Ep 222: What SEO Strategy To Use For Flipping Websites with Rad Paluszak

The market for website flipping is highly competitive, with many experienced investors and entrepreneurs vying for the same opportunities. This can make it difficult for newcomers to break into the industry and make money.

That’s where an SEO strategy comes in handy. It can increase website visibility, improve user experience, lower marketing costs, and increase website valuation—all of which are crucial for successful website flipping.

In this special episode, Rad Paluszak joins me today and discusses creating an SEO strategy to use for flipping websites.

Rad Paluszak is a web developer and software architect with 20 years of experience. He has been a technical mastermind in the SEO industry since 2010. Rad helped Matt Diggity run his SEO agency The Search Initiative and Matthew Woodward with Search Logistics. He recently founded Husky Hamster, an outreach link-building company, and his SEO Agency Non.Agency. Rad’s specializations include international and technical SEO, machine learning, and understanding, as well as looking at SEO from business and management perspectives.

During our discussion, we covered the topic of how Google uses entities to organize websites, their rankings, and their value. How can you understand SEO in the easiest way possible by focusing on just the main 3 elements of SEO? What helpful content looks like, and what information do you need to find out about your competitors to outrank them?

We also discussed what is tech SEO and why you should focus on resolving a few key tech SEO fixes as a launch pad to growing the site. And what you should and SHOULD not do after you’ve bought a site?

Last but not least, we talked about my GOB course that Rad took and what he learned from it.

Catch this valuable episode and learn SEO strategies that can make your website flipping venture a success!

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Episode Highlights

02:30 What are the 3 main things in SEO?

10:01 What is helpful content?

23:36 Content or backlinks—which is more valuable?

28:20 Technical aspects of SEO

32:40 Tech Order

43:57 Know your website!

48:57 Best SEO tools

Courses & Training

Courses & Training

Key Takeaways

To create an effective SEO strategy, you need to focus on 3 main things: content, links, and technical aspects. Your website must have high-quality and relevant content that satisfies user intent, authoritative links from other websites, and a technically optimized website structure, page speed, and mobile-friendliness. These three components work together to improve your search engine rankings and increase your website’s visibility.

In SEO, links are important because search engines use them to assess a website’s authority and relevance. If your website receives high-quality links from trustworthy and reputable websites, search engines will see them as valuable, which can improve your search engine rankings. Internal links within your website can also help search engines understand which pages are the most important.

Addressing technical SEO issues often involves making changes to the website’s code, structure, or server configuration. Once these changes are made, they are typically permanent and do not require further attention unless there are new issues or changes to the website.

About The Guest

Rad Paluszak is a web developer and software architect with 20 years of experience. He has been a technical mastermind in the SEO industry since 2010. Rad helped Matt Diggity run his SEO agency The Search Initiative and Matthew Woodward with Search Logistics.

He recently founded Husky Hamster, an outreach link-building company, and his SEO Agency Non.Agency. Rad’s specializations include international and technical SEO, machine learning, and understanding, as well as looking at SEO from business and management perspectives.

Connect with Rad Paluszak

Transcription:

Most people who buy an online business destroy that business within the first year and that’s because they don’t know what SEO strategy to actually implement and most importantly when. Hi, I am Jaryd Krause and I am the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, and today I am speaking with Rad Paluszak who is a web developer and software architect with 20 years experience. He has been a technical master mind in SEO industry since 2010. Rad helped Matt Diggity run his SEO ad agency in his The Search initiative and Mathew Woodward with Search Logistics. Rad had recently founded The Husky Hamster, an outreach link building company which I use and he also has SEO agency, Non.Agency. Now, Rad’s specialization includes international and technical SEO machine learning and understanding as well as looking at SEO from a business and management’s perspective.

Now in this podcast episode, Rad and I talk about how Google uses entities to organize websites, their rankings and value them in different ways. He breaks them down in a very detailed manner. We also talk about how to understand SEO the easy way, easiest way possible by focusing on just main three elements for SEO that we mention in this podcast episode. We also talk about what the helpful content update looks like and what helpful content actually is. What information you need to find out about your competitors to outrank them?

