Why waste your time and resources creating high-quality content that goes unnoticed? You should also consider building an SEO strategy, and a key component of this strategy is link building. It not only improves your search engine ranking but also drives traffic, builds authority, and contributes to the overall growth of your online business.
For today’s episode, Jaryd Krause is speaking with Maria Harutyunyan. She will share how to create a link building campaign to propel your business.
Maria is the co-founder of Loopex Digital, a fastest growing SEO agency. In just three years, she transformed the agency into a seven-figure enterprise. In addition to her work at Loopex Digital, she is a renowned keynote speaker and SEO coach.
Maria is the pioneer behind the first SEO academy, offering offline training in Yerevan, Armenia, and has already trained over 500 marketing enthusiasts by 2023, enabling them to pursue successful careers in SEO.
Jaryd and Maria talk about growing a website once you’ve bought it. How do you discover what you should work on first after you’ve bought your online business? How do you run a successful PR link building campaign? How do you create topical authority the right way?
They also discuss beating AI content with non regurgitated content. The difference between an SEO strategy and a content strategy What should I check in GSC when doing due diligence? What tools does Maria recommend for all site owners?
Do you want to improve your site’s performance and stay up-to-date on the latest trends in link building? Then this episode is what you need. Check it out!
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Episode Highlights
03:57 – Maria’s experience in PR link building
16:01 – How to create a good link building campaign?
21:01 – What to consider when buying a content site?
29:40 – Why build topical authority before you start publishing content?
44:32 – Difference between content strategy and SEO strategy
49:40 – Should you work first on the technical SEO issues of the site or not?
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ PR for Link Building can be a valuable strategy for building high-quality backlinks to your website. This involves creating unique and newsworthy content that appeals to journalists and media outlets.
➥ Maria advises that when buying a content site, it’s important to focus on content relevance. She emphasizes that the content should be clustered around a specific niche or topic. For example, if the site is about surfing, it should cover various aspects of surfing and related topics in depth. This approach helps in building topical authority.
➥ To improve engagement and the user experience, they suggest looking at both direct competitors and industry leaders. Examining the websites that are ranking well in your niche can provide insights into user engagement strategies, content quality, and site structure. Learning from successful competitors and adapting their techniques to your own site can lead to growth
About The Guest
Maria Harutyunyan is the co-founder of Loopex Digital, one of the fastest-growing SEO agencies in the world. She grew the agency to a 7-figure from the ground up in 3 years.
Outside of Loopex Digital, Harutyunyan is a keynote speaker and SEO coach. She is the founder of the first SEO academy, an offline training program in Yerevan, Armenia. By 2023, she had trained 500+ marketing enthusiasts to deepen their knowledge and start a successful career in SEO.
She is one of the fastest growing SEO influencers on LinkedIn, where she shares her experience and success stories to educate and inspire SEOs.
Connect with Maria Harutyunyan
Transcription:
What growth strategy should you focus on first after you've bought your online business? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast. And today, I'm speaking with Maria Harutyunyan, who is the co-founder of Loopex Digital, one of the fastest growing SEO agencies in the world.
Now, she has grown the agency to a seven-figure valuation from the ground up in three years. Now, outside of Loopex Digital, she is a keynote speaker and an SEO coach. She is the founder of the first SEO academy, an offline training program in Armenia.
By 2023, she had trained over 500 marketing enthusiasts to deepen their knowledge and start a successful career in SEO as well. Now, she is one of the fastest growing SEO agencies and one of the fastest growing influencers on LinkedIn for SEO, where she shares her experiences and success stories to educate and inspire SEOs as well.
And in this podcast episode, it was such a delight to speak to Maria. We talk about a site that had grown to 80,000 hits per month in a very short period of time. We talk about what you can do, what you need to do once you buy a site and how to grow it. We talk about how to discover what you should work on first after you've bought your own content site. We also talk about how to run a successful PR link building campaign.
We move on to talking about how to create topical authority the right way. We also talk about how to beat AI content with non-regurgitated content. There's really cool strategies within that we discuss. We also discuss the difference between an SEO strategy and a content strategy.
There's a huge difference between those. And we also talk about what to check through the Google Search Console when doing due diligence. And lastly, we talk about some tools that Maria recommends for all site owners that are looking to grow their site with SEO.
Now, there's so much value in this podcast. I'm sure you guys are absolutely going to love it. We do talk about buying businesses. If you're going to do this, make sure you get my Due Diligence Framework at buyingonlinebusiness.com/freeresources.
You can get my framework that I use and that my clients use that’s helped people buy great websites, saved people millions of dollars and made people millions of dollars. So get that. Now let's dive into the show.
Have you been lied to about how to increase organic traffic and grow your website? I too used to think that all you needed to do was add more content and gain backlinks, but this just doesn't work. More content and more links alone are not the answer. Nor do you need to butcher your website with generic SEO changes you picked up on some crummy online tutorial, leaving you with a Frankenstein website that's slow and clunky.
And because I got sick of seeing great people with great websites struggle to grow them, I decided to do something about it. I created an SEO service, which is not just about publishing content and getting links.
Sure, we offer that. But first, we give you quick wins, which are SEO tweaks. We can make you a website that actually boosts your rankings. And then we lay out a killer SEO strategy to acquire more traffic and revenue that outranks your competitors with less content and fewer links.
