Kris is the Founder and CEO of ArdorSEO, an Award-Winning Digital Growth Agency that directs traffic to your website. Enamored by his ego with his early success in the tech industry, Kris got a wake-up call when the global financial crisis happened—he lost his job, went back to Australia, and assessed what else he wanted to do in his life. As a business expert and tech enthusiast, he had always been interested in the framework that builds the massive global network called the internet, and today, Kris breaks down the discovery he found on unlocking the secrets of website traffic—that changed his life forever.
Kris Reid Real Estate Background:
- Founder of Ardor SEO
- Business Growth Expert
- Developed a simple system to direct traffic to your website
- Based in Brisbane, Australia
- Summit coming soon: www.ardorseo.com/bestEver
- Say hi to him at: www.ardorseo.com
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Best Ever Tweet:
“Google looks at the whole internet as a big internal web; they can’t trust what you are saying at face value. They have to look at what everyone else is saying and how your content reflects that.” – Kris Reid
TRANSCRIPTION
Ash Patel: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. I’m Ash Patel and I’m here today with our guest, Kris Reid. Kris is joining us from Brisbane, Australia. Kris, thank you for joining us. How are you today?
Kris Reid: Man, I tell you, with COVID rampaging around the world, what a great time it is to be able to work online. It’s fantastic being on the other side of the planet being able to speak to you today.
Ash Patel: Well, we’re excited to have you, Kris. So today is Sunday, so Best Ever listeners, we’re doing a Skillset Sunday, where we talk about a specific skillset that our guest has. Kris is the founder of Ardor SEO, and is a business growth expert. He also developed a simple system to direct traffic to your website.
Kris, before we get into your skillset, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on now?
Kris Reid: Sure. So as you mentioned, I’m from Brisbane, Australia. I don’t actually live there anymore. And right now I’m in sunny Saigon in Vietnam. But yeah, I studied software engineering at university. And as a software engineer, there’s two ways to make money – you can move to Silicon Valley and you work for tech startup, or you sell your soul to the devil and you work in finance. I took the finance route, I moved to London and – man, it was awesome. Yeah, I was making billionaires more money and living the dream. I got to go to Paris on the weekend, or Berlin or Amsterdam. It was fabulous. I was living high on the hog in my mid-20s with my ego as big as the sun, feeling that I was absolutely invincible. And that all happened until the global financial crisis came and kicked my ass. And I lost my job, just like pretty much everyone else I worked with, and it kind of sucked.
I went back to Australia with my tail between my legs going, “What the hell am I going to do with my life? My career is ruined. There’s no jobs to be had. There’s no way I can make the money I was making, what am I going to do?” And being a computer geek, I built an online game. Not particularly because I wanted to be a business owner or anything, just because I was geeking out. And as the game came to fruition, I was like, “Well, how the hell do you get people to a website to play this damn thing?”
So I started learning about SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization, and how to get traffic to a website through a search engine, Google being the biggest one. So focus on that. I got a bunch of traffic to my website, I went, “Hey, that’s a whole lot of fun” and really been doing that ever since.
Ash Patel: What a story. So your skill set today that we’re going to discuss is SEO. And I’m assuming you took those SEO skills and ramped them up into your business now.
Kris Reid: For sure. That’s exactly what we did. So I started doing it for our own websites, and then I started doing it for other businesses.
Ash Patel: What was the next evolution?
Kris Reid: The next evolution — the secret behind how Google works is what are called backlinks. And once I discovered what backlinks were, I was like, “Wow, I can rank any website.”
So to take it back one step, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, while he was at university, he was thinking about the internet is terrible and they need to organize it a lot better. Back then, there was all these search engines – Yahoo, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, all these crappy search engines. And they were based on text. So if you wrote, “I’m the best realtor in the world” a million times on your website, you’d rank number one for the best realtor in the world. And that’s a really bad way to organize the internet.
Well, Larry figured that if you do a thesis right, and everyone else references your thesis, well, your thesis must be really good. He figured it must be the same with a website. If you’ve got a website and everyone else references your website, links back to your website, it must be really good and credible. And he invented what’s called the PageRank algorithm. And that’s still the forefront of how Google works.
