← The Russell Brunson Show
The Russell Brunson Show
Damon Burton’s 3-Part SEO Strategy Funnel Builders Are Missing | #Marketing - Ep. 32
00:36:23
Loading summary
Transcript73 lines
- [00:01]
Ryan Reynolds
This message comes from Greenlight. Ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to earn, save, spend wisely and invest with your guardrails in place with Greenlight you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance and keep an eye on your kids spending with real time notifications. Join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits together on Greenlight. Get started risk free@greenlight.com Spotify Ryan Reynolds.
- [00:31]
Mint Mobile Representative
Here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com.
- [00:48]
Russell Brunson
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com now obviously if you.
- [01:01]
Damon Burton
Want to sell stuff online, you're going to need a good funnel. But if you want a great funnel, then you're going to need to use ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is the number one funnel builder in the world, helping more first time entrepreneurs to leave their 9 to 5 and to launch their dream than any other company on earth. ClickFunnels was built for the dreamer and the doer and you can get a free 14 day trial by going to clickfunnels.com podcast right now. That's clickfunnels.com podcast. Click funnels because you're one funnel away.
- [01:27]
Russell Brunson
From changing the world.
- [01:29]
Damon Burton
This is the Russell Brunson Show. What's up everybody?
- [01:34]
Russell Brunson
Welcome to the show. I am here right now with one of my friends, Damon Burton, who has been an Inner Circle member now for four and a half years. We're here in Boise doing Inner Circle. I've grabbed a couple cool people in and I wanted him to come in because there are two things that don't.
- [01:49]
Damon Burton
A lot of people don't think they.
- [01:50]
Russell Brunson
Go together and that is funnels and SEO. And Damon's been doing SEO for all my funnels and my brands now for, for quite a long time. And so I thought we'd geek out and have some fun talking about SEO and funnels. But my first question, isn't SEO dead? That's what I heard. Is that true?
- [02:04]
SEO Expert
Yeah, it dies before AI, it was about every two weeks, but now with AI, it's about every two minutes.
- [02:10]
Russell Brunson
It is different though, right? Or how does AI affecting what you guys are doing at all or is it better?
- [02:14]
SEO Expert
Well, it's increased the demand. Right. So the way that I've thought about it is AI has kind of increased the viability of SEO into infinity because AI is largely just another search engine. So we'll probably get into the technical stuff and kind of deliverables of SEO. But to do AI optimization is really just traditional SEO.
- [02:33]
Russell Brunson
So for your answers to get pulled into AI, it's just SEO. That's cool. What do you think about this? Is something just more so like I've noticed, like my wife specifically, like she used to Google everything and now she chat GPTs everything. Is that think chat GPT is going to open up a platform? Is that going to open up something where we can get traffic or paid ads or anything in the future, you think?
- [02:55]
SEO Expert
Yeah. You know, there's two things come to mind on that. One is usually what I hear is kind of what you said. But before that, is SEO dead or is AI going to kill SEO? And so there was this really cool study that came out just three, four weeks ago by Semrush, I think it was Semrush and Rand Fishkin, if you know anything about SEO, he was talking about that study and what it said is Google actually grew by, I think it was 21.64% last year. So it's not going down, it's going up. And obviously ChatGPT has done amazing and had a huge adoption rate. But I might be off a little bit on the statistics, but ChatGPT or Google is 800% bigger than ChatGPT. But back to your second question. What was even more interesting is out of the adoption of ChatGPT, only 30% of the queries are commercial. Right. Because if you think about how Most people use ChatGPT, it's like write a thing for me or make a thing for me. It's not how do I find a thing to buy? So I think that's skewed For Q and A based sites, those are probably been more impacted. But my commerce and retail clients has had no impact at all other than positive because now we can get the them into another source of audience.
- [04:01]
Russell Brunson
Interesting. Yeah, it's definitely a weird game. I started playing SEO way back in the day when it was like you had just the top 10. You had the little couple ads, pay per click ads, and that was it. And it was just spamming the search engines. And that's how we had a lot of fun with it. But when it started getting more complex after I can't remember which update it was, Hummingbird or Panda or some update that slapped where I gave up and I walked away from SEO and I was like, all right, I'm not going to keep playing this game. But you've been driving, obviously. Keep on playing. When did you start?
