← The Yoast SEO podcast
The Yoast SEO podcast
Mike King on increasing CTR with personas and the power of internal linking
00:39:11
Loading summary
Transcript96 lines
- [00:05]
A
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another Yoast SEO podcast. I'm joined today by a good friend from one of the best cities in the world. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed into the country right now. Otherwise I'd fly over and record it with him right there, because that would be loads more fun. I'm joined by Michael King.
- [00:27]
B
What's going on, Yos? Oh, you talking about the city I live in? Hold on. I didn't show you my view. Look at that.
- [00:34]
A
Yeah, so you're listening to a podcast, but he just showed me the most gorgeous view of New York, and I'm super jealous. Marika and I actually have flights booked to New York and Orlando for the end of the year, but as it looks right now, we won't be allowed into the country.
- [00:55]
B
Well, next time you make it over, we definitely got to kick it.
- [00:59]
A
We will. Can you. What do you do? Tell our listeners what your business is and what you do for a living, because there's too much.
- [01:08]
B
Sure. So my main thing is I run Ipool Rank, which is a marketing agency here in New York City. We primarily do SEO and content strategy. On the back of that, we do a lot of other cool projects, like machine learning stuff, analytics stuff, but the core of what we do is SEO and content strategy. And outside of that, you know, I'm also a rapper. I just put out a new record. I'm also a father, which is my primary job, and I've got two awesome little children, the youngest of which just had a birthday yesterday. So, yeah, that's.
- [01:38]
A
Congrats, man. Yeah, it's. Seeing you and your gorgeous kids on Facebook the whole time is very fun. So, as I do with these podcasts, I ask my team, like, hey, I'm talking to this person. In this case, I'm talking to Michael. What should I ask him? And the first thing that came up was, hey, yeah, he made that incredibly cool video. And then they mentioned the wrong conference, but it was for you made it for Moscon. Tell us a bit about what the video was about and why people should still go watch it.
- [02:14]
B
Sure. So it's called Runtime. I did make it for Mozcon, and really the emphasis for it was that they were going virtual. And for me, Mozcon is, like, my favorite conference. Like, that was the first one I went to. It's very well produced, and I always try to bring something special to it. And I was like, all right, well, if we're going virtual, let's maximize this medium. And so we made a movie, and the way I describe it is it's like Mr. Robot meets Batman, the Animated Series. And so the whole story arc is like, you know, you've got this protagonist who has to, like, figure out these SEO things to basically save the city of New York or whatever. And then the protagonist meets me, and I walk through and give her, you know, just some new skills. Skills on things that she can do in order, like, to beat this SEO game. So it served two purposes. It's like edutainment. Right? Because the parts where I'm explaining things to this character, those are all tactics you can actually do. And so it's wildly technical. It's really fun. It was actually pretty ridiculous because all the code in it is code that I wrote. But I don't know about you. You code better than me. So you're probably just like, everything is perfect when you're typing me. I'm messing up all the time and everything.
- [03:26]
A
And there's nobody who codes like that. I mean, I look up every function.
- [03:35]
B
And so, like, when I did it, you know, I typed it all out and then I erased it. And then what I did is I just played it backwards so it looks like I code perfectly. But, yeah, it was a fun project. You know, we did it way faster than we thought we were because we thought we had more time. And then Moscow was like, no, no, we need this, like, three weeks in advance. And we're like, oh. So me and my team, we had a lot of, like, very late nights getting it done, but it was a lot of fun.
- [04:02]
A
Cool. Yeah. How is the conference thing going for you now? Is it. Do you have in person conferences already?
- [04:11]
B
I did one recently. Pubcon Miami. But, you know, people aren't really ready to be out like that right now. And so it wasn't as many people as you would normally expect, but there are certainly some people that were like, hey, I'm here to, you know, learn and. And congregate and so on. And that was awesome. But, you know, it's kind of like a risk reward thing right now. Like, I don't think I want to do a lot of conferences right now, although I say that, and I'm about to go on tour. So, you know. But yeah, I probably won't do any more in person conferences until, you know, mid next year or something like that.
- [04:50]
A
How has that been for your business? Were conferences important for your business as a.
