#140 – Non-technical SEO: How high-quality, standout content will always win | Nick Jordan, Mike Haney, & Ben Grynol

How do you “win” at the SEO game with content, landing pages, time-on-page, backlinks, and redirects—without getting technical? Levels’ Editorial Director Mike Haney and Head of Growth Ben Grynol sat down with Nick Jordan, CEO of Content Distribution, to talk about how to outrank your competitors with SEO, how to avoid common mistakes and actionable tips for better SERP rankings.

04:18 – How Nick started

Nick shares his experience from being an entrepreneur to entering in a SEO agency.

After four years, I burned out, and I wanted to get back into startups. But when I looked at my skillset, it’s an enterprise biz dev skillset. And, now I’m a 30 year old and just felt very inaccessible. How do I build an enterprise product? How do I build an enterprise support team, an enterprise legal team? And I realized I didn’t have the right skills to service me as an entrepreneur. So, I joined an SEO agency, my friend’s SEO agency, for minimum wage in Seattle. That puts me well below the poverty line, because I knew that, in order to sell SEO, I was going to have to learn it. It’s consultative, so you can’t sell it unless you actually know how it works. And, I ended up growing our blog from zero to 100,000 organics a month as a sales guy. And then it’s all kind of spiraled from there.

05:49 – Digging deep to SEO

Nick shared his early learnings around SEO and what makes it successful.

So, when I ended up growing the SEO agency’s blog that I worked at to 100,000 organics, and I ended up outranking Instagram for Instagram Support, and I ended up ranking right below Shopify for Shopify Support, and I ended up outranking Shopify for Shopify Safe. What I realized is that, it’s not about technical hack. It’s not about backlinks, because I didn’t know any of those. I didn’t build any backlinks. What I saw is that, the content that I created was better than Instagram’s Support page, and the content I created was better than Shopify’s page on whether it’s safe or not. And so really, I learned two things, that it’s all about creating higher quality content, and then the second is, being more relevant to the search that the person’s making.

09:30 – How to outrank your competitors in every niche

When it comes to search engine optimization, there’s a process that works for every niche. The key is figuring out what that process is, and making sure you stick to it.

We’ve figured out a repeatable process, and it’s different for every niche. So for example, users are expected to behave differently when you search for a recipe, versus when you search for glucose monitoring. And, a good time on site for a recipe search will be vastly different than a glucose monitoring website. And so, the whole strategy involves Googling the keyword you want to rank for, and then looking at what’s already ranking, and then making your content more comprehensive. So if you look at the first 10 results, even the first, positions one through three, they’re not going to have content that’s in positions four through 10. And really, what you want to do is you just want to figure out what they didn’t cover, based off of other websites that tell you what they covered. And then you just combine that into this uber guide that provides more value than any other page Google could show.

10:57 – The easy way to be more comprehensive

If you’re a new startup and trying to rank for SEO, write more words thank your competitors.

One of the easiest ways to be more comprehensive is to write more words. And so, if you’re a new startup and you’re competing from a place of weakness, write more words and that will make up for the lack of other factors that you don’t have. And then, once I hit full authority mode, I can get away with publishing less words because of the prior history I’ve developed with Google and servicing their users well.

12:43 – Mistakes that most brands make

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make is they think there’s one keyword or only a handful of keywords that are relevant.

So, one of the big mistakes that a lot of brands make is they think there’s one keyword or a handful of keywords or like a hundred keywords that are important to their brand. I did some research before I jumped on the call. There’s 70,000 keywords representing 1.5 million searches a month related to glucose plus tracking, monitoring, Levels. And that was 70,000 keywords. You might need to write a thousand pages to rank for all of the ways that people are searching around this thing that you guys do.

17:48 – The toughest part of content operations is people

Content operations is more than SEO. The biggest challenges are around people and processes.

It’s very hard. Content operations, publishing 8,000 pages in a year, is everything but SEO. It’s logistics. It’s operations, and it’s actually mostly people, people and processes. You can’t hold people accountable to doing something a specific way 8,000 times, times 800 words, unless it’s documented. So, we have over a thousand SOPs. But, going back to your example of parking tickets, you can’t create a page about the speed of parking ticket, and then rank in every city in the country. Because, when you have a parking ticket in Wichita, Kansas, there’s a different kind of motion than when you have one in Seattle. There’s a different courthouse. There’s different rules. And, you’re higher quality when you’re specific to the exact problem that the user has.

22:55 – The power of referral traffic

Figuring out how to send referral traffic to your target page will alert Google that real humans are interested in it and suddenly your page becomes worthy of ranking.

I think that time on page is a signal for quality. There’s other signals for quality that I think exist, like overall site engagement, return visits. They hit your page and then they stop searching for that thing. One of the things that I found really effective, that I think is kind of slept on, is referral traffic. The more referral traffic I could send a page, the easier and higher it ranks, the better I beat competitors. And my theory here is that, Google discovers a hundred zillion pages every single day, and 99.999999% will never receive a human visitor. Most content published will never be read by a human. And so, if you can jam social traffic or email or Reddit, or literally any referral traffic to a particular page, it immediately puts you on the map of Google because you are somehow able to get all of these people, come to this content and engage with it. And then Google goes, “Hey, I think I should test these guys on my search results,” and they’ll bump you up. And if your user engagement metrics are comparable to what they’re already showing, then you’ll stick there. If they’re not, you’ll bounce back off and you’ll stay off the first page until you rewrite the content and Google will give you another shot.

24:13 – What is backlink?

Backlinks are links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website.

So a backlink is just a website linking to you like in your Instagram profile, your LinkedIn profile or a guest post or whatever. Most of those links will never receive a single referral visitor. Referral traffic is when there’s a link, and then people click through and they go to your website. And I found it works with email. It works with YouTube. It works with Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest. Any kind of traffic that you can send to a particular page is helpful, as long as that traffic is engaged.

