Badass Is The New Black (Season 6) Episode #24 - SEO Strategies and Techniques You Haven't Been Told with Farzad Rashidi

small business growth and marketing strategies Jun 12, 2024

What if you could get ranked higher on Google so that when people search things relevant to what you do, your website was the one that popped up at the top so that they could click on, well, of course your business would grow faster. And there are lots of strategies, SEO strategies to do this. But this is a strategy that we're gonna talk about today that most people don't talk about.

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SEO Strategies and Techniques You Haven't Been Told with Farzad Rashidi

I'm bringing in Farzad Rashdi. He is the lead innovator at Respona, a link building outreach platform that helps businesses increase their organic traffic from Google. He previously ran the marketing efforts at SME where he helped the company gain over 27 million active users and passed 2.5 million monthly organic traffic. We've talked a lot about SEO lately, you know the practice of making your website and content relevant and show up when people are searching for topics.

We brought in Laura Jawad recently to talk about SEO for our Access the Experts training. It is actually by far the most popular attended, watched, and purchased training on our Access the Experts series so far. Amber said “so much great content, thank you. SEO felt so scary and unknown, but you make this digestible and I'm so thankful I now have actionable steps to take today.”

We had so many more people that were impressed with that training and it is not boring at all. I'll leave the link below this video and in the show notes so you can grab lifetime access to that training. But today we're gonna talk about off page SEO. So that training was all about on-page SEO. Today we're gonna talk about off page SEO with Farzad and how you can build up your credibility and increase your search engine ranking with another strategy.

And our guest is also sharing a time efficient method to booking podcasts in your space with AI, that doesn't seem like AI. It's a strategy he used to get on my podcast to pitch me and it worked. And I usually turn down a lot of applicants for bad pitches, even pitches that come from PR firms. So this one caught my eye and I was so excited to bring him on to talk more about this method to increase your rankings on Google and how to get on people's podcasts in a much easier and faster manner.

Farzad, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to continue this SEO convo that I've been having a lot with our audience and I'm really excited to dive into some off page SEO strategies to help our listeners.

So let's just talk a little bit about what off page SEO is so that the listeners have an idea of kind of what we're gonna be talking about today and the difference from what people normally think about when they think about SEO.

Sure thing. Absolutely. Yes. And you know, we, we had a brief chat before Krissy where you know, what most people think of SEO is essentially doing keyword research and you know, producing stuff in keywords in your blog post and you know, all the good old technical stuff like making sure that your website loads fast and it's responsive and all of that stuff is very important obviously. But nowadays that everybody's doing them then the search engines need another metric to be able to essentially go and rank these websites and the measure that they've found that essentially would do the best job at determining how credible these resources are is the popularity of the domain and that website. The more authoritative sources are talking about your site, the more emphasis Google other search engines put on I would say prioritizing you in the search results. And that's really how Google became Google back in the late nineties and there's a bunch of search engines and they came up with this algorithm that would take the level of popularity of a website into account, not just, you know, the number of keywords that was on the page because that's very easy, you know, cheatable, you can essentially get around the algorithm very quickly. So, the concept of off page here is to get more of those and get other people to talk about you. It turns out a little bit harder said than done, but that's why most people don't really want to think about it or do it because it's uncomfortable. But you know, we found that it's a necessity, especially in more competitive niches.

Yeah, I think it's more fun to be honest. Like literally before recording this episode, I just had a three and a half hour meeting with Claire, my business partner and our project manager, and we were diving into on page SEO and like trying like what are our keywords? Are we doing a good job? What do we need to be focusing on? What's not? And like seriously, my brain wanted to explode, whereas when we’ll dive into some of these off page SEO strategies here, 'cause I already, I already know what we're gonna be talking about, I get excited about those things. Right. And you said like, oh, it could be uncomfortable.

For most people.

Yeah, for a lot of people, right. But like I've, and, and yes, in the beginning I think, you know, it was uncomfortable and again, you'll know what we're talking about here in just a minute, but I personally just feel like the off page SEO is a lot more fun. Right. So I'm excited to kind of dive into what some of those strategies are and how people can leverage them to build up their ranking for Google.

