Ep 281: Why Authority Wins In SEO & How To Build SEO Authority with Nathan Gotch

Have you ever wondered if the traditional knowledge about driving traffic and ranking keywords is actually leading website owners astray? What if there’s more to SEO success than just content creation and keyword optimization?

Today, we’re thrilled to be joined by Nathan Gotch, co-founder of Rankability and founder of Gotch SEO. Nathan helps people create content that search engines love to rank and provides top-tier SEO training.

In this episode, Jaryd and Nathan discuss the recent Google updates and why some websites lost traffic while others remained stable or even saw gains. We explore the concept of authority in SEO, including the importance of domain and brand authority, and how you can build these crucial elements for long-term success.

But the conversation doesn’t stop at SEO tactics. They also dive into the broader strategy of building valuable assets for your online business, knowing when to focus on ranking keywords, and why SEO shouldn’t be your sole focus.

Join us as we uncover the state of SEO today, predict who will dominate the search game in the coming years, and reveal insights to help you navigate the ever-changing landscape of online business. Let’s dive in!

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Episode Highlights

03:25 What are the effects of the Google update?

13:20 What sites get results after updates?

22:20 CTR considerations when picking out keywords!

30:30 Producing a lot of content is not the answer

38:10 SEO means high-intent traffic

Courses & Training

Courses & Training

Key Takeaways

Real businesses, especially those selling tangible products, are more resilient to updates. Sites that function as actual brands fare better than those focusing solely on content or affiliate links.

SEO requires ongoing, long-term efforts, not short-term fixes. Realistic expectations about time and resources are crucial.

➥ For new websites, focus on building site authority through linkable assets before expanding content production. For established sites, leverage existing authority to rank new keyword-driven content more effectively.

About The Guest

Nathan Gotch is the co-founder of Rankability, which helps people create SEO curated content that search engines love to rank. He is also the founder of Gotch SEO, which is an SEO training platform for SEO’s.

Connect with Nathan Gotch

Transcription:

Jaryd Krause:

What if every niche website owner was taught wrong about how to get traffic and rank? What if it wasn't just about creating content and ranking keywords?

Hi, I’m Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast. And today, I'm speaking with Nathan Gotch, who is the co-founder of Rankability, which helps people create SEO-curated content that search engines love to rank. He also is the founder of Gotch SEO, which is an SEO training platform for SEOs.

Now, in this podcast episode, Nathan and I discuss what websites lost traffic during these last few Google updates, why they've lost traffic, how that's happened, and then also what sort of sites have fared well, stayed stable, or even maybe slightly gained traffic, and why they were able to do so through all these SEO changes lately.

We also talk about how authority actually is, authority brands and domain authority, what that is, and how those things beat keywords, and how you can actually build that authority, and how Nathan actually builds his own websites to weather all the storms.

And not just for SEO. We talk about assets, building valuable assets, what they look like, how to do so, and when you should start ranking for keywords in the journey of building up a website.

We also talk about the state of SEO, who will be the big dog in the next two plus five plus years, and why. And you may not see this coming; maybe you do. We also talk about why you shouldn't only focus on SEO in your business.

Now, there's so much value in this podcast. Dive in; I'm sure you'll love it.

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 that 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.

Nathan, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Nathan Gotch:

Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me back on. Appreciate it.

Jaryd Krause:

So interesting times for SEO, right?

Nathan Gotch:

Very, very. Yeah. I had to modify some of my strategy since the last time we talked. So we can get into that if you'd like.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, absolutely. That's what I was wanting to talk about—how you're changing your approach. But also, I guess let's start from the top. There's so many things to talk about, actually. What have you noticed where people have fared well out of this or not so fared well in terms of publishers or website owners?

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah. I'm going to try to walk a very delicate line here because I know a lot of people. Let's just start with the most obvious fact. It never feels good to get penalized.

So that never feels good. No matter what type of business you have, whether it's a content site or a traditional business, a business is a business. If you're generating income beyond, I think, $600 a year in the US, you are considered a business.

So I personally have had many sites penalize me over the decade that I've been doing this. When I first started, I was much more on the gray hat side. So I know how it feels. It does not feel good to wake up in the morning and see your traffic gone.