40:57 – Every factor is within your control

The most empowering part of SEO is recognizing that you can impact every part of your brand’s SEO strategy.

The framework that we’ve discussed today is actually really empowering because it means two things. One, it means that every factor is within your control. There is no praying to the Google gods, “I really hope this works. I hope these backlinks I sprinkled on the website pays off.” You don’t have that. It’s within your control. You can control quality. You can control your website. You can control the user experience. And that’s a very powerful place to approach SEO, because it doesn’t mean it’s up to chance. You own the outcome. If you don’t get the desired outcome, it’s not because of some voodoo magic. It’s because of, you didn’t do the work.

44:31 – The importance of titles and meta information

The title of your page is one of the most important elements when it comes to generating clicks and driving relevance to your search term.

It’s important in the context of getting the click and kind of driving relevance to the term, Google, in terms of how relevant is this page to what they search for. They’re looking at the URL. They’re looking at the meta and they’re looking at the H2s within the content. So, it’s important from that perspective, but I don’t think you need to get super fancy. One thing that I do. So if I have a page, let’s say you’re on page two for metabolic health, and you wanted to rank on page one. I don’t want to build any backlinks. I’ll build internal links. And I’ll go back to the 400 pages on your blog, and I’ll create an internal link that’s relevant to that page I really, really, really want to rank for. And generally, that’s enough to get the outcome that I want. Your competitors probably don’t have 400 internal links to their top ranking page. So, it’s an easy way to beat them.

Nick Jordan: (00:06) Every factor is within your control. There is no praying to the Google gods, “I really hope this works. I hope these backlinks I sprinkled on the website pays off.” You don’t have that. It’s within your control. You can control quality. If you control your website, you can control the user experience. And that’s a very powerful place to approach SEO, because it doesn’t mean it’s up to chance, and you own the outcome. If you don’t get the desired outcome, it’s not because of some voodoo magic. It’s because of, you didn’t do the work.

Ben Grynol: (00:39)

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol: (01:04)

Nick Jordan cut his teeth in the startup game. He joined an early stage company around eight employees, and he ended up being part of it until they grew to over 200 and went through an acquisition. At this time, Nick thought of himself as a sales guy. He didn’t have a ton of experience in things like SEO. He took some time off, and eventually, he wanted to get back into the startup game. So, he started digging into this concept of SEO. And, like any startup, he started uncovering it one thing at a time. Well, that led him to build contentdistribution.com, Workello and a number of other companies in the SEO game, the most impactful being from zero to over a million and a half organic visitors in just 18 months for one company alone.

Ben Grynol: (01:49)

And so Nick has this lens on SEO, how to build pages that people want to visit, how to think about time on the page, not just backlinking, not some of the SEO strategies that you typically hear, but what does strong SEO look like. So Mike Haney, editorial director, he and I sat down with Nick Jordan and we deconstructed all of the things around SEO. How does Nick think about it? What can you do to improve your SEO? And, if you’re just generally interested in content, how does it make the internet better? Here’s the conversation with Nick and Haney.

Ben Grynol: (02:29)

So, why don’t we kick it off? We got to go back to your story as a founder, because you have, in your own words, you stumbled your way into SEO, coming from more of a sales background, but you’ve got experience in tech and startups and having raised funds in the past. And so, some of these things led you down this path of, “Hey, SEO, isn’t as challenging as it sometimes seems to be,” something that, if you learn and you start to execute against it what actually works, it’s kind of one of those things where it’s like, there’s a model and anyone can do it. And so, demystifying some of these things around backlinks or around keywords, and around things that get thrown out in the SEO world, where people might start to lean too much one way over another. Love to dig into your background and hear just how you came into where you are right now.

Nick Jordan: (03:18)

Yeah. For sure. I think, back in the day, it was all about hacks and things like that. But, I think that, by the end of this episode, your audience is going to have a really solid framework for kind of answering any SEO question that comes up within their organization.

Nick Jordan: (03:31)

So, I’ve been an entrepreneur for my entire career. I dropped out of college, and I started two failed startups, where I spent about six years failing. The first one, zero users, zero revenue. The second one I called Call My Way to 6K-mer, but we still failed for various reasons, and ended up joining a startup as employee number eight and like won the lotto, because we grew to 200 employees in four years, bootstrapped by making a ton of cash. In the process of doing this, I got experience across literally every department, from sales, biz dev, support, product development, legal, finance. And I think, outside of the founders, I had one of the most cross-functional roles in the organization, as a 26 year old, in an industry I didn’t know existed when I joined the company.

Nick Jordan: (04:18)

After four years, I burned out, and I wanted to get back into startups. But when I looked at my skillset, it’s an enterprise biz dev skillset. And, now I’m a 30 year old and just felt very inaccessible. How do I build an enterprise product? How do I build an enterprise support team, an enterprise legal team? And I realized I didn’t have the right skills to service me as an entrepreneur. So, I joined an SEO agency, my friend’s SEO agency, for minimum wage in Seattle. That puts me well below the poverty line, because I knew that, in order to sell SEO, I was going to have to learn it. It’s consultative, so you can’t sell it unless you actually know how it works. And, I ended up growing our blog from zero to 100,000 organics a month as a sales guy. And then it’s all kind of spiraled from there.

Ben Grynol: (05:05)

Nice. Very cool. And so, when you were doing this, it sounds like there are lots of case studies as you started to dig into SEO. You’ve got a great one around DoNotPay, and the way that they used landing pages based on search, some of the geographic considerations where it’s like… I mean, maybe that’s something interesting to dig into is, SEO isn’t a playbook. There isn’t one, “Hey, here’s your business. Go.” It’s more of a book of plays. What works for DoNotPay might not work for, let’s say, Levels, because we don’t have the same geographic constraints. Maybe we do with some things, but not others. So, I would love to dig into more around how you started to learn some of these things of leaning into SEO, where it works and what you did.