Absolutely. Now I'm with you. I mean the fact that it makes people uncomfortable is not that it's difficult to do per se, it's just that it's not as clean cut as on page stuff because you can always open up a Google Doc, start typing some words and bam, you get a blog post, right? You put in X amount of time, you get X amount of results. And that's something that's very easy to do, but when it comes to off page stuff, you're building relationships with people going out and talking to people that don't know you. And so, it requires a bit of experimentation to figure out what works well for you and your niche and the amount of hours you put in doesn't always equate to results.

Right.

As in getting actual links and, and mentions to your brand so that that's what makes people hesitant.

And a lot of SEO agencies don't wanna deal with it and they don't actually position it to the client that that's something that's important. Or the ones that do offer it as a service usually offload it to another agency to actually do the work because they just wanna plug in a keyword, write a blog post and bam, you're done. Right?

Right.

You have your deliverables ready. But the companies that do spend the time and focus on those off page tactics are the ones that are winning in the search results, as I mentioned, especially for more competitive niches. And it's not to say that you don't have to do the on-page stuff that's absolutely essential, but that to me is the foundation of the house, right? It, it's something that's required, you have to do it, but it's not, it's not a house, it is a part of the puzzle. You gotta, you gotta put all the pieces together,

Right. Yeah. So the on pages are like the keywords, the image loading, you know, and if you guys attended the Access the Experts with Laura Jawad, like she covered so much of that, that was the on page. And then this off page, which actually, funny enough, y'all like inside scoop, this is the second time recording because I deleted the podcast episode. But I'm so glad like now we're doing it after we just had Beth Nydick come on our Access the Experts and talk about visibility.

And it was kind of this similar topic of getting in front of people, getting people to talk about you, to build up your credibility and your authority. So when we talk about off page SEO, those back links where people on their websites are referring back to your website or talking about you and if you attended that training, just talking more about getting on people's podcasts or doing guest blogging for them. And so then they're linking back to you in all of these ways and and building that authority in these publications. You know, how hard is it to be doing those, right?

Yeah, exactly. You know, at the beginning it feels kind of like throwing spaghetti on the wall because most of the time when I talk to folks, they've never done it before at scale. And so something that's the first time they're ever tapping into, and especially now with Google's updates, they're essentially adding these AI generated snippets at the top of all the search results. So you're gonna see a reduction in search traffic coming through the traditional blue links. So now the question is how do you get up in those AI search results because they only summarize, you know, essentially the content from the top three or top five essentially pages. And so then those are the ones that are essentially gonna get majority of the clicks. So what we want to do essentially is to get ourselves up there and tell Google that hey, not only do we have good content on our website, but we are also a credible resource because these X, Y, Z websites are talking about us. And a lot of the times these AI generated snippets are essentially consolidating data from multiple sources. So it's no longer enough for your website to get up into search results. Now you also have to make sure your product, your service is mentioned on multiple websites that are talking about, hey, what are some of the best X for X?

So essentially getting yourself on multiple websites beyond the fact that it helps your website get up into search load, but also helps these AI models to get trained on their data and be able to refer and recommend your service or product to people that are searching for. So to me it seems like, again, it's a black box and we don't know exactly how it's gonna play out, but to me it seems like it's becoming more imperative and it's no longer enough to just go through the traditional flow of keyword research, writing blog posts, creating landing pages, rinse and repeat.

Yeah. So what, so with this kind of coming up in the ranks of being almost just as important as, you know, the on page, the keywords and all of that, what are some of the challenges that you see for small business owners, entrepreneurs, coaches, course creators to be able to accomplish this?

Right. So the challenge is, as I mentioned, it's more of a matter of experimentation at the beginning. So you don't really know what strategy is gonna work well for you in your brand. And it varies widely based on industry.

Like if you're a coach, the type of average to do and strategies utilized for off page is very different from a SaaS company or it's very different from an e-commerce brand, right? Or if you're an agency providing a service, the type of outreach you do is very different from each other. So kind of understanding what type of tactics work well for you in your brand and there's no single silver bullets, not a step-by-step thing that works for all businesses and makes it a bit more challenging and something that requires a bit of education to figure out. But at the end of the day, the concept is simple. You should just get people to talk about you, not just having the work on your website, that's required, but now you also have to put that website out there and get other people to talk about it.