- [04:55]
B
Definitely, definitely. Because, you know, primarily our business is inbound. Until recently, we really had no, like, outbound sales people. And so a lot of the people that come to us, saw me on stage or they read a blog post or whatever. And I haven't been blogging as much. And also now I'm not speaking as much. But we do have people doing marketing for us. We do have people doing outbound sales. And so it's not. It's been offset by their work. But nevertheless, there was always like a big pop in inquiries whenever I did a speaking engagement.
- [05:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that it would drive a lot of business. Yeah. So you were one of the first that started talking about a technical SEO renaissance, which next to just being three awesome words in a row is also like, yeah, we have had this period where everyone was like, no, technical SEO is dead. And I'm like, no, technical SEO has never been dead. It's just that we solved it all for you and you all just installed our plugin and nobody was thinking about it, but it's far from dead. But how is that going in your eyes? Are we. Is it getting better?
- [06:13]
B
I think what we're seeing now is there's just more technical SEOs. There's more people embracing things like Python and building their own custom solutions and really understanding more how the web works. And I think that a lot of that was just missing. I'm sure you had this experience where you would present something and you would show code and people's eyes would glaze over and you'd be like, yeah, you should learn the code. And they'd be like, no, I'm never doing that. But now you, you have far more people who are like, yes, I'm going to learn to code. And look at this thing that I've come up with and look what I'm sharing. And then, you know, you kind of have something similar to the general open source community in SEO now. And I'm not saying it's huge, but it's like a good sect of people that are like, you know, people like Jono, people like Hamlet, rest in peace, and all these other folks who've come up in the wake of that. And I think that's really awesome, you know, and at the same time, you've got more SEOs. I guess I would just call them SEO managers who are more technical than they were before. I remember a few years ago, one of the interview questions that we would give to an SEO would be like, so how do you solve for JavaScript frameworks? And they wouldn't have an answer. Now everyone has an answer. I think that's great. I think it's great that we are all Moving into that direction also just being more adherent to the things that Google is doing and thinking about them from a technical perspective rather than just like thinking of them as like a super user, which is kind of how I would classify general SEOs. So yeah, I think things have just gotten more. They've just gotten better. You know, I think that you're just seeing more people with technical prowess come into the space.
- [07:56]
A
Yeah, well, I, I think I'd agree with that. And at the same time, I wish I could just repeat some of the presentations I gave a couple of years ago.
- [08:06]
B
You can.
- [08:09]
A
Everybody in the space has always done that. But no, I gave a presentation. I didn't know whether you were there. Smx, Munich, at some point on, hey, we should all be doing testing a lot more. And not testing Google, but before you deploy a site.
- [08:27]
B
Yeah, automated testing.
- [08:28]
A
We should have automated tests to check our SEO stuff. And there's still so many sites that don't do that. And it drives me nuts.
- [08:38]
B
And it's not that hard, you know, it's something that developers and engineers know to do anyway. And when we were working with a really big E commerce site, someone said to me, they were like, hey, are there any tests that we can put in place here? And I remember you saying to me that there was a client that you worked with that everything they deploy, they write the test first. And then I started digging into that more, you know. Cause I hadn't seen your talk, but just the idea of that, I was like, oh, why aren't we doing that now? We do that with every client that allows it, basically.
- [09:11]
A
Yeah, it's funny, right? That's the sort of. Because when you say people are doing Python and data, I'm like, yeah, so basically SEOs are getting better at datalytics and everything around that, but are they really getting more technical? I'm not entirely sure. Fair enough. They're still not doing everything that they should be doing. We've got some ways to go.
- [09:38]
B
Well, here's the thing. I think that there's just a fundamental lack of understanding of how the Internet works for a lot of people in SEO. And I've seen a lot more people dig into that, you know, like, especially with the page feed stuff, like more people are looking to understand, like, okay, how do things come across the wire? How does the browser actually construct the page? And things like that. So you're just seeing more people that are, that are curious about that. And I think, you know, a lot of that just started over the last few years. So I think it's just good that we're moving in the right direction. It's not perfect, but we're making progress.
- [10:16]
A
Yeah, no, absolutely, it is. We don't have to explain HTTP anymore.
- [10:22]
B
Right? Right.
- [10:23]
A
Yeah.
- [10:23]
B
Now. Now that we got H3, like, people are now like, oh, multiplexing. I get it, you know, so, yeah.
- [10:29]
A
And at the same time, I couldn't even explain that to you off the.
- [10:34]
B
Top of my head.
