of Transportation for the word dot drug testing so much so for years, even after once we rebuilt the site so we got penalized in 2012, fell off Google search entirely for those bad practices again, completely against the advice of Jeremy and his team to not do those things. But the, the founder and owner of the company at the time decided, I don't care, I want to win. I don't want to be number one. Right. And so there were shortcuts taken, most of which when we scrubbed the site shut, literally shut it down, rewrote it from scratch, new framework, new content specifically built around positive link building.
And our search volume is upwards of 9 million visitors a month now and still grows. And so that's how companies currently find us. We put quality, solid content that's relevant for what the everyday user is going to need.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: That's incredible.
It's not every day that you get to talk to other people in almost not other people.
It's not every day you get to talk to another entrepreneur who has built a multiple seven figure traffic source.
Like that's big.
So let's dive into that. So you said something. You, you lost everything with one of the updates and you said you rebuilt from scratch.
Did you change domains by any chance? I'm curious.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: No. Okay, so we, we originally were USAMDT.com just an acronym of USA Mobile Drug Testing.
We just literally scrubbed the site. I mean, obviously you're, you're dealing with being blacklisted, so we had to have enough momentum. It took us over a year before we even started filling up and ranking again at all. It didn't take too long after that because the practices, the quality links, the news media outlets that link back to us, getting on the local public news, those things made a huge difference.
Really. It just comes down to the level of effort that we put into building the content, trying to make sure that we were with, inside the proverbial Google, you know, walls that we did exactly what they like.
Today. It's, you know, I see, I see some owner associates in their sites. We struggle. Right. And I still see a lot of black cat SEO tactics. Like, I know some, some of our competitors in this space build, you know, 1500 sites with city names. So they'll be Tulsa, Oklahoma, they'll be Houston, whatever. And they rank. And, and they do spend a considerable amount more money on paid ads than I do, but they still rank. They still show up on page one and page two. And so it's really interesting over the years to constantly follow someone like Jeremy who says, hey, this is the right way, this is the right way, this is the right way, and see that our progression has been slow, you know, slow on a scale of, you know, being as large as we are now, slow from being zero up to ranking again, seeing phone calls, seeing engagement. But realistically, it was slow in comparison. And so you get tempted along the way to want to do the same tactics that seem to be working for your competitors. But I think the moment we start looking at our competitors too hard, we lose focus on what we do in business. So that's, that's probably my advice there.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: Love it. Okay, so let's break this down. So break down the traffic.
So I know.
So we've grown numerous websites to 1/10 million, 1/10 million monthly visitors. So we know from the, from what we've done and our stuff, what works for us and the clients that we work with.
But. So you went from effectively zero to 9 million monthly visitors.
If, regardless if someone is just starting out or if I'm at 300,000 monthly visitors or even a million monthly visitors, and I Want to get to, you know, set multiple seven figures in traffic each month or even I want to get to the next benchmark. Like let's say I'm at a thousand, I want to get to 10,000, I'm at 10, I want to get to a hundred or a hundred to a million, whatever that next benchmark might be for my SEO traffic.
What are some principles or guiding lights, things that you've done with SEO that you're like, oh, you have to do this, you can't skip this. Yeah, you can skip this other stuff, don't do that stuff, whatever, right? What are some guiding principles that are just like you have to do this if you want to scale.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: So one thing that I, I dug in real early, right?
Having a printing marketing background, a little less digital background from the early 90s, I approach things from a, it doesn't always have to be the way it's always been, right. It's not always going to look the same. And one thing that I dug into being a franchise or we had 50 franchisees back in 2012 and 13 and every single one of them were very, very, very successful individuals in their life, in their own right, right? From owning state farms to executives at Coca Cola to you name it, and these individuals come in and they, they don't realize when they're buying a franchise that they're buying a job, right? We were a start from home, home base, you know, you start marketing and all of those things and every one of them, when you, when you typically dealing with franchisees, they come with money, right? You have to have a certain amount of money to qualify to come and play in the pool that we're playing in. Because it just isn't worth the time for somebody who's doing it the way I did when I started in my garage back in 2006, right.
So, so I had a, an uphill battle. I decided to take advantage of the fact I've being in printing. I had some insight to other franchising companies and some were printing companies, some were dental companies, lots of different franchises because I printed for them.
I got to see how they did it.
So that's really what, what made the difference. And for me I, I stood fast. And so our site is a multi site subsite infrastructure. So USAMDT.com forward/Atlanta is a subdomain. So if you, if you were to type that in, you'll notice that that content on that site, my franchisee can edit the content, they can add the images, they can write their own blog you know, they can pretty much do anything with inside the template framework that we provided them. And what I found, and what I think actually multiplies our traffic is that out of the 20 active franchisees that I have now, probably less than 25% of them spend a lot of time, energy and money on their sub sites. And it's twofold. Some franchisees are all in, some franchisees are looking for that midlife part time, what am I going to do for the next 15 years of my life?