We also talk about what is tech SEO and why you should focus on resolving a few key tech SEO fixes as a launch pad to grow in a site that you just bought. We also talk about what we should and should not do after you bought a site then go on to talk about my growing online businesses cost that Rad did that people also do within the community after they bought their online business. What he actually learned from it and so much more. We did talk about sites you actually going to go away and buy in this podcast episode.

So if you are looking to buy a site make sure you don’t do this the hard way and make it super simple by getting my framework at www.buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources this framework has helped people save millions of dollars and make millions of dollars and it takes the guess work out of buying a business. Now go away and check that out and there are other resources on my page as well. Now let’s dive into the podcast episode.

Do you have a website that you might want to sell either now or in the future, we have a hungry list of cashed up and trained up buyers that want to buy your content website? If you have a website making up to $300 a month and you want to sell it, head to www.buyingonlinebusinesses.co/sellyourbusiness or email us at; [email protected] because we would likely have a buyer. Details are in the description.

Jaryd Krause:

Rad welcome back.

Rad Paluszak:

Hello. Glad to be back.

Jaryd Krause:

I have gotten some really good feedback from the links that you shared in the last podcast episode that I have shared with some people in our community. People are excited and using them and excited for the path and they have been asking me questions, wanted me to lay out a little bit more context as well so it’s really good and I am excited to dive into this one today. I get just for the listeners Rad has access to now growing online businesses course.

So we in the Buying Online Businesses community we have Buying Online Businesses course where a lot of people come forward to learn how to buy a business. I also created a course many years ago I have been adding to it as well on how to grow the business once you have purchased it and Rad’s gone through it and has got talking points based off that course and based off the SEO knowledge and may be you are either going to debunk some of the things that I have mentioned or keeping my fingers crossed confirm and reaffirm some of the things that I have mentioned throughout that course as well. I wanted to start off by asking you about SEO right?

You have been doing SEO for a long time, people know that now from the introduction that I have done for you, it’s really easy for people to get confused with SEO. Because I have listened to multiple podcast and YouTube videos, read blog posts *hint* *hint* *nudge* *nudge* we are going to put one out soon and will be linked in the show notes as well. We will talk about that shortly Rad. Read things and get confused and try a million different things and they get very very technical, talk to me about that how can people ease their mind when it comes to SEO and how can we simplify and understand I guess the 80 20 I guess?

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah, I mean absolutely and I feel sorry for folks who are just trying out for SEO or buying their first website and then they suddenly have to go for this absolutely. Rush course of you know everything to deal with digital marketing and SEO that’s terrible. I don’t know if it was better, I was just starting out or worse for myself, but all these materials that area available now they weren’t then so there was a lot of trial and error and practical stuff that I had to just go for and figure out myself and I think that saved me on one hand from following some advice that might not have been the best for me at the time.

On the other hand, that just helped to gain that practical knowledge, experience and feel of digital marketing SEO but something I would definitely say to someone who is just starting out or someone who has been playing around with digital marketing SEO let’s say up to a year more or less experience that even though we tend to overcomplicate things, in essence SEO is just three main things and I know its going to sound like something every one is saying but it really is just those three main things; its content, links and technical stuff. And all of these three things have their upside and downside so let’s go for them one by one.

When it comes to content, content is great because you have full control of your content on your website so you can access it, you change it, you can go through it, you have full access to it and it’s under your control. However, the difficulty with that is especially if you have a content heavy website or full content website is you are talking 200-300 blog posts so that is a lot of content to go through touch wood.

Jaryd Krause:

That’s a lot of content to go through to control, to update and maintain.

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah exactly. Your site is affected with something like helpful content update that Google has been realizing more and more recently. First of all this update affects the entire site as a whole, we say it is affecting at a site wide level and secondly google said just barely today when we are recording at least Gary Illyes said something that this update penalizes you but even though you may have fixed what this update has penalized you for, this update or algorithm is going to wait to give your site a trial period or like a grace period in case you are going to miss the same thing up again.

How they explained it is they look at the site, the site did something dodgy, and may be it was a mistake or may be it wasn’t so what if it penalized it and the site fixed it and then the site does it again so it would be all the time cat and mouse playing catch up or something, google with the web master and getting penalized reverting, getting penalized and reverting so what google is doing it will penalize you for a longer period of time even after you fixed it. So this is pretty bad and as we know at least most of the SEOs will agree with me and are suspecting this update is mainly focusing on your content so obviously you are not only talking about a lot of stuff to go through on your own website and even though you did that and fixed everything, you may still not have recovered because is just testing you because they can.