- [04:32]
SEO Expert
2007.
- [04:33]
Russell Brunson
2007. How many updates have you.
- [04:36]
SEO Expert
I don't even pay attention. You know, the. All these updates. So out of, out of all these updates, I've never had a client get a penalty in 18 years. Yeah. So my clients are either neutral or up. And this goes back to one of the things that you kind of open the conversation up with is, has SEO changed a lot? So the problem with like a lot of other people that get into SEO or agencies that crash and burn or their clients crash and burn is because the agencies get caught in looking for ways to cut corners. But if you just look at the fundamentals, which are really just three things, it's one is how good or bad is your website built so structure. Two is content. How good or bad is your content? And three is credibility. How good or bad is your. You know, that's why reviews are important and backlinks and things like that. And every algorithm today might change in the future, but everyone today falls under one or multiples of those three. So if you just focus on the fundamentals and play the long game, then you don't have to worry about all these little corner cutting things that might work for a short term but just crush you long term.
- [05:27]
Russell Brunson
Yeah, we talking about. For those who were not searching spammer, we would just like mass create articles, spin them, post them, and get 8 billion links coming from everywhere. It was amazing. You drink for every. I was drinking for like make money online and get rich quick and like we ranked for everything and then one day they all disappeared. So Damon does it the. The white hat long term way, which is, which is way better, which is why he does all of our projects now, because I trust him and I'm not nervous about, you know, the effort and work you put in. That's going to last. It's not something that's going to disappear, you know, or penalize you in the. In the future. So. All right, so I want to talk about the crossover between funnels and SEO because obviously, you know, I talk about funnels all day and for a long time, you know, I assume that people investing on funnels, you know, and then you start coming in a circle and started doing presentations for everyone like, hey, there's a couple of things we can do to actually do SEO and to optimize your funnels. And so anyway, I'd love to go down that path of just tying those, the two worlds, my world and your world together. How does it work? What do you look for?
- [06:25]
SEO Expert
Yeah, the big adoption or opportunity with the new release of ClickFunnels, because within it you have extra things, right? Largely it's the ability to scale content through the blog feature. And there's a couple other things like the sitemaps and stuff that you guys have added as well. But when we just kind of briefly mentioned those three core pillars of SEO, the second one is content. And so you can only show up on Google for what Google can read. And so now that you guys have all these extra features in ClickFunnels, how you can build out content, interconnect things, that's really what leveled it out. And there's some ways that you could kind of get around that in the original version of ClickFunnels, but now, now it's just like so much easier to scale your content. And so that was what closed that gap. And so now anytime anybody says that, it's really just they're not familiar with how to do it properly.
- [07:10]
Russell Brunson
Yeah. So what's this model look like? Someone's building a funnel. Like they go through all my training, they build a funnel. How? What should they be like, what does that look like? So they got to build out a content structure. There's a plan, there's stuff like, let's say I'm a brand new client, you're taking me through, like what, how's it look? What do we do?
- [07:28]
SEO Expert
Yeah, well, the first thing is you got to go find the money, right? So it's like, what is your audience already searching? And so a lot of people know that content's important, but they write for the sake of writing instead of actually writing to attract a pre qualified buyer. And so first you want to spend all your time looking into the audience and go, you know, there's tools out there that show what people are already asking what they're already searching online. And so what you want to do is look for those buyer intent based keywords. So a lot of people are familiar with maybe also asked or actually answer the public. Also asked is my favorite tool. Also asked, also asked. Yeah. And these tools are great for paid ads too, because a lot of times when you run paid Ads, right? You're trying to get in front of the intent of what the audience is. So you can use this for all sorts of marketing, whether it's paid ads or SEO or email. You can figure out what's kind of already in the mind of your buyer. And so what you first want to do is your SEO strategy is going to be as good or as bad as that trajectory that you first identify, right? And so you want to figure out where all that money is because you're going to build the foundation of your campaign around that. So first you want to go identify where the buyers are. Now after that, you can only show up for what Google can read. And so it's mapping out this content calendar. So we like to map out a big 52 week content calendar because let's be honest, writing sucks. And so it's like if you're going to write, then at least know what the game plan is and when you want to put on your writer's cap for that day, be super productive and crank out a ton of content. So now a good example people want to like, see an example would be secretsofsuccess.com and so where funnels and paid ads and SEO kind of overlap is if you look at Secrets of Success, there's the top level of the website, which looks very traditional, right? And so it's like, here's the value propositions, here's the navigation, traditional looking kind of website, but all the calls to action go to the funnel. And so on the SEO side, you need that top level domain for Google to look at. But then on paid ads you can direct them wherever you want. So you can still run your paid ads to the funnel and then you just build up the SEO on the top level domain and then that's how they overlap.