It's not exactly the best way to start your morning. So I know how that feels. But at the same time, there are just certain qualities of sites that continue to survive these updates. And this has been consistent.

I mean, I've been through so many cycles at this point, and there's one thing that's been consistent through all cycles. Actually, there are many things. But the biggest one I'll say here is overall site authority.

That's one thing that when you look across all the updates, very rarely do you see a DR80 website getting hit. It just does not happen very often. It's extremely rare. In that pool of sites, it's very rare to find a site that's even, honestly, probably DR70 and above.

And I'm using Ahrefs in this case, but that can also be Semrush's authority score, whatever else you're going to use. But really high authority sites that have really strong link profiles tend to be able to weather any storms that come their way.

So that's kind of like the first part. When you look at a lot of the content sites that get hit, usually they're lacking in that department. That's one thing where a lot of them will have low, really low authority. They may have a lot of content, but as far as link authority, there's a deficit.

And so that's the one area where I like to focus and see, like, okay, how much of a deficit do we have relative to the websites that are ranking in that particular vertical? And usually, there's a big gap. So that's kind of the first part.

The second part, and this is more just my purely anecdotal, just based on me actually doing SEO and studying different verticals and different SERPs and everything that I see. And I'm not even talking about sites that necessarily went up during the updates, right?

They didn't necessarily grow, but they didn't move. And I actually like to see that. They just didn't move. They weren't affected. They didn't go up or down. They just kind of stayed the same. The sites that are in that bucket—nine out of 10—are real businesses.

So the example I'll give you is in the e-commerce space. There are several coffee brands. You have Black Rifle Coffee, Death Wish Coffee, and Peet’s Coffee. You have these different coffee brands. And if you look at their organic keyword profile, it stays pretty much flat or went up after the updates.

Now, of course, this is one very isolated scenario. But if you look in that particular industry, any other site that was not an actual business that actually sold coffee, like if they just wrote coffee reviews or they reviewed different types of espresso, whatever it is,.

They didn't actually sell anything, but they referred people off of their website to another vendor; those are the ones that suffered the most. And it was pretty consistent in that regard.

So I'd say those two things seem to be the two variables that influence the most. Site authority from links and then brand authority seem to be kind of those two things that, at least in my opinion, seem to be pretty influential.

Jaryd Krause:

So when you say site authority from links, that's like domain rating authority or domain authority, and then you've got authority through branding, you mean e-commerce businesses. Is that what you mean?

Nathan Gotch:

Correct. Yeah. So on the link side, this gets a little nuanced because I want to be careful not to generalize here. Because it's easy to manipulate the third-party metrics. So you can go to Fiverr, and you could get a DR50 overnight, right? So that is absolutely not the criteria.

That's more of the baseline criteria to say, “Okay, this site has authority. Now let's investigate the link profile further and see if they're getting links from high quality entities? Are those links relevant? Are they actually an authority in their particular vertical?”

That's where you start to kind of narrow it down and see the quality of that link profile. Also, the way that those links are acquired. That's another part of it, too.

Some people may have that clean link profile, but it was acquired through buying links. And the way that they purchased those links left a massive footprint because they were driving links to pages that did not have any link intent. They were driving links to pages that were highly transactional, did not deserve links, and left a massive footprint.

Because when you study sites that do get links naturally and passively, most of the links they're getting are going to things that actually deserve links. So it could be free tools, free software, data, or just informational content, whatever it may be.

But usually, very rarely, are you going to see natural links going to affiliate review pages, category pages, product pages, or local lead generation pages. That is not normal. And so that footprint is very obvious. So there's some nuance to it, right? And then, of course, you could talk about anchor text diversity and things of that nature as well. But there's a lot of stuff to unpack on that front. Do you want to follow up on that?

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. I was just going to say to add to building them naturally; obviously, the search engines aren't going to want to see them overnight, and your links have just increased hugely.

SEO is a long game, and you want to play the long game by not just linking to high brandable pages that aren’t just money pages but are actually adding value.