But the younger ones that really listen to the marketing strategy didn't fight this. Right. I had several that I signed contracts with that I let them build their own site standalone, its own domain, just approved the logo usage and the basic content.
And I've seen them invest 3 and 4 and $5,000 a month consistently on a 12 month, 24 month contract with some of these marketing firms. I think they have a better way to butter the bread. And as a result, because they weren't intertwined, they didn't know the business well enough, they produce no results.
And when I say that it's not a matter of somebody traveling there, it's also tied in with your sales strategy. Right. And so yeah, what I did kind of refocus where I was going with this was the multi site for us made a huge difference. So my Northeast Ohio, my Ohio franchisee, my, my Dallas Plano franchisee, they write content, they post on social, they do what they can to contribute to the overall website traffic even though it's landing on their subdomain. The parent domain is taking advantage of the overall positive impact when people are engaging with the sites. And so I, I had to explain to the franchisees, I said, I know this is a little out of the box, this was early 2013.
And I said this multi site will give you the control, the convenience so that you don't have to build the framework, you don't have to spend thousands of dollars a month. This is included in your franchise royalties and all of the things we provide this service for you and the effort you put in in Houston or in Dallas or in Ohio and the effort we do at corporate amplifies each other.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: And so the ones that don't do as much online SEO, you'll see that their, their subsites are just copies of the corpor.
It's just mirroring all the content. It's not duplicate, it's just pulling from there. Right. And so we saw tremendous growth. When we started doing that early on we had over half the franchisees engaged in that practice. We've. So we've. Since the ones that don't stay consistent, we've reverted them back to just corporate rhetoric from our site.
But generally multiplying the fact that you have that many pages being constantly worked on within our site, I think made a big difference. And I've had a dozen arguments with qualified SEO experts over those years to say, hey, I don't know how it works. I just know that's going to work. And, and can you explain why it wouldn't work? And no one really could.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: Okay.
I love you.
So.
Okay, so I'm, I have a handful of questions that just immediately came up. So that's what. I'm my monitor here. So I'm typing, taking notes. I was looking at a few things.
So a couple questions.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Or.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: I wanted to clarify something. You said they were their own domain. So I just googled mobile drug testing Atlanta. And then I also, in a separate tab, took your domain and just did forward slash Atlanta. Both took me from Google and from your main site, took me to the URL Forward/Atlanta, Georgia. But it's still USAMDT.comForward/ So where on here?
[00:12:39] Speaker B: I want to.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: I'm trying to understand where on here. How do you have it set up? So it's a.
You mentioned that you said the word subdomain.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, and that's probably my lack of my ignorance in the, in the SEO space.
So literally there is a full site loaded, hosted at forward slash Atlanta and that's how they have full control on the back end of their site. Because it only lives as a forward slash Atlanta. You have to literally land there through our domain.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: So to clarify, it's not a, it's not atlanta.usamdt.com it's not that you have set up as a subdomain in the folder side of things, but everything lives on the root domain.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Okay, cool. So I just wanted to clarify that. Okay, that's a better way to do it. Okay. So we did.
We've done SEO for, for 22, 21,000 different locations between the different exp. Realty HCA ServPro.
And I think that's the bigger ones.
And so we've seen a lot of things done right, a lot of things done well, and a lot of things done catastrophically bad.
And one of the things that on the catastrophically bad one, I'm not going to say who someone did their research, they would find it very quickly what they did. This is a fortune.
Pretty sure it's a 100 company they do multiple. They do over 15 maybe almost 20 billion a year in revenue and they have 2,300 and change locations.
And when we were doing stuff for them it was very complicated because they had everything.
It was such a, it was such a clusterfuck.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Herding cats, huh?
Herding cats kind of.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh my God, I love that analogy. Let me steal that.
They had the root domain and then each franchisee had their own domain and everything linked back to the root. Everything linked. Like when I say their own domain I mean like let's say it was Keith Brisse.com is the main mothership brand and Keiths favorite mug.com was the franchise number one.
Every like each franchisee had their own.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: New.Com and every naming conventions, matching or anything. It was just random ish.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: But the hilarious thing was everything was controlled by the main corporate company and they only let them update their about page and their blog but their even then their blog like maximum 500 words and it was very extremely limited and tied down.
And so the corporate company is trying to control everything and nothing was connected.
And so there is, it was just literally 2,200 2300 different counts.
It was just, just. And it didn't work. And it was one of the, it was bad.
You on the other hand, like.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Our.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Biggest client we've ever had, Fortune 30 company with 12, with 12 13,000 locations.
They did it like you did. Everything was on the main domain, main URL. And so with that we were able to control everything.