- [09:30]
Russell Brunson
So by the way, he just said, go to secretsofsuccess.com so this is one of the sites that Damon's working on with me. And like he said, I created a couple good funnels and then we built a, we used the clickfunnels, you know, website feature. And then Damon's team's been going through and like building out the, what do you call it? Not the width, the bulk of the building out the site, making it, I don't know, what's the word in your, in your, in your world. More pages, more stuff.
- [09:53]
SEO Expert
Yeah, Secret success is gangster. That one's got so much. How do you balance sharing all the technical stuff without going super nerdy? That one has a lot of stuff. So secret success has the value of what the program delivers. And so there's a lot of talk about that. But then we're trying to identify people that are already familiar with or have an interest in the authors that are.
- [10:17]
Russell Brunson
Featured, Point Hill or whoever.
- [10:20]
SEO Expert
Then you can go, I'll just try and throw out a couple random examples. Some people might really like Napoleon Hill quotes, and so they want to go search for other Napoleon Hill quotes. And so that could be a potential target is Napoleon Hill's best quotes. And then you can build out a content piece about that, bring them in, and then you answer the question or deliver the value. And then you have a call to action in there. Right? And so your goal is to establish yourself as the authority or the website that has the answers, not sell them as, not directly sell them. Right. We're not just vomiting cells on every page. It's actually establishing value trust. Then after you've delivered that, then you can have a call to action to the funnel.
- [11:00]
Damon Burton
All right, funnel hackers, let's have some fun for a second. One of the hardest parts about B2B marketing isn't getting attention. It's getting the right attention.
- [11:08]
Russell Brunson
I'm sure you know what I mean.
- [11:09]
Damon Burton
Isn't it a pain when you see the weirdest ads showing up in your feed? Ads for things you know you would never use in a million years, and you start thinking, that person is wasting so much money targeting me for a product or service I will never use. And here's the thing, those companies probably thought that they were marketing perfectly, but they were wasting money because they didn't get their targeting right. And that's why LinkedIn Ads is such a game changer. LinkedIn isn't your everyday social platform. This is where over 1 billion professionals, people who are already thinking about business, are hanging out and their targeting options are unreal. You can target by job title, industry, company size, role skills, revenue level, seniority, literally laser focus to the decision makers who can actually buy what you're selling. It's like having a magic filter for your perfect customer. And if you're serious about growing your business and you don't want to keep paying to show people ads who will never buy, then you have to get on LinkedIn. Here's the best part. LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign. So you can try it yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com clicks. That's LinkedIn.com clicks. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. Hey everyone, if you're anything like me, you've probably spent more time than you want to admit just trying to stay on top of your email. Am I right? I used to wake up, fire up the inbox and boom. I was hit with a wave of random stu, newsletter noise, low priority requests, affiliate spam, and somewhere in the chaos, a few messages that I actually needed to respond to. It drove me nuts and I end up spending hours every day sorting, replying, getting distracted and pulling off the work that actually moved my business forward. But that all changed when I tried Notion mail. And let me tell you, it's like somebody took my funnel brain and built an email platform out of it. This is the inbox that thinks like you. Notion mail uses AI to organize everything based on what's important to you. It learns what matters, automatically labels and sorts messages, drafts responses and even schedules meetings. It's personalized, automated and completely flexible. And you want to know what's become my absolute favorite feature? Custom inbox views. I've created views for my podcast, outreach, my internal team, my JV partners, and even launch commissions. I can jump into a view and laser focus. No distractions, no noise. And when I need to move fast snippets, I've got one click templates ready to go for follow ups, affiliate approvals, speaker confirmations. It's like having a pre built funnel, but for email replies. If you're like me and your brain runs 100 miles an hour, Notion mail gives you a calm, focused command center and it just works. Get Notion mail for free right now@notion.com Russell and try the inbox at thinkslikeyou. That's all lowercase letters. Notion.com R U S S E L L to get notion mail for free right now when you use our link you're supporting our show.