Jaryd Krause:

I wanted to touch on that quickly because a lot of SEOs or want to be SEOs do is they do try to play a cat and mouse game and they try to play the game against google and try and find a shortcut and do it in a cheaper and easier way and have it not detected by google. The google is just going to get smarter and smarter and that protecting it so people are really wasting their time and energy not doing what google is going to want for the long term and have some ideologies around what is going to be the best way to use and best for google long term anyway rather than play that cat and mouse game.

And I would also like to just expand a bit more on content because at the time of recording this podcast episode and the update happening or us recording and this podcast being released there is being a bit of time between the latest update which is very fresh for us. But most people don’t know what is helpful content and what does it look like and what is helpful? It’s easy to think that it needs to be valuable content but are there certain things within that content that can make it helpful or make it more helpful?

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Overall, it’s a little bit of difficult one as well because to figure out what is helpful in the helpful content or check what does helpful mean in the helpful content and you have to actually look at a few things that google was doing recently, what they are saying but at the same time and this is maybe a little opportunity for me to kick out a little bit understand how the algorithm works just so it might be the least of your worries later. I will start with the way that the algorithm works. So Google algorithm works or looks at the world how it understands everything in terms of entities and connections between those entities and the thing is these entities can be pretty much anything. So an entity could be Jaryd Krause or it could be Rad Paluszak and that’s one example but an entity can be also much bigger like a whole website like WebMD this is one big entity, humongous even that contains a lot of other entities within itself or things might be very little like an entity that is included in the content so your page is one entity that talks about how to buy business and it includes references to some other entities.

Best visualize it, I am a very visual person and for me the easiest way to visualize all of it is to look at the tree, if you look at the upper branches of the tree they create a very complex system overall and just as complex system is created in the roots but essentially it’s just a visualization how everything connects with each other but when you talk about the tree, you also have to have connections between the leaves of the tree to actually represent how google looks at the things and since I am talking about leaves and connections between them, entities are just one thing when it comes to google’s understanding because obviously google tries to build an entity around everything else. But at the same time other than entities, what’s outside is just as important or even a little bit more important are those connections between the entities. So for example your name might be related to online marketing but someone who is a doctor will not be related to digital marketing obviously and by the way as you can see by the sentence that entities could not just be person or a thing or an object but also a branch or a niche like digital marketing for instance.

All of that gets really complicated and in order to represent it easier within the algorithm Google looks at everything as it’s a factor because a factor you can mathematically represent, everything is a factor and then that factor being an entity contains other factors and those are sub entities or atleast related to that factor. Now when it comes to the content and just bear in mind all those things about how google algorithm looks at everything in terms of entities and connections and stuff, there are a couple of things to maybe not exactly tell you what google will treat as valuable but definitely it will give you a very strong and actionable hint in that direction. When we are talking about a piece of content lets say we consider a content about how to buy a business, you are a new website in the niche and you want to create this piece of content and obviously you want this to be basically the best piece of content about that in the entire internet so what would you do is go and look at your competitors because this is like the most obvious thing and then you would probably jot down what those competitors are talking about, the outline that is repeatable among the competitors and you would include all these graphs if they have them and then the tables and the lists and what not.

So all of the things that the competitors are doing as well and then you would think to yourself because when you look at the competitors who are already promoted by google you can think that yes this is basically google exactly telling me what its looking for on the website if its promoting those websites. But then you would probably discover I don’t know may be more than half of what google is looking for because it’s like looking at something taken out of context, you have that little beautiful thing in the middle that piece of content, that outline that you can now create and stuff but you don’t know what this content is connected with. So you are seeing one entity you are not seeing all the connections and all the supporting entities. And now the easiest to discover that is to look at competitors websites ideally without a tool so you will have to do it manually and find external links that are pointing at these content because these are kind of like votes of confidence from the internet.

Jaryd Krause:

Pointing to that piece of content.

Rad Paluszak:

Yep, so these are external voices of confidence that point at this content but then you would also look at internal links within the website of your competitor that the other pages within the site that are linking to that page about buying businesses. And this is important because obviously google doesn’t look at the stand alone piece of content, usually doesn’t look at standalone piece of content. Google looks at this piece of content in the neighborhood of other content and this is what I said about external links. This is external neighborhoods so everyone pointing at that, which gives you authority and let’s say the closest neighborhoods which are internal links, would also be pages that as we understand supporting that content semantically.