In fact, let me just read an article to you, the title of an article, it’s by one of the best SEO tools called Ahrefs. And they analyzed 2 billion pieces of content (2 billion is a fair bit of content) and the title of this article is “90.63% of content gets no traffic from Google.” So over 90% of content gets zero traffic from Google. They break it down even further where they show only 0.21% of content, so from 2 billion pieces, only 0.21%, less than 1% gets over 1,000 visitors a month. And if you’re a super geek, this article is amazing.
Spoiler alert, the number one reason content doesn’t get any traffic from Google is the page doesn’t have any backlinks. The secret’s out – if no one’s looking to your content, Google ain’t going to give a crap about it, and they’re not going to rank it. So once I discovered that, I was like, “Wow, this SEO game is a lot of fun.”
Ash Patel: So Kris, from my understanding, backlinks are a large part of how you get ranked. But then you read about all the other criteria that Google uses, whether you have a table of contents, an index page, pictures, everything is grammatically correct, pictures are named appropriately… What percentage of that other criteria versus backlinks, what’s the ratio there?
Kris Reid: Really, you need to look at it holistically. Google’s trying to look at the whole internet as a big internal web; they can’t trust what you’re saying in its own, they have to look at what everyone else is saying and how your content reflects that. So you can’t really trick Google, you need to have an overall great user experience. And Google has evolved. I mean, in the 10 years that I’ve been playing this game, it’s got a lot harder, a lot more difficult to rank a website. But it also got way more valuable. But the Internet of today versus 10 years ago – it was dwarfed. And what’s it going to be like in 10 years’ time from now? It’s a lot bigger than any of us can imagine, I’m sure.
So it’s a really good investment, but you do need to follow everything that Google wants; you need to have a really nice site, that loads fast, has really good content, that has a really good site structure, that has nice title tags and description that’s easy to see.
So based on how many backlinks you have coming to website, that builds up what’s called domain authority. And from that domain authority is how much time Google allocates to looking at your website, which is called a crawl budget. Because the internet is really, really big. And even Google, with all of its massive computers, can’t look at the whole internet all the time. And it has to keep coming back to websites, because websites can change at any time. It might say one thing the next day, and it needs to change so the search engine is accurate.
So depending on your authority is how much time it’ll assign to crawl your website. And the easier you make it for Google — so the easier it is to understand, the less time it has to try and work those things out. So the further it can go deeper into your site, the more content it can understand and the more it rewards you with traffic.
So it’s always best if you can have all your ducks in a row. But really, it’s building up that domain authority that is the secret of ranking in Google.
Ash Patel: This is a lot to take in. Let’s take one of our best ever listeners. Let’s say they’re looking for off-market multifamily deals; they create a website either on their own, or they pay a small company to create their website. Obviously, there’s no traffic coming to it initially, unless they’re promoting it themselves. What are the next steps they should take to get more traffic to their site?
Kris Reid: Well, just to break it down, of all the things that you should do and way before you even build a website, is to start out with keyword research. You need to understand exactly what your customers are searching for and in what search volume. And from that, your keyword research, that dictates how you do everything; how you’re going to structure your site, category pages, what are your main subcategory pages?
If you think about Amazon, right? It’s a really big website. What is amazon.com, the homepage meant to rank for? Really nothing particularly, because they sell everything. Most websites aren’t quite that big. So the homepage rank for your most valuable sought-after keyword. But your categories – if you think about Amazon, it’s amazon.com/movies, amazon.com/music, amazon.com/fashion. Then under Fashion, you’ll have men’s and women’s, and then all the different subcategories. And that shows Google a clear line of where those pages are and what content’s more important, like the men’s fashion page is not as important as the fashion page.
So it’s really important you have what’s called keyword mapping, that you have each keyword assigned to a page. So each page gets one primary keyword and three secondary keywords. The primary keyword goes in the H1 and the title tag, and then the secondary keywords go in the description in the H2s. And this makes it really clear of what page should be ranking for what. But you also make sure that your main category pages are ranking for you the big keywords that are really hard to rank for, and your internal pages are ranking for the easier ones.
So a good example of easy and — long tail vs short tail as they’re called… A short tail keyword might be smartphone; it’s going to have heaps of search volume. But what the hell is someone searching for when they type in “smartphone”? Are they doing some research? Do they want to buy a new phone? Who knows. It’s not going to convert that well; “where to buy a secondhand iPhone on the Southside of Chicago” – that’s a longtail keyword, the search find for it is going to be really small. But if that’s what you sell – man, it’s going to convert like crazy. And that’s the same thing you can do with any industry, is work out what those main keywords are, and that’s what your homepage should rank for, is your number one main priority keyword, then your top-line category pages, and then you go down and you have really petite pages that go after those longtail keywords. And those are ones that anyone can rank for.