We've thoroughly tested this service on many websites before launching it and have achieved incredible results, which you'll see on our landing page, which I'm about to share with you. Now, you can finally buy a business and give it to us to grow it for you. To check out our SEO service, head to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services and book a call to chat with us to see what the best growth strategy is for you and your website. That's buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services. And a link will be in the description too.
Maria, thanks for jumping on the pod.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Thanks for having me.
Jaryd Krause:
I wanted to get you on to talk about PR for link building and scaling a content site. But just for everybody listening, when Maria jumped on, we were just talking off air about how she started a site about a year ago and got to 80,000 hits a month. And I just thought, damn, we need to break that apart as well. So have you done any PR link building for this site at all—this one that you started from scratch?
Maria Harutyunyan:
I did, yes. I did a few campaigns, about four or five campaigns, which have generated about 200, 300 backlinks from really, really relevant websites and big media that have multiple millions of traffic and 90, 80 DRs.
Jaryd Krause:
Oh, cool.
Maria Harutyunyan:
So in my opinion, that helped a lot.
Jaryd Krause:
So what—
Maria Harutyunyan:
But—
Jaryd Krause:
But what, sorry?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah. But I have also built the website on an expired domain.
Jaryd Krause:
Oh, okay.
Maria Harutyunyan:
So basically, the domain had some kind of authority before. And the name was good. The domain name was good. So instead of redirecting, I just used that and continued that. That helped as well. To say that the expired domain had huge authority—no, it didn't. But some authority is needed to get that initial boost, if that makes sense.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, definitely. What was the domain or the DR or DA for that domain that you bought?
Maria Harutyunyan:
I believe it was about 19–20, but it had some domain relevancy and topical authority. That's why I pick something that already has a domain, the topical authority, rather than something that is semi-related and has a big authority.
Jaryd Krause:
Got you. And have you done this before? Have you bought expired domains before or started many sites before, like blogs?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Eh, not really. I have helped people do that with my agency, but for myself, this was my first project.
Jaryd Krause:
Okay. Cool. Congrats.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Thank you.
Jaryd Krause:
And at what stage did you start to do the PR for kink building in this?
Maria Harutyunyan:
I would say that when I started pushing some content on it, I immediately started to push some PR links. Yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
So you would say at any stage of a site's journey that if it's got a little bit of authority or a small DR with a little bit of traffic, then you can start to build some links for it?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah, yeah. If you have content that you want to rank, this is where link building comes in, right? You just need to do something to get it ranked out there.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. And so when you say PR for link building, is there any difference between that and just regular old link building?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Well, the purpose is the same. It’s to get good backlinks for your website. But the methods are different, meaning during the traditional link building, which still has its positive value, like guest posting, insertions, three-way exchanges, and different kinds of strategies out there,
The PR defers that, firstly, it's an earned medium, meaning you can't theoretically pay those websites—big, large websites—to link back to them. And if you find someone from inside that could do that, they will charge crazy amounts, or the website itself would charge only for one link, say $3,000, $4,000, etc.
So the way I found that works really well is to find some unique data or ideas, or come up with or connect a few dots together, package it up in a really nice press release, or create a nice page with data, and send it out to journalists to cover the story.
Well, I present it as simple, but the process is not that easy, right? I mean, you need to put some really good effort into each campaign to make it succeed. Because I see, for example, some clients of ours that are doing some PR work, initially, when they come in, they say, “Oh, I have this idea, and then the statistics, etc.” And then I look at the idea and tell them, “Listen, it's not going to work. It's too specific or too broad for a journalist to cover.”
And here, when starting a digital PR campaign, you need to understand the psychology of the journalist—what they have previously covered and what they're interested in covering, right? Because what journalists want is to cover stories that are going to be read by a lot of people, to get more eyeballs into their content, and to make ad revenue, right? That's one of the most important things.
So if you're too specific with your campaign, say, the journalist will not get that many reads, right? If you're too broad, you shouldn't go into political stuff, etc. So you need to be like a nice, really nice story.
For example, during the Prince Charles coronation, just before the coronation event, we did a campaign that we knew that they're going to spend 100 million pounds on the coronation event, and people were not that happy in Britain.
And then we kind of reversed it until, if they hadn't spent that 100 million pounds on the coronation, what kind of social issues could they solve? Not for this specific website, but for another website. And then it went viral, with about 100 backlinks from The Sun, MSN, and different kinds of media outlets.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, okay. So that's awesome. Thanks for sharing. There are so many things that I want to backtrack on, cover and get right. Starting from the start, to get the PR links—public relations links—you want to have, it sounds like you need to be in a Goldilocks’ zone. It can't be too niche, and it can't be too broad. So I want to touch on that. I want to ask about that.
And then I also want to ask about how to present the campaign, whether it's a blog or it's a campaign, a post or it's a campaign, and it's completely separate. But first, how do we find that Goldilocks’ zone? Can you give us an example of something that's too niche, something that's too broad, and then something that is in the Goldilocks’ zone?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah, sure.
Jaryd Krause:
I would say the Goldilocks’ zone.
Maria Harutyunyan:
So I would say something too niche would be, say, I'm working on a construction project, right? It's my client. So if I went about construction time clocks, something to study and so on and so forth, most probably it wouldn't work. Even if you send it to a journalist who is covering industrial related content and so on and so forth, the broad thing is, say, if you find some kind of data, say, I don't know, the searches, like some kind of predictable data, say, Kia released this car and the searches for this car increased by this many percent. It's kind of a vague, broad thing that people most probably would not like to cover.