So there is a term that we use that is called semantic clustering and then what it means is that it basically helps one core piece of content and then a lot of other pages that are around this topic link and point at that piece of content but unfortunately for you, you being this new site who wants to create an article about buying businesses would also need to create those other piece of content to support that one. And now to go back really quickly to what I was saying about those entities and connections, I think through all of that now you can see how these things connect with each other those entities on one hand, Google isn’t looking at one individual it is looking at multidimensional vector space or entity space.

You have to when you want to create something that is of unique value and high quality you sort of need to recreate all of these things and now this is a little bit of a buffer may be, once you have done all of that I have just said you will be let’s just say as good as your competitor but it doesn’t guarantee that you are going to rank better than them. So what to do to outrank them? The easiest thing to say is to find things that those competitors aren’t talking about. So may be try to go out of the internet and develop something or elaborate on something no one is talking about but it’s clearly connected with buying business.

Jaryd Krause:

The context on a different variant of the subject I guess.

Rad Paluszak:

Yes, for example that’s one thing but now when we say content I think like probably the vast majority of us think text but really you can actually expand on the content and make it much, much better also by including some videos, including unique graphics or graphs if you did some research you can add voice to that content and all these little things will also essentially add up and compliment your written content which is just text and just to give you an example this new term in the SEO world; EEAT and I have been doing some research around how to rank for what is EEAT in Google top 10.

I have noticed that 8/10 sites that are currently ranking for what is EAT they have like 2000-3000 words of content but there is one outlier that is striking me really weird that one page is just 800 words of content and that page ranks at 5 so obviously I had to dig into it and try to understand what’s so special about this Page. Has it got like supporting pages around it? What is with it? And as soon as I saw it because that page not only explains the topic but it embeds like 20 videos of that blogger mainly that also talk about that topic, it includes embedded presentation of that blogger about EAT and you can look it up the page is by Lily Ray who is a very prominent figure in SEO world.

Jaryd Krause:

She has been on the podcast.

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah and she talks a lot about EAT and obviously her page is slightly different and delivers quality and value in different way through videos and presentations. So it doesn’t need that much content on the page but this one let’s say side note to that also since she is talking about EAT so much, Google also connects her entity, her persona with EAT essentially so this gives her a big boost in the searches also. So this little bit of digging mainly to look at your competitors and making your content better than theirs.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah awesome so that’s helpful content is making it better and more valuable than our competitors and understanding how our competitors are doing it through different entities, and entities being interlinked in different ways from niche to the person, the identity of that person to the domain to the external links and internal links. I love it. That was a long explanation but it gave us a really good picture of how we can create content that is more helpful than our competitors and understand why our competitors may be outranking us based on these different levels of entities that are interlinked in different ways.

So that’s content we did go deep down the rabbit hole there and we talked about it in a technical aspect but at the end of the day it’s just under that content umbrella and you could go really down that rabbit hole about how to create better content but of course at the end of the day it’s just really good content. So that’s one facet or one element of SEO, what are the other two out of the three that you mentioned?

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah so second one would be definitely links and I am always split internally whether content is more important or is it links?

Jaryd Krause:

Can we have a bit of the argument on both sides? Can you share a bit may be two reasons why you are more content and two reasons why you are more into links?

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah, that’s a tough one.

Jaryd Krause:

May be that’s another episode in itself; content vs. links which is more valuable? May be we can go down the rabbit hole there?

Rad Paluszak:

Just very quickly so if you think about it without content you can’t rank usually there are some exceptions but content is like the fundamental on which the link building should be built on overall. If you don’t have content you are basically wasting your links because even if they point at your page we cannot gain the relevancy signals because it doesn’t have anything to draw those relevancy signals from if there is no content.

Now on the other hand I have seen sites throughout the year and recently I think I am going to be seeing those sites or similar cases in the future too where the content hasn’t changed for a long period of time and the ranking haven’t changed for a long period of time but then as soon as you push it with the help of your links, boom it starts ranking in top 10 for example if it was just hanging on the second or third page. Sometimes the content is just not enough of what you need so the most diplomatic thing to say is you just need both. Just wanted to say when it comes to links, links are this weird element where they are relatively easy to gain because you have many link building companies like e.g. husky hamster, little product placement here.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah I will put a link in show notes for link building as well. It is an affiliate link but check it out.