- [13:40]
Russell Brunson
Notion.com Russell so in my example obviously we did, we did authors and inside the authors then there's their books. Like is that kind of you structuring like that? I'm trying for other people thinking through this on their own side how they.
- [13:54]
SEO Expert
Would yours goes categories. So it's like book types, right? So motivational entrepreneur books as a general example. So there's a hierarchy where it gets more granular. So it'd be book types and then it'd be authors within that book categories, authors within that category, then books from that author and then within all those then there's a bunch of stuff on the back end that you add. I don't know if we'll get into it because it starts to get more technical, but if anybody's familiar with SCHEMA We've gone super heavy on schema on website. And so the short answer of what schema is is like when Google goes to a website, it makes educated guesses and it goes, I think this is about Napoleon Hill. And then schema will say, Google, you don't have to guess anymore. I'm going to tell you definitively this is about Napoleon Hill who by the way is an author and these are his books. And this is the book ISBN number. This is the date that the book was published. And now all of a sudden Google has clarity on all these little things about the products or the books. And then because it has clarity, it trusts it more. Because it trusts it more, it's willing to position that website higher.
- [15:01]
Russell Brunson
Interesting. So I'm thinking, let's say somebody who's listening to this, they're in our world, they're a coach, they're weight loss coach or fitness coach or I don't know, some yoga coach, whatever it is. How, because again, most of us aren't going to be like me. We have authors and books and stuff like that. Like how would you structure something like that? If it's somebody who's like a guru in their space, how would you build out that, the categories, things like that for somebody in that world?
- [15:30]
SEO Expert
So you'd want to dig into those, the research first. So I'd go somewhere like also asked if we want to address this for the listening audience and kind of keep it actionable. I would focus on two things. So the first thing is make your website load quickly and the design really simplistic. Everybody over complicates designs and I consistently see the most simplistic designs outperform the most visually stunning because the most visually stunning are either distracting or they load slow because they have all these fancy videos and all these moving animations. So really simplify the design and make sure it loads quickly. There's a free tool called GT Metrics. It's the go to tool that we use where it'll just tell you very specifically how do you make your website load faster. So just start there with that structure. After you fix the structure, then go all in on content, use those two sites, answer the public also asked and then in there type in. So if it's like yoga instructor, you can just type in yoga instructor. And what it'll do is it'll create this visual tree branch and then you can start to identify topics. And what you're looking for is buyer intent. And so what a great opportunity to look for buyer intent is, are people Asking for time commitments or financial commitments. And so when you're clicking through the also asked and you got these queries or example targets for yoga instructor, look for the ones that might say something like how much does it cost to hire a yoga instructor? How long does it take to get certified in yoga? How long does it take to lose 10 pounds in yoga, whatever it might be. So look for those intent based topics and that is what you're going to build your content calendar around. So just make it a really simple, efficient website and then double down on content.
- [17:08]
Russell Brunson
Very cool. What are, what's it look like now with AI and content? I've heard for a while was like you can't use it because they know and they'll slap you. And then I've heard other people who like the new, the new AI is so good it doesn't matter. Like yeah, what are your thoughts on using AI for content or do you just need to get back to actually.
- [17:22]
SEO Expert
Writing A little bit of both. Right, yeah. Who I wear that tin hat sometimes on. Like if Google's gonna, you know, I'm not so much worried about Bing since they're the bigger investor on ChatGPT and so it's less likely that Bing sharing that data with Google, but who know. So I'm okay selectively using AI. The biggest thing we don't have to explain why AI is attractive to integrate into your systems, but what people don't think about is let's go back to you mentioned you used to be an SEO back in the day and you got hit by one of these algorithms. So one of the old algorithms was called Panda and Panda focused on mass produced low quality content. And so back then we had these things called content spinners where you could just type in, scrape some content from Wikipedia or your competitor and then it'll shuffle around the paragraphs and synonyms. Well, AI is largely just a way bigger content spinner. It's more glorified, it's more efficient, but it's still sourcing content from somewhere else. So one, how accurate is the content? Two, are there any liabilities in the content? But I think what's most important is AI misses the opportunity to be as relatable or personal. Right. So most people might follow your content for your expertise, but that they convert when they relate to you as a human. And so the example I always give in AI is AI doesn't know what it's like to smell grandma's cookies in the holidays, only you can write that compelling piece of content. Or AI doesn't know what it's like to get your heart broken. So only you can convey that. So it's not that you don't necessarily have to use. It's not that you don't use AI, but how can you weave in those relatable personal stories that only you can tell that make people relate to your unique hero's journey? Right.
