Unichannel SEO with David Quaid | NYC Views & a $325M Exit

Mr. David Quaid joins the podcast once again. Dude, what are we talking about today? Well, we're talking about SEO and what I'm calling the Uni Channel. And it's great to be here in New York with you where uh I started my US career. You're from New York, right? I'm from Brooklyn. Yeah. Yeah. This is great. Um we're out here in a lovely Manhattan evening and um I think what I want to talk about is how when I got into SEO 20 odd years ago, it was the big channel and I think it still is. I think email is under a lot of pressure. I think social media is under a lot of pressure. Lost Twitter as a as a marketing channel. A lot of people post into LinkedIn, but I don't think LinkedIn really gives you that much organic reach, right? They've got like a billion in ad revenue to make up. I really think that if you're a SAS company, anything B2B, any tech company, you've got to be on Google. And I think you can do it with Google. I would hate to do any marketing without Google. I I don't even know how it's how it's possible, right? I mean, look at um Chat GPT, they're running ads on Google. Um the amount of um projects that I've worked with over the last 10 years that derive over 75 90% of their leads from SEO. I was speaking to a a marketing consultant in in Europe uh during the week and uh we pulled up this the G4 analytics for the last two years. LinkedIn accounted for 0.1% of leads for this company for how much? 0.1% of the use. Um, when I was at Kemp, we we've spoken about Kemp before. Um, we had nine Twitter accounts. We had a whole LinkedIn team and all of our revenue came from Google. I think a lot of people talk about like this holistic marketing and multi- channelannel marketing. That's fine. But you can still do you can launch entire companies on SEO right after. Do you let me ask you, so a lot of people listening to this show, they might be like, well, everyone comes on the Edward Show and they're like, you have to build a brand. How much do you need to build a brand in relation to actually doing search engine optimization? I I think one of the things I love about Google is that it was the big brand breaker and the big brand builder. I think when people start googling things, they're not brand affiliates, right? They're not fanboys. No, nobody who owns an iPhone googles iPhone alternatives, right? I think that when people are using Google, they want to find the best product, the best price at the best time. And I think that's why they search so much. That's why you have so many sites like G2, Capira, so on. Why you have all these review websites, aggregate websites, uh people do all their research from A to Z on Google. And I think if you're building a company and you're not on SEO, I I I don't know how you're doing it. I mean, I can understand that there are a lot of market segments that don't use Google that successfully. look at everything that's sold on Tik Tok. But I think for every SAS B2B company, I wouldn't be surprised if you did the analytics and saw more than 75% plus of your leads coming from Google search, Bing, paid search, that kind of thing. When you Okay, let me ask you this. If you're a startup and I mean just based off like how you like to do marketing, what p would you first of all would you do like the would you do the core link building? So like social accounts for example, would you do things like that? Would you do any posts on on social? And then what percentage of your marketing would be SEO compared to other channels? Um I I think I would I I'm a big fan of YouTube, the world's second biggest uh search engine. Um I think it's it's been phenomenal for you. I think it's lifted my name from, you know, unknown to Oh, come on. Come on. No, David has lifted my name. That's what has happened. Definitely not. Um, I think I would do some social. I like social marketing, especially for leaders, thought leadership, and for influencers, but I think I would focus everything on SEO. Um, I still think you need to do a little bit of paid, even though I'm an all-in on SEO guy. Um, people when they want to buy, they will click on the top result. They will click on ads, but you can only do so much. I think I would think 75% would come from SEO. 75%. Yeah. Yeah. And then you know we were talking about this, we've talked about this on a bunch of shows. When you are going really hard on SEO, how much do you need to scale link building before you start ranking too you start ranking too much without having enough authority? Um, you know that you understand like what I'm what I'm trying to get at. Yeah. The there there's so much authority you can get from cornerstoning and and and linking up, right? And eventually you run into sites that have earned or or obtained back links that could be in the hundreds to specific pages. That's going to be very very hard to challenge. If you've got to rank for a specific term, you've run out of all the longtail. It it does it can become a game of link building for sure. I I start link building the minute the site is has got a holding page. I don't think there's too soon. I wouldn't want to build 100,000 links and I don't think I could uh to a holding page. But I think this idea of waiting and wait and see that that's one of the biggest mistakes in SEO. Like this method of marketing is so effective I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions how, what, when. Compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords landing page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "Compact Keywords contributed to a $4,000 sale within the first 6 weeks." Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. Have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything and you're going to gain a six-f figureure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. What do you mean waiting and waiting to see? So, I I see a lot of people um asking questions on on X this week, for example. Um, hey, I've I've I've uh started doing some links, nothing's ranking yet, everything's on page three. How long do I wait? I'm like, don't wait. If you've got no more content to add or adding more content is not going to rank, then you've got to go back to promoting your website. You know, SEO is not effort free marketing, right? Building a website is not free marketing. There's millions of websites, billions of pages. You have to promote it as a marketer. That's your job. So you wherever you can market it, chamber of commerce, um finding other link builders, product hunt, go build links if you're waiting, right? Because time time there is no time in the algorithm. There was no time in the API leak. The time there's no Google sort of like saying, well, we have to wait another 30 days or we have to wait two weeks. That it doesn't work that way. It might backlink authority can incrementally increase. Sites that link to you can grow traffic and that can have a downstream effect. But that's not because of time. That's because of something happening, right? But nothing happens just because of time. So don't don't be waiting, right? Get out there and you know, even if you can only build one link a day, uh