And then they'll trickle on through; eventually, you build your brand and your trust first. That's how you should do that in business and life before you go away and seal a deal or close a deal with somebody. That's how life works. That's how business should work: build trust first and play the long game.

So even if you were able to build a lot of links naturally to great pages on your site and it looked great with anchor text diversity, doing it too fast is a scary thing as well, right?

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah. I mean, there are some scenarios where a high velocity of links could be natural, right? In some small scenarios, like if you did some advertising campaign or some marketing campaign that attracted a very high volume of links in a short amount of time,.

So I helped this one client, and they came up with—I don't want to get too specific to reveal them, but they came up with basically a position at their company that was very unique, a position within their team.

And they marketed this particular position on their careers page, and it was basically a PR move and it just acquired so many links. Overnight, they just skyrocketed their link authority and, obviously, their link velocity. And it benefited them greatly. Their organic traffic climbed at the same speed as the link acquisition.

But that's 0.01% of scenarios, right? In most scenarios, that type of link velocity is usually artificially driven and it's usually easy to detect.

And I always like to say that I'm just one person who can open up a little tool and be able to see that someone is manipulating Google through links. If I can do it, Google can definitely do it, right? That's the way that I think about it.

I'm just one guy, right? And they're a trillion-dollar company. I would assume the trillion-dollar company can figure out these patterns and these footprints.

And I know they can because I've been really aggressive on the link-building side in the past and I've been penalized, right? And I was even trying to avoid footprints. So there's certain things where they have the capabilities.

So, yeah, I think in most scenarios, link velocity is probably a dangerous game to play, but just kind of that 1% or less where it might be beneficial.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. So take it with the slower approach, obviously, I guess. Build links and build authority. Well, Google says that's not about links, to probably not build them unnaturally, and that's not what we're prescribing in a certain way. You want to do it in a natural way.

But we have seen, and you have seen, and a lot of other people have seen, that links have helped. And like you said, favored or not, it has affected sites that have that high authority.

What else? I mean, how would you go about a link-building strategy for a site that has been affected?

Or, actually, no, let me ask you a better question. What sort of sites would you work on as an SEO that you know you can get results on? And what sort of sites would you not work on that you are not too sure you could get results on after these changes in March 2024?

And I ask this on the basis of people who have been hit and are wondering, ‘What do we do? ’ And I want to caveat your answer; nobody should be able to hold Nathan accountable for what he says here. Every single site is completely different and nuanced in its own way.

And I dare say what you are going to say, Nathan, is pretty general, but maybe just a little bit of an ideology for people that are thinking about what we should do moving forward.

Nathan Gotch:

I mean, everyone has their own different qualification process for working on campaigns, right?

And for me, my process is pretty strict. I very rarely will take on a campaign unless I think it's basically going to be a done deal as far as the success possibility. If I don't believe that I can actually generate a return on investment for a campaign, I won't even take it on. It's just not worth it.

So let's talk about what a campaign may look like that I would say I would not be able to generate an ROI on. Now, first of all, I charge much more than the average person, okay? So that has to be taken into consideration first. I charge much more. So therefore, to get an ROI, there has to be that bigger gap, right?

I'm looking at a 10-to-1 type of ratio, right? If they invest $10,000, they make $100,000 or $200,000—that type of thing, right? It's the type of return on investment I'm looking for. If it's really narrow and I don't feel like it can get there, then I just won't be able to get people to do it.

Now, there are a couple of things I'm looking at. I don't want to get too agency side, but this is part of the process to qualify a campaign, and there are certain details.

One of the details is how many SEO companies they have worked with, as well as the company itself. I love to ask that question: How many companies have you worked with?

And if I hear the answer, “Well, we've worked with seven companies in X years,” I'm going to say, “I'm not going to be number eight. So I'll refer you out to someone else.” This is not my thing because all that tells me is that they're not committed, right?

Because at a certain point, in every industry, there are bad actors. In every industry, it's the bell curve, right? It's just the nature of most SEO agencies. Just a fact. In any industry, that's how it's going to be.

However, if you've hired ten different SEO companies, the likelihood that all ten are average or below average starts to get pretty low. There had to have been at least one in there that was decent or above average.