Nick Jordan: (05:48)

Yeah. So, when I ended up growing the SEO agency’s blog that I worked at to 100,000 organics, and I ended up outranking Instagram for Instagram Support, and I ended up ranking right below Shopify for Shopify Support, and I ended up outranking Shopify for Is Shopify Safe, what I realized is that, it’s not about technical hack. It’s not about backlinks, because I didn’t know any of those. I didn’t build any backlinks. What I saw is that, the content that I created was better than Instagram Support page, and the content I created was better than Shopify’s page on whether it’s safe or not. And so really, I learned two things, that it’s all about creating higher quality content, and then the second is, being more relevant to the search that the person’s making.

Ben Grynol: (06:34)

Yeah. The way that we’ve been thinking about long tail content, and it’s exactly that. It’s focus on, like Haney’s thing is, what am I adding to the internet today? If the quality’s not there, it’s like, why even distribute it?

Mike Haney: (06:47)

Yeah. That’s where I’d love to learn more is, when you talk about that quality lens, how you arrived at that, was that sort of accidental? Did you just sort of follow your instinct and end up making better content? Was it that their content was particularly terrible, so just meeting a sort of minimum bar got you over that? And then, once you sort of got that insight, however that occurred, how did you go about sort of operationalizing this idea of higher quality content around whatever the topic where you were doing?

Nick Jordan: (07:14)

That’s exactly it. I didn’t set out to grow to a 100K visitors a month, and I didn’t come in with the concepts that I ended up ultimately learning. But, when I ended up ranking above these brands, I looked at the content and I realized my content is better. Instagram Support page is garbage. It doesn’t help the user. And I looked at my page and I had a bunch of information I collected. And, to be honest, my information probably didn’t help the user either, because you can’t get ahold of Instagram Support [inaudible 00:07:41] possible. But, users would definitely stay longer on my page than they would Instagram’s. And then I looked at the things in terms of relevance, like the URL and the H2s, I was optimized where Instagram didn’t really take that into consideration.

Nick Jordan: (07:57)

At this point, I’ve published more than 8,000 pages of content with my team. And, basically, our entire approach is, it’s 2022. If I told you that Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok use user engagement metrics to influence reach, you’d say, “Duh, Nick, everybody knows that.” But, for some reason, Google, the world’s most innovative, big data company that owns the entire analytics stack from the device, Android, to Chrome the browser, to Google Analytics, people don’t make that connection that Google has the data on how users behave on one page that they show, versus another page that they could show.

Nick Jordan: (08:32)

And if you think about it, there really isn’t a better ballistic that Google could use than how users spend… Two pages, you can’t read the language, they’re both in alien. You Google, you can’t understand it. But you can see that the user spent five minutes on this page and 30 seconds on this page. Just by that, you can kind of guess that, the five minute page is better. It creates more value for the user. They go deeper into the website. They return more often. They type in branded searches more often. And that’s influenced my entire strategy. I don’t know how to build backlink, because I’ve never built a backlink, because I’ve never had to learn how, to get the outcomes that I want to deliver.

Mike Haney: (09:14)

As you started operationalizing this approach more, and it sounds like really indexing on engagement time, how do you optimize that? How do you learn what it is that will make people stick around, and then repeat that over and over again, across different companies and different topics?

Nick Jordan: (09:30)

Yeah. We’ve figured out a repeatable process, and it’s different for every niche. So for example, users are expected to behave differently when you search for a recipe, versus when you search for glucose monitoring. And, a good time on site for a recipe search will be vastly different than a glucose monitoring website. And so, the whole strategy involves Googling the keyword you want to rank for, and then looking at what’s already ranking, and then making your content more comprehensive. So if you look at the first 10 results, even the first, positions one through three, they’re not going to have content that’s in positions four through 10. And really, what you want to do is you just want to figure out what they didn’t cover, based off of other websites that tell you what they covered. And then you just combine that into this uber guide that provides more value than any other page Google could show.

Mike Haney: (10:20)

That’s interesting. So, there’s so many little things that one is told to do if you want to make SEO-optimized content, right? And I remember when I started, one of the things that some wisdom some SEO person passed down is like, “No article should be longer than 1,200 words, because that’s the optimum length.” And, I don’t think we’ve written an article shorter than 1,200 words, because we just do very deep stuff. And as a journalist, that’s not the way I think. I’m like, what is the story I need to tell? But it sounds like that kind of a length constraint isn’t something that you worried about. Comprehensiveness is more important.

Nick Jordan: (10:55)

Yeah. And actually, if you think about it, one of the easiest ways to be more comprehensive is to write more words. And so, if you’re a new startup and you’re competing from a place of weakness, write more words and that will make up for the lack of other factors that you don’t have. And then, once I hit full authority mode, I can get away with publishing less words because of the prior history I’ve developed with Google and servicing their users well.

Mike Haney: (11:19)

Have you found an upper limit to that? Have you found that there’s a point at which a post gets too long and users lose interest, or that other people come along with more specific posts and are able to sort of grab the traffic because they’re more specific on something?

Nick Jordan: (11:36)

Yeah. I think specificness is huge. But, in terms of length, generally, we stop at it’s [inaudible 00:11:43] that, but just, operationally, I’m publishing 8,000 pages a year. I have to stop somewhere. I can’t just make one page 10,000 words just from a service delivery perspective. And so, I generally shoot from 800 words, if I’m like really authoritative and already crushing the niche, to 2,500 words if I’m new to the niche and I want to beat stronger competitors. It’s just logistics.

Mike Haney: (12:09)

I’ve not heard the strategy before of sort of combining what falls in the first rankings with what falls in the articles that are in the later sort of rankings of it. How much do you index on…? Or sort of honing in on what people are actually searching for, right? This is always the challenge of like, people search for continuous glucose monitor, but that’s a very broad term. Are they searching for continuous glucose monitor for diabetes or continuous glucose monitor cost or continuous glucose? So how do you kind of hone in on what the right things to cover even when you’re being comprehensive are?