I mean it's, to me, it sounds intuitive but when it comes to when you break down the percentage of your resources that you spend, what percentage of resources you spend actually building on your site and what percentage you actually spend on promoting, right? And it's usually the, a very small percentage of effort goes into promotion.

So what we did at our parent company, is that we flipped it on its head. We spent 20% of our resources on creation of content and 80% four times the amount goes into promotion. And that's how it's been. We've been growing our traffic year over year and beating all the other companies because they don't do that. You know, they usually flip it on its head.

So if at companies like, hey, I'm a small business, I'm a one man show, I don't have time or resources to spend that much time on promotion, my response to that is always, it's not a matter of how much resources you have, it's a matter of how you, how you essentially divide your resources. If you don't have much time to, you know, to promote your content after you create four blog posts in a week, don't produce that much content.

Right, right.

For that one blog post, promote it, get some links to it and then move on to the next.

Right. Ooh, I love that tip. Yeah, that's such a great tip. And that's something that Beth talked about on this training in terms of getting in front of people and she's like, oh it just kills me when I see someone release a podcast and then they do one post about it or they do a post in their one story, you know about it, where it's gonna disappear. And she's like, you have got to promote these things.

And that's something that we're diving into and I 100% agree with that in terms of, you know, content creation is important and it only goes so far, right? Because if no one's seeing it and it's not getting out there, then no one really still knows that you exist. And so when we were heavy in content creation and fine tuning our program and like doing a couple other things over the last year, it was like growth wasn't as, you know, it wasn't going up as much as we had hoped. And then when we kind of shifted and are like, okay, this year we're gonna focus, like we're not creating anything new, like let's just focus on promoting what we have. And we've already started to see an increase in that. So I'm just like gonna vouch for that 100%.

And I love that tip, just going back to if you don't have time to do one blog post a week or one podcast a week or one YouTube video a week, whatever your strategy is for your business and promote them all effectively, bring it down and do one or two and then increase your promotion efforts. I love that tip. Y'all remember that? Write that down, star, bookmark it in your brain 'cause I think that's just really genius and will decrease even the load, like the workload on the front end part of it.

Can you share some ideas for, I mean I know we'll kind of get into Respona a bit and how we can leverage Respona to help us in this method, but you know, kind of what do you wanna share about making this process easier for promotion?

Yeah, so I could go through a few examples and by the way, I don't recommend folks just jump straight into a software like Respona and just expect it to kind of solve all the problems. Where our platform comes into place that we just save you time, help you scale it and kind of pour gasoline on a fire. But if you've never done outreach before in your past, you don't have, you don't need all these fancy tools. So you can do it all manually and it's gonna take a while and that's fine. I mean that's why we built these tools to help resolve that. But if you've never done it,

you don't have a proof of concept, then send one email today, you know, get the ball rolling. You don't need to have a process built out before you actually start getting some, some emails out the door. So when it comes to the tactics and the strategy, as I mentioned, it varies widely based on the industry you are in.

But just to kind of give you some examples, let's say if you are in eCommerce store, right? And you want to promote your product and let's say you have this new CBD gummy that you put together with your team, okay, well you can't really promote CBD products on Facebook ads and all these other channels. So what do you do? Well as a consumer, first thing I'd do, if I'm looking for a CBD gummy, I don't take them. But if I were to do some research, what was the first thing you do Krissy, like when it comes to looking up a new product?

I would be typing in, you know, best CBD gummy or best CBD products.

Exactly, yeah. And a lot of those brands that show up are not CBD brands they are, you know, articles on other publications that have been published around these topics. Well why aren't you reaching out to them and say, Hey, let me send you a free pack on the house for you to try. And if you liked it, it would be great if you can mention us and no pressure if you didn't. And I would love to invite you to my affiliate program and each referral you to send us, we get you a cut of the commission. So not only you are driving bottom of the funnel traffic to your product from articles that are already ranking on Google, but you're now also getting vouchers, these little votes of popularity to your website to say it also helps your landing pages to show up in more longer tail keywords over time.

So that's one example. Now if you are for example, a coach or you don't have a product that you sell necessarily, okay, why don't you go on as a guest on podcasts, like on Krissy’s podcast. So you're going and talking about the topic that you're an expert in and talking about your experience, that's doing a bunch of things at the same time.