So when I see that high volume of switching—because it's so hard. SEO is very difficult. I've been doing SEO on my own personal website, gotchseo.com, for a long time. I started doing SEO on it in 2014, right? And I don't do regressive SEO on it, but that's how long you have to be committed to this. We're talking five or 10 years.

And honestly, when they ask me, “Well, how long is it going to take?” And I'm going to say, “Well, you should view SEO as like you do this until you're no longer on earth, your business goes out, or you get acquired.”

That's it. There's no like, “Let's just do it for three months and then stop, and then through another three months.” And it just doesn't work like that. It's constant; it's every month; it's all the time. It never ends.

Because every single key word that you go after is its own individual battle that requires its own individual strategy. And I think people view it as like, “Oh, we're going to do SEO; yay, let's all do SEO,” and it's this broad kind of umbrella of things.

But really, if you break it down, you pick one key word that you can actually compete on, and that's one individual battle against a variable set of competitors that is going to be different for every key word that you go after. So it's never the same and it just requires constant iteration and change.

So that's one of the questions I like to ask because it reveals a lot, right? It reveals a lot for me.

Now, the other thing is, before I even get on a call with anyone, I don't do a lot of discovery calls anymore, but when I do get on a lot of discovery calls, the first thing I do before I even talk to them is look at their situation, right?

I looked at their site. I can see what their organic keyword profile looks like. I see their volatility over time. I looked at their LinkedIn profile. And the biggest thing for me typically that will scare me off is aggressive traffic declines.

If I see they've really been hit super, super hard, unfortunately, if you dig yourself into a grave, okay, you have to climb out of that grave, right? And to climb out of that grave just gets you to the ground. It doesn't get you to where you need to go.

So that's why, for me, I don't want to be the person digging out of the grave. And then, finally, we get to ground level, where we can actually do some stuff.

And there's no offense to any business owners. I know it's difficult. Everyone wants to get a return as fast as possible. But the problem is that every business owner wants an ROI.

And when you tell them, “It's going to take six months for us to just get out of this grave that was built over the last seven years of you doing SEO. It’s going to take six to twelve months just to get us into being able to actually play on the field," I always tell people that. I straight up tell them, “You have a long journey ahead of you. And of course, I'm willing to help you, but I can't have the expectation that this is going to be an overnight situation.”

So I'm looking at those types of things, and this is why I don't take on many clients, right? Because I'm looking for someone who has realistic expectations, and then it also depends, too, on the type of business that they are in.

So we will take on local campaigns where we handle the whole campaign, right? From end to end, we're doing everything. We're doing keyword research, creating the content and even doing a little bit of design and link acquisition. We're doing everything. It's an all-in-one type of service.

But other times, if I'm talking about a SaaS company, I need to know what their resources are. And usually, depending on their size, if they're bigger, they'll typically have copywriters and developers in-house. So then it's kind of a different situation. And I may be more intrigued to work with them because they have the resources to scale and do things that I need them to do.

If they've got like one copywriter or one developer, and I know it's going to be a huge bottleneck, that's going to be a no-go for me. So, yeah, I probably threw a lot at you there, but that's just the way my mind works when I go through discovery.

Jaryd Krause:

No, it's great to see that playing long-term games, long-term people, and SEO are the ways to win in business and life.

And moving forward, you've said you've changed your strategies. Have you changed them significantly? And if so, how? And what sort of strategies are you focusing on more now that this environment has changed versus what you may have been focusing on prior to September 2023 and March 2024?

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah. I mean, for me, as far as my overall broad SEO process, it stayed pretty consistent as far as the cadence that I go through in a campaign.

So it obviously begins with keyword research, and then I build a keyword database, qualify those keywords, and prioritize those keywords. That has stayed pretty much the same.

Now, with some new developments with SGE, Google SGE coming, obviously, and it's been rolled out quite a bit so far, I will have some CTR considerations in my keyword research process because of that, which means when we go and look at prioritizing keywords, we'll see if SGE is being served up, and if it is being served up, I have to decrease my click estimates for that keyword, right?