But when you go to, for example, a study, we have done this previously, and it again creates about 50, 70, or something like these links. The most searched celebrity kids and we ranked the celebrity kids based on the searches, kind of, and we measured their popularity by that and created some kind of popularity index out of it. This might be kind of cool for a journalist to cover. It's not too broad, and it's not too specific.
And you need to understand one thing in here that the campaign, say, your time clock up, is HR related. So you can pick any type of content, any type of campaign idea related to HR, people, working habits, and so on and so forth. So you can touch upon so many topics in your industry that are not specific and the value is still the backlink that you receive from them.
Mainly, the journalists are going to link back to your brand name, referencing you as the initial source for the campaign in their write-up. So the surrounding content here should be some kind of related to your business, but it doesn't need to be specifically related, right? Because what matters at the end is that they do follow the backlink that you're receiving back to your website from an authority website.
Jaryd Krause:
Okay. So you can't be too niche; the audience is going to be too small, and they won't want to cover it. And you don't want to be so broad that everybody knows what is already being talked about because it's so damn broad, right?
So what do you have in this Goldilocks zone that you can add to that topic to be very clickbaity, very out of the box or something pretty alarming or different that people would never have thought of, for example?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Not necessarily. You just need to be interesting. Clickbaity, you can be clickbaity as well with your campaigns, but when you say clickbaity, I usually think about these breaking stories and so on and so forth that a lot of people want to have interest in.
But you just need to be interesting enough. Again, you need to understand what journalists are looking for and what the readers on the other side are looking for and create stories for them.
Jaryd Krause:
Cool, cool. And then, how do you find the journalists, first and foremost?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Oh, there are different kinds of tools that are pretty expensive that could do the work for you. For example, Cision, Muck Rack, and Rack are pretty expensive. For site owners, well, we are an SEO and digital PR company, so it makes sense for us to have those tools.
But for a site owner, if you have a site, it most probably will not make sense to buy these tools. There are some alternatives that you can consider. For example, if you're writing about an HR story, right? You can go to Google News and find someone who wrote recently in the past, I don't know, three months about HR-related topics.
Jaryd Krause:
HR?
Maria Harutyunyan:
And then pick the journalist. What was that?
Jaryd Krause:
HR, as in human resources,
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah, for example.
Jaryd Krause:
As an example, yeah.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Just an example, yeah. You can go and find them and then you could go to Hunter. Find their profile in the news media, go to Hunter, find their email there, and then create an outreach campaign. It's a little bit time consuming, but it's completely worth it.
Jaryd Krause:
It’s what you have to do when you're just starting out and you can't afford the—
Maria Harutyunyan:
Exactly.
Jaryd Krause:
So when you find a couple of journalists, what goes into creating a good campaign? Do you go away and create an article first and foremost and say, Hey, would you like to link to this article? Here's how you could do it in your own posts. Yeah. What does a good campaign look like?
Maria Harutyunyan:
So as soon as you have your ideas and your research down, you can either create a press release on the document (it's like Google Doc) and send it to them. Or you can create a page on your website, host that content and then ask them to link back to that content, right?
Typically, I do this with Google Docs because I want them to link to my homepage rather than that specific page. But if they end up linking to that specific page, after some time, after I get the campaign over, I'll redirect that page to any of the relevant pages that I want to rank.
For example, it can be a homepage. Or you can choose to link out from that press release to different kinds of important money pages that you have. So you can go different ways about it.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. I believe I'd know why, but just for the listeners. Why would you want to get links to your homepage versus the page that you've published on your site?
Maria Harutyunyan:
The reason being that the homepage has a route with internal links to many different kinds of pages, right? So kind of the link just in the authority passes through that links to other pages that you want to rank, right? And typically, that's the main reason.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. And then if you did have money pages or specific pages that you did want to outrank competitors with and you needed to build authority to that individual page, then you could also link to that direct page versus your homepage, right?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah. You can redirect that press release to that page or link out from the press release to that page. It's a choice.
Jaryd Krause:
What do you mean by redirect?
Maria Harutyunyan:
So for example, you have a press release written on your website, right? And it holds a really good amount of backlinks, like authority backlinks. You can redirect that page to your money page and put the content on another URL, kind of, if that makes sense. Or you could link out from your press release page to the money page. My preference is redirecting.
Jaryd Krause:
Redirect straight. So when somebody goes to that press page, they'll be redirected straight to the…
Maria Harutyunyan:
News comes and goes. I don't think that people are going, for example, after three or six months, to go back to that news, right? Because it's not evergreen content. So there is not that much of a risk there.
Jaryd Krause:
Okay. So you're doing PR for non-evergreen content?
Maria Harutyunyan:
In some way, yes, because it's published in the news. Today it's published in the news; tomorrow 100 news stories are coming. After tomorrow, 200 news stories are coming, right? So because the data is time sensitive, meaning I have done a campaign about the most popular celebrity kids and given an index to that. Three months later, some other kid may be the most popular, right? So that old one is not relevant anymore.
Jaryd Krause:
Got you. Got you. And so what increases your chance of journalists awarding you a win in terms of linking to your page or your domain? What goes into that?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Sure. So first of all, what is the relevance of the journalist? You don't want to pick an automotive journalist if you're writing about celebrities, right? So first, how do you pick and pitch? In your email, you don't need to fluff. You just go exactly to the point of telling me I've got a story for you. Interesting data research about this. Are you interested in covering it?
