The New Era of Search: There's a New Way to Rank... | Dan Kurtz

The New Era of Search: There's a New Way to Rank... | Dan Kurtz Speaker 1: If you are getting into link building and you want to get your feet wet, according to Google, the whitest of white hat backlinks you can build to anything you own is a press release. Don't put a link directly linking to your site that you can't go in and change yourself. Speaker 2: So important. Speaker 1: One of the places where we're spending a lot of time on Reddit to the general public is still not very well known, but Reddit answers. Speaker 2: Why didn't you tell me about that? Unknown Speaker: Hey, Dan's the expert. Speaker 1: The people that say do follow, no follow, you're following advice from 2012. Speaker 2: Our guest, he's a returning guest and he's been in marketing since 2006. He's the grower of business, the optimizer of processes, the slayer of bad digital marketing. And he's also known for his very unique, sometimes controversial t-shirts. He has a 15 year career in digital marketing, including consulting with companies like Bing, Nielsen, just to name a few. All right, we're talking about the famous or infamous Dan Kurtz, and he'll be joining us in a second. We could not do this podcast without our sponsors. So we'd like to thank Cellarboard, AzRank, Sophie Society, the Titan Network, and Connect Cash. Now, sit back, relax, grab a coffee, enjoy the show. Welcome, Dan. Unknown Speaker: Hey, Norman, thanks. Speaker 2: I want to talk about Amazon sellers and we've done a lot of talking. Kevin, you and I, we've formed this relationship and you've talked about things that just blew my mind about Amazon sellers, listings that people aren't doing to get ranked and have no clue that they can use to help gain the advantage on the competitors. Can we start with that? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: Why don't we start, first of all, is there something that we can do on the top with either listing optimization, images, wherever you like to go, and then we can head over to the ranking side, which is completely different. Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. So I think in Amazon, they call that A plus, right? Yeah. Speaker 2: A plus is their secondary content that's below the fold. So they have the slide deck, which has seven images. Then they have the A plus, which is absolutely very critical, which has images, images and font, video. It's basically your webpage. Speaker 1: Right. Okay. Yeah. So we do in, excuse me, in SEO, we do the same thing a lot of times. So when we're optimizing a client page, you know, they have their content, their copy that they want to have at the top of the page. So when you come to do SEO, a lot of times the question is, well, if they don't want that copy touched, how do you still optimize the page? So what we do and kind of how we've worked it is we put supplemental content, kind of like a plus at the bottom of the page, and we'll do an accordion and a little clickable accordion. And within there, there'll be several questions about whatever the topic on the page is. The case of Amazon products, size, shape, weight, shipping, you know, does it fit in my living room? Does it, you know, all the questions around what somebody would ask. And we put those into an accordion. We put them on the bottom of a webpage. And normally that content is enough content. It's well optimized enough just by simply talking about the topic at hand, the product, the service, whatever it might be, that that is enough to actually make that page outrank everyone else. You don't have to compete by writing 38 linear feet of content. You can put very pointed, decided questions into a collapsible accordion and that's enough to move it up. Same thing kind of applies on Amazon with the A+, which is why I bring it up. There's a parallel there. So if you're doing anything on your website, the A plus could still be used on your website. So the images, the videos, same thing on your product page for that product. Speaker 2: Okay. Now, if we're taking a look at that listing, we talked about this before and we actually had some examples that we, or just some studies, case studies, I guess, from a couple of clients, but people don't realize that they can take their Amazon listing and rank fairly simply on Google. with something that is an SEO little trick. You want to talk about that? Speaker 1: Absolutely. So, and what Norm's alluding to is using... Speaker 2: I hope we're on the same wavelength. Speaker 1: Absolutely. So what Norm is alluding to, I think, is, I always think, I try not to, but what Norm's kind of alluding to is using what we like to call borrowed authority. So, As an Amazon seller, you're listed on Amazon.com, which has a huge, huge reputation online, the largest e-com in the space, been around since the 90s. So in terms of what SEOs look at for metrics, so authority, relevance, things like that, number of links hitting the website, there's a ton, which is why Amazon ranks so well in the search engines. Along with, you know, during the holidays, they bump Google a little bit extra cash and they bump the listings up, but that's neither here nor there. Same thing with Reddit in past years, if you haven't noticed. But what I'm getting at is you have all the authority of Amazon behind you. You're on Amazon.com. You have pages on Amazon.com. The thing is, is that if you look at a URL, you've got Amazon.com. slash every time you have a slash you have an order of magnitude or one step further away from that domain so you're still on amazon.com But you're all the way out in the nosebleed section on the listing. So think of it as like you're going to, you know, going to go see a concert. You can go see Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, whatever. You didn't get front row tickets. You are up in the nosebleeds or you're watching outside on the jumbotron. Right. It's one of the two, but you're still there. So what I'm, what I'm getting at is there are ways to affect How you are ranking in the search engine. So for example, being on Amazon.com, even though you're all the way out there, if you were to point a few decided links, backlinks to your Amazon listing for what your product is, what your product does, they could be either from an Amazon keyword tool or a Google keyword tool, or even better yet, blend them together so you can rank in both. But what you do is you build a few backlinks to it. You'll notice sometimes on Google organic listings, if you type in an exact product, there might be an affiliate website that pops up above you, or your product might be number four or five, sometimes lower on the page, depending on what's going on. But by pointing those links at the page, you have the ability to move that website up. Normally for Google to pay attention, and this is not my number, this is from a colleague of mine. The number normally is about 25 backlinks from 25 different sites. You don't have to go to some huge authority site and go build a link. You can go build your social media profiles. That's enough to link to it. You just simply make a post on social media. With that backlink in there, and that's enough. Speaker 2: And that link going back