Nick Jordan: (12:43)

So, one of the big mistakes that a lot of brands make is they think there’s one keyword or a handful of keywords or like a hundred keywords that are important to their brand. I did some research before I jumped on the call. There’s 70,000 keywords representing 1.5 million searches a month related to glucose plus tracking, monitoring, Levels. And that was 70,000 keywords. You might need to write a thousand pages to rank for all of the ways that people are searching around this thing that you guys do.

Mike Haney: (13:10)

So again, it comes back to sort of comprehensiveness as opposed to trying to own some of the top keywords. Some of the ones that we think might be directly in our sort of bulls eye of metabolic health is one we’ve tried to own, because we’re like, well, that’s the space we’re playing in, right? That’s the thing we want to do is own metabolic health. But, the debates we’ve had is, how much effort do you put into owning that keyword? And it sounds like you would scale more on create a whole bunch of articles to get all of the kind of, again, I don’t know if long tail’s the right word there, but cover more of the keywords than just index on one.

Nick Jordan: (13:44)

Yeah. And so when I say comprehensive, I mean on that individual page that you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword, but I also mean covering the entire topic. So, John Mueller, the head of Google Search, at least public facing, he has said, “It’s hard to call a 30-page website authoritative.” And, when you think about it, in 2022, literally, anyone can create a 30-page website. And so, if Google gave that glucose monitoring keyword to anyone who wrote 30 pages about glucose monitoring, it’d do two things. The first is, there’d be so much fluctuation that the next day someone else would beat you, because you beat the guys before you. And the second is, there’d be a bunch of scammers publishing glucose monitoring content that really don’t deserve to be there. They don’t have the business model to support that keyword. They don’t have the knowledge that you guys have.

Nick Jordan: (14:29)

And so, Google has this kind of barrier to entry. 2022, it’s so easy to publish content. There’s AI everywhere, where, the more content you publish about a topic, the easier all of that content will rank all together. And, the example that I always use is, if you look at a 30-page website and a thousand page website about glucose monitoring and metabolic health, all things being equal, the guys who wrote a thousand pages probably know more. One, they learned a ton while writing it. But two, they also have some sort of business model behind it, to support that level of investment. Because creating a thousand pages by experts on glucose monitoring is not cheap. It’s actually very expensive. And so, it kind of acts as a filter for all of the bad actors on the internet that would love to rank for that keyword, but not do a good job at servicing Google’s users.

Mike Haney: (15:17)

Interesting. I’d love to dig in more to this notion of quality, because this is a lot of where we live. And a lot of our tension sometimes with SEO is, we approach our editorial operation much more as a sort of traditional editorial site, as opposed to a marketing tactic, right? We’re not writing to get conversions. We’re writing to educate the world about metabolic health.

Mike Haney: (15:37)

The flip side of that is, we need people to see this. Otherwise, nobody learns, right? I can write all the great articles in the world, but if they don’t reach the people who need them, then who cares how good they are and how well resourced and reported they are. So, we index very highly on quality, and I could see a counter argument to what you’re saying. If the important thing is to generate a thousand pages, there’s a little bit of attention there between… It’s easy to generate a thousand kind of low quality pages and just cover a topic, really already generate a thousand pages of deeply reported research stuff. So how do you benchmark on that quality thing? How do you know when you’ve hit the right quality bar?

Nick Jordan: (16:15)

I don’t bend on either. So, it has to be more valuable than any other page Google could show, and I need to do it at scale, bigger than anyone else I’m competing with. And if I do those two things, I’ll always win. Regardless of backlinks, regardless of authority, regardless of DR, regardless of all these things that SEOs say are important, if I do higher quality content at a bigger scale, I’ve never not won.

Ben Grynol: (16:37)

So, digging into the idea of long tail content, I love that example of DoNotPay. And, it sounds like it’s along the lines of what you’re saying, where if you create a page that is like, How to Pay a Parking Ticket, well, that’s the macro category and it’s like, maybe you rank on that, but that’s not helping to serve the people that are looking for these specific things, how to pay a parking ticket in Wichita. To Haney’s point, when we start to think about metabolic health, it’s like people are searching for such nuanced things where it’s like, is rapini good for my metabolic health? It’s like the most long tail thing where it’s some cruciferous vegetable, but it’s not just broccoli. I mean, it gets really long tail.

Ben Grynol: (17:17)

And so we go, cool, we put up a message to our entire team that says, “Haney, I think we need something on rapini and olive oil as it pertains to metabolic health,” right? But we’re doing this as far as having the quality lens, but also serving what we think is going to be the most helpful for members. So, we’d love to hear more about the way you think about pairing quality with relevance and long tail content, because they are juxtaposed in some ways, where it’s hard to do both so they come with trade offs.

Nick Jordan: (17:48)

It’s very hard. Content operations, publishing 8,000 pages in a year, is everything but SEO. It’s logistics. It’s operations, and it’s actually mostly people, people and processes. You can’t hold people accountable to doing something a specific way 8,000 times, times 800 words, unless it’s documented. So, we have over a thousand SOPs. But, going back to your example of parking tickets, you can’t create a page about the speed of parking ticket, and then rank in every city in the country. Because, when you have a parking ticket in Wichita, Kansas, there’s a different kind of motion than when you have one in Seattle. There’s a different courthouse. There’s different rules. And, you’re higher quality when you’re specific to the exact problem that the user has.

Nick Jordan: (18:29)

When I was just preparing for the show, I found keywords like keto glucose levels and fat zinc-like glucose levels and normal glucose levels. And you just can’t answer those three questions with one page. You have to create separate subtopics that’d be very specific to the user. And that’s what quality is. It’s answering the exact question that they’re looking for.

Ben Grynol: (18:51)

So is there ways that… How have you managed? So as you’ve been doing this, how do you manage it all, where you start to have more and more content out in the world and some of it needs to be updated? You want things to remain relevant. You want things to remain updated. And so, the more you grow, it probably becomes exponentially harder to manage everything.