But you took it a step further in that. And this is the part that I freaking love. And even though my mouse is dead, I can still see my notes. Thank God you did the multi site element right in that you gave and this is the utter brilliance of what you did. And this is I, I would bet big money that this is a big piece to your success in you giving each of your franchisees control you created like so how many different franchisees do you have or franchisee owners?
[00:17:11] Speaker B: I have 20 active franchisees now and I think there's probably around five of them that, that actively work their site currently still.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Okay, so you have more than yourself doing SEO for all of your locations and you're not paying for it, right? Am I? Is that correct? That's right.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: That was, that was the key. I knew that it would benefit us at corporate considerably for the effort they're putting in. And while they might still hire a professional that's three or four thousand dollars a month to put the content on their site. If it's not themselves, it would, it would multiply to the tens and tens of thousands of dollars we put into, to the online content at corporate. And so you're just adding, whether it's just three people in your organization or adding content or 200 of them, the more obviously the better.
But with AI now they can start to sense is, you know, is this AI, is this human being, is there the right type of tones? Does it make sense? And this way you're getting everybody's opinion differently. You're getting, you're getting. What I think Google really wanted originally was people's feedback.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: I agree.
So we have a, so there's two, two components to that from my perspective and correct me if you see it differently from your, I mean because I mean I don't have your inside analytics.
So tell me if you see something different. But so there's two components.
One, I love silos. I have never taken a site to over six figures in traffic or seven or eight figures in traffic without silos done. Well, we had one client that was doing 180 ish thousand monthly visitors and all we did was rework their silos like on their folder side, on the server side and on interlinking and categories and subcategories. Took like 2 months to redo all this stuff. And we, in like two months, two, three months after going live with all that, we passed 400,000 monthly visitors and it was silos. And when it, when it comes to local geo based businesses, you have Atlanta or you have a clear hierarchy of state, city, maybe county and or region within the state.
And I mean that's a very clear hierarchy of a silo. And it all stems from the main domain and you have it all on one domain. So you have a very. And you have it.
I've worked with numerous big real estate companies and some of them have done it right, some of them haven't. And the ones that haven't, it was, it was so funky in that their silos and the way they had it all broken down effectively is very programmatic SEO sort of approach had to have been with that, you know, us an office in as many thousands of locations as they have.
You know there's a lot of duplicate shenanigans that you get around with that sort of stuff. But that's, that wasn't the problem. The problem with them was the way they had it all structured. You have it very clearly, what's the word? It's, it's a pinpoint razor in how clear it Pierce is Not clear up. Pierce's in how easily scrapable and understandable it is. I'm in Georgia, I want to go to Atlanta. Plain simple, right?
And it, and it sounds like, and I know it doesn't sound like that's hard to mess up, but it's very easy to mess up when you have a bunch of devs who don't know SEO building thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of pages. Like when I say hundreds of, I mean like 7,800,000 pages.
So your silo is clear and done right then with your, with your, your other franchisees creating content and doing SEO sort of thing. They like. None of them, I'd be willing to bet, are trained in SEO. You know, they might have education, they may have done some Googling and whatever, but they don't do it for a living like you and I did, slash do.
And their approach and their inputs into the site is very organic and raw and it's very conversational. It's very oftentimes relatable. Would that be accurate?
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. It's definitely relatable to the industry. It's relatable to the buyers, the people consuming drug testing.
You know, it took us a while to actually create SEO that would stop certain phone calls.
Like literally some of our New England locations 10 years ago, they would receive calls daily about people wanting to get their, their DOT license. So we were out ranking people searching for their, their, their DOT truck driving license schools and we were outranking all of those people in that industry, including, you know, the, the dmv. And we would get calls constantly from some of our other sub sites, some that we managed that were remote. I own locations outside of Florida myself, bought franchisees out.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Talk about.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it was, it was a nightmare for some of my administrators and that answering the phone and it was like constantly. And it took a while. We had to really tweak the way the content was written to exclude those type of search results.
So it's kind of funny that you spend that kind of time narrowing down your focus.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Right.
So excuse me. Okay, so you have a, you've done silos well, you've done content well, you had your other people doing your other franchisees doing SEO for you when it comes to.
So, so I've seen the back end analytics for well over a thousand sites and who knows how many, probably tens, if not hundreds of thousands. I've looked at over the, you know, 15 years of doing SEO and it's not often you see again a seven figure a month traffic website Unless it's, you know, you go to WebMD or you know, like a top 500 website, like population traffic wise in the world. You know, they're just not websites that you come across often.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: For.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Cont. Let's, let's go into content and links and how you've navigated. I would love to hear how you navigated, you know, helpful content update, eat shenanigans and all of that when it comes to the content side of things. So Google, you know, what was it 23rd September of 23? I think it was maybe 22. I think it was 2023 when helpful content came out.