A good example is one of our clients who buys distressed housing. So he’s chasing keywords like “sell my house fast.” When we did the keyword research for them – they’re based in LA – we did “sell my house fast” in every suburb in LA; Beverly Hills, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach; every suburb and the search find is really small, but the competition is nothing.
So you structure your website, you write the content, and you can rank in all of those locations. Even if you’re looking at “sell my house fast, Beverly Hills,” it might only have 10 searches a month for that exact keyword. But that’s 120 searches a year for that exact keyword. If that gets you one deal, it’s worth making a page for. So keyword research is where you need to start.
Break: [00:11:35] to [00:13:36]
Ash Patel: Kris, is there a way our listeners can research keywords and see what the competition is?
Kris Reid: You can indeed. So the article that I was mentioning before is from a tool called Ahrefs, go to https://ahrefs.com/. It’s spelled A-H-R-E-F-S, which is the HTML tag for a backlink, it’s a bit of geek humor. It’s a pretty expensive tool, but I think they have a trial that’s like seven bucks for seven days. And that should give you plenty of data.
A real easy way to cheat – like, if you’re in some little village or a small town, you can just go to more competitive places, right? So if you’re looking to “sell my house fast”, look at the L.A. keywords or the New York keywords, or real estate investing keywords. Search “best realtor in New York”, and whoever is ranking number one in Manhattan, you can bet that that’s a really competitive area, so their site is gonna be great. You can grab their site, check it in ahrefs, and it’ll show you all of the keywords that they rank for. Then you can probably just change Manhattan to whatever your town is, and you’ve got most of your keyword research done. But lots of these SEO tools have tools where you can put in keywords and play around with it.
Another thing you can do is just get yourself in your mind of your customer and work out what they’re searching for, search that into Google, look who the competitors are, and even look down the bottom where it says “Related Search”. You can click on those and just click around and see what the competition’s like.
So generally, what you’ll find is you might have big authority sites that’ll rank, but they’re easy to beat on a localized level. It’s like, if you see Amazon in a listing, it’s really easy to usually beat Amazon; Amazon just ranks because it’s such a big authority. And if they write any content, it ranks. It doesn’t mean that they SEO on that page. So usually, you can beat that. And that’s the same with if you see any of the big real estate websites like Sotheby’s; it’s usually very easy to beat them on a localized level.
Ash Patel: Interesting. A lot of our Best Ever listeners use Google AdWords, where they pay for placement. What are your thoughts on continuing that practice, supplementing SEO with that practice, or just not using it?
Kris Reid: If you’ve got an AdWords campaign that is converting and making money, why would you ever turn that off? Go for it. Great. But digital marketing beats traditional marketing in every way, no matter which version of digital marketing it is. But anything like Facebook ads or AdWords – it’s only ever going to get more expensive and more competitive.
With SEO, it’s compounding. The work that you did last month, you get this month, and next month, and it just keeps building up and building up. Where AdWords doesn’t; as soon as you stop spending, you stop getting. SEO does take a little bit longer to get started; it’s not instant. AdWords, you can turn on straightaway, but you can also burn through money really, really quick. You get that wrong or someone’s clicking on your ads and not converting – oh man, does that hurt. Whereas SEO, it’s compounding, and I think it was Einstein that said, “Compound interest is the most powerful thing in the universe,” right? Those that understand it, earn it and those that don’t, pay it, something like that.
Ash Patel: So who would win if I naturally rank high, just using SEO, for let’s say “Miami apartments for sale”, versus somebody that pays money to outrank me – who wins that contest?
Kris Reid: Google organic search and AdWords is two different things; they don’t affect each other. If you’re buying the ad placements, it won’t affect your SEO, and it won’t help at all. AdWords is really just auction; whoever bids the most, it’s going to be at the top. But it’s also builds on a quality score. So the better you rank organically and the better your quality score of your website, the less you have to bid.
A good example of that is if you go back to smartphones – if Apple and Samsung were both bidding on the keyword “smartphone”, they’d both bid about the same, because they’re both smartphone companies and they both got quality websites. So it would be a one-for-one relationship. But if it was an iPhone-related keyword, Samsung would have to pay a lot more money than Apple, because Apples’ way more relevant for that.