Nick Jordan: (19:14)

Well, I’m a consultant. And so, I like to do the things that people pay me to do. And in this case, DoNotPay, we grew them from zero to 1.5 million organics a month. And, they wanted more surface area. So, we focused on creating more surface area and not going to the courthouse in Seattle shut down, and is that a new address? It just wasn’t interesting as creating more surface area for them. You guys still need new health updates, and people find out new things about the metabolic gateways, and I think it probably is more important for you guys, especially when it’s related to health, that you actually do have to follow the latest news. You have to go back and update that content because it’s people’s health on the line. And so I think, in your case, it’d probably be a disservice if you guys didn’t refresh that content every once in a while, with the latest and greatest scientific findings.

Ben Grynol: (20:02)

Pages or pages, you get sites like Wiki, where super high domain authority, constantly being updated. Limitless, it’s almost like unlimited numbers of pages, because they’re always getting updated and created every day about the longest of long tail things. The challenge becomes, when you’re an organization like WebMD or Healthline or Mayo Clinic, something that is reporting in an objective way, or is as objective a way as possible, knowing that things are always evolving and changing, I think that becomes exponentially harder to solve for is the problem that you’re trying to make sure your content is up to date. It’s guiding people in the right direction, knowing that it’s not possible to just have that oversight on everything as you scale a team. Some of it relies a bit on the community in a way.

Nick Jordan: (20:53)

Yeah, it does. And, it can get very expensive. So, NerdWallet just IPO’ed, I think, for a billion dollars. They have something like 14,000 pages, and it would take you, I think I calculated, something like 400 or 600 pages a month for four years to catch up with them. Well, NerdWallet has 131 writers on staff. I calculated their payroll at over $500,000 a month just on content. And so, when you think about these Healthlines or these WebMDs, probably a million dollars a month on writers and editors and scientists that are creating this content.

Mike Haney: (21:26)

So when I ask a very self-serving question then, how do we beat Healthline in our little specific part of the world? They write a little bit about metabolic health, but we want to make sure, when people search metabolic health, we do have higher quality content. We know we do, in terms of quality as measured by sort of accuracy, reporting depth, et cetera, maybe not quality as measured by are we answering people’s questions because I don’t quite know how to answer that. How do you go up against a NerdWallet if you had a smaller targeted financial organization coming to you or us against a Healthline?

Nick Jordan: (22:00)

So let’s talk about you and Healthline. I said earlier, there’s 70,000 keywords I found related to glucose monitoring levels of tracking. And then there’s probably another 70,000 or a hundred thousand related to metabolic health. And there’s another hundred thousand related to some of the other more complicated words you said earlier in the thing that I didn’t understand. And, when you look at the human body, there’s probably a hundred thousand keywords about my fingers and wrinkles and aging and organs. And so, WebMD, even though they spend maybe a million dollars a month, they can’t be everywhere. There’s simply too much searches. There’s too much variability in the things that humans need. And so the way you guys win is you just focus on metabolic health. You focus on glucose monitoring. You publish a thousand pages on each and you’re going to crush them.

Mike Haney: (22:48)

What other metrics, you mentioned time on page, what other metrics do you look at, to know whether or not you’re being successful?

Nick Jordan: (22:55)

So, I think that time on page is a signal for quality. There’s other signals for quality that I think exist, like overall site engagement, return visits. They hit your page and then they stop searching for that thing. One of the things that I found really effective, that I think is kind of slept on, is referral traffic. The more referral traffic I could send a page, the easier and higher it ranks, the better I beat competitors. And my theory here is that, Google discovers a hundred zillion pages every single day, and 99.999999% will never receive a human visitor. Most content published will never be read by a human.

Nick Jordan: (23:37)

And so, if you can jam social traffic or email or Reddit, or literally any referral traffic to a particular page, it immediately puts you on the map of Google because you are somehow able to get all of these people, come to this content and engage with it. And then Google goes, “Hey, I think I should test these guys on my search results,” and they’ll bump you up. And if your user engagement metrics are comparable to what they’re already showing, then you’ll stick there. If they’re not, you’ll bounce back off and you’ll stay off the first page until you rewrite the content and Google will give you another shot.

Mike Haney: (24:08)

What’s the distinction there between a referral link and a backlink, or a referral and a backlink?

Nick Jordan: (24:13)

So a backlink is just a website linking to you like in your Instagram profile, your LinkedIn profile or a guest post or whatever. Most of those links will never receive a single referral visitor. Referral traffic is when there’s a link, and then people click through and they go to your website. And I found it works with email. It works with YouTube. It works with Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest. Any kind of traffic that you can send to a particular page is helpful, as long as that traffic is engaged.

Mike Haney: (24:44)

And you mentioned there, people landing on the page and sticking around, so is bounce rate something that you index highly on?

Nick Jordan: (24:50)

Yeah. So, bounce rate, time on site, number of pages visited are the things that Google Analytics tracks. Now, I don’t actually know my competitor’s data. But what I’ve seen is that, when I deploy a super aggressive popup that jumps out at the user one second after they land on the page, bounce rate goes up, number of pages view goes down and my rankings go down, almost immediately. If you have a lot of traffic, go deploy an aggressive popup and you’ll lose that traffic pretty quick. Because the UX metrics decreased, there could be no other reason that you would lose that ranking so quickly. Slow spite speed, you increase your pricing to a million, billion dollars, anything that’s going to decrease those metrics will almost, sometimes overnight, drop your rankings.

Mike Haney: (25:34)

The slow slight speed gets that, what I wanted to ask about next, because I know it’s one of the other things you’ve talked about is the idea of sort of technical SEO and that’s a thing that comes up, tweaks to your page and your site. So how do you think about the role of some of these other things? And if they are over indexed, if people think too much of them, why do you think that is?