So if I thought that that keyword was going to get, let's say, 100 clicks a month because of SGE, maybe I'd drop that down to 60, right? It's just an arbitrary kind of thing, but just try to figure out, like, okay, let's just prepare for potential click loss.

And it's just smart to do because it can help you kind of estimate that ROI a little more on the conservative side, right? So that's one thing.

And then honestly, that really isn't different from what it was before, because I was still doing that even with featured snippets and instant answers and all the other things that Google throws at you at huge adblock. So I've always considered CTR.

So as far as that goes, keyword research, then immediately going into doing an audit, prioritizing the technical SEO opportunities, and then going in and optimizing existing assets. pages that are already alive, making them better, upgrading them, optimizing them, and creating new assets to build topic authority.

And then the next piece—there's kind of a secondary part of that—is building linkable assets. So assets that are specifically designed—and we can talk about more specifically, but assets specifically designed to acquire links to function more as link bait.

And then the final piece of that is to go out and actually promote those assets on relevant websites. Now, if it's local, we also obviously add a Google business profile and citations—all that good stuff. But that's basically the process.

So at a high level, that process has not changed. It's the exact same process that I go through. Now, within each of those little elements, though, there's a lot of things that have been changed for the better, as far as my profitability.

So because of AI, you can do so much now at a speed that you really couldn't do before. And it's even small things. We can talk about a lot of different ways to use AI within the SEO process. But even small things, like having ChatGPT build your Google Sheet formulas,.

I know it seems very simple and very basic, but sometimes you have this idea for a formula and you're like, “I can't even fathom how to build this thing.” You put that scenario in the ChatGPT, it builds the formula for you going into Google Sheets, you test it, and you keep going back and forth.

Eventually you get it and you're like, “Whoa, I just automated something that was really annoying.” And you would have never been able to do that before, right? You would have had to find some Google Sheets person who even does stuff like that. You couldn't even find someone. I don't even know who you'd find.

But now it's like you have this sidekick who can help you. You didn't even know who to ask to solve it at that point. So now you can do that. And we can get into more details of that, but it's just like one small kind of thing that has helped massively.

Jaryd Krause:

So what I hear is basically that you're still doing the same thing, but in a different way and you put different levels of resources into each sort of thing. Are you going for more keywords now or less keywords and putting more of the budget into less keywords? Or was that already something you were already doing?

And I guess this is going to depend on the site and the business and what it needs, but typically, do more resources go into building assets for clicks or for link bait to build up that authority and make that the real foundation that the keywords can rank on? Is that how you're looking at it? That's how I would probably look at it.

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah. It definitely depends on the type of website that we're working on. So if I'm working on a site that's completely new, like fresh out of the box—we have our software rankability—we're building a brand new-domain.

So my mentality with that domain is radically different than gotchseo.com, which's over 10 years old and has tons of links, right? Totally different mentality. So I'll start with a new website and then we'll transition to an existing site.

So for a new website, my number one priority is building site authority. That's the only thing that matters to me with a new site. How do we grow this site's authority as fast as humanly possible? Because I know there are many different philosophies and many different ways to “skin a cat,” right? Everyone's got their own way of doing things. This is just the way I do things, because I believe that links are very important. Just my opinion. And I've just seen that anecdotally and through a lot of data.

But I need to build that site authority, because if I can lift site authority, then every asset that I build after that is going to perform much better. things,

But what I see a lot of people do is start a brand-new website, and they build out a bunch of content and there's no link support for any of that content. And it just kind of doesn't do anything. And it's not the content that's a problem. It's the fact that the website has no trust or authority.

So what I want to do is attack that deficit that you have—the biggest deficit of all—and get that squared away to a point where I think, ‘Okay, we've got some traction here.’ Now I can start to kind of increase that content velocity as far as targeting specific keywords.

I was just going to say that I'm pretty extreme about this with a new website because I'll build out like three to five linkable assets, roughly three to five. And then I'll spend the next six months or so just focusing on promoting those like crazy. And that's it. I won't do anything else. I don't even care about traffic, necessarily.