Rad Paluszak:

So links are relatively easy to get but the problem with them is you usually have little control of what’s happening with that link especially if you are doing decent outreach which is one of the methods that google isn’t that much against overall. So you are placing links over external websites and then someone who owns that website can take it off or they can switch off the website or they can delete the article and you are losing that link.

Jaryd Krause:

That site gets hit by an algorithm update and your link is non valuable anymore.

Rad Paluszak:

If the site over does sharing links with other sites let’s say it might even turn toxic in some cases.

Jaryd Krause:

So guys you need to be very careful of the links you do get to make sure they are going to be good links for a long period of time and I am sure when you do link building, if you are to do it yourself you would need to understand how to vet and how to do due diligence on each site that you are going to gain a link from before you do outreach too. So you are only outreaching to the right sites. Of course link outreach is a big time suck, I don’t recommend people to do link building themselves and usually recommend people to go and check a few different agencies.

Hence why I don’t do it myself either and use you guys. So you have got content you have full control, you have got links easy relatively easy to gain but you have got somewhat control on the links you gain but got no control after you gain that link. And then what’s the third element of SEO? So guys we have three elements of SEO, we don’t want to make it too confusing, we are diving into context within each one but there is three main things that I guess you need to focus on; contents, links what’s the third?

Rad Paluszak:

Last one is technical stuff or technical aspects of the site. So with this one I grew up being a web developer and that is by far my favorite one although its relatively the most difficult one to grasp because it has so many weird nuances and so many weird different technologies that you sometimes have to know a gist of them to actually properly audit everything. Now that’s on the bad side but on the good side is the technical stuff in most cases. So there are two good things about it in most cases it’s a one off job because if you fix technical issues once very rarely I would say based on my experience these things would come back. I mean of course I am assuming that you fix them in a proper way and didn’t just put a little leaf over them or chuck them under the carpet.

Jaryd Krause:

As long as you aren’t trying to play games against Google still.

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah and by the way I read recently on Linkdin that everyone nowadays is talking about short cuts but essentially there are no shortcuts because 99.9% of the time you just got to do things. I mean this obviously applies all aspects of SEO but especially to the technical where you just want to get it over with, just get done and pretty much forget about it. You don’t want to use any weird shortcuts and another good thing about technical stuff that although one that still means that SEO job is to take care of them but overall Google can forgive you a lot when it comes to technical stuff.

Google algorithm has been getting better and better at understanding some mistakes that are reoccurring on the internet and obviously Google has a lot of data they can figure out a lot of common mistakes that web masters or site owners make and Google algorithm is actually able to maybe not fix them for you but at least not take them into consideration against you. Now this isn’t to say that oh yeah off I go to take a nap now and forget about all the technical stuff because its still there and me being an SEO essentially my job is to make things as easy for Google as possible.

So even though Google is able to find some duplicate content or duplicate pages on your site, choose between them which it prefers you know our job as site owners SEOs would be actually to make that choice for Google because well Google is just a machine it’s an algorithm and it might get it wrong and might choice content that we don’t necessarily want it to choose and over relying on Google’s algorithm to do stuff for us. It usually means that we are trying to take a short cut and it’s better to just properly fix something and not worry about it ever again. So that’s the technical stuff.

Jaryd Krause:

A lot of time, we will talk about what to do once somebody has bought a site how to grow it, a lot of time what I like to tell people to do is first and foremost have a look at the technical aspect, what technical SEO issues they can get cleared up because that really creates a great platform for them to build on if there’s technical things to work on and to resolve. Right?

Issues with Google Search Console, I guess we will give it a bit of brief of few things that you can fix with technical SEO. I will mention a few and I will let you mention a few as well that I miss out. So we are talking about broken links, we are talking about main descriptions, titles, tags, h ones, we are talking about broken images, issues with Google Search Console, there is a long list but what are some other key ones that you would add to the list of things to be looking at when you are going to do a bit of a tech order.