to your Amazon listing. Speaker 1: Right. The caveat to that is that any of the ones that are what we would call a quote-unquote walled garden, so like putting it on Facebook is usually pretty good, but in order to see Facebook search results, normally you have to log in. So it has to be something where Google and their bots can come along and take a look at it or Amazon and their bots can come along and take a look at it and reward you based on that. So you can do it on places like Pinterest. More recently, Instagram reels and posts are now indexable in the search engine. Speaker 2: I heard about that. Speaker 1: Yeah. So you can now, you can affect those if you optimize your titles and some of your stuff in there as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's something we could talk about in a second as well. But we're old school and I'm probably even more older school than you. Like I was doing SEO and renting out pages for all sorts of different categories back before the first update, like before Panda. Yeah, and it was so easy, you know, oh we'd have charter fishing boats and in Florida charter fishing boats and we would just here's a keyword we'd go for it and we would rent out space. You want to be number one? Here's your page. What we always used was always important and it is to this day is quality backlinks. But I just want to get your take on this because people might just go to Fiverr and get some guy to post, you know, a hundred thousand crappy backlinks from whatever sites they want. Is that going to be effective or like how, how do you know? Where to go to get a backlink and you're not getting ripped off? Want more unfiltered tips from top eCommerce experts? Well, hit subscribe and you'll never miss a Lunch With Norm episode. Speaker 1: So in this particular use case, you could, and again, this is somebody speaking with almost 20 years experience in SEO, you could go buy a Fiverr gig and go do that. What I will say is if you're going to do that you point it to what we would like to call as a buffer. So what that means is you make a post on let's say Pinterest and then instead of giving them the link to your website or your Amazon listing you give them the link to the Pinterest post. The reason being is Pinterest has a lot of authority and there's already a lot of backlinks pointing at it so it can take the hit. It will then, we call it link laundering. It will scrub and all of the negative stuff that would normally trickle through actually is turned to a positive because the authority of something like Pinterest is so high. Speaker 2: Okay, let's go through, let's back up. Can you create the sequence of events that would need to happen? Like, give us the action steps. What would have to happen? Sure. Speaker 1: So, go out, make your profiles. Go on Blogger, Tumblr. Whatever websites are out there, you can find a laundry list of them. I think I gave one away on one of the previous webinars with Kevin. Speaker 2: Yeah, I listened. Speaker 1: So there's probably about 100 out there that are really, really good. So you can pick a couple. Go build profiles on them. Just plant your flag for your business. If you have questions about where to plant that flag, as far as in related to your brand, there's a website out there called Spark Toro, which will tell you where... Speaker 2: Oh, Ran Fishkin. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: He's in on the podcast. Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got a tool on the back end that will actually tell you what podcasts they're listening to, what channels they hang out on, where, where your customer spending time. So that's a great place for you to go to figure out not only where to plant the flag, but actually where your ideal customers are hanging out. Cause there's, there's two different schools of thought, right? As an SEO, I can go build links for whatever I want and go register a profile or I can go hang out where the customers are and then that's part of my SEO strategy. Because now I'm interacting with people on the platform that are actually genuinely looking for the thing that I have. Speaker 2: Go back to SparkToro for a second. So somebody signs up, goes to SparkToro, gets their information. They see where their potential clients are listening and tuning in, podcasts, whatever it is. Then can they target those people? Speaker 1: So there are ways. Obviously, if it's a podcast, you can do podcast advertising. There's a lot of different ways to go and do something like that. You can get a sponsor post and get in front of somebody. There are other tools in the market where, based on browsing behavior, you can go ahead and follow somebody based on what their typing is. So there's different ways you can do it. Easiest one is get on the platform, do it under your brand name and say, hey, we are this brand. If you have questions, this is the official account. Ask away. You see it a lot of times on Reddit. Companies will do that. They'll jump in and go ahead and do something like that. Where they'll set up their brand account, but then they'll also set up a couple of burner accounts, and they'll have people ask questions to the account to kind of foster that engagement and kind of move it. Speaker 2: Kind of like the tip jar, right? Gotta put a couple bills in the tip jar, get her going. Speaker 1: Yeah, but Reddit moderators are pretty privy to that, so you gotta say it with your whole chest when you do it. Speaker 2: So, just going back to the action steps then. Speaker 1: Yeah, so market research. Plant your flag. Start posting content. Make that post at a link from each of the sites to your Amazon listing. That's normally enough to biff it to the top. If not, you can go ahead and normally I don't recommend this. Again, do this with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila, but you can go ahead and find a Fiverr gig. Don't go crazy. Find somebody who can build a couple links. $500,000. You're going to tip against your favor. But find somebody who can build a decent amount of links. Pay them for it. Push it to one of the branded properties that you have or one of the posts that you have a link to your Amazon product. And just let it sit. Let them do their thing. Don't touch it. Don't do anything else with it. And just track the difference. See what the results are. Because what will happen a lot of times with the higher authority sites like that, because they have such a massive influx of links coming in every single day. Some of the big sites, you get sites from great neighborhoods. You get backlinks from not so great neighborhoods. You get backlinks from places you wouldn't even wish on your worst enemy. But because of the magnitude and the size of a lot of these sites, they're used to getting 5, 10, 15,000 links to a page at a clip. It's not a big deal for them. And they're so widely diversified in the number of backlinks that they have. There's a rule of magnitude. I won't bore anybody with this, but years ago, there used to be something in Google called PageRank. And it was how they defined how authoritative a website was. There's a couple of websites where you can kind of look at it and see that nowadays. Some people trust Moz, some