All I care about is just building support. Because my long-term ambition is that once I've got that support, I'm going to start to publish keyword-driven assets. And I know that because I have site authority, they're going to rank on the second page as soon as I publish them, as opposed to ranking on page nine when I publish them.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, that was going to be my next question. How many pieces of content do you publish, or keywords do you put out there or assets—you would call them assets in terms of valuable assets for people that are coming to the site—to use them as link bait again?

I love that approach. It's really an evergreen strategy versus, “Let's just throw a bunch of keywords at this and see what ranks.”

And then, once we see what ranks, we'll start to go for more keywords in that space. And then that can all be taken away by one person or one other website that has authority and goes, “Oh, I'm going to rank for this now,” which is basically what you're saying.

When you already have the authority and you want to rank for a keyword, you have confidence that you can rank for it right away over maybe hundreds or thousands of other websites that are maybe niche sites in that space that have a lot of keywords or topical authority around them but no real foundation for them to sit on in terms of domain authority or brand authority, right?

Nathan Gotch:

Correct, yeah. And I mean, you could technically do the keyword-driven approach initially with the new website. But the challenge is that even if you do that, you're still going to have to drive links to that keyword-driven asset to make up the deficit that you have.

And that actually introduces a lot more risk because it doesn't look very good. And it's much better to get links to assets that clearly deserve it.

For example, if you build out some sort of free tool on your website, getting a lot of links is very natural. It's a very natural thing that occurs. And then you can easily just piggyback off that authority and lift all the other assets.

So I believe topic authority is definitely a thing, but I think it's overblown a little bit. I think people focus a little too much on “Let's just produce a lot of content.” If it were just as easy as publishing a lot of content, there'd be a lot of rich SEOs. It's not that easy.

Jaryd Krause:

I want to highlight that for people listening. The reason all these SEOs would be so rich is because it's very cheap to produce a lot of content and it's a lot more expensive to build links and topic authority and build a good campaign.

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah, it's hard to build a brand. It's not easy. It's very, very difficult. And it's easy. And we just go into ChatGPT and overnight we could produce hundreds of articles. So there's not a whole lot of value in just words, right? There's more nuance that's required there.

And we haven't even talked about how to develop SEO content, which is actually keyword-driven content. And some people freak out about the term ‘SEO content,’ like, “Oh, that's too focused on driving organic traffic.”

But I just say SEO content to differentiate from link bait. Those are the two differentiators for me. So SEO content, in my opinion, is just any page that's built around a keyword.

Jaryd Krause:

Would you also call that a linkable asset? Is that what you would call a linkable asset as well?

Nathan Gotch:

There is some blending that can occur. You could technically have a linkable asset that is targeting a keyword as well. But there are occasionally linkable assets that I build that are not built around a keyword.

So, for example, it might be car accident statistics in Chesterfield, Missouri. You're not going to go into the tools and find search volume around that. It's just not going to exist. But is a reporter potentially searching that to get some data about some study that they're doing? Potentially, right?

So that's what I like to do. I like to put a lot of lines in the ocean and hopefully some of those will start to pick up some passive links. I mean, this is where I really started to geek out. So we can go in whatever direction you want.

Jaryd Krause:

All right. Well, SEO content—you mentioned SEO content. What is SEO content? to you?

Nathan Gotch:

I mean, I just define it as any page or post—if you want to call it that—that is built around a specific keyword phrase. That's it. So it's literally designed to bring in organic traffic from Google. It could also be designed to bring in organic traffic from YouTube, right?

I mean, some people think of search engines; we just think of Google, but you've got YouTube, you've got Amazon, you've got Etsy, you've got TikTok, and there's a lot of search engines out there. But it stems from some type of asset that is built around a topic or keyword.

Jaryd Krause:

I love it. I agree. Optimizing only for Google is a risk.

Nathan Gotch:

Very.

Jaryd Krause:

So in saying that, where do you see this landscape of SEO changing and evolving with how different companies may come and go? I'm not insinuating anything at all in that question, but how do you see the landscape evolving in the next sort of two to five years in terms of who might be winning in the search game?

Nathan Gotch:

So I try to be very, very careful with not going down the dark, on either side, right? Because it's easy to go the pessimist route, right? Oh, okay. Google's going to die, and things are going to get worse, and SEO is going to die. That's one route that people will take.