It’s like the same if you’re bidding on your own brand name or a competitors brand name, it’ll cost you a hell of a lot more than it’ll cost them. So the better you rank organically, the less you’re going to have to pay per click. But even with that, Google’s constantly fiddling around with the ads, because they want people to click on them. That’s where Google makes all of their money. The parent company of Alphabet, something like 95% of their revenue is from Google ads, a lot of it. But only that 6% to 8% of people click on ads. So even if you’re buying all the ads you can, there’s 92% of that traffic is still going to organic, so you’re missing out on the vast majority of it. And even with the organic, so there’s 10 search results, and they get a really dramatically different amount of clicks. The one at the bottom gets 3% to 4% of the clicks. From memory, one of the top gets 34% of the clicks. So you’re looking at about 10 times the amount of traffic from being at number 10 to number one, and being number one is still going to get you four or five times the amount of traffic than if you paid for it. So SEO is going to get you the lion’s share of all those people that are searching for multifamily investments.
Ash Patel: That is interesting. Let me clarify one point. If I have a great real estate website that has a lot of content and I want to bid for the keyword “multifamily for sale, Miami” and my neighbor has a brand new site, not a great site, he wants to bid for it also. Because his site is not as in-depth as mine, does he have to pay more for that top ranking?
Kris Reid: Yeah. So Google awards you a quality score relevant to that keyword. So if you started bidding on something that’s totally outside of your niche, it’s going to cost you more. But with those two websites, say, it gave you a quality score of 50 and him a quality score 25; then he might bid $5 on a keyword and you bid $1 on a keyword and you still win, because it’s your quality score times your bid price.
Ash Patel: Interesting. I did not know that. So for our listeners, if they have their website up and they’ve got it optimized, they’ve got a fair amount of content in it, why can’t they just tell all their buddies to link to their site?
Kris Reid: Probably because their buddies don’t have any domain authority. But seriously, that works a lot. One of our customers who has a carwash in Denver – so he’s on a street that has a whole bunch of car repair shops, so he knows everyone on that street. And so we worked with them to provide them content and some free coupons to give away for the carwash, and they get a link. So having big authority websites linking to you is awesome. But what’s even better is if it’s niche relevant and location relevant. The more localized you’re looking — like, if you’re a realtor in Naples or something, if you have links from other businesses in Naples, that builds up a lot of credibility, because Google’s like, “Wow, everyone in Naples knows this person. They’re really cool.”
So you want it really niche relevant… Like, if you’re looking for multifamily, where it isn’t so much location-based, then the more multifamily investment-related backlinks to you, the better. But if you’re looking for location-based keywords, then the more location-based the better.
Ash Patel: Do outbound links help you at all? If I link to my competitors and they don’t link back to me, do I get any domain authority for that?
Kris Reid: So that’s the opposite. That’s an outbound link. So backlink is a link coming back to your website. An outbound link is you’re linking out to someone else; that’s helping them alone. If you’re linking to each other, that’s called a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link doesn’t have the same amount of weight as a backlink. A link coming just back to you is much better than a reciprocal link. So reciprocal links is still pretty okay.
Also, linking gets complicated… Where the backlink is on your website matters as well and where’s it linking to. If it’s on the homepage, that’s worth a lot more than it’s buried in an internal page. It’s also the page authority, not just the domain authority, where that backlink is coming from, plus the content that’s on it.
So to understand what your page should rank for, it looks at the content on that page, it looks at the content on your website and how everything’s linking to that website. Plus, it’s looking at all the other websites that are linking to you on what they’re about. Google’s not trying to look at a website like a human would, it’s trying to look at the whole internet as this giant web and how it’s all associated, and what’s the context of what you’re trying to search for, and what’s the best result for that. So yeah, you can’t do it in just one piece, you need to really have a holistic strategy.
Ash Patel: Walk me through the process, Kris. So if I come to you, with my multifamily Miami website, what are some of the steps that you’re going to take to help me get the backlinks and to get a higher PageRank?
Kris Reid: Sure. So we start every customer off the exact same way. It’s what we call a market visibility blueprint. And what we do is we have an in-depth call with them to understand exactly who your perfect customer is. What does that person look like? And then how many of them do you want? Because if you want to generate 10 leads a month or 100 leads a month or 1000 leads a month – well, it’s a different investment. The internet is way bigger than any of our little human brains can understand. And the market’s massive, whatever industry you’re in.
