More SEO experiments with surprising results that you can apply to improve your own site ranking.

Podcast highlights:

01:14 - Can you damage your competitor’s site?

03:31 - What experiments showed

06:52 - Some action steps

10:50 - Pagerank defined

11:45 - Outbound links - good or bad?

15:20 - Action steps

17:16 - The concept of the fishbone post

19:23 - Do links have an effect even after they are removed?

23:41 - Quick recap

Get targeted business coaching and resources HERE

Download the PDF transcription

Part 1 of the series

Part 2 of the series

Transcription:

James S.: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is part three of a three-part series called Counterintuitive SEO Experiments Tune-Up Series. The whole point of this series is to find out what SEO experiments have been effective and then you can adjust your website so that you can gain better rankings in Google, and to do that, I brought along my special guest, James Reynolds from SEOPartner.com. Welcome back.

James R.: Hey James, good to be back.

James S.: So we've covered six experiments already in this series. If you haven’t listened to those, go back to part one and part two. You'll find them on SuperFastBusiness.com. Look for Counterintuitive SEO Experiments Tune-Up Series or check out the podcast in iTunes or Stitcher.

For now though, let's talk about negative SEO. This is a big, bad wolf, this one. There's a lot of scaremongering going on. The whole point of course about negative SEO is that some people believe you could take down a competitor with malicious intent by sending them nasty links and sinking their ship. So does it actually work or is it something we don't need to worry about?

Negative SEO

James R.: Well, let's dive in and discuss this, shall we? I think we've covered a little bit about sort of spam tactics in the previous episodes and talked about it from the point of view that if you do something dodgy yourself, then you could land yourself in trouble. The same applies to then doing something dodgy to competitors’ websites.

It has been talked about a lot. Is it possible to take down a competitor's website by sending them dodgy links or doing something that's not completely above board? This has been fueled I guess by testing also, but also by Google’s stance. They changed their positioning on a statement on one of their sites to say back in 2003, I think was when they first announced it. They said there's nothing that you can do to harm the rankings of a competitor's site. And then they updated that statement several years later to say there's almost nothing you can do to harm your competitor's website.

Obviously that fueled the fire that maybe if you were to send some dodgy links or do something like that,

Discover how anchor texts, proximity and PR links can affect the ranking of your site.

In the podcast:

01:38 - Can this harm your rankings?

05:00 - Here's the SEO experiment

06:06 - Is it a good idea?

09:22 - Some takeaways

10:56 - What is proximity?

11:48 - The test and result

13:22 - Big takeaways

14:02 - On image linking

19:10 - PR links - do they help?

23:59 - Recap and action steps

Powerful business resources await you inside SuperFastBusiness membership. Click HERE

Download the PDF transcription

Part 1 of the series

Part 3 of the series

Trancription:

James S.: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. You are actually listening to part two of a three-part series called Counterintuitive SEO Experiments Tune-Up Series, where James Reynolds from SEOPartner.com and I have been looking at some of the tests that have been run regarding SEO results and seeing some of the surprising results.

If you haven't listened to part one, please go and listen to part one before you listen to this because it'll set you up nicely for where we're at. In that episode, we looked at if click through rate affects rankings. We had a look at Mobilegeddon and how that impacted search results. And we were seeing if Google displays more rich answers in search results.

But in this episode, we've got a few more theories to test. And the first one is exact match anchor text and if it harms rankings. So welcome my guest, James Reynolds, to discuss this very topic.

James R.: Hey James, how are you doing?

James S.: Doing well. So, interesting feedback from our previous episode. A few myths exposed. I'm sure that there's been some new mobile-ready websites and some better calls to action being put up on the internet of late.

James R.: Let's hope so. Yeah, let's hope so.

James S.: Alright. So exact match anchor text. Can it harm rankings? First off.

Exact match anchor text

James R.: What is it?

James S.: You know what I’m going to ask you, right?

James R.: What is it. OK. So exact match anchor text. I guess first, determine what anchor text is. Anchor text is the text, clickable text element that's in a link that points to your website. An example, if you have a third-party website mentioning you within that content and there's a hyperlink from that content through to your website, the actual text component of that is what's called the anchor text.