Did you guys see a spike up or down? Were you just neutral the whole way?
And what is your general approach? So two questions there. Helpful content and eat and then two, what is your general approach or broad approach or just what is your approach to content creation for the purpose of SEO?
[00:24:55] Speaker B: So what I think that we focus more on is keeping our content relevant to what's going on right now.
Right.
And I think that's for many industries, I would say that we, we have an advantage the, the Drug and Alcohol Testing association, like the industry itself, fairly small. You probably have, you know, less than a 3 to 4,000 businesses total across the country that support this industry.
And so it's not difficult to compete in that space if you do what we're doing.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: So you're big fish, small pond.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: That's right. And we're still a small fish. I mean don't get me wrong, we're, we're, we're a small to medium sized business and we just, I just knew which strategies I predicted, right? So I predicted, I asked Jeremy, I'm like, hey, how do we make this work? And you know, for any guy who writes code like you sounds like you have done. And he looked at me at first like, well, I don't want to do this. Right. And it wasn't because he didn't agree with it on principle. He was 100%. This is, this is going to be a way to go. It was originally, how do I manage it? I couldn't imagine you with your thousands of sites. For those franchisees I only had to deal with 50, now 20. And it's challenging enough on that.
We did have to police duplicate content. I mean we've had that solved now for many years pre Covid. But originally franchisees would just copy our content from the corporate site and then post it on their site. And it's just like, guys, you don't understand the principles here's. The, here's the 10 rules to follow. Everything else is a go.
And so really, like, I wrote an article recently, a couple months ago when they were all talking about drug testing Congress.
So, you know, Newsmax Money published an article for me that just said, hey, I think we should publish Congress. And you know, people commenting on it and engaging in those things, I'm like, look, I'm not going to get that account. You know, some of my friends were like, hey, you're looking for a new job, political space? I'm like, no, not at all. I'm just making a point that while we drug test in government are the right people being drug tested in the decisions they're making, you got to question that sometimes.
And so that was relevant only because Elon Musk said so. Right? He just made a comment off the cuffs and it was all over X and it was everywhere. So we just jumped on, on that content.
But really our content is centered around engaging what our customers are challenged with.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: I love hearing that so much. Okay, so.
And here's why.
So our approach, we call it the People first framework. I so in our literal sops that, like every site I've taken past six, seven and eight figures in traffic are, we have three core, four core folders, our first folder for every new client. And, you know, once a quarter we'll have to revisit sometimes, sometimes more, sometimes less. Whatever is, we call it analog research. And we literally get on the phone with paying customers. Because I want to understand when someone goes to buy a ceramic mug with a what is this Wyoming flag on it? I bought this in Wyoming.
I want to understand why did they buy this mug? And sure, you know, there's a lot of subjective elements to buying things.
Or maybe why did someone buy. Spend way too much on a little meteor from somewhere in Brazil. Like, I'll stick with that analogy. I try. I want to understand the buyer and why they bought the thing that they bought. Or maybe it's a problem in that maybe this mug is very ergonomic to my hand, or whatever it might be. I want to understand their. The customer's perception of the problem and the solution and why they chose to spend money on my clients in the way that they did.
And then I'll also interview my client themselves and try to get their perception of the problems and solutions that they offer or. And the problems of the client. So that way, when you look at, when you look at, you know, a book, for example, or this mug, hey, this mug has a flag on it.
Your Perception is that my perception is no, there's not a flat right. It's the back. There's no flag. And so your perspective, your perspective and my perspective are both accurate, but when we combine them, we now have a more accurate perception of, of the problems and the things that they are experiencing. So like we ask them what's the first question? What's the goal you're trying to achieve?
We ask them, what are the obstacles you're you faced or are facing in going after said goal? What are the fears you have? What are the burning questions you have?
Sell this to me if I sell this to me if you were trying to convince me to buy it. And my favorite one is if, especially if it's in your life, your money sort of stuff, which I think you would probably fall in the category of very closely to is now sell me this product as if I was a loved one.
And the, the rawness and intimacy you get from those conversations, you then we then translate that into content and that comes, comes through. And like our engagement time, especially with some of the bigger accounts is like minutes on some of these pieces of content that we really dive into because we're really trying to connect with the people and we're not creating content based off of keywords because you know, keywords are nothing more than a data informed assumption. And you know what we all get when we assume so we first. And I love that you said that because it's like the.
I just love it so much.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: You know, it's funny not to segue but literally just tell me prepping to be here, sitting quiet, reading some posts. I was reading Alex Hormozi and you know, he's big everywhere right now is having sold his company and all the things. And he's got a lot of really good SEO or not SEO, but a lot of good social content right in in the backbone of what he does. And it kind of segues. He posted this business strategies that actually work. And he's throwing a lot of short snippet content out to him and his wife.