One of our clients that sells pet carriers. You didn’t know that there’s 70,000 people searching for pet carriers every single month, that exact keyword. I was looking at it today, and I was like “Man, who knew.”
So there’s so many people using the internet and wanting to buy things, so we need to establish what your goals are. Then we get into the research, then we do the keyword research to understand exactly what your customer is searching for. Then we need to do a website audit to understand what’s wrong with your website and why is it not performing now; some things might be critical, some things might not be. Sometimes websites have been hacked, sometimes they’ve got little flaws. We need to understand where you currently stand, and then we need to understand who your competitors are, how competitive is your niche. What are the keywords you’re going out for.
So basically, we look at all the keywords and we’ll put them into a difficulty between zero and 100. So really, what you’re looking for is keywords that have a low difficulty and ideally a high cost per click. Because even though we’re not buying traffic from AdWords, if something’s got a high cost per click, it generally converts well. That’s why people have bid it up. Those are generally, just as a rule of thumb, the keywords that we want to rank for. And based on your domain authority is where we will target. If you’ve got a low domain authority, we want to focus on keywords that are 10 to 20 difficulty; if you’ve got a medium, then we’ll go towards 50. If you’ve got a really kick-ass domain authority, well, you’re probably ranking for good things already and then you can go after the bigger ones.
Then we build a strategy, so we build a 12-month strategy of how to get from wherever you are today to where you want to be and what your goals are, and we outline every single step. Hey, you need to structure your website; what content needs to be on it, how do you build backlinks, at what velocity. But that’s only the first piece of the puzzle, is generating traffic, because at the end of the day, you need to be making money; if our clients don’t make money, they don’t stick around. So that’s what we really want to show straightaway; search engine rankings and traffic is great, but they don’t pay the bills. It’s new clients that do.
So the first step is about getting people to your website, and then it’s turning them into clients. So what you do with that is by having a big old lead magnet. In fact, Joe’s website has got a fabulous lead magnet with a calculator. That’s the sort of thing that you want. So many websites will have just a really crappy call to action, like “call now” or whatever, or “book a call with me.” It’s like, “No one wants to be sold stuff. They don’t want to take time out of their day to call someone that’s going to pitch him”, especially if you’re looking for a multifamily deal where you’re looking for an investor to give you 50k. No one’s going to give you 50K straight over the phone; you need to build up a relationship with that.
For example, a really good keyword for syndication companies is “how to invest $50,000”. Because you can be pretty sure that someone that’s searching for “how to invest $50,000” has 50K that they want to invest.
So you build a nice article about “five different ways to invest $50,000”, you rank it in Google, and then when people get to that article, they read it down, and you have a nice pop up that pops up and goes, “Hey, here’s the five biggest mistakes that people make when getting started with investing. Give me an email and download the guide.” That’s called a lead magnet. And something like that works really, really well. They put in their email, they download the guide and they go, “Wow, this dude really knows what he’s talking about with investing.” And then you let your email nurture campaign do the rest. So if you’ve been on podcast, you go, “Listen to this podcast I was on,” or, “Listen to this other article I did, where I was featured in here, or these people that we helped.”
And now they really understand what you do and see you as an authority. And then you go, “Hey, how about you book a call with me?” Now this person really understands what you do, they’ve proactively booked a call to you. And when you’re ready to talk to him, they’re ready to give you 50K. So that’s really the whole strategy of having a killer website.
Break: [00:26:48] to [00:27:29]
Ash Patel: Kris, I have to tell you – so there’s SEO companies out there, they’re everywhere. I’m going to equate it to used car sales, because there’s so much money involved in SEO. And what I’ve learned thus far is if an SEO company doesn’t fix your website first, they’re not worth hiring.
Kris Reid: There is a lot of BS in the market, for sure. Because the barrier to entry of being an SEO company is so low. You go, “Hey, look, I’m the best guy in SEO.” Who’s to say you’re not? So you get a lot of people that just talk crap. And generally, they’ll sell packages, small, medium, and large. And if anyone tries to bundle you into some package, it’s total BS.
We do have a one-off for our initial product, which is building your strategy. And that strategy is tailor-made to fit whatever your goals are; the bigger your goals, the bigger that strategy’s going to cost; the further you are from where you want to be, the more it’s going to take. But you need to do that research. Anyone that’s shooting from the hip and just gives you an estimate, it’s total BS.