people trust Ahrefs. Personally, I like to use Majestic because it's a more accurate number I found. It's closest to the original page rank as possible. But page rank was on a scale of 1 to 10 how authoritative your site is in Google's eyes. And every The number that you went up, it was a logarithmic 10 degree of difficulty to get from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, meaning exponentially your website had to do a certain number of things. The sites that we're talking about have an authority of like 9 or 10, 90s and 100s. Once you pass like 6 or 60 in this case, Backlinks no longer apply to your business because you are so big at that point and you have so much algorithmic juice going for you because of the size of your site that backlinks is no longer a thing, meaning Google doesn't count that factor anymore. It's part of their algorithm, which is called MC4. It's the too much of a good thing clause. It's the, you know, I'm going to sit there and I'm going to keep pushing the button and eventually somebody comes along and goes, no, that, that button's closed. You can't use it anymore. Go do something else. Um, that's, that's how Google works. But once you hit that scale, it's, they know that backlinks are no longer a thing. You've gotten so big that anything that somebody throws at that website is not going to tip the scale in either direction. So you can quote unquote link launder through some of those websites. Speaker 2: If I understand it correctly, uh, you're, you're going to go and find your audience. Uh, you're going to, uh, put in a post, uh, these links are going to go to that post. So that post could be, it could be Pinterest. It could be on Instagram. I'm not sure if you'd point it to TikTok, but it would go to one of the major, uh, social media, um, sites. What happens is if you've got, 10,000 50,000 links going over let's say the Pinterest because they're used to crap filtering crap they're going to help Get rid of the crap and then your post that has your link over to your Amazon page is It has better links going over to it. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So that's, so hopefully everybody understands that it's, it's just not directly pointing over and saying, here you go. And you get all these porn sites and all these other things, uh, from some cheap guy doing 500,000 clicks that could actually hurt you. Couldn't it? Speaker 1: Absolutely. So the general rule of thumb that we use in SEO is, Don't put a link directly linking to your site that you can't go in and change yourself. Speaker 2: So important. Speaker 1: So, because if, like let's say for example with the Fiverr guy, he goes and does that and all of a sudden, yes, I'm ranking number one and then 24 hours later, Google goes, oh, these are junk links and now your listing's gone. Your Amazon listing is not in the top, whatever, seven, eight pin, 10 pages. Now you went from number one, number 160 something and there's no way to undo that because you paid somebody to do the links and you can't turn them off. Speaker 2: Is it important to have the proper country? So if you're in the U.S. that you stick with links that are from the U.S.? Speaker 1: It definitely does help if you're doing international SEO. So like if you're on Amazon.com, look for .com links. If you're on Amazon.co.uk, look for .co.uk links. It does help on smaller sites. Again, when it's a bigger site like Pinterest or something like that, the country code kind of doesn't matter. The other fun thing and the reason I keep mentioning Pinterest is Pinterest on the back end will auto translate your post into several other languages when you post it and they won't tell you. Meaning you have a couple of referring domains there that are international. Once Google picks it up and pays attention. Speaker 2: And Google or Pinterest by itself is probably has been around forever. I think LinkedIn and Pinterest are probably the two most underrated platforms there is out there. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, especially for Amazon products. It's just, it's a great way to get traffic, especially if you're doing, you don't even have to do like massive content production. I know a lot of the, a lot of folks that are on Amazon just do Amazon, you know, you guys, there's, I found there's a big line down the middle. There's either people who are just doing stuff on Amazon and haven't built a website yet, or there's people who have built a website first and then went to Amazon, or some combination of the two. Speaker 2: Yeah, and maybe not even just one or the other. They're either Amazon haters, so they do Shopify. Or, uh, you know, possibly they just do Amazon and they're leaving a ton of cash on the table. You know, we have a, we have a sponsor AZ rank. They have a company called Press X. And one of the things that they do is they find, um, quality magazines to run editorial campaigns in. So now you're getting, you know, Forbes or you're getting, uh, uh, what's it called? Uh, L you know, like just higher, the top ranked. Tier two, tier one magazine sites. Would you recommend spending more, because these are, they're not free. You pay a few hundred dollars for these, but is it worth that quality link? Speaker 1: It is, and a lot of times. I know folks inside of the SEO space who, depending on the vertical they're in, I have some friends and colleagues who are in the education space, and they will go ahead and they will put together a scholarship. For that EDU backlink. Like they will actually go ahead and put up the money for a scholarship and get that high quality EDU backlink. So a lot of times you can build your own when you're starting. So there's the hobbyist approach, and then there's the built not bought, and then there's people who do both. I like to build what I can first. Obviously I'm a hobbyist SEO. I'm like, yeah sure, let me go build the links. If you don't have the time or you don't have the inclination or you don't know where to start, find somebody who can do the links. Fiverr can be good for it. I prefer, my buddy Chris Walker has a site called Legit, L-E-G-I-T. That's more of an SEO service website and he personally vets everybody that's on that platform and tests it first before he lets them put it up there. If you're looking for things that are more crafted towards that, like if you want an SEO doing your SEO campaigns, go to Legit, not Fiverr. Speaker 2: Okay, I'm just making note of it. I've never been on Legit before. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the same environment as Fiverr, just a little bit more nerdy. Speaker 2: Okay, and you know, we like our nerds, right? So, the other thing, by the way, I just want to point this out, you can always reach out, DM me. Dan's just not sitting there taking orders and you're not going to hear him say this, but he does provide a backlink service to people for Amazon. So he came out and he spoke at BDSS Iceland. He blew everybody, he literally blew everybody away with what he presented. So just to let you know that he's got the service and he's got a ton of other things that are probably pretty helpful for Amazon resources. But I do want to talk about, and there's all around the same sort of topic, But we talked about Pinterest. For an Amazon seller who doesn't know anything about Pinterest, what's a few good pointers to do when you're creating a Pinterest account? First, it should be a business account, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: Then you got to make a couple boards. Speaker 1: Yeah, make a couple boards. The way I view it is the same way you would structure a website. So you make your Pinterest and then you make your boards are kind of like categories. So you put all of your stuff and you'll see people kind of structure however they have things. So all of your, if I was going to break it down real simple for the folks at home. So think of it as either, let's say we're organizing Legos. We're going to do it by color. Real simple. You've got a red category, blue category, yellow category. And you go ahead and you filter whatever size bricks you have. You get the big eight peg bricks, the one by ones, the little nubby ones, the ones that look like coins. They all fit into that bucket. And that's kind of how you organize your Pinterest. Obviously it's a lot more complex than that, but you can organize it in that fashion and then everything inside of that interest bucket can relate to each other. So it kind of helps them to understand. It's basically classifying and organizing your own stuff. So basically if you keep your room clean, Google likes you. Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can just create like it's for visuals. So you know you can have video, you can have regular posts, you'd have a caption and within that post you want to link that back to your Amazon or you know if you have Shopify over to your Shopify and that's where you're talking about directing the backlinks over to that post and then it would clean it up and send the links over to your Amazon and you've seen some pretty amazing results with these Amazon backlinks, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work. But it was something I stumbled across and decided to give it a test. I'm like, well, this principle applies to a lot of other websites. Why can't we do it with Amazon? So I started playing with it and oh, it works. So started doing it that way. Speaker 2: We're at the bottom of the hour, and if this is the first time you're listening to the podcast, we do something really special at the top of the hour, and that's the Wheel of Kelsey. This is where our guests give away a prize. Today, Dan is giving away a backlink service that's worth $500. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Dan? Speaker 1: So in everything we've talked about so far, we've talked about links and authority and how to do all that stuff. So what I've done in all of my ventures is I've found the best of the best as far as links are concerned, all of the websites, all of the different places to put it. And within a few button clicks because of how I've automated it and what I've done, I can effectively build those links directly to an Amazon listing and it will do exactly what we're talking about without you having to go through everything I just described. It's a one-shot thing. We go ahead, do it, the backlinks hit, and the listing starts going up. And I mean, we go for it for a full 30 days, taking care of it and getting the links crawled and making sure Google's paying attention to them. And just every kind of link you can think about, .edu.gov, backlinks. We've got all sorts of blog post networks. We've got, I've got a network of over a quarter million domains inside of my private blog network. So we'll be using some of those to actually get links pointing to your website, like just massive amounts of stuff. Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you think you might want to see your Google listing or your Amazon listing boost up and jump up in the ranks on Google, All you have to do is hashtag WillaKelsey or tag two people and you'll be entered automatically. Or if you get our Monday newsletter, you'll be able to join it there as well. And then not this, not today, but a week from today, we'll be doing the draw for that. So that's awesome. Dan, thanks a lot. And now I think we should go over to the word from our sponsor. Did you know Amazon profit is more than revenue minus ads? Sellerboard calculates your true profitability, factoring in every fee, return, shipping cost, and even cost of goods using FIFO logic. That's first in, first out logic. Plus, they automate your PPC, forecast inventory and avoid stockouts, reclaim money with Amazon reimbursements, set FBM shipping by period, and track Walmart profits with the same dashboard. And you don't even have to have an Amazon account. You can try it for free for two months. Seller board, know your numbers, scale your business. Okay. You said something a little earlier on about Reddit. We've never talked about this. I don't know if I'm going to throw you a curve ball here. But Reddit just keeps coming up nowadays to help you with your ranking, to help you just be brand awareness, everything. Can you tell us a little bit of the advantages and why we should try to create a subreddit? Speaker 1: Yeah. So as of what, two years ago, um, Google gave Reddit roughly, or one way or the other, somebody exchanged tens of millions of dollars. I believe Reddit gave it to Google to figure out what was going on with their stuff and give them access. In doing so, Google went ahead and curtailed the algorithm to Reddit to get better answers in front of people because Google has a section in it called People Also Ask on a lot of their search results. In addition to that, Google is curating what they think are their own search results to how people are doing stuff based on what's on websites. But we know as consumers that not every time is a website always correct, nor does it have the information we're looking for. So what they started doing was providing a box where it provided answers. So back in the day, it used to be Yahoo Answers was the big thing. Nowadays, it's Reddit. So you can go in and see the answer from a specific post or a specific subreddit or what the most upvoted thing inside of that subreddit is, and that's kind of what they use as showing up in there. And to Norm's point, yes, you can go ahead and build a subreddit specific for your brand, your audience, a keyword, whatever it might be. Or there's ways to go ahead and claim one that's been dead for a while and then use that one and rebrand it and massage it to your own brand. But that's a. Speaker 2: Larger conversation let's talk about a popular topic lm how do people start to get indexed into these lm the short version is seo. Speaker 1: The longer version for anybody who's playing at home is it works the same way that the, and the reason I say it, it's SEO is it works the same way that Google's bot crawlers do. So a bot is a little piece of code that comes to your website, picks up information and goes back to the mothership to build a profile of your business. They exist on pretty much every site that's out there. They come and visit. There's tools out there that do specific things. They have their own bots. Anyway, all of the LLMs to some degree have a crawler that goes out and looks for information on the web about