- [10:34]
A
I'd have to Google that first. So as you do this, you probably come across a lot of cool new tech. Is there anything cool that you've seen recently that you're like.
- [10:47]
B
That's my primary focus as far as, like, cool tech right now is natural language generation. And I have this ridiculous dream of generating perfectly optimized content. And obviously I just said it's ridiculous because we all know it is ridiculous. But the idea is this, like, we have all these tools out there right now that extract features from what ranks in the top 20 or whatever for a given keyword. And then as you write, it's like, oh, use more of these words or whatever. Why can't we just feed those into a language model and say, okay, generate me copy that speaks to this. So, I mean, I know why, but like, you know, it can be figured out. It's not like an impossible problem. So I've been playing with a lot of the language models. Like, there's an open source one that's like a version of GPT3, it's called GPT6J. I think that one's been really interesting. But everything that comes out in that space is just like, okay, let me play with that. Like, because everything is now available via a hugging face. Hugging face keeps getting money and they keep, like, building more and more libraries to support it. So I've just been playing with everything that comes out via them. But as far as, like, you know, just general SEO stuff, I feel like that space is. It's kind of broken. And what I mean by that is like, you know, a lot of these tools, they have all this data, but they don't actually let you access it. And then their interfaces are not powerful enough to really get insights out of. So it's like they generate these fake numbers, you know, I mean, like these entertainment scores basically. And they're like, hey, your whatever rating or authority or whatever is this. But it doesn't necessarily reflect what Google would think. And you can't really get the data out to then, like, do your own analysis on it. So it. I just wish that our space Was like, all right, let's make more power tools rather than trying to abstract it for the lowest common denominator. So it's kind of frustrating.
- [12:58]
A
So power BI connectors or even just direct bigquery dumps of data. Yeah, I feel your pain there. We generate a whole lot of data ourselves, and it's just so nice to just go into a bigquery interface and just type your own queries. I'm like, that's exactly what I wanted to know.
- [13:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think, like, Botify, I think they do a decent job of being able to, like, you can cross tab any data point that they have in there and you can export everything that they have for you. I wish, at minimum, every tool had an interface like that so then I could just get after what I'm looking for rather than just like being like, oh, there's a thousand links to this page. Cool. What does that really tell me, you know?
- [13:49]
A
Yeah, so. And in many ways, that's actually probably easier for them to build than a lot of interfaces.
- [13:56]
B
Yeah, agreed.
- [13:57]
A
So we should just go to Marcus and say, hey, give me the expert. Yeah, Marcus was on the show recently telling us all about what they're doing at Write. But I think that this is indeed for everyone who is a power user. You want to get access to the actual data. I mean, my BI team is consistently like, yeah, those are nice graphs. Where's the data?
- [14:24]
B
Yeah, and a lot of the data. And I'm not specifically picking on the link indices and all that, but you know, they'll give you data on something and it's like, are those links even still live right now? So you're like, you're, you're getting all these, you know, metrics that they derive from these, from this data, but you don't know if that's, like, accurate to right now. So it's like you can't, you can't trust these things at face value. And I think that's the biggest difference between someone who's, like, really understanding how SEO works and then someone who just knows how to use tools.
- [15:02]
A
So if you came into the industry right now, would you recommend people use these tools, or how would you recommend they started doing SEO?
- [15:14]
B
Well, we don't really have anything else, so we got to use these tools. I mean, so for a lot of these things, they do the same things you can do in the browser themselves. You know, I mean, like, there's all these, like, page speed tools, but it's like, yo, you have your waterfall right in Chrome itself. So you don't necessarily need these. Lighthouse is built into Chrome itself. So a lot of on page things you don't necessarily need a lot of the existing tools for. But as far as like these data sets for links and so on, you know, what are you going to do? Crawl the whole web yourself? I mean, you could, but like, you don't. Like, it's not, it's not realistic. Right. And so what I do is I'm just like, okay, let's get all the data from all the places and deduplicate it and then figure out what's actually real. In the case of like, let's say we're talking about a backlink audit, we'll crawl everything in real time to see what's still live, what is the anchor text right now, things like that, so that we can get a sense of like, okay, what is accurate here? And ideally we would also be able to say like, okay, let's see what's actually indexed in Google as well. But of course, when you're talking about sites that have hundreds of millions of links, you can't necessarily do that. But you know, it's the best we have, so I guess you got to use it.