And sometimes they don't even reply. Sometimes you just see the Google alerts saying, “Oh, your brand has been mentioned here and there.” So most probably the choice of the journalist and the actual email that goes to them And obviously, the campaign itself, which would be interesting.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Cool. Love it. Love it. So what else did you do to get this site to 80? Think of it through the lens of people who are listening to this and buying content from these sites. They're buying blogs and you bought a DR 19 domain name, built a site on it and then grew it to about 80,000 hits in a year.
People are buying similar sites and similar businesses with similar levels of authority, but they already have some traffic. What are some of the things that you have done to get this site from zero to 80,000 hits that could be very beneficial for people who are buying their first content sites to build up their traffic as well?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Sure. So if I were buying a website, I would take a look, not only at the good amount of backlinks that they have, but at the actual content that they have, right? If they have two scattered topics about different kinds of here and there and so on and so forth, without clustering the topics together,
Jaryd Krause:
Give me an example of a niche or something. You could use surfing; you could use push bikes; you could use anything as a hobby. But could you give me an example?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yes. For example, if your website is about, I don't know, surfing, or if you're a general, life, the whole business, etc., website, and you're talking about surfing and you're talking about, I don't know, hiking, and you're talking about just scattered topics,
One, you found a good keyword. It's like, ha, I want to rank for that keyword. Let's go and do an article for that. If they're too scattered, then it's very unlikely that you will get topical authority. If you focus on several topics around surfing, connect them together and answer all the questions that people have about surfing. And then go to another topic that is related to it, right? I don't know; something else, like jet skiing, etc., would make the website more authoritative within that topic, right?
So I would like people to focus and take a look at how they're structuring their content, what kind of content they have on the website and how closely related those topics are to help each other rank.
Jaryd Krause:
Spot on. So I've seen people look at buying lifestyle blogs where we've done reviews. We help people do due diligence and we review their due diligence before they go away and buy a business. And we point out things like niches. And some people will send us businesses; they're looking at buying that lifestyle niche where it's a personal brand that they talk about relationships.
They talk about family. They talk about health. They talk about their hobbies, and they talk about everything in their lives. Whereas that person cannot really grasp of topical authority because they talk about so many different subjects that are not relevant to one another
Versus somebody who has a website that is about surfing. They might talk about surfing in multiple different countries, different types of surfing, big wave surfing, small wave surfing, barrel riding, and different types of surfboards. And they can create authority a lot easier because they're covering so many topics within that one category, versus trying to cover topics in a range of categories. Is that a good example?
Maria Harutyunyan:
100%. And also to add to that, not only right now that Google is prioritizing this E-E-A-T compliance, etc., but you also cannot physically cover all the topics and have really good writers dedicated to them, right?
So this is another point. And I think we'll come back to the E-E-A-T this time, because it's super relevant, as right now, with these recent Google updates, Google has started smashing a lot of affiliate websites that are not compliant with them, and so on and so forth.
Jaryd Krause:
And they have been for a long time as well. Sites without proper authority. So are you saying that for somebody who's bought a site, they would look at what the positioning is of their authority and what topical authority they do or don't have, and then start finding keywords that can help them cover more topics within that category to build topical authority? Is that what your suggestion is?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yes. Kind of just take a look to see that they have covered at least a couple of topics at a full grade, right? Just to make sure that—well, typically when I'm buying my website, I don't go too niche with the domain. For example, if I decided to have a surfer brand, a surfing brand, I wouldn't take a domain with mysurfing.com, right?
Because at the top of my head, surfing is a very niche topic. There are a certain amount of articles that you could do, and then you most probably exhaust the topic. Then I might go to another relevant, very adjacent, relevant activity as a hobby as jet skiing, right?
This is water related, pretty relevant as a hobby and it covers that, so I wouldn't limit it to only one niche unless that niche is maybe too big. There's too much search volume in there and so on and so forth. But my preference is not limiting a domain.
But at least you should cover a good amount of content and interlink everything together to get this topical authority firsthand. And also, when it comes to PR, it's also very hard—not PR, but general link building; it's very hard when you're covering different topics. One has nothing to do with the chatter to bring relevant backlinks on a domain level, right?
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely.
Maria Harutyunyan:
This is another thing.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, absolutely. Why is somebody going to link to your blog when you're covering so many lifestyle topics and they don't know what your site is about? It's also when the user goes to a website and they see that it's a lifestyle blog and they cover things about their health, their exercise, and their relationships that the user is going to be like, “Well, you're a jack of all trades and a master of none. Why should I listen to you in any of the categories?”
Maria Harutyunyan:
Exactly, exactly. That's true.
Jaryd Krause:
What else have you done that you feel would be helpful for somebody who's just bought a site to grow it?
Maria Harutyunyan:
So pretty much, I would say I have created a lot of clusters. My entire website is built on those. Until I exhaust all the topics within one niche, I won't go to another, talking about something else.
Jaryd Krause:
Another growth strategy Stick with that one strategy of covering topical authority before you move on to another growth strategy.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yes. Yeah. Typically, I do that. Even sometimes, and I mentioned this in my other podcast with Anatoly. And I forgot what I was saying. It slipped my mind.
Jaryd Krause:
That's all right.
Maria Harutyunyan:
: I'll remember that.
Jaryd Krause:
Say somebody has spent a year covering topical authority and they put out, I don't know, 500 articles and they're really good, solid articles with good quality content. Where would you go next? What would you suggest somebody do once they've covered that topical authority or started to make a really good leg way on it?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Go to the next topic.