One, be significantly faster than everyone else.
[00:31:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:49] Speaker B: To be significantly easier than everything else.
3. Is being significantly better than everything else. 4, being significantly cheaper than everyone else. 5. Being more reliable than everyone else. He's like pick one, go to work. And and the first thing I thought was when I owned my printing company in 2006, I wasn't a salesperson. I said I am not a salesperson. I do not want to talk to people. I don't want to sell anybod I work with salespeople who do all those conversations.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: And I thought that I would be the cheapest wholesale printing company in Tampa, Florida that there was. So they didn't have an option. They needed the price. I could give them the price and I could give them a great product on top of that.
That is definitely the wrong business strategy for anyone starting a small business.
Be significantly more expensive than everybody else and, and wait it out.
And I, I reposted that and said that being easier.
So our SEO is designed to help people get their answer fast.
Although that's counterproductive to SEO. I want them to get their answer fast. I don't want to dive in too long, but really the goal is that they call us. We built our model around a human quality. You need a drug test and you need it in Ohio or you need it in Wyoming. Billings. Billings, Montana, you need a, you need a drug test. You got three guys that are, you know, gonna be in the office tomorrow morning. They're long haul truck drivers, but you got to check the box for the DOT and get their test done. Yeah, well, we'll get a call and usually within two to three minutes we've qualified you and we can tell you what it's going to cost for us to show up in Billings, Montana and, and we can be there today within a few hours.
And so you got to pay for that. Right? I mean, one of half of our revenue in, in our business is emergency drug testing. So a truck driver has an accident, qualifies for a DOT drug test, or someone chops their finger off in a machine at work. You know, things like that. And we're called out primarily, and unfortunately for most of the workers, we are called out for the employer. The employer wants to mitigate their risk. They want to say, hey, you had some sort of drugs in your system and our burden is a lot lower now.
That's why the workers comp industry hires us to get to the hospital, collect a blood sample and determine, hey, what's my risk as the workers comp carrier.
But really the SEO strategy is around being able to get them to call us.
Right. They find the answer they need, then they call us for clarification. And if they're going to buy, we want to give them a price right now, even if we're, we were higher than we needed to be, but that way they can decide on the fly. I'm okay with that.
Right, sure. It's really that simple. I mean I, we used to have the number one paid YP subscription in the country. And we had it for probably 25% of what the cost would have been for anyone else. I don't know how I negotiated it, but I did. And I listened to countless hours of recordings of my franchisees. Experienced salespeople talk about their knowledge, how much they learned about drug testing and how much more they know than you.
And they're never, I would say probably less than 20% of the time that I was listening to these calls, did they ever ask for the money?
And so as a result, their sales suffered.
And so our SEO strategy is put enough content, make it relevant, make it original, make it what someone's looking for when they're looking for a drug testing question. Because it's unique. You're not going to run a billboard. You know, we actually had billboards designed and car wraps and all kinds of things back in the inception, right? That was not my, that was not my doing. I bought the company and came in in 2012, bought the company later in like 2017.
But I took that and I said, there's no way that I'm going to run a billboard on some major highway and someone's going to say, I need drug testing for work right now. Let me, let me do that. Let me pull over and make a phone call.
And so it was really geared around getting the individual to find our site. So SEO played a big part getting public speaking opportunities, being a part of an association, being on the board of the National Industry association, and then having opportunities like talking with people like you and creating links from high profile sites that are very naturally organically ranking, not from paid sources. All of that strategy helped the customer believe we knew what we were doing and they would call us right away and we would close them right away.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: That's crazy.
So if I'm at, if I'm, I don't know, under 50, 000 monthly visitors or some smaller amount. But I'm not just getting started. I'm not at zero.
And I want to take it to the next level, the next benchmark, ten hundred, five hundred, a million, whatever visitor amount that might be.
And I know I have work to do, an optimization to do with my content.
What are some.
And I'm, I'm in me asking this question. I'm sure there might be a few things you've already said, but just for clarity's sake, if I wanted to take my content to the next level, how would you go about if you just looked at someone else's business in a totally different industry, mugs or coffee Whatever.
What are some of the things you're going to look at and you're going to try to gear their site towards? So that way it has more of the things from the content perspective that you know, it needs to have to get to the next level.
[00:38:01] Speaker B: Well, I would start with looking at what the business is. Like you said the question, what's your goal? Like, and I would say everybody says I want to make a lot of money, I want people to buy my product. Right? And that's a generic answer, I think, for every, every business owner.
But really, what's your goal? Are you, are you.