- [16:33]
A
Yeah. And in general, when you go into a site, what would be, where do you start? Do you have the same approach all the time or is that custom all the time?
- [16:44]
B
I basically like just look around the site and see what the site tells me. You know, like, of course we'll do a crawl and whatever tool we're using and then there'll be a punch list and whatever. But it's really like when you start to dig into the site, look at the different page templates and so on, that's when you truly know like what needs to be done. But at the same time, there's always like, you know, five to 10, five to 10 quick wins that I see across pretty much any website, especially enterprise websites. Like, they always have links pointing to pages that no longer exist. They always have links to redirects or links to 404s. They always have, you know, metadata issues. They always have. I'd say those are like five things that I always see. Right. And so those are all things that we can fix really quickly. That shows a win right away. And then they're like, okay, yeah, now let's continue to invest in SEO.
- [17:37]
A
Yeah, it's internal links in general is like, it's like one of those things that I, I know myself for myself. When I go into a site, the first thing you look at okay, so what's your internal link structure like? You fixed, like, 20, 25 internal links on a small site and, like, boom. Yeah, yeah, you improve stuff. It's super simple.
- [17:58]
B
And for big sites, especially E commerce sites, the internal linking structure is, like, one of their strongest assets. You know, we did a bunch of AB tests around with, like, one, again, a big E commerce site, and we found that if we built, like, I think it was 200 links to any given page, it pops up to the first page. So. And, you know, I know that Dennis, when he was at ebay, they built out this whole, like, mechanism that pulled rankings to see what was on the second page, and then they built more internal links to that URL and then that popped onto the first page. So it's something that, you know, it's. It's not easy to do because you got to do it programmatically or you got to have people, like, manually adding links all over the place. But if you can get that done, it becomes like, a step function of growth for SEO. So that's always something that we look at, especially for bigger sites.
- [18:49]
A
Yeah. I'm going to use part of this as a promo for our Yoast SEO workouts, because we've actually built a workout in Yoast SEO Premium now that helps you just add internal links to pages quickly, because that is one of the things that, Yeah, I do when I go into a site. I was thinking, like, okay, what's the next step? So we have Yo Yoast SEO. It does everything for you technically. Basically, consider it the gym with all the tools that you need. And now Yo Su Premium is going to be your personal trainer that's going to just push you through, like, hey, okay, what do you need to do next? But internal linking is just such an underrated art. We've been doing that for a decade, and it works wonders.
- [19:36]
B
Yeah. And the thing is, people don't believe in it because they don't know, you know, there's not enough people talking about this. I know Kevin Endig did a great guide to it recently, but it's one of those things. You go into a company, you're like, yo, let's work on the internal linking structure. They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Aren't you guys going to build more external links for us? I'm like, no, no, watch this, watch this. And then we do it. And they're like, oh. And then I just call it the Mike King effect, and we're all good.
- [20:04]
A
Well, it is. It is sometimes that simple. I do remember when I. Years ago, when I was still at the Guardian, just for fun, creating a payday loans tag on theguardian.com just to show people, like, all I have to do is just point 10 internal links @ this, and this will rank.
- [20:24]
B
Nice.
- [20:24]
A
And then it ranked, like, number five in one of the most expensive keywords on the planet.
- [20:30]
B
Yeah, that space is crazy. We had a client that was ranking number one there for a long time, and I didn't enjoy doing that work, but I also was like, yo, this is one of the hardest keywords in the world, so I'll take it.
- [20:45]
A
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of SEO space that is not necessarily for the best keywords in people's lives.
- [20:53]
B
Yeah, definitely. I was. I was actually kind of happy when we. We didn't renew them because, you know, that's. That's the type of stuff that, like, ruins people's financial life.
- [21:03]
A
So, yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff like that that I'm very happy we don't do.
- [21:08]
B
Yeah, Like, I don't do pill porn. Pills. Porn or poker at all.
- [21:12]
A
Yeah.
- [21:12]
B
And now not payday loans either.
- [21:14]
A
No. Yeah, No, I can totally appreciate that. We've. So we. We've not done consulting for a very long time, but even before that, I've never done any of those either, so that I was just playing around with some of my friends in the SEO space who were doing their work, and I was like, I can rank there. Just watch. Yeah. Hey, you've been writing a bit about Personas and talking about Personas in SEO. Can you explain how you use Personas in SEO?