Jaryd Krause:
So just find another topic and keep creating content?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah. So initially, I start building some topical authority, generate some ad revenue, and then only after creating a topical authority, go to the affiliate side of things, right?
Jaryd Krause:
Yes, yes. And please tell me why. I mean, I know why, but tell us all listening to the podcast, why wait to build topical authority before you start putting affiliate load on or releasing and publishing content that is affiliate?
Maria Harutyunyan:
My first reason is that you need to be a little bit independent and the website itself should generate some kind of independent, recurring revenue before jumping into the affiliate side. That's my first and foremost reason for doing that.
Affiliate contents are much harder to rank than, typically, articles and informational content, right? And then, when you have the authority created, for example, around surfing, it gives you much easier access to rank for the affiliated content. For example, the top 10 surfing brands that you need to consider.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, absolutely. What I feel that most people do too quickly is—it was a couple of years ago. It's changed now, which is really good. Most people are going for the money grab too fast and just creating affiliate sites without any level of authority because they could get money and generate money a lot faster from their sites in the younger years of growing it.
But now Google has fixed that and solved that problem with E-E-A-T. So you want to make sure you've built out some topical authority before you start adding some affiliate load to a website, right? Otherwise Google—
Maria Harutyunyan:
100%. Typically, I would go with 70%, 30%, or somewhere around that. 70% informational, 30% affiliate. But right now, even my website is 80% affiliate.
Jaryd Krause:
And then I got asked this question by a mastermind member. What are some of the things that you track when you're running a content site, like the one that you have built out? What are some of the things you track on a weekly or monthly basis to just see them continue to grow? And yeah, how do you pick apart that data and use it for growth?
Maria Harutyunyan:
I would describe the engagement first and foremost. Because right now, as engagement is becoming more critical on the page, on a domain level, engagement is one of the things that, like user experience, affects how users interact with your website.
Do they come and just review that article and get what they want and then they bounce, or do they scroll,read, navigate to one page, another page, and so on and so forth? So engagement is a really big part.
Jaryd Krause:
So what are you looking at when you're looking at engagement? And if you are using Google Analytics, what are some of the things that you do look at to track? Are they going to be on multiple pages? How long are they spending on each page? Just share with us what that looks like for you when you are analyzing that data.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Sure. So how long do they stay on the page, the page stay time, and the bounce rate, which is important for me? The scroll rate—how far did they scroll? And the sessions—how many sessions per user do I have?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Cool. And so I know it sounds pretty basic, but would you suggest, if people wanted to increase their level of engagement on their site, that they go away and look at the competitors and see what those top-ranking pages are for those keywords that you want to sort of make sure you outvalue them?
Maria Harutyunyan:
I would tell you if your competitors were significantly better than you, yes. In my niche, they're not significantly better than me. So I would go to the big guys. Say, I would go and check out the winners from the last Google's update and see what they have done, right?
Because apart from the backbones, apart from the content, apart from the E-E-A-T, they should have done something correct with their user experiences as well to be a winner in the update.
And also, not only winners, but also someone that you want to become in a few years, right? Someone who is a good role model for you to tell, ha, this website is really good. For example, Healthline, WebMD, etc. They have big marketing goals. They have big CRO teams. And they have done all the testing for you, most likely.
So kind of just taking a look at them and figuring out how you can leverage that on your own website would be a good way to do it. And it doesn't necessarily need to be a niche relevant, right? Because of the knowledge that you learn from other websites, you can process it and then apply it to your business as well.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. And I'm glad that you shared that because I think a lot of people in our space, typically people listening to the podcast, are looking at buying content sites and from what they have learned from all these other places, from free information without getting proper coaching, they are of the belief that they need to buy a content site and just continue to put out content and just keep repeating more and more content.
And yeah, you can do that, and it can cover good topical authority if you do it with a structured approach. But I don't think they are thinking about things differently to get to the next level, to the next step.
Like what you have mentioned, look at the big guys in your space, in your industry, and in your niche who are doing great things and providing a massive amount of value. Those people that are providing the most value are the ones that are reaping the most wealth and income from their sites.
So looking at your blog, how do I take this from just a niche website or just a small blog to an actual big player and carve out some market share in the industry? And take over a portion of traffic and a portion of market share in that industry. So I'm glad you mentioned that.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah. Yeah. It's hard because there are too many moving parts.
Jaryd Krause:
There are so many moving parts.
Maria Harutyunyan:
And I do understand that it's challenging. Google's updates are coming, making it even more challenging. The AI came and made it even more challenging. Initially, people were thinking, “Oh, ChatGPT, cool. We will generate a mass amount of content and get ranked with it." Sometimes it's possible.
But right now, the industry is completely changing the value of the content and who wrote it. Experts. Even how you write the content, right? It's credibility, firsthand experience and so on and so forth—this kind of stuff.
So people might say, “I’m a surfing website. How do I go and check? And it's physically impossible to review each and every—I have nothing to do with surfing; how do I review, right? I don't even know how to surf. How do I test those?”
Jaryd Krause:
You could be further away from the surf from where you live.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yes. This is where I got a newsletter. I just don't remember his name, but he was saying some interesting things, saying that right now the industry is changing from being the master of the content to being the curator of the content.
Meaning, say, if you're writing about surfing and you haven't tested any of it, there are so many reviews and people that actually use the product that you can take their knowledge and reference even them.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Because it's all about proving that whatever you're writing, it's correct. It's fact checked, right?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Real world experience versus what people have done for the last five to 10 years is regurgitating content that is selling affiliate products and just regurgitating content that other websites are talking about that has been written and basically regurgitated from writers, which is what AI is doing and that's just continuing down that thread.