One, you're building great relationships with other smart people in the industry like Krissy. Two, you are getting links to your sites because guess what? You gotta repurpose these episodes, put 'em on your website. So Google looks at it and is like, okay, well if Krissy's interviewed them and it's mentioning them, that's a vote to popularity. So it helps your content to start showing up more.

And also at the same time, just free advertising to a niche audience. You're essentially getting an hour or 30 minutes in this case of time talking to another person's audience. And at the same time you're helping that person create a new piece of content, right? So it's all of these tactics that we talk about are mutually beneficial, that you're essentially building partnerships with people and it has to go both ways. You can't just ask people to do something for you, which is, believe it or not, again, sounds very intuitive, but most people mess it up and they just reach out to people and say, Hey, can you do this for me? Well, why?

Right. It's Like that they're getting asked to do a million things all time.

Exactly. Yeah. And you know, you're not the first person to email that person that day. So, you know, having these incentives, putting the focal point of the email around the incentive you can offer them usually goes a long way. I mean, I can talk more and more about different types of tactics and strategies and we can dig a little deeper but I know we want to keep this short and sweet, but I'd like to direct folks. So on our website we actually have a library of these templates that we have step-by-step instructions. So folks wanna learn more, it's ungated, it's open to the public and it's videos. So you could just go to respona.com/templates and we have these examples of the type of tactics you can do and you can implement 'em all manually without any software.

And then once you hit a point that you're like, Hey, this is going great, getting some proof of concept, now I want to scale it 10 x, you can't do that manually. So then it would probably make sense to start looking into some tools to help you scale.

Love that. And so we'll put the link for that in the description in this YouTube video. Or if you're listening on the podcast, you can click on the show notes and get access with that link and then like, hello, if you didn't notice y'all like that is the perfect prime example of now Respona’s website will be on my website. Right? And so this is a perfect example of, you know, me vouching for Respona and I just think, I do think the platform is really, really cool and like Farzad said, that you don't need to have, you know, pay to use something like this getting started. You can use these skills and tactics of reaching out personally to people to share how you can add value and maybe get on their podcast or a guest blog or things like that.

But again, when you wanna ramp it up, then using a platform like that. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, that you were using Respona to get on my podcast, yes?

Yes ma'am. Yes, absolutely. And again, it's always weird to bring it up because you know, it doesn't happen very often where, you know, the host hears that, oh, you actually use your own software to land an interview.

I love it, this is why I love it because it worked.

Proof is in the pudding, right?

It worked, right? Like, okay, y'all, I've talked about this and I'll link the old podcast episode where I talked about bad pitches and like what you need to stop doing when you're pitching to be on podcasts.

And I get bad pitches from people who are like PR agencies who someone has hired them to pitch to be on the podcast and it's impersonal and it doesn't connect and it feels like it's just, ugh. But when I got the email from, you know, not you, right? And whoever, and I know that there's like, the platform does a lot of the searching and then there is a human behind it, like, you know, fine tuning the message and whatnot. So there is human connection there some, but a lot of it is AI from what I understand in the beginning and we can dive into that. But I got this message and it didn't feel ick, it didn't feel spammy, it didn't feel like whoever was reaching out didn't know me at all.

It was actually quite tailored to me to what I talk about, what I teach about sharing, you know, that they knew someone who could add value and hey, could I introduce you? And I'm like, yeah. Like, okay, that sounds great. Like it wasn't a typical pitch, like so and so would be great on your podcast episode and this is what they talk about. And I'm like, that's, that's not really even what my podcast is about. Right? But no thank you. Right? So I just love, like it felt, it felt personal, it felt like there was some connection there and then it was just like, you know, kind of casual, but like, Hey, can I make this connection?

And I was like, yeah, that'd be great. And then we connected and, and I was like, and I love this because it, it did get me to take that next step forward and meeting with you and talking with you and wanting to bring you on the podcast. So I think the strategy and the techniques that Respona uses, they worked on me. And you know, there's a lot of people that I turned down on the podcast just because of these reasons.

