SEO On-Air: Expanding the Ambits of SEO Beyond Rankings and Traffic

In this episode, we cover:

Today, we talk to the father of SEO, Mr. Bruce Clay. He is the CEO of Bruce Clay Inc. a global search marketing optimization agency providing search engine optimization, pay per click, social media marketing, content creation, and SEO tools and education. 

In this episode, Bruce will speak on the topic “Expanding the ambits of SEO beyond rankings and traffic.”

Stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where our guest, Rand Fishkin, talks on his tool SparkToro.

Show notes

• How would you have different sites link to you?
• When is this blog post of yours going live?
• Is it right when we say, you are not going after links, but you are the guy who is attracting links?

Show Notes Explanation

Hello everyone, this is Senthil. Welcome to a new episode of SEO On-Air. Today we have with us the “Father of SEO,” Mr. Bruce Clay. Bruce is the CEO of Bruce Clay Inc. and our topic for the day is “Expanding the ambits of SEO beyond rankings and traffic.” This is part 1 of  4 part podcast series with Mr. Bruce. Stay tuned for the complete series coming your way.

Senthil: How would you have different sites link to you?

Bruce: I’d have to have content that is attractive to that site’s audience because the site owner may find my content cool, but the content must have something that would look cool to the audience too. 

What makes anything cool? It’s when something is unique, leading-edge, but not way out of bounds. It is also not to a level of taking somebody off, but also not to the level of being like everybody else. That gives you a coolness factor that makes a person think, “Oh, I gotta link to this.”

All the things I’m talking about is going to take in Springboard, even your company, perhaps. Springboard use just passed three other link building companies in the world because nobody is thinking this way. 

You may think I’m crazy, but I think that’s the thing it’s gonna be. This is a game-changer, and I don’t think most people understand that. 

Senthil:  Bruce, why don’t you do this in the podcast, it looks pretty interesting, you know. So, when is this blog post of yours going live?

Bruce: I haven’t finished writing it. When I write something, I write it and put it down. Then I come back to it and look at it and say, ”Did I actually write that?” Then I correct it. Currently, I’m working on probably six blog posts right now on different topics. 

If you go to our blog, you are going to like a lot of the stuff that’s there. I actually have a series that is intentionally short, 600 words or less. There are not doing that well and are only getting 10,000 views. Size doesn’t matter, its the message. People don’t understand that, but I’m able to prove it. 

We have technology that is a part of our tools, where you give us a keyword, and we go to Google, pull out the top ten results, throw out Wikipedia as they rank because of links, and then whatever other sites remain, spider each of them the whole time. 

Then through configuration with our best-fit algorithm, we can tell you, to be on the top-ranking sites, you probably should have 839 words, or you should have your keywords on your page four times because we are trying to fit word pattern through keyword-by-keyword basis, totally going contrary to everything has to be 1500 words.

We can create a brand new piece of content that is not promoted at all, but as soon as it’s spidered, it ranks among the top 100, and then you promote it, it’s in the top 15 or 20. Then you tune it a little bit deeper, and it gives you targets. Behave normally, and you can perform very well. 

We took a site that sells tickets for sporting events and concerts, and as you can imagine, right now, they are dying. So, we sold them on a private program where we took 100 other pages and ran it through this process, and we had a 10X increase per page in traffic. One page actually ranked for over 400 keywords in the top 20 by permutation and combinations of things.

Senthil: Now I can see how you can build the best content out there without building links. You are not going after links, but you are the guy who is attracting links. 

Bruce: We found by attacking the part, which is on-page, handling the speed, and holding up the expertise, you attract authority and trust. Only then are we perceived as a thought leader, and that gives us visibility. But we have to think where’s Google going. 

The hardest part is so many people in the world think, “I don’t need to worry about getting links, or I haven’t maintained it for fifteen years or 80% of my content has not been updated in ten years.” On our content projects, half of all our efforts go into maintaining existing content. 

Let’s say there are 20 pages of new content, but 300 pages of content that are more than five years old. That old content quality is going to drag everything down. That ticket company is having us do an 8000-page rewrite.

Senthil: Wow, that’s a lot!