And how you beat that is a real world experience of somebody saying, “Hey, I bought this surfboard, or I bought these five surfboards. I surfed once a month over five months. This is the one that I liked best for my surfing ability.
This is the one that I liked the least. This is how much they cost. This is where you can buy them from. And this is how to take care of them. These are the type of waves to surf these surfboards in.”
If I were to do that, I'd become the master of that domain in surfing for board reviews because I'm sharing real world experience that people are going to trust a human being that has shown proof that they have the surfboards in their room and video footage of them actually using that product versus somebody's perhaps affiliate site of, “Here's the best five surfboards to buy from Amazon.”
Maria Harutyunyan:
That's good. But for example, when you don't know surfing or you're covering trucks, large trucks, you're affiliated with their website. How do you test that?
This is where there is so much information across the web from people who actually drove it—comments, product comments, even the reviews, etc.—that you can take a look and just figure it out. And then for example, you could take the reviews of that truck or that surf—
Jaryd Krause:
Surfboard.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yes. And analyze the reviews. Analyze the reviews and say, “Okay, this portion of people told me that this has this kind of defect. This portion of the people say that this specific thing is really good.” For example, I don't know. Very sound.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. This surfboard is for big waves. And everybody says, This one's good for small waves. Yeah.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Exactly.
Jaryd Krause:
And you can use 5% of the commenters who have said this versus that.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Exactly. Yes. This is where I come to them to make my first point telling, you need to prove. You need to prove it. And in order to prove it, you don't necessarily need to have firsthand experience. You can use others’ firsthand experience by analyzing the trends and then incorporating them into your website.
Because theoretically, especially those large, large affiliate websites, say, you're trying an eyebrow serum, right? That would help you fill in the gaps. You're reviewing 10 of them; how's it possible to test them? Even if you have a year, you cannot test it.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I still beg to differ if somebody—let's just use makeup as an example. Say you have an affiliate site that is all about makeup, right? And you have 50% informational content, and then you have 50% affiliate content on there.
I still believe that if you went and started hiring other bloggers and other people that are in the makeup space to record a video of them using a product and sharing their pros and cons, and you paid them to do that, And you could turn that into a piece of content that it would probably beat, probably outrank the user-generated content from lots of other sources.
So I think a lot of people have gone down the game of let's use AI to create a lot more content, but it's going to be thin and regurgitated versus how you can actually win by paying people for good content and outranking them.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Absolutely. This is a brilliant idea of how else you can kind of take that firsthand experience and apply it to your blog. A brilliant idea. 'Cause, at the end of the day, yes, SEOs, we all like automation. We all like scaling. We all like doing less work and getting maximum results. We all like it.
But with the current changes, the other day I was talking to a website owner that was very much affected by this Google's update of helpful content, probably losing 50% of traffic. And then I'm saying, “Okay. What are your next steps? What do you think?” It’s like, “Generating more content. I need more content, probably 1,000 more content.” I was like, “Look, you just have been hit for that. Think twice.”
Jaryd Krause:
That's what people have been taught, right? That's what I'm saying. So many people have listened to free advice on podcasts, YouTube videos and all that sort of stuff. And it's an old behavior that worked 10 years ago or 15 or 20 years ago to keep your website fresh, clean and updated and to continue producing and feeding the machine because Google wanted more content so they could be the biggest search engine. They're clearly the biggest search engine. Now they don't want any more content. They don't want more. They just want better.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And everything is directed toward that. Everything.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. I think effort is attractive and I think effort in content is going to win. And I'm glad because it's going to make the internet a better place for us.
And I wanted to ask you, ‘cause we've talked about content a lot. There's a big difference between a content strategy and an SEO strategy. So SEO is not just one side, right? And then you got content. I think the SEO strategy comes first and helps you build a content strategy, but can you explain the difference between what an SEO strategy is and what a content strategy is so people can clearly navigate that?
Maria Harutyunyan:
I can give you a really good example of that. For example, I have a page right now on my website about crypto link building, which is very specific to my SEO website. Typically, I used to write very niche content about each industry and I'm looking at Ahrefs’ data, Mangools’ data, and Semrush data; nobody searches for crypto link building.
I was like, Come on, this should be something that's wrong with it. I mean, I have that gut feeling in my industry. There are so many crypto websites with so many programs out there, etc. People should be searching for it. I get, I don't know, several inquiries without having that content on my website per month.
How is it possible that nobody's searching for it? I was like, Come on, I'm doing that. I'm still writing that content. Even if there was zero search volume for that, right now, that page generates about 200 visitors for me, right?
So, basically, yes, SEO strategy gives you some kind of glue, some kind of a direction telling, okay, this is a topic that people are interested in, but you need to take that content topic and then own it; write it like you have experienced it from all angles.
Whether it's creating search volume or not, most of the time, these third-party tools are good at identifying search volume for keywords that get a higher number of searches. But most probably, even if you see the keyword holding 40 search volumes per month on Ahrefs, the actual search volume is way higher than what's reported. So just go for it. Because people tend not to pay attention to those lower search volume keywords. But essentially, that can bring you a lot of traffic.
And when it comes to the content strategy, you just need to own the topic, right? If you're writing about these eyebrow serums, then don't write only about the best eyebrow serums, how to use an eyebrow serum, and the effectiveness of it, right? Try to figure out and ideate all the possible angles.