- [21:43]
B
Yeah. So my thinking around that is very much that we, as SEOs in general, we focus on intent. And intent is great. You can certainly do anything you need to do with just intent. But I've always been curious about the user behind the visit so that we can zero in on the context of what they're trying to do in addition to that intent. So it's one thing to say, like, hey, I want to go on a boat trip, but who's the person trying to go on a boat trip? Because there's different types of boats that different people want. Right. And so we basically add that. We basically map our keywords to the different Personas, and then we also map those keywords to the different stages in the user journey that they go with. So if you want to keep that simple, you can just use, like, the consumer decision journey or your standard marketing funnel and, you know, just kind of leave it at that. But in some Cases when there is like a broader, like consumer life cycle, we'll use something like that instead and then map that to the different stages. So then you have a very clear picture for content strategy. You have their intent, you have who's the most person, who's likely, who's the most likely person searching for it, and then what are they specifically trying to do? And then that way it just really informs content strategy, rather than just like you trying to write just to a keyword, so you're writing more to a person and then you know what they're trying to accomplish. And so that way we don't end up with like very generic metadata. We end up with a message for a specific person. And I think of metadata is kind of like, you know, your page title is what it is, but your meta description is more like an advertising tagline to get a person to click. So in the same way with advertising, you want to understand, like, who are you trying to target? We use Personas in that way and say, okay, you know, how are we, how are we going to speak to this specific person to get them to click our result rather than another result? And so when we've done this, like, this has been my approach for, I don't know, since like 2011. And even when we don't rank better, we end up driving more clicks because we're very zeroed into that person that's actually looking for the thing. So it's just an approach that I take. You know, people have talked about Personas in marketing forever. I think the first person that I saw talk about them for SEO was Vanessa Fox. Like, she mentioned them in her book. It was kind of like, you know, just kind of in passing like, hey, search your Personas and what have you. And, you know, by the time I'd read that book, I had developed this approach from working in a big ad agency because every, everyone around me was talking about Personas and I was like, hey, how do we apply that here? And then we basically built out what I just told you about. And so, you know, when I say Personas, I'm not talking about, you know, just getting a bunch of people in a room with posted notes and the highest paid person in the room being like, oh, that's our consumer. Like, we take a very data driven approach to it. So it's effectively we're talking about segmentation of data and then writing a story on top of that for who those people are and then mapping the keywords.
- [24:56]
A
Yeah, but it is bringing the data back to actual people.
- [25:00]
B
Right.
- [25:00]
A
Because it is something that people seem to forget a lot. It's like, yeah, all these numbers are people that are doing something. And in your example of like someone wanting to rent a boat, it entirely depends on your budget, how big that boat is going to be. And as I've recently learned, there is a very wide scale of boat budget for renting boats.
- [25:29]
B
Nice.
- [25:31]
A
So does that mean that you also sometimes write, have multiple pages to tackle multiple Personas or multiple segments?
- [25:41]
B
Absolutely. I mean, the way I look at this is like you're really just combining SEO with CRO, Right? Because in conversion rate optimization you're very much thinking about your audience and so. And a lot of people build Personas for that. They build it for ux, they build it for all types of design considerations and so on. But yeah, at the end of the day, you may have to build a series of pages. And so where I believe that Google is ultimately going is, you know, more personalization in the future and so they'll get down to the Persona level with respect to mapping results to people and so on. And you know, the reason why I believe that is they also have what they call affinity segments within the Google ecosystem. Right. Like if you're, I don't remember which ad product where you can use these, I'm guessing it's in display, but it also pops up in Google Analytics. If you've got the demographics and interest reports enabled, you can see, you know, each user represents or some, some segment of, or some percentage of users represent different affinity segments. And you can target against that in ads. You can measure that in your analytics. And so I think at some point Google's going to be like, hey, this content matches with these segments best so that we can further refine these results in the future. So I think it's going to continue to make sense to have different content assets that speak to different audiences, that will then eventually map to keywords.
- [27:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, it does make a lot of sense. I remember talking about Aida a hundred thousand years ago. Similar, similar thoughts and similar process around. Yeah, around this whole thing. So given all these things, do you use Personas in how you acquire business yourself too?
- [27:37]
B
Absolutely.
- [27:38]
A
Absolutely.