And it’s the same with web design companies. Most web design companies have no idea what they’re doing, because they’re focused on just building beautiful websites; like, who gives a crap. You build a beautiful website that no one finds, you spent 20 grand and it doesn’t make any money. A website is just like a business card; you have a beautiful business card that’s sitting in your desk drawer, it’s not going to make any money. You need to get out there and hand it to people.
When we start with a new client that doesn’t have a website, we build the minimum viable thing you need. We don’t go and spend 20 grand building this massive website. Get something live and get it indexed and start getting some traffic to it; you can always improve on it. We’ll even start with a very basic lead magnet, because you need to capture leads somehow, but you need to get traffic to the website first.
So just start with some little lead magnet and improve on it later. But yeah, anyone that’s trying to pigeonhole you, then that’s not a good strategy.
Ash Patel: So packages – stay away from them?
Kris Reid: Indeed.
Ash Patel: Now, let’s talk about timeframe and expense. I have my new site out there and you poke a lot of holes at it, it needs a lot of work, it needs a lot of content. What’s the timeframe, and what’s my budget for getting ranked on Google?
Kris Reid: So it’s a hard one, because it really depends where you’re. If it’s a brand new site — like, say we’re building a website, right? And so you don’t have a domain and we’re starting completely from fresh. Usually, depending on how much communication we get with the client, we can get a website live within 30 to 60 days. Again, and it’s the basic website ready to rank. Then it really depends on how quickly we can get Google to trust you. They don’t like new domains. Because people do what’s called churn and burn, they build up websites—you might see hacked websites sometimes… And generally, what those hacked websites do is linked to these brand new websites.
So these hackers will build a new website, hack a whole bunch of websites, link it to their new website, pop it up in the rankings, make lots of money, Google eventually understands everything and drops it. But by then, they’ve already got another one live. So they’re always one step ahead of Google.
So Google doesn’t trust you. Usually, it takes about two months to get out of the sandbox and start getting ranking. As a general rule of thumb, we say, “Don’t expect too much for three months; by four months, you should have leads coming in; by five months, you should have a profitable campaign.” That’s just a general rule of thumb.
Ash Patel: And what is that going to cost me?
Kris Reid: Well, for us, we don’t work with anyone for less than 2K a month, because it’s just not worth us getting out of bed for. So it really depends on what you want to achieve. But that’s our minimum.
Ash Patel: That’s great. I’ve seen a lot of packages that are five figures and no guarantees. Do you have guarantees?
Kris Reid: In fact, we do.
Ash Patel: Oh.
Kris Reid: And then in fact, there’s a beautiful book on my shelf behind me called 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Matthew Perry, I believe. And man, one chapter in that is the power of guarantees; I read it and went, “That’s great, we should have guarantees.” And we added guarantees to our strategies. And I’ll tell you, man, there is a power in guarantees; you start guaranteeing stuff and people are like, “Man, I trust you. Yes, take my money.” And it gives you so much authority and it gives you control too, because you’ve got to do what we say. If you don’t do what we say, then it won’t work. You need to follow our strategy. And they’re like, “ Yeah, cool. All right, I get you.” And it works every time and that’s why we’re able to do it.
SEO is not black magic. Google is an algorithm and you feed it what it wants. It’s getting better and better all the time. Google has an army of software engineers, so you don’t want to try and BS them. There’s a really great book by Simon Sinek called The Infinite Game, which is about how long does business last for – infinite. It’s not about this quarter or next quarter next year, it’s about for eternity. And when you think about investing in your business like that, that’s what you’re doing with your website; you’re growing it for eternity.
So as long as you have a really fast loading website that has great content, you’re building up that trust and credibility month after month, year after year, if you just keep building all that traffic – man, it just keeps on getting more valuable.
Ash Patel: The guarantee then is going to be client-specific, depending on the competition.
Kris Reid: We make are guarantee based on their goals.
Ash Patel: Got it.
Kris Reid: So whatever your goals are — if we’re working with a podcast and they want to grow their audience from 2,000 to 20,000 or you want to generate 10 leads or 100 leads, whatever it is, we go into the analysis and go, “This is what it’s going to take to get you to goals.” And that’s exactly what we guarantee your goals. So if you do a multifamily deal and you go, “Okay, I need to raise $10 million.” “Okay, so how many investors do you need?” And we just work backwards. “Okay, you need 100 actual investors. So you need at least 1,000 people that say they’ll give you 50K? Cool. This is how many people we need to download your lead magnet, because we know what all the conversion rates are”, right?