And the way I go with the content strategy is that I find a topic that's a good topic on Ahrefs. I put that aside. I vetted that it's a good angle, right? It holds a good amount of search volume for the top-level keyword. Then, if the top-level keyword holds a substantial amount, then the interests around that topic should also be more or less searchable, right?
Jaryd Krause:
Correct.
Maria Harutyunyan:
And then I go to YouTube. I watch videos, and from those videos, I learn what angles people are covering and what they're talking about, right? I watched the comments. I go to Instagram. I watched the comments. I go to forums.
I watched the comments that Google autocompleted. People also ask, and I get a lot of information around the topic. Then I start deduplicating all the duplicates, etc. And then I have my full topic that I need to cover. This is a content strategy.
And the keyword strategy or SEO strategy is that out of these 20, 30 topics that I need to write about, I don't know, 15 or 20 of them have search volumes. So this is that, right?
Jaryd Krause:
A lot more, a lot more. But obviously, the SEO strategy—I mean, that's a keyword strategy. SEO's a pretty broad term. Because you can have an SEO campaign that has nothing to do with content and keywords as well.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Jaryd Krause:
You can have a technical SEO strategy to fix some technical SEO issues first and foremost.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Exactly.
Jaryd Krause:
Now that's a good question to ask you when you bring a client on board with your agency. I know that's what we typically do. When somebody buys a site and they come into our SEO agency and we grow that business for them, typically we start with an overall look at the site, break down a bit of an audit and then we start with some technical things, typically first. Do you normally go that route as well? And if not, what do you typically do first?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Depending on what website we're talking about, if it's a content website, yeah, I might take a look at the technical things, probably the search console, etc., but the technical would be the last thing that I would be looking at. If the website is already generating a good amount of traffic that you’re willing to buy, then most probably 70%–80% of the technical should be in place, right?
Yes, there might be some speed issues. There might be some here and there. But I can show you thousands of websites with lower speed issues and better engagement that are outranking the better speed websites, if that makes sense.
Jaryd Krause:
Because content's winning, people will read good content and wait for good content to load, versus cheap, thin content that loads fast.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So for the content website, most probably the first thing that I would look at is the distribution of the traffic to make sure that not 20% of the website is generating 80% of the traffic, if that makes sense.
Jaryd Krause:
Well, that's something we look at when we're buying a site as well. We look for no single-source dependency on traffic from just a handful of pages.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
We saw on a site just today that 50% of the traffic was going to the top two pages, while 25% of the traffic going to two pages is a huge risk.
Maria Harutyunyan:
High risk, yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
That's good that you brought that up.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Exactly.
Jaryd Krause:
That's great.
Maria Harutyunyan:
So I would take a look at the content, the quality, and the E-E-A-T compliance first, and then most probably the link building and then the technical SEO side. But if it's a website, for example, a marketplace, right? It's a highly customized website and it's such that most probably the technical should come first.
Because those websites tend to have a ton of technical issues, a very large e-com and so on and so forth. So depending on the case, which part of SEO comes from three directions of the SEO content—technical and link building—should be prioritized?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. And it's different for every single site at every different stage as well. Like a green site versus something that's reaching adolescence to something that's kind of immature and wanting to go to the next step is always different, yeah.
Maria Harutyunyan:
For example, a client came to me and told me, “I have this page that was ranking first, second position for a very large term. Right now, it's like ranking 30th position.” And then I'm looking at the traffic. It was that one page that suffered.
Most probably, I wouldn't prioritize technical SEO first. I would just go deep into figuring out what caused that keyword. But if I see a huge drop in traffic, then most likely it would be a good idea to check it technically as well.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, absolutely. Now for somebody who doesn't use an SEO agency and is running their own site, what would you find among the top two to five SEO tools that a site owner should be using?
Maria Harutyunyan:
Sure. And, oh, one more thing, Jaryd, that came to mind is that I feel that's also important for the people that are considering buying a website to take a look at. Go to Search Console, go to your pages and see how many pages have been crawled and not indexed, discovered and not indexed. Good, good representations of what Google thinks about overall.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. I'd like to test this thinking with you. ‘Cause I've had this discussion two different times in the last two days.
Maria Harutyunyan:
Oh, really?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up. When people are buying sites, yes, definitely go to Google Search Console and look at what's indexed, what's not indexed and what's crawled and what is not crawled. And the way I was talking about it is that Google has a certain crawl budget, right?
And, say, there's a lot of pages not being crawled on a site that you're looking at purchasing. That can be due to the site structuring of where people can actually go—now that all the bots go through the site, it is not the easiest.
So for example, if a site doesn't have the best site structuring and categories or subcategories and whatnot, and they've got, say, three categories with like all of their articles within those three categories, the Google bot may have only a certain amount of crawl budget and they'll go to find all the pages on the site, but that will run out of budget if they get lost and in a big pool of content in one category.
And that's where you can see if you've got a lot of pages that are not crawled or indexed in the Google Search Console, which could be a site structure issue. Do you have anything to fix or add to what I've just mentioned?
Maria Harutyunyan:
I would say that most probably, for me personally, the crawl was not indexed and discovered was not indexed, meaning that Google saw the content but didn't yet have the time, whether for crawl budget purposes or some other reason, they didn't have time to crawl those websites. I wouldn't be that worried about it. I just need to wait a little bit more for it to crawl.
But if it's crawled, not indexed, unless those pages are, for example, paginations and unnecessary pages, but there's real content, that means that they just reviewed the website and the page; they just took the page; they spent money on you; they crawled your page because they spent money on you. And then it's a waste of money for them. They took it and put it in the trash.