Nick Jordan: (25:53)

So, if you connect with me on LinkedIn, you’ll see my tag line as 0 to 1.5 million organics a month without backlinks or technical BS. When I started SEO, I actually tried several times throughout the last 15 years, and none of it stuck because I focused on the technical things. And I’m not a very technical person. My mind doesn’t work that way. I’m better at coming on a podcast than I am doing WordPress plugins. And, I didn’t see success until I focused on content quality and content scale. I don’t think you need to be technical to win at SEO. I didn’t log into Google search console until I took three projects, so a hundred thousand visits. And I still don’t understand a lot of the things SEOs talk about.

Nick Jordan: (26:33)

And I think the reason that it’s so prevalent is because SEO, now it’s getting more mainstream and there’s normal people doing it. But I think, traditionally, SEO attracted a really kind of weird crowd who is more interested in managing those technical aspects than they are at managing content and servicing the user. And so I think, just the pure nature of how many weird tech guys came in, that’s all they talked about.

Mike Haney: (27:00)

I guess it also seems easier, right? It’s like, if I can just hire some smart programmer who knows what they’re doing and they go do something on the back end of my website, and then I get an increase, that is cheaper and way easier than me producing a thousand pages of content.

Nick Jordan: (27:14)

I have a 45-person content team, and people are so difficult to manage, and absolutely is it easier to manage a WordPress plugin than it is people. So, I totally get the alert. People are really hard. You got to motivate and inspire and coach and mentor, and sometimes, discipline. And it’s really tough, especially for, I think, the crowd that was traditionally attracted to SEO, the make money online crowd. What I see is, I see a lot, not anymore, and it’s changing, but I see, a lot of SEOs never had a normal career before they got into SEO. They went straight from, I don’t want to wake up and go to work, to like, how do I make money online, to black hat world, to backlinks and redirects.

Ben Grynol: (27:57)

Let’s go into this idea of… A couple of things. One is, what do you think most people get wrong about SEO? We’ve touched on a few of them. If you were to say, what are the top three things that people get wrong time and time again, so that they don’t go down this path of spending time unnecessarily in one place where it’s maybe lukewarm results?

Nick Jordan: (28:23)

Yeah. So I think there’s… The biggest one is people think they can hack it. And ultimately, it looks like a lot of things. It looks like AI content. It looks like act legs. It looks like weird technical things. And really, people are looking for a shortcut. And if you want to win and you want to win big, there’s no shortcut. You have to put in the work. You have to build a team. You have to publish the content. You have to service the user. You have to create value for Google searchers. And if you can do all those things, which is the long cut, the hard way, you’ll be rewarded very greatly.

Ben Grynol: (28:54)

Interesting. Let’s go into this other idea. It’s always this philosophical capital M marketing conversation to have. But, with marketing, it’s important to have a book of plays as opposed to a playbook, depending on category, depending on industry, depending on like, let’s just keep going forever with this example. But, sometimes, we, as a society, we can fall into this trap of giving prescriptive advice, like everyone should be on digital, on social. It’s like, well, maybe not. Maybe depending on the category of business you’re in, the industry you’re in, that’s not a good use of your time, especially as a small startup. And so, when you think about SEO, I’d imagine there are certain businesses where SEO and content creation is extremely important. Let’s give ourselves a pat on the back and be self-serving and say Levels needs content. Why not have some rationalization here?

Ben Grynol: (29:52)

But, there are other things, assume that someone has a small, independent business that serves, it’s like a B2B business in a smaller town, and they might not benefit from spending all this time creating content because of geographic constraints and, and, and right? When you start to think about this, where do you see SEO being great? Or, where is it a really good play? Where might it not be the best play? And the analog is, if you are in the direct to consumer business and you’re creating a product like that, it’s extremely important to be on digital. It’s extremely important to make sure that you’re creating content and social, and that’s how you’re going to appeal to people. But, if you’re in the enterprise game, digital is maybe not the best recommendation, so let’s bring it back to SEO. When you think about it, where should people play and where should they maybe think twice about it before spending all this time?

Nick Jordan: (30:44)

That’s a great point. I run a content agency, and I’m saying everyone should publish more content. So, in that sense, it is self-serving. I’ll give you two-part answer. The first is, two industries where you can ignore everything we’ve talked about, up until this point. The first is converters. So, how do I convert JPEGs to PNGs? Or how do I convert MP4s to Avis or whatever? You don’t actually need to create any content. You need to have a great converter. And when you look at the people that are ranking for MP4 to Avi or YouTube to MP3, they don’t have any content on their website. It’s usually a one page app. But, going back to the user engagement metrics, they have a better product than the other pages that Google could show, and that reflects in the user engagement metrics.

Nick Jordan: (31:29)

Another example would be a calculator. You don’t need a lot of content to rank for a calculator if it services the user in the way that they want to calculate. And, you can throw it up, and it’ll… I would say also local businesses, but I don’t actually know about local SEO just because I’ve never found it particularly interesting. I’ve never taken on any projects in the space. I want to work with the most ambitious brands on internet, and local businesses aren’t that. It’s probably less important as well in a local business.

Ben Grynol: (32:01)

So when Haney and I go and start a widget company in his hometown in Minnesota. Edina, Minnesota, right?

Mike Haney: (32:09)

Austin, Minnesota.

Ben Grynol: (32:11)

Austin, Minnesota.

Mike Haney: (32:11)

Yes.

Ben Grynol: (32:12)

Austin. When we go and start a widget co, Haney and Ben’s Widget Co in Austin, Minnesota, we probably don’t want to be investing time in SEO is what-

Mike Haney: (32:22)

That seems like the worst thing you and I could go do. We’re not expertees. The content guy and the growth guy probably shouldn’t do that given what Nick just said.

Ben Grynol: (32:30)

The intrinsic motivation’s there. There’s no stopping anyone, Haney.

Nick Jordan: (32:34)

I mean, it depends on your audience, right? If you could sell widgets from Wisconsin to anyone in the world, then yeah, content’s probably a great play. But if your geographic service area is 10 miles, then you probably don’t need as much content as what we’re discussing on this podcast.