If you know that it’s actually one in 10 people that say they’ll give you money, gives you money, then we need 10 times your goal. So how many people need to download your lead magnet before they tell you they’ll give you money? Maybe it’s another five times that, so now we’re at 500 people. What’s the conversion rate on your lead magnet? Maybe it’s one in 10, so then you need 10 times that. So then we just look at the search form and the keywords, and take it from there.
Ash Patel: Kris, for our Best Ever listeners that don’t yet have a site but want one, do you recommend they come to somebody like you first, or get the website up first?
Kris Reid: For sure. Do the analysis first. If you don’t know what people are searching for — like, a web designer won’t do the analysis. They won’t do keyword research. They’ll just build your website. And it’s like, “Well, how did you decide how you’re going to structure that website?” You need to know what people are searching for so that you can work out what your main category pages are. If you go to a web designer, they’re just going to make what looks pretty and what you think looks pretty. And at the end of the day, who gives a crap what your website looks like. It needs to say really clearly, punch in the face that a caveman would understand, “Oh, this is what I do. This is what these guys do. And this is how I take action.”
Beautiful websites don’t sell things; it’s words that sell things and those words need to get in front of people’s faces to for them to have any effect.
Ash Patel: Kris, I wish we had more time. This was an amazing amount of information overload. I’m going to have to relisten to this podcast several times. Great advice. Your story I’m sure is even more fascinating, moving all over the world… But you’ve given us an incredible amount of advice from both a beginner standpoint, as well as people that are more experienced. And I think the most important thing is we’ve understood a little bit more about SEO, what to look for when outsourcing your SEO to companies like yours. So where can people get a hold of you?
Kris Reid: I’ll tell you what, there are a couple of ways you can get a hold of me. You can go to Google and type in “the coolest guy in SEO.” And I tell you, if you don’t see my face, then it’s broken. An even better way is if you go to our website, https://ardorseo.com/ and “ardor” means to do something with fire and passion. That’s why we do SEO. So https://ardorseo.com/bestever – if you go there and put in your details, I’ll do a video review for you. So I’ll show you exactly how many people are searching for your products and services, or searching for multifamily in your city, or real estate agent in your city, or selling distressed houses, whatever it is. And I’ll show you some simple things you can change yourself to get your website in front of where those people are actively looking and predictably grow your business. So it’s https://ardorseo.com/bestever/.
Ash Patel: And then one more thing, was it “thecoolestguyonseo.com”?
Kris Reid: The coolest—not just the coolest guy in SEO. Go to Google, type it in, you’ll see me.
Ash Patel: The coolest guy. So you’re ranked on “the coolest guy on SEO”?
Kris Reid: I am indeed. That’s a bit of reputation engineering right there.
Ash Patel: That’s amazing. One more question. How important is the actual domain name?
Kris Reid: Well, it depends on what the keyword is and what branding is. Often you’ll find http://emergencyplumbingsydney.com – that ranks really easy for emergency plumbing, Sydney. It’s really hard to rank it for anywhere else. And it’s really hard for anyone that goes there to remember your brand name. So it’s good to say what you do on the tin. Our website, https://ardorseo.com/. It tells you that we do SEO. But that’s a difference between branding; like, Starbucks has a stupid name and a mermaid on their tin, but they’re a multi-billion dollar company. So you can kind of have anything, but that’s a branding issue.
Ash Patel: I want to keep going down different rabbit holes. Another question. What if I have emergencyplumbingBrisbane, but I also have Brisbaneplumbing, both pointing to the same website? Does that work?
Kris Reid: Not really, no. Because you’re building up your domain authority — yeah, if you’ve got multiple domains, which some people do have, it takes twice as much effort to rank the websites. You want to have just one domain if you’re a small business, because you can migrate an old domain to a new website. So that is a kind of hack that people use, but it can get you in some trouble. So I wouldn’t try doing that.
Ash Patel: Alright, so gaming the system is no longer a system?
Kris Reid: Gaming the system – you can get away with it. But Google can lay the smackdown for you and they can de-index your website; that’s the worst penalty. And how much is that worth to destroy your business? You should always err on the caution to be on Google’s good side.
Ash Patel: Even more reason to hire a true professional. Kris, I can’t thank you enough. I hope you have a Best Ever day, and Best Ever listeners, thank you for joining us.
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