This is my thinking. What kind of good representation do you have if a good number of pages that you have are crawled and not indexed? So kind of as a student, right? You mean that you wrote your paper, and the teacher took it and put you, you know, I don't know what's the grading system in Australia, but like a D minus or something like F. Yeah. It's just like, go, I don't like you.
Jaryd Krause:
That means the site's content is not that great when they’re crawling it.
Maria Harutyunyan: It's not that great, yeah. Or either it's not great or you have some kind of technical issue with that Google cannot render and normally read the page, two of the reasons.
So I would be very specific about that. Just go and take a look. If there are thousands of articles and those people spend so much time writing that article or put an effort into AI writing, it doesn't matter. In some way, it is still time, right? Jaryd Krause: Still resources. Maria Harutyunyan: If they have done, yes, that all effort and it's still not considered good enough or worthy enough to be indexed, right? Then, uh-uh, there's something wrong here. Jaryd Krause: Absolutely. Absolutely. Maria Harutyunyan: So, yeah. Jaryd Krause: Yeah. Good diligence. Maria Harutyunyan: And I'm sorry—yeah. Jaryd Krause: That's really good diligence to talk about. I'm glad you brought it up, because it's very, very relevant for me and the discussions I've had in the last couple of days too. Maria Harutyunyan: Exactly. And then you were asking about the best tools—the top tools that I'm using. Jaryd Krause: Yeah, tools. I've got a few tools that we like to use, but I'd love to hear what you have to say. For people that aren't using an SEO agency and they're running their sites themselves, what are the top two to five tools you recommend? Maria Harutyunyan: I would tell Search Console. Know how to use the search console. That's the best tool. That's your best friend in SEO. I know that people are jumping and doing Semrush, Ahrefs and such. But I know how to get data and how to learn and interpret the data from the search console. Take the data, go to Google Analytics, do your further digging into stuff in Google Analytics, and then it can be a rank tracker that you can use. You can use Ahrefs, Semrush, and ranktracker.com. These are the ones I'm using. I'm personally using Ahrefs a lot in my agency. Yeah. Less Semrush, more Ahrefs. Semrush is brilliant as well, but we are most probably used to using Ahrefs much more. But Semrush is also great. Jaryd Krause: Yeah. We use Ahrefs quite a lot as well as Semrush. But I also think it's worth highlighting what you've said here with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Most people just get fed and shoved down their throats all these different SEO tools that you should use or could use. Those are typically ones that are paid for, and they're typically affiliates. I know Ahrefs is not; Semrush is. But Google Search Console and Google Analytics are not paid things, and they're free. And also, it's far better because it's more accurate data. Whereas Ahrefs and these other tools are an estimation and an assumption, merely Maria Harutyunyan: 100%, 100%. Jaryd Krause: Using the right data. If you are using data to grow your business, you want accurate data, and the most accurate data allows you to grow your business better. So I just wanted to highlight that. So thanks for bringing that up. And yeah, thanks for coming on. Maria Harutyunyan: And then you can do a lot of keyword research in the Search Console as well. So a page that has a good amount of impressions is ranking in the 80 or 90 position. It's a good idea to create a dedicated page for that. For example, it's also a good use of it. And SEO testing. I know we're running out of time. seotesting.com, use that you or any other SEO testing, use that, test your SEO test, your meta titles, test your descriptions, you’re everything. Just like UX, test everything. It's a very important thing to do. Jaryd Krause: Everything, I think, when you're growing a business, stick to what's working and then experiment and test, and whatever wins the test, you keep doing. Everything is a test, right? Maria Harutyunyan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. Jaryd Krause: Cool. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can we share? Maria Harutyunyan: Thank you, Jaryd. Jaryd Krause: I'd love for people to go and check out what you're up to. Maria Harutyunyan: You can check my website at Loopex Digital, L-O-O-P-E-Xdigital.com. And my service for the digital PR is that I will send you the link if you can add it. And my LinkedIn, most probably. Jaryd Krause: Cool. Maria Harutyunyan: I'm very active there. Jaryd Krause: Cool. Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you, Maria. Maria Harutyunyan: Thank you, Jaryd. Jaryd Krause: Everybody who is listening, thank you. Maria Harutyunyan: Thank you for having me. Jaryd Krause: Yeah, thanks. And I'll see you guys on the next one. Hey, YouTube watchers, if you thought that video was good, you should check out this video here on 2 Types of Websites Beginners Should Buy. Or check out my playlist on How I Made My First $100k Buying Websites and how to do due diligence. Check it out. It's an awesome playlist. You'll enjoy it.
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Host:
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.
Resource Links:
➥ BOB SEO service – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services/
➥ Buying Online Businesses Website – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com
➥ Download the Due Diligence Framework – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources/
➥ Surfer SEO (SEO tool for content writing) – https://bit.ly/3X0jZiD
➥ Page Optimizer Pro (SEO tool for optimizing web pages) – https://bit.ly/3wQCzin
➥ Rank Math (WordPress SEO Plugin) – https://bit.ly/3Acyjf4
🔥Buy & Sell Online Businesses Here (Top Website Brokers We Use) 🔥
➥ Empire Flippers – https://bit.ly/3RtyMkE
➥ Flippa – https://bit.ly/3WYX0Ve
➥ Motion Invest – https://bit.ly/3YmJAmO
➥ Investors Club – https://bit.ly/3ZpgioR
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