So I'm gonna say yeah, it's a hundred percent. But I mean I was impressed by what it did. Now I didn't, didn't know the ins and outs of the backend, right, like I'm on the front end getting the message from what it does kind of at a high scale, but on the backend, how is it helping me as a busy entrepreneur save time by getting connected with more people to be able to be on their podcasts or guest blog or things like that so that I can create more authority and get credibility from other people when I have limited time, right… like that's the whole thing is like, you gotta find all these podcasts to be on. You've got research to them, you have to listen to them again if you want that connection. So they don't think like, oh they've clearly never listened to the podcast before. Right? You're like, gosh, now I have to spend hours and days just kind of researching different places I wanna be and show up and all of that to connect. So can you share with us a little bit more about how it kind of works behind the scenes? Just 'cause I'm, I'm even more curious.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the way the system works, so first of all we try to keep the human elements still human. That's unfortunately something that's kind of getting a little bit as, as you mentioned, icky. Because now with these AI tools, especially these models getting so good at imitating humans that we sort of lost our personalized touch. So, the way we always our philosophy is that the person sending email actually is a real person within our team. So it's actually Yvonne or Lad, one of my marketing team members who probably reached out to you. Yeah, they're real humans. They have their own real email. As the business email is connected to Respona.

What Respona does is automating the dirty work, the research and the getting the contacts and, and then also it, it goes and listens to the episode of the podcast and, and pulls the transcript, it reads it, reviews it, and it helps you personalize the pitches so that the person can actually spend the time instead of blasting emails out to actually make sure that this is the type of podcast that I can add value and this is the type of host that, you know, would like having a guest on their podcast. Not all podcasts have interview style episodes, right?

So what I'm trying to say is that essentially by taking that dirty work out, the only part that a human plays in this equation is the actual human relationship. So, because a lot of the times humans spend all their times on, okay, let's go on iTunes, find a podcast, let's go find your email, and then let's go open up our Gmail, let's go think of a template to write them and personalize. By the time you get there, you're ready to just plug in a template and just get it out. So you think that you've done a lot of work, but from a recipient perspective it just feels like, like a generic email that they, that I'm sure you get on a daily basis. So essentially by automating the dirty work that allows the user, the customer to actually build this relationship. So you can spend the majority of your time actually communicating with the other person after they've shown some interest. So that that part is really key. And also at the same time, making sure that the system would find you new opportunities that would be actually relevant. And that's one of the things that's usually very time consuming. The nice thing about computers is that it doesn't make any difference for them to go look through three and a half million podcasts that are in the world, right? Or look through three podcasts that they look up on your Apple Podcasts. So they have access to the entirety of podcasts that exist in the world and they have access to all of the episodes that have been published so they can keep an eye out and then make sure that they find interviews opportunities that would be relevant and that would essentially help the user or the customer connect with relevant podcasts that they can add value.

Because at the end of the day, it's a mutually beneficial collaboration. Podcast hosts are always on the lookout for a good guest to come on this show. So essentially we're building that link in a way that hey, let's, let's make sure we match a good guest with a good host, you know. If you host me on a keto diet podcast, like I have nothing to add value right. To the audience. So, making sure they're relevant and also implied to that, to that host that, hey, we've done our research. It's not a template generic email, we're just sending out to everyone. So yeah, that's something that the system kind of helps put together to kind of prevent some of these mistakes from happening.

Yeah. And I love that and I like, you know, there's that human element kind of before it goes out and to, to continue that human relationship because I do think that's really important in a world that's like turning towards AI and also let's lean into AI and use it to jumpstart or kind of like you said, do the dirty work. Do the things that are really time consuming to whittle it down, right? So like I listen to a handful of podcasts on a regular basis, but I'm not listening to a hundred. And so it's like I might have a few that I'm like, Ooh, I'd really like to be on that podcast 'cause I listen to it, I know my audience is listening, but I'm sure there's many others that would find value from what I have to teach on. They'd have my ideal audience there and, but I just don't know about them. So like, yes, thinking about, oh my gosh, sitting down trying to find podcasts that are about this topic and listening to all these episodes and trying to figure out is my audience listening to these as well, you know, super time consuming. So if it can just like kind, like you called it dirty work, the time consuming work for me and say like, like we've scanned all these, we've listened to transcripts, like we really think that these three podcasts are gonna be great for you. And then I can be like, okay, oh great, I can take over now and know that my efforts that I'm putting in to build that human connection and relationship and to pitch, you know, quote pitch to be on the podcast is going to probably go further than just like you said, right? Like doing a blanket copy and paste to like a bunch of people and then it feels like it's spammy. So, you know, I think that AI in this respect is just, you know, valuable in this, in this scenario. But, but I like the human connection too and hey, it worked, it worked on me. But I love that you also have like some of the templates to use in, in terms of how you're wording things and that people can access that. Again, like you said, if you're in the beginning stages and you're maybe not ready to dive into invest in a platform that's gonna just like speed this up for you and you wanna just get your feet wet and start exploring it and hopefully you've been attending the Access the Experts. So this has been kind of like a topic that's been building and you've taken some of Beth’s examples on terms of how to get in front of people or ideas and then you can take these templates from Respona and use them to your advantage and get some experience and then when you're ready to throw that gasoline on the fire you jump in.