- [19:12]
Russell Brunson
Yeah. Interesting. And I keep thinking back in the article spinner days. It's funny because that's how Todd, when I met Todd, he had built an article spinner software that literally was spinning articles and then ranked him, he was like number one ranked for the word article spinner. And so then people started signing up for it and that's. And he took four years off and just like lived off of that for a long time. Which is kind of funny that now that's what AI basically is. I never thought of it as a complex version of an article spinner, but that's, that's interesting. Okay. Because I just think now again, this SEO spammer Russell, from back in the days going back, I'm like, we can use AI. We could pump out like 500,000 sites a day. It would be insane. I wish we had these tools back then. But obviously they don't work that way anymore. Okay, so those are the on site things is back in the day, the second thing you talked about was like reputation and trust and things like that. And used to be back in the day links. Is what, what created that, what caused that? Is that still part of the algorithm or is it not so much anymore?
- [20:12]
SEO Expert
It is, but in my opinion, I mean, SEOs will throw rocks at each other over this all day, every day and have a different opinion. I'm of the opinion that they become less important. I think Google's always looking for ways to identify credibility in websites that are less likely to be manipulated by SEOs or webmasters. And so backlinks have been manipulated as soon as SEO's kind of figured it out. Right. And I think they're still part of the algorithm, but it's been diluted in value. And some of our clients, we've actually phased out backlinks entirely and they're still competitive with all the others. And then going back to what we talked about, when algorithms come out, do people get hit? So every time there's these new algorithm updates, we haven't had anybody hit because we're not in there playing this mass produced backlink game. And so for the listeners who might not be familiar with backlinks, it's when Another website hyperlinks to yours. And so each one those links counts as a vote in the search engine popularity contest. So we largely are not aggressive on backlinks anymore. And so we try to attract them passively through value added content. And the only time we do backlinks is if a client understands a risk reward and wants to be more aggressive with it.
- [21:21]
Russell Brunson
Interesting. So the most part, then you're focusing 100% on content schema, site load design, and then from that waiting for Google to find it and hopefully ranking.
- [21:32]
SEO Expert
Yeah, we go super heavy in structure for the first one to three months depending on how big the site is. And then after that it's a giant content machine.
- [21:39]
Russell Brunson
So how do you get from. Because back in the day again, if we were on page two or page three, it was, it was just a game where we're trying to get more and more links to move us up the ranking. So eventually hit page one and then, you know, spot three, then two, then one are the things you can do actively to increase the ranking or you kind of, you create the best version put out there, then you move to the next one and just kind of hope that, hope it lands or how.
- [21:59]
SEO Expert
Does that part work? You can introduce a couple extra things. So there's different content types that you might be more aggressive with or content volume. So there's no such thing as too much good content. But when you're an agency and you bring SEO to a client, it's like, how do you economically balance what's the best fit for the budget? And so on agency side, there's a little bit of dancing with what's the best, the maximum ROI for the budget. Because if you double the budget doesn't mean you're going to compress time by, you know, cut in half. And so there's a little balance of that. And there are some ways. Like the thing with backlinks is there's no real good, scalable, affordable way to back to backlinks. So they're either scalable and easy and garbage, or they're way expensive and unscalable, but good, but expensive. So depending on the campaign, like you can come in and do some high priced backlinks which are good, but, but you would do it in the case that you gave where it's like, okay, what can we just use to get over the edge? And you wouldn't necessarily integrate it into like the reoccurring part of the campaign.
- [22:59]
Russell Brunson
As you're adding more and more pages, more content every single week, will that naturally help Others. Is it like a rising tide rises, all ships like other ones will all start rising as well? Or is it kind of each piece stands in and of itself?