Mike Haney: (32:48)

Marketing point, where do you think about content, and maybe this varies by industry, but where do you think about content in the funnel? Do you think of it as a top of funnel awareness that’s job is to get people to the site, and then other things take over? Or do you ever do projects where you’re really indexing on conversions from the content?

Nick Jordan: (33:06)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s totally both. And what I found is that, you will rank for those bottom of the funnel keywords that have high commercial value a lot easier, if you have middle and top of the funnel content supporting to it and linking to it, especially if you can get people to search for top of the funnel phrase, and then click through to your bottom of the funnel. That’s a really great indicator to Google that you have something special going on and will give you a shot at page one. Typically, what we do is, we’ll try and saturate bottom of the funnel and then we’ll go to mid funnel, and then we’ll go top of funnel. What I don’t do is just stop at bottom of the funnel. I found it to be a lot less effective than if you have that supporting content, going back to just kind of that authority of having a lot of content about a particular subject. Bottom of the funnel isn’t generally enough.

Mike Haney: (33:51)

I’m curious, coming off that example, it sounds like this might have been a path you went down at DoNotPay in terms of the localization of what could be done there. One of the thought exercises we played with recently was what would it look like to 10X content at Levels? And, in thinking through that, what I came with is, without 10Xing the resources or even more 15Xing the resources that we have in terms of people and expense, one of the ways we would increase content would be to create very repeatable formats, so the way that thumb tack does plumber San Diego, plumber LA, plumber whatever, right?

Nick Jordan: (34:24)

Yep.

Mike Haney: (34:25)

So we could do something like glucose level by a food, glucose apple, glucose strawberry, glucose whatever, very dynamically created probably types of pages where you bang out a thousand of those. Where does that kind of a strategy fit in your notion of being comprehensive and having a volume of content to help your rankings?

Nick Jordan: (34:45)

You’re absolutely right. There is all these aggregator and websites that have these landing pages that are like barber shops in Seattle and Greek restaurants in Greenwood and things of that nature. I don’t think that particular example is programmatic. I think you will have to write a little bit of content, but I think it’s probably a lot easier to publish that amount when you only do a particular type of template. You don’t have to have an SEO look at every page. You have the SEO look at the template for the page a thousand times, and then the writers end up doing whatever the SEO says.

Nick Jordan: (35:17)

So, I used a strategy pretty successfully on my second project. I created a company, well, a website called doggypedia.org. And, I published 200 pages, and it was basically breed one plus breed two mix. So, husky corgi, German shepherd golden retriever, and literally, the template was the same across every one of those pages. The content was specific to the breed, but it was a lot easier to manage from just the operational perspective having one template. And, it ended up growing to a hundred thousand organics a month as well, with the DR9, which is one of the things that informed my opinion that authority and DR is as important as quality. So yeah, I love it. You should totally do that for every food group.

Mike Haney: (36:03)

What was on those pages? What was the content on the breed mix pages?

Nick Jordan: (36:08)

So it’s basically, going back to being the most comprehensive thing, I’ll share some hacks at the… I’ll share that effect, but it’s basically, what is it like owning this mixed breed? What health problems do they have? What’s their energy levels? What kind of diet do they need? How much do they weigh? How big do they get? How dangerous are they? Or primarily, are they good with kids? Is it good for an apartment? Just think about everything a dog owner would want to know about a dog, before they buy the dog breed. And then, it was all just the same thing for 200 pages, but swapped out keywords.

Nick Jordan: (36:42)

So, the hack is kind of clever. Going back to user engagement metrics, one of the user engagement metrics that I believe Google uses is, let’s say I’m in position 4. People scroll past position 1, 2, 3, and click me. Then I think that’ll ultimately bring my position up. And so what I noticed with this dog breed space is that, everyone’s like, “Oh, the husky corgi is so cute and fluffy. And you should get one and it’s amazing.” But I went the opposite direction. I went contrarian, because I wanted to get click even if I was in position six. And so, my meta titles, which shows up in the search, was, here’s three reasons not to get this mixed breed. And everyone else is saying, “You should get it,” and I’m saying, “Don’t get it.” And of course, they scroll down and they click me because I’m the only one who’s saying something that no one else is.

Ben Grynol: (37:25)

And that’s probably why they’re searching too, is they want to make sure of… They’re trying to mitigate any downstream things that they don’t want after getting a puppy, so they want the knowledge on it.

Nick Jordan: (37:39)

Yeah. And then it was always like, “Oh, well, the husky corgi is really hypergenic, so if you have a small apartment, don’t get it.” So it’s always kind of like, I don’t go too hard and be like, “This is a terrible dog.” It’s just like, “It’s the wrong dog for these type of people.”

Ben Grynol: (37:57)

And because we’re emotional beings, we end up getting the dog. We just need to know that we read it ourselves to say, “I did my homework and I’ve come to terms.” That’s always, always the way that it goes. One thing to dig into is this world of, so given geography, and given that there are people in all these different markets, is there a world where we can still maintain a quality lens without feeling like we’re trying to use a blanket strategy to take, we’ll call it like the same article and say, we’ll call it metabolic health in Seattle, metabolic health in White Rock BC, metabolic health… We start getting into these geographic things because we’re trying to rank. But, if we can find a way to create meaningful content on a geographic basis, is that a play or is the game, “Hey, let’s stick more with food and lifestyle choices as they pertain to metabolic health and get long tail in that way.”?

Nick Jordan: (38:50)

It depends on the industry. I’m not convinced that consumer search that way. I don’t know if they search metabolic health plus Seattle. Maybe they’re looking for a doctor. Maybe you guys could do this index of all the metabolic health clinics within a city, and that would be interesting, but I don’t think that every industry has a local geo play.