Rad Paluszak:

Well usually I would say page speed but I want to make a little foot note here with the page speed, so this is actually based on mainly my experience but it happens that Google has actually confirmed it very recently at I think at popcorn in the end of February that if you are a small to medium business, page speed issues are very rarely effecting you in a negative way. They are there, users may experience slow down on your site but it’s not to say that its dragging you down, it’s just to say that you are at this level and you are not going further. Fixing page speed issues can in the long run enable you as the site grows obviously, page speed issues become more and more prominent and more and more important so it’s not to say that you should completely forget about them but just take a note of them if you can and you know how to measure their impact and then if you decide that okay it’s a quick fix but something that might potentially help me so then fix it because it gives you leverage.

Although if it’s something that is only there to satisfy a tool you are using to audit your site so it’s no longer coming up in red and especially if it’s on top of that cost you a lot of money to fix because some issues with the templates are pretty costly to fix then obviously it wouldn’t necessary be beneficial to fix. Now so you mentioned the Google Search Console, I think if there isn’t by now a book about Google Search Console and fixing issues in Google Search Console there should be one and we should probably come together and create one. But there are a lot of things that you can actually notice in Google Search Console, its crazy stuff like crawl stats so you can find out how often is Google crawling your site even how much data it downloads from your site but this for example again it would be important for big sites.

One place in Google Search Console that I always look at are coverage issues and index ability issues and with this one also there are things that Google would just be pointing out to you like for example redirect because usually redirects are a normal occurrence on the internet although it all needs to be inspected and with the index ability issues while we are at it, I would also like to mention some mechanical issues some no index issues; cleaning up the website from the stuff or blocking the stuff that you may be or perhaps want users to see but this is something that is totally not important for the algorithm, like login page or like my count page for example which is quite often accessible on big shops or some shopify websites and you just don’t want Google to be seeing that because there is nothing to see.

But a lot of this stuff what I would do so first of all when we approach a new website or a new client comes to work with us, we have two way approach or two possible routes that we take. First one is we audit absolutely everything and that is very useful for a client who only ordered an audit with us or we are working with sites that are we presume that this is going to be a one off thing because if you are doing a big audit obviously it takes a lot of time and it points out a lot of these things and we for example prioritize it but I know a lot of agencies and consultants when they perform an audit they don’t usually prioritize these things, they just give you a full dump of issues and off you go and this is everything that is broken within the site.

Jaryd Krause:

It's more confusing than anything when those SEOs do link orders and are like here is everything that you need to do, and it just makes people overwhelmed without a starting point.

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah, but our approach at least prioritizes those things and I usually put them in three buckets; priority no.1 which are like stoppers and things that are holding you back, not only holding you back but things that are literally breaking your SEO or not allowing you to rank further your full potential. Priority no.2 are things that should be fixed because they may potentially block or put a glass ceiling on your rankings and priority no 3 are all the things that we know about but they might not necessarily be wise to have your time, energy and resources invested into them at the moment because they are good to have fixes but not something that will enormously help you.

But then other approach is and this is something that I do for my own website, for some assets that we have for affiliate or ad revenue as well and this is an approach that we also do with clients that are with us for a longer period of time like a monthly rolling campaign and that’s where we only audit things that we see are most important at the moment and we fix them and then we reaudit stuff and we fix that stuff when we find it and we basically have this almost an agile versus scrum approach where we have monthly or 6 weeks long sprint where we audit things and then fix them and then audit and fix. That’s works really well because incrementally you have you are implementing fixes that are already helping you so you can basically see the results faster overall too.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah I can attest to this I really like this approach because I have had an audit done by you guys and we have got people that have come and work with you and have told me great feedback on the results they are getting through that method of audit, work on priority thing and then reaudit and work on priority thing because that’s what’s getting results faster than rather than just doing one order and going through the checklist until its done whereas new things may pop up that are going to get you faster results because it’s an ever evolving landscape.

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah exactly. I like to avoid going into the rabbit hole of SEO and where you are so focused on little things and you don’t see or don’t have time to see something that is hurting you even more.

Jaryd Krause:

That’s easier to do in tech SEO is to compared to say content and links, I think it’s easier to get caught in the rabbit hole of tech SEO as there is always going to be a list of things that can be done and it’s hard to know when to go is this me working on this task any further actually going to make it better? It’s sort of like concreting, usually they have a saying around concreting that when you are concreting if you just try to keep making it better and better, you make it worse because you get so deep in and you just keep trying to touch it and do different things and end up with a Frankenstein structure in the end.