- [23:11]
SEO Expert
No, that's a great comment because a lot of people get caught up in, you know, I need to optimize this page and this page. This is the Money page. This is the Money page, which might be true, but SEO is now about the credibility of the entire domain. And so is there a little bit of value spread throughout? And so, yeah, you want to. The more value you bring and aggregate good content, it lifts the entirety of a site funnel.
- [23:33]
Damon Burton
Hackers Let me tell you a story that still makes me cringe a little. We were gearing up for a huge launch. Funnels were done, landing pages were tight, copy was dialed in. Everything was ready to rock. Except for one thing. We were looking for more support people to be able to handle the launch. And we figured, no big deal, we're going to find somebody quickly. But that didn't happen. We spent weeks trying to hire the right person. We put listings on all the typical sites, but they got buried under a flood of random applicants who weren't even remotely qualified. It delayed our campaign, slowed our momentum, and ended up costing us tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales. That's why now I tell everyone to use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all that you need. It's built to help you find quality talent fast, especially with Sponsored jobs, which put your listings right at the top of the page so it's the first thing the right candidate sees. And here's what's wild. Sponsored Jobs on indeed get 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Why? Because they're seen by the right people.
- [24:25]
Russell Brunson
At the right time.
- [24:26]
Damon Burton
You can get your job post live in minutes and reach people who are actually qualified. No more scrolling through irrelevant resumes, no more wasting time. And there's no monthly fee or contracts. You just pay for results. Want to know how fast it works? In the time we've been telling you about this story, 23 hires were made on Indeed around the world. That's how efficient it is. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com clicks. That's Indeed.com C L I C K-S so what are you waiting for? Just go to Indeed.com clicks right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com clicks, terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need.
- [25:09]
GMC Representative
The Hoover Dam wasn't built in a day. And the GMC Sierra lineup wasn't built overnight. Like every American achievement, building the Sierra 1500 heavy duty and EV was the result of dedication. A dedication to mastering the art of engineering. That's what this country has done for 250 years and what GMC has done for over 100. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. Assembled in Flint, Hamtranneck, Michigan, in Fort Wayne, Indiana of US and globally sourced parts.
- [25:39]
Russell Brunson
I'm curious because on YouTube we have an issue where if we're buying ads on the same channel, we're trying to get organic views. It messes up the algorithm. Right. Because it's like you're paying for ads. Someone comes, they see the ad, they leave. And then YouTube doesn't separate this ad traffic versus someone viewing it, and it's like, oh, these videos aren't good. And then like your whole channel suffers, at least for us, like a year before you're able to fix it. Do you have a similar thing with SEO where it's like, we're also driving paid ads to secrets, success.com, whatever. People come in and they're bouncing faster than they would if they were organically finding. Does it affect the site as a whole or is it.
- [26:11]
SEO Expert
It can. Yeah. The one thing you said, the bounce rate. Yeah. So we've had some clients where we'll be crushing it on organic, and then all of a sudden we'll have thousands of visitors that come in and they stay for five seconds and we'll hit up the client and they'll be like, oh, yeah, that was our ad guy. Well, like, what's your ad guy doing? And they're not paying attention. So yeah, you can largely SEO and paid ads and don't directly influence each other. SEO can influence it, which maybe I'll come back to in a minute. But paid ads and social don't largely influence SEO other than bounce rate. Yeah. So you can send a ton of visitors, and if people are just bouncing, then Google's gonna go, maybe this isn't the best site because people aren't sticking around.
- [26:50]
Russell Brunson
So would it be smart to put your funnels on a sub domain or different domain altogether?
- [26:55]
SEO Expert
Do you think you could? Yeah, I mean, because that's the beauty of paid ads is you can direct that wherever you want. So unless you have it dialed in or if you want to a B test something pretty significantly that could impact your SEO. If you already Have a good SEO foundation established. It's something to consider.
- [27:10]
Russell Brunson
Interesting. If you were to put the pages on a subdomain, would it be separate, or does it look at the subdain the same as the rest of the domain?
- [27:21]
SEO Expert
A little bit of Both subdomains are technically separate domains, but search engines are obviously smart enough to know that they're related. I have seen some weird nuances where, you know, you and I and most users would just consider it the same thing, but you'd be surprised at how the anomalies that can show up in the data.