your business or just about business in general. And they go out and they crawl and they scrub and they add information into their database if they don't have any about that specific thing. So the more places that you can put information about your business, your website, your social posts, all of that stuff. If the bots understand that, Hey, this, this brand, this is this ecosystem. That's like the most important thing to get your stuff into an LLM. So, the big three for anything, whenever it's a search engine, LLM, whenever, there's three things that they need to know. Who you are, what you do, and how you do it. If you can answer all three of those, they will start building a profile and a use case for what you're doing. On the other side of that, I was going to say, we did a webinar with you and Kevin a little while ago. I went and showed people how to use LLMs specifically to go ahead and generate pages that were good for both humans and for LLMs. So the other thing you can do is start asking the LLMs questions about your Amazon product and throwing those in there. And as you start having that conversation on the backend somewhere, whenever they go ahead and pull logs, that data will be added to that next run. Speaker 2: Very good and that by the way was you've been on a few of our webinars and you are the probably the most in demand. I remember getting And Kevin, too, getting tons of emails because people wanted to know exactly when you were coming on. And we usually keep that kind of blind, right? We just want the next guest to come up, the next guest to come up, so people can't cherry pick. But every time we get overwhelmed with, when's Dan coming up? We gotta see Dan. And you deliver. Like I said, in Iceland, you've come up and you've shown consistently new ideas to either get ranked or just cutting edge stuff that nobody, nobody is talking about. I can remember, I think the first time I heard about this, the LLMS. And it was like, what are you talking about? And so you want to talk a little bit about the importance of that. And if you don't have it, like if you've just got a robots.txt file, you're missing out on possibly being indexed or indexed quicker on the LLMs. Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's, it works kind of similar. And if you've spent any amount of time with a website, you know that there's a file called robots.txt. And that file, as I was mentioning earlier about the spiders and the bots, that file tells them exactly who's allowed in, who's not allowed in, and what they're allowed to go browse and not browse. Because there's, you know, if you have an eCom website, you don't want them coming and browsing your sock category and just going through socks for 25 minutes and then leaving. And then next week they come back to pick up their crawl. So you can tell them where to go spend their time and what's the most effective. So you can say, hey, go to this file, not this one. Go to this folder, not this one. You can do a bunch of stuff like that. With the advent of AI, we now have an LLMs.txt or LLMS. Some people like to say the whole thing out loud. It's a similar thing, but you can actually, instead of giving it, you know, files and folders, you can say, Hey, here's an additional information about our business. Going back to the initial part of our conversation, you can compound that and say, Hey, here's a list of all my social profiles and the URL. Here's where I hang out. Here's where I'm making posts. Here's our most recent press release. You can throw all of those URLs into that file and the LLM will go ahead and crawl it and have a better understanding of your brand and now have more reference points. Speaker 2: Now, is there just an article or is there something that you can reference? So in case any of the listeners aren't technical, they could just say, hey, to my developer, read this and do it. Speaker 1: It basically just put all of your links that you have for your business anywhere that you're listed into the LLMS and just let it run. It's the simplest way to do it. They know what a URL file is. They'll figure it out and go do the thing. At a rudimentary level, that's the easiest way to do it. If you're more technical, there's other ways to do it. And it's still relatively new, so there's no structure to it. It's not like deciding a webpage where you've got headers and paragraphs and title tags and all that. It's very, very fluid because there's so many different ways that so many different AIs and LLMs interact with data. So there's no real one way to do it yet because there's not been a developed standard. Speaker 2: So you're not going to affect the speed or cause a problem not getting indexed because you've set it up wrong. I just remember the days of the batch and config files. And if you stack them on top of each other in the wrong order, your computer could just die, like slow down. So it was a pain in the butt until basically Plug and Play came around. Are we looking at that or can you just put literally put the URLs? Speaker 1: I just dump the URLs. I've been doing pretty much that. You can get more complex with it. Being an SEO, we do a lot of schema, which is a markup style. It's telling computers, instead of having them read the whole page, it's saying, hey, here's this snippet of code. This is everything that's on the page. Go take this back to home base and Go throw that in the repository. So you can do some of that in the LLMS, but again, if you're not coding, you can just copy paste URLs and call it a day and get the result you're looking for. Speaker 2: You know, we talked a little bit about Reddit. One thing we didn't talk about is Quora and Reddit and Quora put together are both really fantastic platforms to help with not only the people also asked, but to also get indexed for certain questions that you're answering and the LLM will pick it up because you would be considered an authority. Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 2: Isn't that correct? Speaker 1: Yep. So one of the places where we're spending a lot of time on Reddit, that's not a subreddit. It's not any of that. It's still to the general public. It's still not very well known, but Reddit Answers. Reddit now has its own thing specifically called Reddit Answers. Speaker 2: Just a second. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Why didn't you tell me about that? Unknown Speaker: Hey, Dan's the expert. Speaker 2: Okay, we'll be talking afterwards. I didn't know that Reddit had Reddit Answers. Speaker 1: It's a new feature. It's reddit.com forward slash answers and it is their question engine. It's their answer to Yahoo Answers. Now that they have the pull and the gravitas that they do inside of the search engines, they now have Reddit Answers. So you can go in there, whether it's a person or it's a branded profile, just be aware if you do it with a branded profile. People are going to go, Oh my God, corporate, corporate, corporate. It's, it's just the nature of Reddit that they are, Reddit's fairly anti-establishment. So just know if you're going in there with a branded profile with your logo on it, you're probably going to get flamed. Speaker 2: Okay. But it is something cool because we've talked about that on the webinar. We've talked about this, just sitting around having a cigar together, but the things that you need to do to become an authoritative figure right now. So Quora, Reddit, one of my favorites is press releases. Yes. Google is actually, like when I saw this, Google is actually saying they want that original content, like press releases. If you never thought it worked in the past, then for the last 20, 25 years, I've used press releases. I've used press releases to launch businesses, to talk about employees, to talk about anything. Guess what? When I go out there, I have those authority links. Now, Google's backing it up. Everything I've been trying to preach, you know, for my launches on Amazon, I would use press releases. Everybody, oh yeah, boring, boring old school. Well, you can't ignore it anymore, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And we've been using press releases and in SEO for forever. But as an SEO, if you are getting into link building and you want to get your feet wet, according to Google, and this is without, I know what you're talking about, but I haven't read the official brief. But the whitest of white hat backlinks you can build to anything you own is a press release. And a lot of people, the next question that comes out, they know what you're going to say. But Dan, that's duplicate content. The answer is no, because duplicate content with Google only counts if it's on the same website. What you're doing is you are syndicating. You are having the same thing posted out over a newswire. You have the same post in multiple locations, all with the same exact information. It's the same thing as going around and putting out flyers or banners or stapling things to phone poles like we used to do back in the day. It's just a different form of advertising, but Google counts each one of those domains as a backlink, as a URL, as a referring domain, which if you remember is the thing we need in order to rank our products. If you had a newsroom on your website, let's say, or you went ahead and made a newsroom. I know some people charge for newsrooms, but if you had a section on your website that was forward slash news and you were putting out regular press releases, that would be a great way for you to go ahead and get a ton of links back to your website. Some press release services will let you put even two or three links to your services and website into the newsroom. It depends, but usually I recommend one. Me too. So like if you've got a shop and an Amazon listing, you can do it that way just so that they understand that it's the same product on both platforms. But for the most part, yeah, it's one of the best ways to build backlinks. And it doesn't have to be super expensive. A lot of people spend a couple hundred bucks on a press release. As long as you can get Google News inclusion, and you'll see that on some listings depending on where you go. Again, legit great platform for this. You go on there and they'll say, hey, we're guaranteed included in Google News. That is enough for, number one, for you to start getting the links that you want. Again, you don't need Yahoo.com and Binance and all these other huge websites to link to you. You just need diversification if you're just starting out. You need a good portfolio. It's the same as investing in stocks. SEO is a consistent games over time. PPC is day trading. You're in, out, in, out, in, out. SEO is more of a mutual fund approach. You get in, you start slow and you see consistent growth. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. There's been so many times that we've, because I own a press release company, I've owned it forever. Once, in fact, I bought the press release company once I found how good it was. At ranking when I had a different industry. It wasn't an Amazon at all. And we became the first video press release company in the world. And we kind of built our reputation on that. But now we've shut the doors on that one. Kevin and I have created another service. But like you said, You can go out, as long as you can get some authority sites on there, like Google News. If you're in there, you can get ranked. But even further, if you go out, press release companies will either give you a $49 blast, a $100 blast. You can find people that'll just go out and do it for $10. But there's other services that you pay for if you want to get into Yahoo Finance, Reuters, what are some other, MarketWatch. There's a bunch. And some of these might have even bigger sites. So you might not have a, what are they called, a satellite station from Fox. It'll actually be the Fox main, the main content site, which will give you more authority than others. And I've never talked to you about this. Press releases aren't just press releases. You can go out and do exactly what you just said. Go do it very inexpensively and that Google summary is going to pick that up. I was just going to say, what do you think about spending more? So you're going out and you're getting like 400 to 5,000 sites and most of them or a lot of them are high quality sites, backlinks. Speaker 1: The way that I like to use press releases is a couple different ways. So what I'll do is There are some press release sites, and this is standard across the industry, but a lot of press release sites will leave your post on their website and it will either roll off after 90 days because they have to clean house because they're a news outlet. They've got a ton of stuff coming in. They don't want a million plus pages on their website by the end of the year. So they will either fall off because the news cycle's done. It could be about 90 days. Or it'll stay depending on the quality of the site, the ones that stick. So I'll keep a list of which ones and there's ways that you can check if they're alive or dead. You don't have to click each one, but I'll go ahead and figure out which ones are live after 90 days. And at that point, I'll go ahead and do a press release to those links. Just a very small, you know, just a, again, a lower level than I would normally have pointing to my site. It doesn't have to be, again, it doesn't have to be super expensive, you know, 20, 50 bucks, like, just get it out there. But you can build a press release to those press releases and say, hey, we recently did a story on this. Here's an update 90 days later, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what that'll do is actually power up the existing links, same way we talked about doing with the Pinterest stuff earlier. But the other thing I want to mention was earlier I had said this is you get included in Google News. A lot of times we do press releases. Guess who's constantly scrubbing Google News? The LLMs. Meaning if you are affecting the press releases in that particular way and you are spending time and writing out something that's authoritative and thoughtful. And again, you don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but the LLMs will start to pick it up and start to recognize a pattern of behavior and it will start pulling information from your website and your business into those LLMs. So it's a great way that, you know, if you're not waiting for the bots to come crawl your website for