I have, I have an artist friend who designed a site for bicycle seats and they're high end racing bicycle seats. And, and so the same with another one with guitar strings, right? A niche market, right? Like how many people are competing and making guitar strings. But the acoustics in the sound quality in the, the technology in which they built their guitar strings is what had people find them. So their customers are quality artists that like to play high quality instruments and have high quality output. So first I would start to understand what is it exactly that their customers would do. And then secondly I would ask them how are they currently buying from you, right? Are, are they buying from a clicked ad on Facebook? Are they landing on a site? Are they watching a video, a tutorial, are they downloading something that can help them in their business?
What gets them to you when they do come to you? And then secondly, how do you sell, right? Are you over the phone, are you talking to them? Or do you just want them to pay the 49 bucks online and you fulfill whatever it is that, that you fulfill.
I think all SEO strategies today take a second seat to your social media and the social media strategy. I mean, look, I, I'm not, I don't, I don't have a face for, for film. I'm, I'm a, I'm a radio face. And so, you know, I, I, but that's a good, I heard that on podcast earlier today, so I thought I would steal it. But totally the reality is, is how, how do you want to sell to your client? And that's going to gear my content and my funnels and the whole process. And so really you need to determine how do you currently sell it and then go do that more so that you can see that you can produce higher results. And so your content's going to be geared towards measuring the more output from similar energy, right? You're going to put the same amount of energy in, but you're going to tweak the way they see it. You're going to tweak the way they respond to. You're going to tweak the way you respond to them.
Many companies are using AI. I've seen a fellow associate of mine, it's like we're going to stop using AI in our sales process because it's a little young right now. Right. It's the answers aren't always what they, what they want, but the content's going to come from your sales cycle. What's that look like most in my industry? If I'm trying to sell to a government entity like my Atlanta franchisees does the Atlanta public school system. And, and that's a bid process. And if he's actively looking for those opportunities, he's going to find them. They're not likely going to find you.
So each, each company, no matter what it is, whether you're a dog groomer and you have a van and you come up here, whatever it is that you do, you solved a problem that the market has decided you're worth paying for.
[00:41:21] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: And so your content should be geared around the problem you're solving for people that has them want to use your service. It's really. That's it.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: That's it.
I don't know if there is a more simple way to approach.
Well, in all, in all honesty, any form of content, whether it's social media, blog, YouTube, whatever it might be. Because I mean, like at the end of the day, the content is going to do one of two things. It's going to answer a question or it's going to solve a problem.
And you could debatably say answering a question, having an unanswered question is a problem. So you could just sum it all up to problem solving and the better we can understand. And that's why we have our interview process. And it sounds like you effectively have the same people first framework built in just differently in that you're tapping into the sales teams and you're able to intimately understand the problem and correct me if I'm wrong in saying how you interpreting how you're saying it, you understand the problem and you communicate that problem. You communicate that solution in a simple, easy to digest and fast way with your content. Is that accurate?
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Absolutely. If the people are buying from you for that problem, you solve.
More people will buy once you get in front of them. So it's simply just talk about why you're great and not in an egotistical way, why you're great. Because the problem you solve is so difficult. Yeah, exactly, Exactly.
[00:42:57] Speaker A: Totally. Link building.
Do you ever not do link building or have you always done link building because you. So like, I've, I've, I'll say it like this. I've seen numerous very successful SEOs that I highly respect. Damon Burton, for example, not that he doesn't believe in link building. It's just, it's not always his. If I, and I might be, I may have misunderstood him, but it's not always a go to strategy and it's not always a part of every strategy.
And his approach works and he has great clients, is he's a man of integrity.
But then you have guys on the flip side who, you know, link building is everything along with everything else that you're doing with SEO and you can't rank with no backlinks or no backlink profile or minimal backlinking.
Then you have me, I feel like I'm very much in the middle and it's a very holistic approach to everything.
What are your thoughts on backlinking and how have you incorporated that or attributed that to your 9 million month visitor success?
[00:44:20] Speaker B: So specifically, you put the links and you build back links when it's necessary.
Right.
If, if what I'm talking about and the problem I'm solving and I want the credibility if I'm featured in another piece of content somewhere specifically answering that question, linking to it expands on the content that I've already placed in that, in that spot. And so the, the, the strategy more like you. Right. I mean the link building is a fundamental structure that's important to, to ranking. But if you're, if you're, you're all online, you, you don't, you don't even have to have a ranking site if all of your sales come from your social media.
So the challenge is, is if someone lands on your site or you credit them, think about all the Facebook links you might have clicked over the years just to see what that drone that they're selling online for 99 bucks looks like. And you're like, what's that domain? Where's that at? And you know, they're nowhere on those funnels. Do you feel like you're in a really warm, safe place? Right. And so I think your, your content and your site and the links that you build are all surrounded around your credibility and your ability to articulate those solutions.
[00:45:36] Speaker A: I love that. So that's cool. Your bill, those, your backlinking is attributed to your ability to articulate your solution or the inverse. The problem coming back to people first.