- [27:37]
Russell Brunson
Yeah, interesting. Okay, Last thing we talked about is I know you've got a program now where you're helping agencies to start doing SEO for funnels and things like that. We talk about that as an opportunity because I think it's a unique opportunity a lot of people aren't doing or heard about or thought about, and something you've been capitalizing a lot over the last little bit.
- [27:53]
SEO Expert
Yeah, it's been fun. You know, you were kind enough to give me a deadline last year, and it's true. I think I told you at the FHL International that I got more done in that, like, 60 days than I probably would have done in a year. Yeah, it's been fun. So why don't I share a little bit of that journey? Because when I got into inner circle, there's so many cool things going on, but there was nothing wrong. I didn't want to get distracted. Right. I didn't want to accidentally mess up the agency.
- [28:25]
Russell Brunson
Like the head of shiny objects here. More shiny objects.
- [28:29]
SEO Expert
Well, for the first year, I really. There was a. A little part of me were like, this place is so cool, but everybody's just launching every day. And I was used to just reoccurring revenue and the agency side. And so there was a little bit of time where there was some insecurity about it, where I was like, am I missing this opportunity here? And then when I got talking to other people, they're like, no, you probably made the right decision, because I did chase both, and then I kind of lost both. Right. And so focus on whatever your most immediate opportunity is. But I couldn't not think about doing training because I've been doing this for so long, and I get asked for so long. But more importantly, that was where the personal reward was in me, is like, I wanted to help those type of people, but that's the total opposite of my agency. Like, the agency is established business and people that want to learn SEO. It's the difference of who values time over money or money over time. And so there are different audiences. And so I mapped out the course years ago. I didn't launch it though because I knew I didn't have the time to support it. And so I didn't want to take people's money. And so for years it was in the back of my mind. And then you see all these people in Inner Circle doing all these things. I'm like, ah. And so I finally got a COO a while ago, got them over the learning curve and then now I feel comfortable whose hands the agency are in. And so I could come back to launching that now back to, I think it was decade in a day last summer, you know, when I came up for the hot seat. You're like, dude, when are you going to launch this? And in my mind I'm thinking and end of the year. But I didn't say that because I knew that was like six months. I'm like, Russell's not going to let me say six months. And I can't remember what I said after that, but you're like three months or something. So we agreed on Halloween and that deadline was okay because I had a couple weeks that I had to wrap up some stuff, but then that would give me like four to six weeks to figure this out. And so then I did a live event. So I did a two day live event to validate the curriculum. Now a couple things happen from that. You know, you and Inner Circle are always talking about bring your product to the market first and then get that feedback. And so you hear that and you like, you think you know that, but until you actually do that, you don't realize how much value that actually brings. So in my mind it was like, okay, I'm going to do SEO training. And there's three types of people that might buy this. One was existing agencies that want to do it better or add it. Two was an entrepreneur that wants to a solopreneur or a freelancer or three was a nine to fiver that might want more job security and they do marketing and so they want to establish that. I thought the agencies would have been on the bottom and when I started posting about it, it was almost all agencies. The other two were non existent. And so then the market started to give that feedback. Yeah. And so then I, I said, hey, who would be interested? I'm gonna do it for a thousand bucks. And I was just wanting five, ten people just to validate it. And I sold 8,000 bucks. Eight seats like that day and so I went and found an event space. I was going to just do a small, nice room and then I booked a space for like 10 people. I'm like, yeah, I got like two extra seats just in case. And then I made a follow up post and then I had 15 seats. So I was like, crap. Okay, so what's still close? That is nice. And then I found this other place that held like 20 people. And then I made another post and eventually I ended up getting to. It was like just shy of 50 people. Right. And so that validated the demand, but then it also highlighted that agencies were the main audience. So then as I started to bring it, as it started to get closer to the event and I'm kind of dripping some of the curriculum of what we're going to talk about. Then I got more feedback. And what I realized was in addition to people wanting to learn SEO, a lot of them didn't know how to run a business. And so it wasn't just about SEO, it was like, how do I actually run a business SOPs and how do you communicate with your client? And so then I shifted like 50% of the curriculum to here's how you run a business, here's how you communicate to clients, here's how you onboard them, here's how you set expectations. So sold that, validated the curriculum, then got tied up for a little bit and then got back to focusing on transferring all that, transitioning all that into a course and then by bringing it to the market, it was the same thing. More feedback, more feedback, more feedback. So I finally did my first launch just about a month ago, just did organic the first time, posted about it for 2 weeks and had 60 something people register. 40 showed up, held all 40 for an hour. Last 5 minutes when I pitched 5, dropped off 35, heard the offer and 13 closed. Done a few more small launches since then and as of now, I'm just shy of 100 grand off of like two and a half, three hours. Yeah.