the LLMs text file, you can go ahead and push a press release or better yet, do the text file first, then go push a press release and then watch the bots go, oh, there's the homepage. Oh, there's the LLM file. Oh, and there's every URL they've built in the past six months. Cool. Now I know who they are. They run back and now all that information is right there in the LLMs. Speaker 2: That's great. We got to talk about it. I don't do that. And it's interesting. Oh, and by the way, like even for the service that we do for ourselves, we've been able to figure it out where we can get into Google News, of course, But we can also, we know we're guaranteed to be picked up on the LLMs for that press release. So we know we're getting it. But one of the things that a lot of Amazon sellers, you touched on it, why not take advantage of being in the news? Have your press room. So you have a copy of it in your press room. And when people come to your site, that just gives you that much more authority. Plus I got to say this because people say, Oh, you know, you said you sent it out to 400 different locations, but I only see one or two that come up when I do my search. Well, correct me if I'm wrong. That's because Google's prioritizing. They're not going to show it all. We can produce a record that says, okay, These are all the keywords that were indexed. These are all the mix match keywords, you know, from five letters down to, you know, two word phrases, and this is their position. And if you go and you check it, you'll find, yep, that's correct. And the reason why is that you're not going to have 400 different sites being picked up and ranked on Google from what I've always seen. It was just a priority of one or two. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's common throughout the space because you have to remember Google's not only doing news for just you or just your specific industry. They also have whatever is breaking going on. So breaking stories oftentimes will get a larger swing, you know, a larger chunk of the page when it comes to that kind of stuff. You know, unless there's something, you know, a world changing event, a massive recall or something else happening in your space, you're probably not going to wind up having multiples listed. It's just it's the nature of the world but it's enough for Google to pick up and put a few in the index and that's a good point I should bring up. I mentioned a word earlier. I mentioned crawl, crawling. There's a difference between indexed and crawled and it's a very short list. Index is Google thinks it's good enough to put into the search results. Crawled is Google has come to the page and it is counting that backlink. So it doesn't necessarily have to show up inside Google search results in order for it to count and be of value to you to actually get a ranking. As long as Google crawls that page that the link is on, That's enough to get them to pay attention and keep tally of what's going on with your business. Speaker 2: Interesting. Very good. You know, I'm not sure if it was you, but somebody told me this about two years ago. It might've been when we were sitting around having a cigar because I changed a few things and that was, Hey Norm. Unknown Speaker: Use Google tools. Google loves people who use their tools. Speaker 2: And I think that you gave me this example. You said, if you have a press release, put in your signature, the newsroom or a link to the latest press release. And Google will look at that favorably for every Gmail that you send out. And people, it'll see that there's new content going out and that you have the new link and if people press on it, that adds up. So now, in the signature, it's, hey, check us out in the news. Click. And it goes to the newsroom. Was that you? Speaker 1: That particular one wasn't me, but based off of when we turned the cameras off in Iceland, you're on the right track. So I will give a very 30,000 foot view because the people that paid to be in the room deserve to have the data that they have. With the way that Google's doing stuff now, if you have a G Suite or a Google Business or any of that sort of stuff, Gemini is baked into your tools from a default, it seems at this point. So it is constantly reading your drive, reading your emails, learning how all of your patterns of behavior, and it's feeding that back into Gemini. So yes, to your point, all of that stuff does count. Google does pay attention to it. Same way they pay attention to anything else under their umbrella. That being said, using Google's tools, and again, there's a ton of them, but as a great example, I like to use Google Drive. If you go ahead and you spend some time and you do some content writing inside of Google Drive and you put a link to your website in there and you turn that link live and you Publish that Google Doc, not share it, but there's actually the file publish. Google will now come and crawl that page every five minutes and see that backlink. And it will count that page as a backlink towards your ranking profile. And because it is such a high authority, because it's coming from drive.google.com, Google loves itself. You know, it's a hundred out of a hundred in its own system because they're narcissistic. But it will count as an authority-credible backlink to your website. And it can't be crawled, it can't be found, it can't be indexed by another human being because it's such a unique URL string. But Google can see it. And that's what matters. You could theoretically build backlinks inside of a Google Drive and create your own internal linking system that nobody else can see. Unknown Speaker: I'll leave it at that. Speaker 2: If you have, let's say you have a Google Doc, which is your press release, and you might have a slideshow or you might have some other document that you want to, you don't mind the public seeing, you can go to share Click publish, and then Google will see that on their root drive, I guess, and give you that, well, they'll like it better. They'll weigh it higher. Is that correct? Speaker 1: Correct. So, and in that great example, so let's say you're doing a slideshow. On one of the slides, you can say, hey, we've also published this as a Google doc. Here's a link to the Google doc. And then on the Google doc, you put a link that says, hey, we also made this into a slideshow. Click here to go see the slideshow. And what you're doing is you're teaching Google that you have a network of things, again, internet of things, that are related to that brand, that service, that news thing. And you can, if you spend some time in there, you can manipulate those files in that system to help with rankings. Speaker 2: Very good. Well, Dan, I hope we can have you back even to talk just press release. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: You know, the probably, you know, make press releases great again. I guess that would be the... How do you, how can we get across to our listeners that, you know, press releases, they're not dead. They, you know, a lot of listeners might think they smell funny. They're not dead. These are real viable ways that you can get indexed, ranked with, along with everything else that we talked about today. Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's do it this way. Here's a great analogy for the folks listening at home. So if you're playing online and let's say you're just on Amazon, if you go ahead and say, hey, we just added this new product to our product line and you put a link to the Amazon store that you have or that specific product, You will have effectively built 500 high authoritative backlinks to your Amazon listing, which will then directly affect your ranking inside of Amazon and inside of Google, meaning you are double dipping into two different search engines for the same product. If you were to push yourself into, let's say, the top three or top five on Amazon, or even top three or top five on Google, you're probably looking at about, I would say, a 60% increase in traffic on Google, number one, and then on Amazon, Whatever the current CTR breakdown is there as far as products are concerned, but you are more likely to be recommended. You are more likely to be into the people also bought. You are more likely to show up in more places because you have built those links. If 50 bucks can't get you to, you know, but if you can't separate it from 50 bucks in order to try and get that much more in sales and revenue for your products, I don't know what to tell you, but that's the fastest way that I can think of to, Do it. To be fair, $20 is $20, but you can do a lot of damage with that very quickly for your product. Speaker 2: I just thought of two other questions, just quickly. Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 2: One of the objections that I hear comes up is that, oh, press releases, it's a bunch of crap. They only provide no-follow links. Speaker 1: Google doesn't care. A link is a link. Speaker 2: It still shows that it's a link, right? Speaker 1: Correct. And the people that say do follow, no follow, you're following advice from 2012. Thank you, Dan. The relevance of all of that doesn't matter because if I have a link from fox.com, let's say, Fox Business, And it's a no follow, but I go ahead and I wind up getting on, you know, joesretailwebsite.net and it's super relevant, but it's a do follow. It's, it's not going to have the same amount of weight as fox.com has. That being said, one of the other things that's super important is contextual links. So if you get a link to your website, make sure that it's coming from an article up about that thing, not that somebody just went in and changed the URL and did that stuff. If the website is relevant, if it's topical about what your business is about. So like getting featured on, you know, AskProShops as the new product that, you know, you're partnering with as a distribution partner. It's probably going to carry some weight. It's also going to do really well for your business. Speaker 2: You talked about syndication. So anybody that's creating a press release, they know that they have to push it out there somewhere. So you can go to a Fiverr. You can go to a syndication company like PR Newswire. That's probably the biggest one out there. But there's a variety of different ones ranging in a variety of different price ranges. But there's also something that when you promote a, when you publish a blog article on your website, there are syndication outlets for content. Speaker 1: There are. Speaker 2: Nobody talks about that. And it's as important because you're doing the exact same thing. You have a blog, you spent time, you spent money maybe, and now you publish it. Well, guess what? It's on your site. What's the answer? Speaker 1: Let's have some fun with this and this will be a good parting gift for everybody that's listening because it's low effort and actually it'll work really well. Again, plug Legit for this. Back in 2011, 2012, a service came online called If This Then That, IFTTT. And what they have on IFTTT, that was the first of its kind, but it allowed you to take a service that you had and another service that you had, and you can get them to pass information back and forth. It would baton pass whatever the thing was. So you could say, hey, if I leave the office, you know, if I get within range or my phone connects to the Wi-Fi, change the thermostat in the house. Stuff like that. You could do smart home stuff and things like that, but they also had connections for different blogs and websites and things like that. So what I will say is on legit, you can go search for IFTTT or syndication network. And there are people out there who for a couple bucks will go ahead and they will build you a network of sites, probably about a hundred that will go ahead and republish and then re republish. Your content to additional sites. The first level is the ones that are under your control. The second level looks like they are brand advocates. So you get a hundred referring domains pointing back to all of your stuff without having to lift a finger. They go ahead and they will look at what's called an RSS on your website, which is old, old school. I think Shopify has got one in there. But if they don't, you can turn it on and you can connect it. Every time a new blog post goes out, it will take that and it will link out from those websites back to your site and then do the same thing another level down. And then now every page that you generate has a hundred referring domains pointing to it just to kickstart it. And that network can be used to grow your brand. It can make it impenetrable to people who might try and hack and be malicious against your stuff. If you use it correctly, you can use any of those properties to build those links we were talking about on Fiverr, wink, wink. All of that stuff can be done with that network because it is so large and it's using the sites that we talked about earlier that most things kind of bounce off of. So you can, you can make your brand un-mess withable, you know, keep it PG for the folks at home, um, against people who might be bad actors and stuff like that. Speaker 2: There you go. That's a piece of gold. If you stayed to the end, that's something that, uh, is extremely useful. Dan, anybody want to get ahold of you? How do they do it? Speaker 1: Uh, best way is to go find me on LinkedIn and pound on the door. It's always open. Speaker 2: All right, that's true. And remember, if you want to register for Dan's giveaway, which is the $500 value, the backlinks to your Amazon listing, or you probably can do it for your Shopify. I'm not 100% sure. Is it either or? Speaker 1: Yeah, either one. Speaker 2: Okay. All you have to do, hashtag WheelOfKelsey, tag two people or Go to Monday's Lunch With Norm, the LWN.News newsletter and just enter there. Okay, Dan. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Speaker 1: You got it. It was great having you. Speaker 2: All right. Well, thank you so much. I hope everybody learned something from this podcast. I know I was making a couple of notes. You probably saw me looking down at my computer because I made a few notes. Dan's always Delivering. He always over delivers. If you get a chance to see him, if he's on a webinar, if he's speaking, go and check him out. You'll never be disappointed. All right. That's it for us today. I hope you liked the prerecord. Uh, we'll be back next week live and we'll see you later.