- [27:39]
B
Yeah. So we've got like, I think we have four Personas in this case and they're more segments for us because, you know, nah, they're Personas. We built our Personas. So you've got like a CMO level person, we've got like a marketing manager, we've got what's like a industry enthusiast, not someone that we're ever going to sell to, but we'll promote ourself our stuff. And then also we've got like a student, so someone who's just kind of learning the game of SEO and other general marketing subjects and so on. And so we think of, you know, everyone below that, like CMO person as someone that influences the person above them or influences across. And so when we make our content, there are assets that we create that are for those lower tiers, but then there's content that we create that's just for that cmo. And so that way we're able to map the right keywords to the right segment and then have the right content for them as well. And again, this is an approach that people are taking in content marketing pretty heavily, but not necessarily in SEO, but we're just mapping that down to that keyword level.
- [28:48]
A
Yeah, and do you use that on other platforms than just Google? Because I can see that working for instance on LinkedIn as well.
- [28:57]
B
Yeah, absolutely. LinkedIn, Facebook. And so my earlier approaches to this before we got better data sets was like, okay, let's just pull things from all the digital stuff to verify the things or validate the things that we learn from like the offline market segmentation tool. So you've got like, you know, Experian, Nielsen, I don't know what the equivalent is in Europe, but all these like providers of data and they primarily get their data from these offline surveys. Like they send these like thousand question questionnaires out to, you know, like a representative sample of people in the U.S. and then they segment everybody into something like 60 or 70 groups. And then from there you can like toggle the questions in their various tools and you'll get a picture of which group does your Persona fall into. But because that's representative of offline behaviors, we then had to map that to online behaviors using the ad targeting platform. So, you know, Facebook had audience insights, you know, AdWords had the keyword planner. LinkedIn has its thing for you can set where you can set up ads and so on. And so you can then toggle in different features and see, okay, how big is that audience online? So that would be a way for us to verify that audience existed. And then also you had like hitwise, which would then integrate with these tools and tell you, okay, here's the Persona that you're going after. Here are the keywords that they are actually searching based on the data that they're getting from their panels. So it was a completely data driven thing, like end to end. But it just required a lot of validation of what we knew from offline. Now we have more data sets online, so we don't have to do so much of that.
- [30:51]
A
And is that data that you've built yourself or that you just buy somewhere?
- [30:55]
B
It's buying. We're buying it from a variety of places, you know, because otherwise we'd have to build our own panel of people and collect all that data and so on.
- [31:04]
A
Yeah, okay, clear. So you do all this, and you're obviously damn good at it, and then suddenly you decide, you know what? I came into this from a rapping career. Let's get back into it. What was that? And, I mean, it's not just turning 40 and your midlife crisis kicking in.
- [31:33]
B
I mean, you could call it a midlife crisis, but, yeah, you know, as. As I was about to turn 40, you know, like, early in 39, I laid out a bunch of goals, one of which was writing a book. And I. Or no. One of which was getting a book deal to write a book, which I did. And, you know, I just wanted to make a record that I was really proud of. And now that I'm good at marketing, like. Like, I actually market the record and see where it goes. And, you know, I sat with my business coach. I was like, yeah, I want to do this. And he's like, well, if you don't actually make time for it, it's not going to happen. And he's 100% right. So I booked a week in the studio in Philly. I live in Brooklyn now. I'm from Philly, though. And just to, like, get out of my context of being in business and, you know, managing or contributing to the management of my children. Don't want to take away from Bea how much she does, because she's awesome. And, you know, I just sat down with a bunch of beats that I've been collecting over the years because I've had a bunch of false starts. I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna do a record. I'm gonna do a record. And so I just, like, started recording. And then there's a couple of tracks that I did that I just, like, really, really liked. And so I reached out to the producer. I'm like, yo, you're just gonna produce the whole thing? He's like, cool. And he sent me a bunch of tracks, and then I just kept going back. I did, like, another week, and then I did another couple days. And, you know, I quickly had a new album, and I was like, cool, well, let me drop this at 11:59, the night before my birthday, so I can meet my goal of dropping it before I turn 40. And that's what I did. And here we are.
- [33:09]
A
Yeah. And honestly, I feel problematic about it.
- [33:13]
B
Why?
- [33:14]
A
Because I don't want you to succeed in that. Because then we'd lose you in the SEO space.