- [33:21]
Russell Brunson
So cool. I hope everyone's listening. Like just the process of creating a product too, I think a lot of people think it's the other way around. Like, okay, I'm going to create it all and then launch it versus when you talked about the iterative process and including the people, then you find out what people actually want, which is the magic behind it. You know what I mean? In fact, it's one of the main reasons why I do inner circle is because I had a chance to see everybody, hear people who are doing this game and Then it's like, oh, like, the ideas come from there, the iterations, the changes, the tweak. All that stuff comes from, like, sitting in a room of your dream customers talking about what they're doing and what they're not doing and what their pain points are. You know, there's a lot of times we try to create things in secret and launch them, and then you just miss the mark.
- [33:58]
SEO Expert
That's me. I overthink it big time.
- [34:01]
Russell Brunson
I know, because when we had first conversations, you never. That wasn't the direction at all. And it's crazy. That's what it's become and where it all landed at, which is really cool.
- [34:10]
SEO Expert
Yeah, it's been fun.
- [34:11]
Russell Brunson
That's awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you coming and being part of inner circle this long and hanging out and all the SEO work you're doing for us. And hopefully this gets any of you guys who are listening understand there's a whole nother world of traffic. Because in my world, we don't talk about SEO hardly at all. You know, we talk about paid ads, and we focus on social and those kind of things. But, you know, it's funny, you rewind back 15 years ago, like, there were only Google Ads, paid ads, and SEO. That was the two things. That's all we drove traffic with initially, you know, and now people don't talk about those very much. And there's this huge untapped opportunity for people who will dive into it, which is why, you know, you're doing it for most of my core businesses right now. And we keep adding, you know, every two months, we add you to another one of our businesses.
- [34:48]
SEO Expert
It's like, take it the next one.
- [34:49]
Russell Brunson
And the next one and the next one, because it's the long tail. I always think about this with ads. Like, people ask me, what should I do? Should I do ads or SEO? I'm like, you should do both, because ads will get you traffic immediately. But if you're doing the SEO in the backside, eventually you can taper down or turn off ads, but the SEO will continue to grow over time. And that's the thing I think people miss is like, you know, they want to just flip on SEO like they flip on ads. It's like, no, you got to start planting seeds now. It's the law of the harvest, right? You plant seeds. Plant seeds, and eventually it can surpass the traffic you're getting from paid if you do it right.
- [35:20]
SEO Expert
Yeah, yeah. Most of our clients, if they give it long enough Runway SEO ends up becoming 50 to 80% of their revenue.
- [35:27]
Russell Brunson
Yeah, even today that SEO's dead, they're still getting that. So that's good to know. So anyway, man, I appreciate you coming out and sharing. If people want to follow you and hire you and all kinds of stuff, where do they go?
- [35:38]
SEO Expert
Go damonburton.com everything's there.
- [35:40]
Russell Brunson
Damonburton.com and who are some of your clients? Just so people know you're legit.
- [35:44]
SEO Expert
Russell, Tony Robbins. We worked with Utah Jazz, Raelle, Salt Lake. Lots of cool, cool businesses. But I think my favorite are mom and pops. We got a lot of mom and pops that we've taken from, you know, little kitchen tables into multimillion dollar warehouses. And you know, I still have my first client, first two or three clients from 18 years ago still with me. 18 years.
- [36:05]
Russell Brunson
They haven't dropped any of the updates.
- [36:08]
Damon Burton
Because you weren't spamming the search engines.
- [36:10]
Russell Brunson
I could have helped you out back then. Glad I didn't. I ruined everything. Amen. Grateful for you. Thanks so much. And yeah, everyone, SEO and funnels, they do go together. Start working on it, add it to your traffic and it'll change your life, change your business. So thanks, man. Appreciate it.
- [36:25]
Damon Burton
Do you have a funnel? But it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com podcast. That's sellingonline.com podcast.