James S.: Yes.

James R.: So an exact match anchor text is when you have, in the text itself, the exact keyword that you're trying to rank for, let's say pest control Sydney was the keyword that we were wanting to rank for. The actual text, the clickable text, which our website would say “pest control Sydney”. Does that make sense?

James S.: That makes perfect sense. I've heard it described before as it’s like a voting system back in the early days of SEO. It was pretty easy to manipulate the search results by literal...

Discover SEO experiments that deliver surprising results, and how you can improve your page rankings.

Episode highlights:

02:30 – What to expect from this series

04:21 – Does click-through rate affect ranking?

09:17 – What does Google want?

09:38 – Action steps

12:00 – Mobilegeddon and its impact

14:43 – Action steps

15:34 – Is Google displaying these results more?

16:46 – Action steps

20:43 – Quick recap

Inject more quality into your business and your life. Click HERE

Download the PDF transcription

Part 2 of the series

Part 3 of the series

Transcription:

James S.: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today is a very special series we're doing, especially relating to SEO. Even more so because it's a counterintuitive SEO tune-up series, it's a three-part series, and I'd like to welcome my guest for these three shows, James Reynolds.

James R.: Hey James! How are you doing?

James S.: Doing great. Now, your name is probably familiar to many of our listeners because you have been involved in certainly the SuperFastBusiness community for many years. Of course recently, you acquired SEOPartner, which is the search engine optimization business that I started, and you became a very active client in. What's that saying, you liked it so much, you bought it.

James R.: [laughs] Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, we've become a very large customer for SEOPartner and was getting fantastic results for us, and it just made sense as the next evolution of my business to bring that supply source in house to service more of our own customers and to reach some new ones. So it's been a really nice progression for the business and a good match for everyone.

James S.: Right. So you've got a few different ways that people deal with you. Of course your main business name is Veravo. You've got a podcast out there as well, called Traffic Jam. You have your agency facing SEO business, is it OK to mention?

James R.: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

James S.: Yup, that's SEOSherpa.com. And of course, you now own SEOPartner.com, which is predominantly dealing with agencies who deal with end users. Through that department, we always had a very strong research and development focus, with a full time team looking for the next thing, looking for signals in the market, running tests and experiments and keeping an eye on the news. Anyone visiting SEOPartner.com would see the blog gets updated daily with the latest findings from all around the industry.

I think what made you very successful with the SEO was keeping an eye on things out there and having a finger on the pulse. So this series is about some of the select tests that you found that had surprising results. You first talked about this at the SuperFastBusiness Live event in Sydney. You then had a very content-heavy blogpost prepared for SEOSherpa.com, and we'll link to that in the show notes to SEOSherpa.com/seo-experiments, where you detailed 16 experiments.

What we thought we'd do today, over the next few series, we'll just cherry pick some of the most surprising results and go a little bit deeper in...

Discover the 4 things you need to cover in your sales copy to persuade your customers to complete the purchase.

In the interview:

03:21 - What is it exactly you’re offering?

05:28 - A formula to establish your offer

06:15 - The most powerful line

09:40 - A story on product dumping

12:37 - Men vs. women

16:56 - Who are you?

21:16 - Do these cliches still work?

26:07 - Establishing urgency

33:20 - Quantifying time

39:16 - Chewbacca goes viral

Powerful business resources await you inside SuperFastBusiness membership. Click HERE

Download the PDF transcription

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. I have my good friend, Kevin Rogers a.k.a. CopyChief.com on the call. Welcome Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks for having me James.

James: Kevin, you've been here before, and you still came back.

Kevin: I did. Yeah. Well it took me this long to heal. But a lot of talk therapy and I have decided to give it another go.

James: The reality is of course that you came over to Australia and presented at SuperFastBusiness Live event. Your presentation was rated as one of the top presentations we've had at the event because the content was incredible. You have an ability to explain things in an easy-to-understand way. I'm not saying that you're simple. I'm just saying that you explain things clearly.

Since the event, we managed to have the recordings and members to SuperFastBusiness who didn't attend the live are still being able to watch it and I constantly get great feedback from your presentation. In fact, recently, I pulled out the 4x6 cards and used them for a project that I was working on because it's still one of the most tangible, easy sales systems to use when it comes to writing up some copywriting or putting an offer in a way that makes sense.