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah, so I really like this saying that the only way to do a thing is to do it. So you know it’s like you can be spending a lot of time auditing something very deeply, very thoroughly but is it really worth it. My rule of thumb is I spend initial one to two hours on the website, I already have a vision, some enough of an understanding to what this website has in terms of the SEO issues and blockers and important stuff so that I can obviously add on top of that when I am writing the actual document and filling up the gaps in the audit but essentially there is something that I haven’t seen in that initial period of time or let’s say following couple of hours when I am actually conceptualizing and finishing off the main part of the audit, if I miss that in that period then that means that it’s probably not that important because if it was important I would have seen it by now.

Jaryd Krause:

With that when somebody and we will run through this at a higher level without getting too down the rabbit hole of each step. I teach people how to grow their sites once they have bought them and I have got a course that I have mentioned earlier and typically I tell people to just own a site for a little bit to understand it and in that period you can check on the site and learn more about it inside and out. What’s your take on when somebody has bought a site to start working on it to grow it and where should somebody start and what do you feel is the 80-20 in that aspect for the people listening? This is obviously under SEO; I am talking about SEO growth not about other growths.

Rad Paluszak:

I second what you said about getting to know the website, that is like the biggest and the most important thing to know your own website. So yes I usually make an audit of what content is on the site and what is at the back end. Hopefully it is WordPress, because that makes a lot of stuff much, much easier than if it wasn’t WordPress or Shopify.

Jaryd Krause:

I once had a site that was on a different platform like Joomla and that job was too much and I had to change it to WordPress straight away. Well, I waited bit but yeah.

Rad Paluszak:

It’s amazing how much stuff you can get out of the box when you are on wordpress because if you think about something there is a plug in for it probably. But I am not saying that using plugins for every little thing are great because plug ins are pretty heavy themselves and tend to slow down the sites but if you are just working on your first site or one of your first sites and you don’t really know what are you doing that well and you don’t want to spend a ton of time researching stuff then just find a plug in and you will be fine or find someone who is going to do it for you for example.

But I inspect what’s at the backend, what are the plugins that are already there, what’s the theme and I try to get to know all this a little bit better and then the other thing is obviously it’s not much applicable on me as an agency or for you for example who is working for this site but I would go an subscribe to some tools. There are a few tools that I definitely recommend from the get go; Ahrefs’ is my go to, as a cheaper alternative if you don’t want Ahrefs’ its Uber suggest it has decent data not very comparable to Ahrefs’ but decent enough to give you an idea of what keywords your site is currently ranking, for all of them so you can do the experts and you can narrow down and identify what are the low hanging fruits to attack them and so devise a plan of attack.

The second tool I would definitely subscribe to is SiteBulb I am absolutely not affiliated with them but they are awesome, the company is great and the tool is absolutely kick ass, just to briefly say what it does, it’s a crawler where you can basically feed it your website url and then it goes through every single page on the site, gathers all images and analyzes the site for you and one thing that Sitebulb is unique in this aspect is it gives you great hints based on automated crawl out of the box, even if you don’t really know what are you doing you are trying to perform your very first tech audit you plug your site into SiteBulb, let it crawl it then look at the results it gives you a full report and tells you whats broken and it doesn’t necessarily always tell you how to fix it but has links to I think their knowledge base where they elaborate a little bit on the issues at least or it gives you a lot of material to work with on how to fix this stuff.

Jaryd Krause:

So once somebody has bought a site because we have gone into each subject a bit deeper and overview is that once you have got it, leave it and learn it, check the theme, check the plugins, do a crawl of the site, use the SEO tools and understand the performance of it, I guess all of that gets done before you even start making any changes. What else? Where will you go from there?

Rad Paluszak:

Yeah auditing part I would just relate to the three elements that I mentioned earlier; obviously content, links and tech stuff, I mentioned tech stuff with SiteBulb, content well there isn’t much of a tool to analyze that at scale but I would definitely look at keywords versus pages which would be Ahrefs’ in this case. Another great tool for analyzing content and comparing it to competitors is Surfer SEO which is great.