Ben Grynol: (39:10)

So, scenario might be, somebody lives in that market. They’re searching for whatever keywords they might search on a macro level. But because of localization, they’re seeing a member story about like Billy in Wichita. They’re from Wichita and they’re seeing that come up first. So it’s a member story that features glucose monitoring, because it’s gotten enough keywords, but it’s ranking highly because of the localization factor. What are your thoughts on that as, not a hack, but making sure that we’re still serving up great high quality content, but spreading the message far and wide?

Nick Jordan: (39:46)

I mean, assuming that that matches and aligns with consumer behavior, where they do search for local metabolic health information, I would think it would be in the context of looking for a specialist or some sort of clinic. I think that could potentially work. And, if I were to do it, I’d probably start with one state, and I’d do like a hundred cities in the state. And then I’d stop there and see what kind of outcome I get. And if it’s good, I’d scale, but I wouldn’t go super broad past the small pilot before I proved it out.

Ben Grynol: (40:20)

Interesting.

Mike Haney: (40:21)

I feel like a lot of the things we’ve heard from agencies are some of these kinds of tricks, right? It’s the backlinks. It’s the keyword stuffing, that kind of stuff. I guess we haven’t talked that much about keywords, but maybe that’s a space to dive into a little bit if you have thoughts there. Because this is a perennial problem for me. I’m trying to write a journalistically good article, and I’m trained as an editor to edit out repetitive phrases. And then the SEO optimization comes back and it goes, “No, no, you need to use this phrase 17 more times in the article.”

Nick Jordan: (40:52)

I also think that’s BS, but let me touch really quick on what you just said about kind of like hacking it. The framework that we’ve discussed today is actually really empowering because it means two things. One, it means that every factor is within your control. There is no praying to the Google gods, “I really hope this works. I hope these backlinks I sprinkled on the website pays off.” You don’t have that. It’s within your control. You can control quality. You can control your website. You can control the user experience. And that’s a very powerful place to approach SEO, because it doesn’t mean it’s up to chance. You own the outcome. If you don’t get the desired outcome, it’s not because of some voodoo magic. It’s because of, you didn’t do the work.

Nick Jordan: (41:30)

The second part is that, the framework that we discussed is actually amazing because it can answer almost any question that will come up throughout your SEO campaign or marketing activity. If it’s relying on hacks, well, there is no framework for decision making. But if it’s relying on content quality and content scale, well, that can answer almost anything. Is this a good intro? Well, does it add more value to the user than the side intro that you have? Is this internal link good? Well, should the user go down this path because you want to expand on the topic? And, having a framework that allows you to answer that question, or any question without having seen it before, is also really, really helpful, from just a sanity perspective because you don’t have to get in arguments about like, “Oh, well, modest blog, 2007, it says like this, but on this other website, it says this.” Just, what’s best for the user, do that. And I think that’s really helpful from an execution perspective.

Nick Jordan: (42:28)

So, basically, going back to those 70,000 keywords, how many pages should I create? No one really knows. [inaudible 00:42:34]. We created a tool called ClusterAI, and basically dump in the 70,000 keywords and your job is done. It spits back every page of content you need to create and which keywords will rank with that page. So, one page might have hundreds of keywords. Variation is the main keyword that can rank with that main keyword. And, the way that we approach it is, we tell our content writers to create the best content possible that they can possibly can. And then during the editing process, when our editors are touching it up, they go and sprinkle those keywords. So, if they say metabolic pathways a hundred times, you might change a lot of those to metabolic, something similar to pathways, but…

Nick Jordan: (43:14)

A better example. If the writer uses glucose monitoring a hundred times in the article, change some of those to glucose tracking. And so I think that you can focus on creating the best quality content. You can do a little bit of SEO and it just naturally ranks. And so, when you look at our content team, our writers don’t know SEO. Our editors don’t know SEO, and our SEO PMs were formally editors and writers that learned SEO with us. And so, a lot of the time, they don’t even know what they’re doing. They just know, “Nick needs me to write the best content possible and then sprinkle little keywords in,” and they don’t know why they’re doing it or how it works. But, when they do it, it just naturally ranks. Don’t focus on the keyword stuffing, focus on the quality. And then, if you notice a writer’s using the same keyword a million times, swap it out with a different one that’s slightly similar, because one page can rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords, not just that one main keyword.

Mike Haney: (44:06)

Are there other… Where I was going with the telephone and the keyword part, where I was going with the idea of the H2 or the meta information, are there other things besides the sort of meat of the article, which is largely what we’ve been talking about, is your article answering the user’s questions and serving the user? Are there other things around that that maybe don’t quite fall into the fully technical voodoo SEO, but things that one should consider? How important are titles? How important is meta information?

Nick Jordan: (44:31)

It’s important in the context of getting the click and kind of driving relevance to the term, Google, in terms of how relevant is this page to what they search for. They’re looking at the URL. They’re looking at the meta and they’re looking at the H2s within the content. So, it’s important from that perspective, but I don’t think you need to get super fancy. One thing that I do. So if I have a page, let’s say you’re on page two for metabolic health, and you wanted to rank on page one. I don’t want to build any backlinks. I’ll build internal links. And I’ll go back to the 400 pages on your blog, and I’ll create an internal link that’s relevant to that page I really, really, really want to rank for. And generally, that’s enough to get the outcome that I want. Your competitors probably don’t have 400 internal links to their top ranking page. So, it’s an easy way to beat them.

Mike Haney: (45:16)

Very cool.

Ben Grynol: (45:17)

Anything else to add before we wrap?

Nick Jordan: (45:20)

Yeah. We touched the surface, but I actually have a 5,000 word guide on exactly how we took DoNotPay for zero to 1.5 million organics a month and drove almost a hundred thousand paid subscribers on workello.com. I also run one of the largest content operation communities on the internet called Fat Graph Content Ops on Facebook. And then you could find me on YouTube at Content Distribution is my channel name. So, Workello, Fat Graph Content Ops, contentdistribution.com.