So today, we're going to specifically cover, of the elements of that, so 10 components that you need to know to have great copy. But there are four essential components that I don't think you talked about too often. Maybe one or two of them but certainly a couple of them are overlooked by a lot of marketers. Are you ready to share these with us?

Kevin: Yeah, happy to.

James: This will be awesome. I know that it's hard to sort of compress things down into little jewels because I mean you make a full-time living from CopyChief.com, where you have a copywriting forum. You have lots of copywriters and business owners in there talking about this stuff all day long. Anything we talk about today, if a listener wanted to find out more and dig deeper into any of these topics, I do recommend CopyChief.com. It's the solution that I've been sending people to, whether they're a business owner looking for copywriters or whether they're really interested in tuning up their own sales muscles and wanting to be able to write good copy.

With that said, let's talk about these four essential elements in your 4x6 system. Let's start with the first one.

Kevin: Great. Just to quickly establish, these are the four things that if they're not covered in your sales copy it’s very difficult for your prospect to complete the purchase. Like you said James, some of these are overlooked, some of them are obvious but still not executed as well as they could be, and some are a little less obvious.

What is it?

So number one is the most obvious thing in the world....

Find out why and how SuperFastBusiness switched its logo, and what change can possibly do for your brand.

Podcast highlights:

01:02 - The thinking behind the new SuperFastBusiness logo

03:00 - Does your designer get you?

04:20 - How to help your designer

06:29 - What good design can do

07:34 - From the designer’s perspective

10:10 - Getting pre-launch feedback

14:05 - What customers had to say

16:20 - Key points for a logo design brief

18:22 - Avoiding cliches

20:03 - Some color psychology

22:18 - The lifespan of a logo

23:11 - If you’re thinking of a new look…

24:22 - Why strong branding is essential

Be sure to subscribe to the SuperfastBusiness Podcast HERE

Download the PDF transcription

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, we're talking about design, so that means I've brought on a design expert. Welcome Greg Merrilees.

Greg: Good day James! How are you man?

James: I'm great. And you are my design expert. Thank you very much.

Greg: Thank you. It's good for me as well. I mean designing for market leaders gives us good exposure. So thanks for being an awesome client.

James: Well you've got a website called Studio1design.com. We're going to be talking about design and the process of design. In particular, why did I change my iTunes logo? That's really the topic. If you've ever seen Zoolander, you're familiar with the blue steel look. Well, we ended up with the orange graphite look or the orange carbon fiber look. Greg, let's talk about the process of what happens between me deciding that I needed to change a logo to us ending up with a new logo. Are you up for that?

Greg: Yeah, sure man, yeah.

The process of changing logos

James: So the first thing is when I was looking through the iTunes logos, I noticed that mine is nice and it kind of fits in with my brands. It's got the usual colors like blue, and a picture of me and the logo of the business. But it's not standing out. It really is not eye-catching. Originally when we did that logo, we were just making it consistent with our Facebook banner and our website, and just being uniform and consistent, but I had this urge to make it really stand out because I've noticed that a lot of the top shows have eye-grabbing podcast logos. And you only get a small bit of real estate and you're in the mix there with hundreds of other podcasts, probably thousands, but let's just limit it to the top 150.

My goal with the podcast is for people to notice my podcast first because I can't get them subscribed until they notice it. Once I get into it, then I want them to be able to easily recognize it when they're scrolling through their list of podcasts or on their Apple TVs, etc.

So the first driver for this was me, in this case, the customer, saying, "Greg, I need my podcast logo to stand out." Let's talk about what flips into your process here. Greg, as the professional designer, what do you do next?

Greg: Yeah. Normally, we would have a pretty in-depth questionnaire for these types of things especially with a new client, but because I know you and I know your audience and we've designed for you quite a few times in the past, your brief to me was literally that, "I need something to stand out, can you show me some radical ideas, I've got no reference, I just want an eye-grabber." Just based on that, what goes through my mind is, 'OK, I know James Schramko. He's straight to the point.