Now in terms of links, this is again we are talking about Ahrefs’ because it will give a big list of links however if you are going for a different tool or want to compliment Ahrefs’ data with something else you also have a great source of links which is free and its included in Google search console so Google itself is giving you a list of links, it gives you basically a dump of links so all of them doesn’t give you any details about them as Ahrefs’ would but at least you can see where those links are coming from and review them or audit them in a spreadsheet or something. So yeah you buy site, get to know it, wait audit it and then make some sort of strategy. Before you do anything, create a strategy about how to expand a site about how to fix what you got to fix, how to create new content or what content.

Jaryd Krause:

I have in a course the strategy on key word research, how to create content and make sure your content is better than your competitors or the best what I like to say is your any keyword that you try to rank, it should be the best piece of content on the internet for that key word and then what’s entailed in that in terms of what we already mentioned through the helpful content like more videos more audio better context in lesser content.

I like the idea of 3000 words posts versus an 800 word post. An 800 words article is ranking just as well. The reason I like that or think its valuable because that article can share the same level of value if not more with less words and that’s great for the user. Nobody wants to read a novel on how to change the text or the font on their wordpress site, just give me a quick simple answer.

Rad Paluszak:

Yes exactly and so with that you got to think of the user because essentially user is the most important thing here. Obviously you were optimizing for the search engine, certainly doing the thing for the search engine to like us because this is where our traffic is coming from but what is the traffic its actual folks clicking through to your site, human beings the user. When you make the site better for the user, I think Google would appreciate it too and seeing the evolution of Google over last few years, you know helpful content update the recent ones and now what they say about potentially incorporating a chat bot in the search results.

May be by the time this episode is released it’s already live. Essentially it’s the human being at the core of it and Google has been doing everything it could and I know it’s nice and sounds kind of salesy from their point of view from when they say we want to try to make the internet a better place but if you think about it with all the stuff they are pushing with the update and the importance of quick websites and useful websites I think it actually boils down to that and if you are thinking long term.

Jaryd Krause:

I think they have already done it. Really without Google like if you need to find something or learn something you will need to go to Google, like they have already made internet a better place and they just want to maintain it I guess.

Rad Paluszak:

So it all boils down to what you said at the beginning of this epsidoe; you have got to think long term and I actually have a little quote form the course that you said, from your course that I really love; you said that make sure your content is the most amazing content on the internet for your niche topic and focus on that. So I think that sums it up.

Jaryd Krause:

I love it. Alright we will leave it with that. Guys as we mentioned different links like Surfer, SiteBulb, Ahrefs’, UberSuggests, all those links are going to be in the show notes but I will also put links to what you guys Rad do link building which I have also experienced and content packages which I have also experienced with working with you guys too. Check those too as these guys are amazing at what they do. Now the reason I am plugging these guys is because I never knew who Rad was and I got him to come on to talk about link building many episodes ago and when I did I was looking for SEOs to help me in different areas you know content, links and a whole bunch of different things tech SEO and then I spoke to you Rad and I was like I didn’t even know you existed and then I considered you in a group of bunch of other SEOs that I was already auditing and speaking to myself and then decided to start working with you guys over them because of the level of value you guys offered for the packages you had and the price point. With that and also speaking to your partner and yourself at the same time; Raphael, the story of how you got into creating Non-Agency SEO company, being that a lot of people were coming to you for link building through Husky Hamster and you were like yeah this is good and we could build you this link, I remember you telling us this story, we could build you this link to this page but you are not going to get the results because there are other things you need to change on your site to have it optimized to get it value from this link and you gave them suggestions and they didn’t do it and then you are like stuff is we are the SEO and if you want us to do it we can do it for you, but this needs to be done before we sell you a link package and I just thought that was really cool and that bought a lot of trust for me and I wanted to hare that story with everybody publicly. I have shared it with different people privately through coaching sessions and stuff but yeah thanks, thanks for what you guys are doing and I put links to what they are doing in show notes so check that out and Rad thanks so much for coming on. Rad Paluszak:

Thanks so much for saying great words about us.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah welcome, it’s much deserved. Alright guys speak to you soon.

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Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives. 

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Semrush – https://bit.ly/3lINGaV

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Site Bulb – https://sitebulb.com/

Ahrefs – https://ahrefs.com/

Ubbersuggest – https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ 

 

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