And the other route is to put your head in the sand and just pretend like nothing's happening. So I try to go somewhere in the middle there because I don't want to go—

Jaryd Krause:

Let me give you a bit of context in my question. Not because I want to create some fear mongering media with this podcast; it’s more so that people can sort of see what's coming down the pike to optimize, to be able to put themselves in front of the right audience to give them more value and serve at a better rate. That's more so the context of the question.

Nathan Gotch:

For sure. Yeah. So the reason I kind of framed it that way is because I just try to be careful not to look too far into the future, because unfortunately, as you have experienced the last couple of years, things are changing so fast that it almost makes your head spin.

I mean, just like when ChatGPT launched, what was that? November 2023 or 2022. No, it was 2022. And to this day, it is mind blowing how fast things have changed in that regard, as far as technological advancements.

But as far as SEO goes, for me, I just look at the cold, hard facts, try to remove my emotion out of them, and try to remove my crystal ball type of behavior. And when you look at the facts and you look at who dominates search, Google has 90% of the search market share. Literally, today, they have 90% of the market share.

The second biggest website on the internet is YouTube, which they also own. And do you want to talk about monopolies? YouTube is the biggest monopoly that they have, by far. There is not a single competitor that they have. I think they have 97% of the video market share. It's just ridiculous.

So when you look at it, not even just from a search perspective, the two most popular websites on the internet are Google and YouTube. I mean, so for that to shift would require just huge, huge things. And even if it were, we're talking a five, 10-year battle for that to transpire. And at this point, that's too long for me to care about.

And by the way, I don't have any allegiance to Google at all. I do SEO. I'm not an ally of Google. I don't care. If another search engine comes in or another type of platform comes in, I will drop Google in a second without any emotion at all.

My opinion is that I just go wherever the attention and the demand are. And right now, Google has all the attention and all the search demand. And that's where people go. It's a freaking verb. I mean, it's going to be very, very, very hard for someone to chop away at their market share.

Jaryd Krause:

So the way I think about the traffic from Google is the level of intent for buying and making a decision to go a certain route.

If I'm going to go away and try to learn something that's going to be valuable to me and that's going to help me make a purchase decision, I'm not going to go to ChatGPT. I'm not going to go to any other search engine, right? I'm not going to go to Facebook. I'm not going to go anywhere other than Google.

And that's why Google is just a beast because they help brands put themselves in front of the people that are asking for their help and their service. And it is amazing what they've created.

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah. Well, I think that the high intent is what makes it—obviously, I'm extremely biased when I say this, but I believe SEO is one of the best marketing channels because of what you just described.

You have high intent traffic. It's just very different than when you're on your phone and you're scrolling through TikTok and then boom, you get hit with some dorky SEO guy like me saying, “Here's how to do keyword research.” And you're like, “What? I was just looking at UFC videos.”

It's such a different situation, right? It's totally different. And of course, there is search on TikTok and the other platforms, but it's not the same. People go to Google. There's commercial intent.

Now I will say that there are a few industries that I would be very scared of if I were doing SEO in them. There are a few. One of them is e-commerce. I have a lot of friends who are in the e-commerce SEO space and like a lot of people that I work with and it's just really tough out there because Google's just eating up clicks.

The traditional results, the traditional top, the 10 blue links—they don't exist a whole lot in the e-commerce space. If you look up best Nike baseball cleats or best baseball cleats or something, there's all kinds of SERP features going on.

I'm just speaking from my personal experience. When I want to buy something that's a physical item, I just go directly to Amazon. I don't go to Google. I just go straight to Amazon.com, and I just buy stuff there. When it comes to e-commerce, really, that's just my behavior and I can't be the only one, right?

I've talked to other people and they're like, “Yeah. If I'm going to get, I don't know, some household thing, I'm not going to go to Google. I'm just going to go to Amazon.” So there's just a lot of nuanced stuff there.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. I would say it's different in different countries. Amazon in America is phenomenal compared to what it is in Australia. So I'll just go to Google, type in what I want and click shopping. And then, if it's the cheapest or best value for money, it'll pop up with Amazon and then a few other ones. And that'll make my decision.