So I love it. Is there anything else that you would like to share with the audience that you think, gosh, I really can't leave until they know this.

Right. So, you know, the one thing I'd like to share first, like, there's two things actually. One is that the couple examples we talked about are, are a couple out of a gazillion different ways that could do outreach. So that's why I recommended folks to take a look at this template. But not only that, but do your own research and, and understand, you know what, there are so many new creative ways people use our system that I, I learn from them on a daily basis because we, we kind of are the knife company and our customers are the shafts, right? So they make all kinds of food with that knife. So kind of getting your, your feet wet as you kind of progress through different types of tactics that obviously people are in different industries, different kinds of strengths work well for them, you kind of come across different ways in how you can continue doing an outreach. So it's not just going as a guest on podcasts or just listing. Those are just two examples.

Two is taking action because we can spend our whole day just learning about all these techniques and we're like, yeah, that sounds good. No, just pull up your Gmail, just send one email and it's most likely it's gonna be terrible, it's not gonna be great. And that's fine. Your first few times you launch campaigns you're sending them not gonna be your greatest hits. But then the goal is you kind of do this on a consistent basis and you adjust and iterate over time to create a repeatable process that can scale. So kind of taking that action and not just, you know, learning about it on podcasts and reading blog posts and doing more research. No, you kind of learn these type of tactics on the job and unless you actually do 'em, you don't really get a full scope of understanding of exactly how it works.

Yeah, definitely. I always say with action comes clarity. So if you don't take that action, like how can you get clear on things? How can you get better at things without taking that action? So yeah, you'll learn very quickly like, oh, okay, maybe that wasn't the right thing to say. Or like, oh, that landed really well and they were like so excited. Let me dive more into this. So I think those are both great tips and I'm gonna, you know, just drive that home. So all of you listening out there, you know, pull out your calendar, you know, if you're driving, wait till you stop, but pull out your calendar and block off 30 minutes, right? Like, or 15 minutes rather, right? To like pull up your email, like you said, find someone who you'd like to connect with and offer value to their community and just get the conversation started. I think that's a great place to start.

Sounds like a plan.

Yeah, well this has been amazing. It's been incredible. Again, we have the links below this video and in the show notes for you to get access to those templates. Farzad, this has been great and I just appreciate your patience with me when I'm can imagine on the other end when I was like, so can we re record that episode because I deleted it.

No problem.

You're so amazing.

It’s my pleasure.

I’m so blessed to have you be so patient with me.

Of course.

And this has has been great. I'm so glad we could bring this message and information to the audience. So thank you.

It's my pleasure. I enjoyed our conversation the first time and I enjoyed it even more the second time.

So I think we hit some other really great points in this one.

Right. I don't remember what we talked about the first time, so it might have been a blessing to, to rerecord and actually have more time to sleep on it.

Yeah, no, it was great and, and I was, you know, sharing on my social media when it happened and I was like, y'all like, oh my gosh, that moment when you delete an interview and have to send that embarrassing email and everyone was so positive commenting back and was like, the next time will be the best. Like it'll be great. And I was just like, I hope you're right.

And they were for sure right. So thank you everyone who listens and follows on social and was giving me that encouraging support because hey, we're human things happen and just, you know, kind of same tone of this conversation, it's like mistakes happen but you do it bad the first time and you get better and, and it's okay. No one's, you know, no one's dying over spilled milk. We're all good.

That's right.

We're all good. Well, this has been great. Again, y'all use the links below this video and in the show notes and we will catch up again soon.