[00:45:52] Speaker B: Always people first.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: I love that. Okay, so, so when you need to do backlinks and you're like, oh, this person is out doing us for whatever reason and you determine that you need more backlinks, how do you go about getting more backlinks and what are the type of backlinks that you're going after?
Or is that, Go ahead, go ahead, I'm just going to add on. Or are you so far beyond that right now with the 9 million visitors a month that you get that you don't really even have to focus on that right now?
[00:46:29] Speaker B: No, I, I would say there's still a focus on it. And Jeremy, he's going to give you that strategy better than I will. I, I just look at it and realize the under, I understand the fundamental reason why it's important.
And right now I think through the media, not social media, but like media that's in our country is one way because they still rank well, they still, some of them still have a lot of authority. They're not like a CNN who spell off ranking and things have challenged. Right. It doesn't mean that they're being at their site link might not have value to you depending on the size of your file, but the reality is, is trying to find individuals who are challenged with the things that you solve and looking for sources that are naturally linkable. Right. Like I, I, I, I think there's so many people that were so wrapped up in 10, 15 years ago, wrapped up in the volume of links that I have to have, I have to have thousands of links on my site and the internal links and, you know, external links, you know, and I still get emails almost daily. And I'm not the marketing guy, right. I mean Jeremy is, I can't imagine the content that he gets. But I still get links, I get emails every day for people who want to, hey, I want to add content, I want to write a content, I want to, you know, link to you. And it's just, it's horrible to be quite honest with you, because it's just not natural.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: You said it's not being natural.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Some of the links, the content that people want to, you know, link to, they're not natural. And because many people still look at links as being like the ultimate, who aren't really in the know, think that the links are 100% the solution will naturally have links that are unnatural just because they think it's a valid and there's weight to it.
[00:48:29] Speaker A: Right?
No.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: So I would, I would avoid those types of Things.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I basically completely agree the, the, your site you get because of the volume of your site. Like I told like I get a lot of inquiries. I get probably a half a dozen weekly in some form or fashion in regards to, you know, like you said, people trying to hit up for backlinks or something of the nature but the more often than not they're either unnatural or just flat out spammy or oh, this is a link, a link farm. So for example, a friend of mine who may or may not listen to this, he sent me over some links to reviews, 15, 20 of them, whatever it was and a ballpark a third of them were. And he was like yeah, I don't know why these negative results are happening. And we're looking at them and I'm just going through, I'm like yeah, link farm, link farm, link farm, link farm, total horseshit, link farm etc and about again a third maybe 40 plus percent ish were total just.
And yeah, so there's a lot of out there. Do you ever.
Have you ever gotten into or dabbled? Dabbled. Dabble.
Dabbled with PBNs private blog network.
[00:50:13] Speaker B: Say it again.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: Have you ever dabbled with private blog networks?
[00:50:18] Speaker B: No, I haven't personally.
[00:50:20] Speaker A: Cool. I, I've done it only on sites that I don't care about that I own as tests.
But yeah, I don't.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: You have to test it. Yeah, I, I can't tell you then the countless number of things I've seen Jeremy test over the years in, in trying to strategize whether it's being found organically or even in social media now. What does it take to actually show up in X?
You know, and it's pretty, pretty psychotic. I mean you gotta imagine Elon Musk who, who worked 20 hours a day, who's you know, playing Diablo in the middle of the night on live stream and right at the same time, you know, he's tweeting things, you know, retweeting things and commenting and, and I'm sure he does a lot of that himself and it's interesting that he's built his algorithm that if you follow a similar pattern as he does, you will, you will naturally show up organically in his social site. If, if you're contributing consistent and I mean consistently, if you have two day gap, it's going to impact your ability to show up. And so your link building in your website I think is critical that it's relevant and new because links that I, I've been writing articles and having links built for the site because of article content or guests speaking or things like that for 10 to 12 years now. And you, those links, as long as they hold enough weight to stay there, should stay there.
But really you need to make sure you're doing fresh new content. It could be the same story, but it's fresh. The date is now, the date isn't, you know, 2013.
That makes a big difference.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: So you still see at your level, freshness a notable factor, as a note.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely, yeah. If, if you know, because a lot of searches coming to you all, pretty much all searches coming back from an AI platform, what you're getting matters based on how relevant it views and I say it, the AI, how relevant they programmed it to view your content. And so in a market segment like drug testing, it's an old segment. The 80s is really when it started out and it hasn't really changed much and it's not a large enough market share.
Although it's a multi billion dollar industry, the people who actually are out doing the service side of it, it's a small industry.
[00:53:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:02] Speaker B: And so really you just have to know, know the industry you're in. And did you take those steps accordingly?
[00:53:09] Speaker A: Right. Did you see last, whenever, whichever month it came out, the Google document leak with a hundred plus thousand documents, it was like it was April, May or June, I can't remember which month it was.