But I see what you're saying in terms of e-commerce; it's very much like what Facebook pages were. As an example, back in the day, you could get a lot of organic traffic from your Facebook page. And then Facebook realized that was a thing and they turned it into a pay-to-play game, whereas Google is starting to do the same thing.

As an SEO or doing SEO for your e-commerce brand, it has worked for a very long period of time, and it's been great. A lot of people have fared well despite these changes in the last year.

Obviously, though, for the people with deeper pockets, Google's going to take their money. And if they're willing to pay to play, they're going to put them at the top. And is that what you're alluding to?

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah. I mean, that's a part of it too. It's also just that the general SERP makeup has changed so much. And this isn't just e-comm; it's also local as well.

Ranking in the traditional results in local is almost pointless in some scenarios. Because if you look at some local searches—and I'm speaking purely US, by the way—. This could be very different in other versions of Google, but at least the dotcom version that I work in.

You're going to have traditional ads and Google ads, which will probably push most of the results down below the fold. Then, above that, you're going to have, in some cases, only in some niches, local service ads.

So you got one block traditional. Then we got local service ads, which typically have two local service providers in them. And then you'll have the local pack. And within the local pack, you'll have an ad in the local pack. And then you'll finally get to the organic local pack, which is the top three.

Then, once you're finally below the local pack, you're at the traditional results. You're at number one, the number one guy. But when you think about all the different ones, that number one guy is realistically number seven or eight, possibly even 10 in some scenarios.

So this is why I think some businesses are still living back in the day, in a lot of cases. They're still thinking, ‘Oh, let's just rank in the top 10.’ And no, you can't just rank in the top 10. That's not going to work.

Literally, you have to look at the SERPs and say, “No, we need to have an ad. We need to be local service ads. We need to have an ad in the local pack. We need to be in the local pack, and we need to do traditional SEO.”

And even when you look at the traditional top 10 and local, you usually have a bunch of other directory sites in there as well. So you're going to have Yelp and the legal directories. You want to show up in those as well.

So really, the goal should be like, “We're going to occupy as much real estate as humanly possible.” Let's just try to occupy as much real estate, because the more real estate that you have, the more CTR you're going to get. It's just a fact, right?

So that's the way I try to think about it, as more of this omnipresent type of approach. As opposed to, “Let's only do SEO and make that our only thing.” And why would you put all your eggs in one basket?

I don't even do that in my own business. I have a YouTube channel, Twitter, LinkedIn and an email list. And I'm doing an interview. This is the way you have to think about these things.

SEO is just one channel. One channel. It's an amazing channel, but I would never tell someone to just do YouTube or just email.

Jaryd Krause:

Because then you have a single-source dependency on that one traffic source or revenue source. And I've been burned hard before. I've told my story about that and it's just not worth it.

So talking about all these different assets that you have and content that you do,. Nathan, thank you so much for coming on. Where can we send people to check out your YouTube channel and your rankability?

Nathan Gotch:
Yeah, of course. You can just go to Nathan Gotch on YouTube. I have tons of SEO videos. I'm actually getting close to 100,000 subscribers, but I think I have 200 SEO videos or something.

Jaryd Krause:

Oh, congrats.

Nathan Gotch:

So there's a lot of material there. Thank you.

And then, obviously, you can go to gotchseo.com. That's where I have my training program, Gotch SEO Academy, and then rankability.com. We have a free trial. So if you want to try out the tool, you can. It’s just kind of designed more for agencies, but for anyone who wants to be able to optimize SEO content, that's what it's for.

Jaryd Krause:

I absolutely love that. Thank you so much, Nathan, for coming.

Nathan Gotch:

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Jaryd Krause:

Hey, YouTube watchers, if you thought that video was good, you should check out this video here on the 2 Best 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:

➥ Sell your business to us here – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/sell-your-business/

➥ 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

➥ Rank Math (WordPress SEO Plugin) – https://bit.ly/3Acyjf4

➥ Ezoic (Ad Network) – https://bit.ly/3NuVR5P



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