- [33:21]
B
Well, I mean, I think eventually you're going to lose me in the SEO space anyway. And what I mean by that is, like, you know, how much more. How many more audits can I do? How many more blog posts can I write where I'm like, hey, hey, let's consider something different. Like, I think. I think I've done a lot. You've obviously done a lot as well for this space. Like, you, you're optimizing 30% of the web. Who else can say that? Or 40%? I don't know what it is at this point.
- [33:46]
A
42. Yeah, 42%.
- [33:49]
B
My bad. Anyway, so, you know, I think. I think at a certain point, because I've been doing SEO for 16 years now, at a certain point, you gotta do something else. And I want to build software, I want to launch more businesses, I want to write more books. You know, like, there's not going to be. I probably got like, three, four more years left in me for SEO.
- [34:14]
A
No, I know, man. I'm just playing with you as well, because in many ways, I can feel the pain of wanting to do more and go different directions. So I. Yeah, I do wish you most of. Most of the best with that. I can't really say anything else. I do wonder what, though. Is it hard because you're running that agency on your own while you've got your people, of course, but you're stepping away to do other stuff. Is that manageable? Is that doable?
- [34:50]
B
Yeah. So I have an awesome operations person now. And, you know, her name is Cami Hess. She used to be with Eric Inga a number of years ago. So she. She's already done what we're trying to do. Like, as far as taking us from where we are to where I want to go. Not necessarily so that we get acquired or whatever, but as far as, like, the revenue growth, she's already done it. So she very much understands our space. She's awesome with the team. I suspect, you know, this time next year, like, I won't need to be so involved. And what I'm transitioning towards is, like, just being more involved in sales, more involved in our marketing, and more involved in, like, our R and D stuff. So we've Got, you know, a gentleman named John Merch who's, like, building software for us. We're really looking to build out that team. We're kind of in the era of, like, SEO super teams right now, Right? Like, you're seeing Shopify scoop up everybody. That's awesome. And so, you know, we're trying to scoop up a bunch of awesome people as well and just keep going in this direction of innovation. Because even if I had stopped doing SEO, I'm still passionate about the improvement to the space. And that's always been my thing. Like, I've always just wanted to come up with awesome things, share it, and then see what people do with it. So, yeah, I think it's manageable just because I have an awesome team.
- [36:16]
A
That's good. I mean, I'm happy to see that. And I was also a bit in awe of, like, how do you manage to do all of this? And I sort of felt the pain looking at it from the side. Like, that must be tough managing this. Right. So what can we expect next over the coming years from you? I mean, now that you're doing, like, free things, I'm just not sure anymore what to expect.
- [36:46]
B
I mean, more, you know. So I definitely am going to finish this book, hoping that we can drop it within the first quarter of 2022. We got a couple software projects that should be coming pretty soon and really trying to ramp up the content that we're getting out, you know, just in a variety of different ways. So I've always wanted to do this kind of like Last Week, Tonight, or Daily show for SEO. And my marketing lead, Garrett Sussman, he just started doing that. So we're just trying to do more and more things, you know, just trying to be more of a content brand. And me, I'm trying to be like a media mogul.
- [37:29]
A
A media mogul.
- [37:31]
B
Just.
- [37:31]
A
Just doing everything and just owning it all.
- [37:34]
B
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [37:36]
A
Okay, well, I think I can see you do that. So is there anything that you'd want to share with our listeners where you go, like, this is stuff that you need to look at right now?
- [37:51]
B
I mean, just go to iporink.com we keep putting out cool stuff. We've got a few more guides coming out that I think are going to be some of the better ones in our space. A gentleman on my team named Colt Sliva, he's been doing a lot of real cool stuff. He just put out this cool tool for layering data for your analysis. But, yeah, just keep watching what we're doing. We've got a lot of cool stuff coming and that's it.
- [38:16]
A
Cool. Well, with that, I'm just going to say, hey, thanks everyone for listening and tuning in and listening to this awesome Mike. Thank you, Mike, for being here.
- [38:27]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [38:28]
A
I really appreciate it. We'll get you back in about a year and see whether you've got a new record by then. Cool. If you go to Ipool Rank, do make sure to also actually look at Mike's record. We'll share notes for links for that as well, because.
- [38:44]
B
Yeah, best rapper ever. Dot com.
- [38:46]
A
Yeah, he's he's not shy. So with that, if you haven't subscribed yet, do subscribe on your favorite platform of choice and see you next time.
- [38:57]
B
Bye.