Did you see that?
[00:53:23] Speaker B: No.
[00:53:24] Speaker A: Oh man.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: No. That doesn't mean anything.
[00:53:27] Speaker A: It's super interesting. It was like a hundred thousand documents. You know, some were pages, some were thousands of pages, so tons of information on.
It was basically Google's internal index on what they know about the algorithm and how it works or algorithms.
And in there they had a freshness score. I don't believe there was an actual number associated with it. But freshness was a big factor in there.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:54:00] Speaker A: So I, I find it super interesting one, that you, how much weight you put on that and two, that you just didn't know about that and you just, you know, know that from your own personal experience. So. That's.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: Yeah. That's cool.
[00:54:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you know, to be clear, I'm not an SEO expert. I just understand business and human motivations and, and what, what people are doing, why they're doing is really a study in ontology. Right. Why do we do what we do? Why does the brain make us do the things that we do? And, and if you can understand that, then you can kind of predict some of those outcomes. And, and by no stretcher am I capable to, to sound at some of those levels that you're talking about. But I think it's, it's, it's, it's strictly, I think being fresh, being relevant to the buyer, right. The buy most, most of the buyers from almost any product, whether it's the pool guy who's coming to clean your pool every month or twice a month, you're solving a problem.
Just don't stop talking about may be boring to you. And that was actually something from the, the founder who, who started you put, you know, a thousand pages, all this different content, all these different links and I'm like, look, when I land there with my ADD brain, I'm lost.
Just because you have all of that content, I'm not going to do anything with it. So, so it all, it offends me. I need it simple, right. And so as they always say, kiss, right. Keep it simple. Stupid.
So that's the same strategy I've just approached with my online space and really paying for high quality advice from people like Jeremy.
[00:55:47] Speaker A: That's cool.
So, so as we're wrapping up here, we've talked about links, content people.
Do you ever think. I'm sure you do. But to what degree are you incorporating or looking at AI when it comes to your SEO approach and are you incorporating at all right now?
[00:56:15] Speaker B: So I use SEO to help accumulate facts when writing articles like, like one for drug testing, the, the Congress, right. And I, I basically just asked Grok to give me all of the content it can find surrounding the relevance of why we should drug test and then I take that content and do something with it.
We're not at the level yet that we feel it that the AI content is enough, relevant, fresh, humanized that we're there yet. We're not there yet.
[00:56:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I, I use in that regard, I use SEO AI the same more so as a research tool or aid to help speed up that process. So like I use GROK and Manus a lot to just like I'll take, I'll say hey Grok, I give me all this information about X, Y, Z or whatever topic, right?
And then I'll have Manus do the same and then I'll have something, I go back and forth between what I use between GB, ChatGPT, Plod and Manus, but then somewhere in there I'll have a outline created but. And then et cetera, we'll go on from there but. Or it'll become more humanized at that point. But for the research and accumulating information aspect, that's how I large the same.
[00:57:51] Speaker B: Awesome. It's a great strategy.
[00:57:53] Speaker A: Dope. Okay. Well David, people have hopefully learned a lot from you right now. Where can they go to learn more about you? Whether they need a mobile drug test or any of the other businesses that you own or work with.
Where can someone go to learn more about you?
[00:58:12] Speaker B: Really? You can go to X Facebook, my profiles are there. As well as USAMDT.com you can find out more about our business. You can, you know, pull up all of your SEO reporting tools and kind of see what they share with you on how our strategies work.
Those are the best places to find me.
[00:58:32] Speaker A: Very cool.
[00:58:33] Speaker B: At DT LJR is the the name.
[00:58:37] Speaker A: Say that one more time.
[00:58:38] Speaker B: A.T. d Bell Jr.
Is my handle.
[00:58:43] Speaker A: You said both Twitter.
[00:58:44] Speaker B: D as in David T's and Tom. Last name's Bell like ring a bell. And then Junior Junior Got it.
[00:58:50] Speaker A: D at E Bell.
Dope. Awesome. And then I'll have all that in the, in the the show notes, etc from there, which will be underneath, on the side, up around, you know, all that stuff. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, David. I really appreciate your time. It's been super awesome connecting with you.
Do you have any last things you'd like to say before anything before we bounce?
[00:59:16] Speaker B: No. I appreciate the opportunity to talk. I don't talk a lot about marketing or SEO. It's a lot of small business type strategies as that's what I do, mostly small businesses. But this is just an area I know enough about to be dangerous. And then always my advice is always find somebody you can trust because it's your money. And when you're paying them for that advice, make sure they can deliver. So that's really it.
[00:59:41] Speaker A: I agree.
Well, David and everyone else listening and watching until next time, live long and prosper.
[00:59:47] Speaker B: Thanks. Bye.