it's better than than nothing. What's the biggest success you've had with SEO? We were talking about this acquisition and I think you shared that the first time you came on the show, but I like it because it's connecting SEO to a major business outcome and in terms of like major meaning hundreds of millions of dollars. That that's so interesting. There were a couple of really um interesting things that happened here in the city. So New York was where I first moved to 11 years ago uh as head of SEO. Um I also joined Digital Irish, which is a big um Irish American. Um I think they've they've invested something like 16 million in in US and Irish startups. It's like they have incredible success. One of those companies came to talk to us here in the city at one of the events and the CEO was um I think it was um the either FanJuel or the competitive FanJuel and he was talking about how they were spending 50 million on AdWords um in their like second last year because for every dollar they spent they made $15 back which is incredible. uh right after I left Kemp um which which was January 2020 uh I joined insights as a as a consultant in April digital was um about 6.9% of closed one by September of the following year it was 70% and in November they were acquired by Rapid 7 for 325 million yeah and you were telling me so digital was mostly just SEO so so most so you when you joined SEO was basic mostly SEO was like 6% of the marketing and before the acquisition SEO was responsible for 70 it was 70% of the marketing one sales and that's because they were doing a lot of events and if you remember April 2020 was when co shut everything down and all of the big events closed that's where they were getting all their leads so they had to depend on SEO and I think we had a tiny budget of like maybe $3,000 for paid search uh which we used very very well and we we got that up quite a lot but it it came from SEO We we really uh the company was sold for how much you said 325 million acquired by rapid 7 and it took Rapid 7 3 years I think to integrate um what was what was your SEO strategy when you're doing that? Um so we wanted to so it insights is a very interesting cyber security company that did a lot of um dark web um threat hunting um and sort of like awareness uh for companies that are going to get attacked. Like for example, if you were City Bank and somebody was buying domains with City in it, they would be aware that someone was running a fishing attack for example. U the SEO strategy was first of all find all of their competitors and where we where we competed with them and and build up those pages. Um then we found a whole lot of um CIS admins and um security engineers uh that wrote blogs about us and we got links from that which was really a great um outcome and really just owning and defining the whole space. So educating people. Wait, sorry. You said you were finding people who were writing about you and you got links from that. But but I I'm sorry. They were already writing about you. So you got the links. No, this was actually an engagement we went after. Uh so I had a contact in the UK for the VMware user group and uh we contacted a lot of bloggers and said, "Look, have you ever heard of these services, right? Not a lot of people had. These are very new services. People probably didn't know they existed." We got them to blog about us. And so we we sponsored their time to research the product and then they wrote blogs about us and that got us a lot of links uh specifically to the individual service pages and and not the brand to the homepage. Uh we actually got them to link to the different you know this is dark web hunting this is domain monitoring. So uh that was very successful. Yeah that's awesome. And then the other parts of the SEO strategy, the other parts of the SEO strategy were to find where so one of the things I really love is to look at where people are uh spending money on paid search. Find the really high um sort of like high value, high bid words like $70 and above. Those are the words that they're getting business on. That's what I want to rank for. So if I reverse engineer that back starting with a gloss re-entry starting with a what is how is like we did with the paa using the end term as the starting result and then working my way up towards it and that's what we did. So this is classic cornerstone. It's classic cornerstone. Also back then GA worked a lot better. We had we were still in universe analytics so you could look back and you could see people touching certain touch points. What we found is that this is like a $100,000 deal, right? So each each lead coming in was potentially worth $10,000 to $100,000. And what we looked at is the most successful leads touched on certain pages like comparison page, a pricing page, who it's for. And we put together a list of about 11 pages that most of the successful contacts touched where we had people that touched the other pages but not those. We created a remarketing campaign that brought them back to those pages so that they would sort of fill in the gaps. And the remarketing campaign became like had like a ridiculous conversion rate of like 15% or something like that. It it was very good. For people listening, you're they're just starting. They want to have a $325 million SEO strategy at their at their company. What's the first three things that that listener should do? Um I think the first thing they should do is is research as much as possible. Um I think Google does a great job at putting out a lot of information. The SEO starter guide a must. Uh I think you're going to agree with me on this. Matt Cuts videos. Yeah. Yeah. Early Matt Cuts videos. If you haven't checked them out, I I try to share them on the show, but you will understand so much about search engine optimization in Google from Matt Cuts was the former head of of web spam search quality. Yeah, he was incredible and he he really explained Google as an engineering product that you know I think SEOs could really understand. And I think there are other companies that are maybe trying to sell to the same person or looks like it. Reach out to them. They've got the same problem. They can't get back links either, right? So, how can you write about them? How can you like we had our partners in Europe uh blog about us? Um we would say, you know, have a we'll build a partner page for you. We'll we'll do everything we can to get more people to your site. What can you do that that helps get people to ours? And we could link to those pages, help them get traffic. So, as long as you keep in mind, it's not just about building a page. The page, those were reciprocal links. So, they are, but they're not sort of like back to the same pages. Yeah. Yeah. We weren't building like 20 reciprocal links. Um, but if we got a page on their site to rank about cyber security and got that to link to say threat hunting, that gave us enough links, right? I I think people think that it takes tens of thousands of links. Um, you have no idea the value of each link because you can't see it, right? So, um, I give up on the DA thing. Go for pages that get traffic and help your partner get traffic. It it it will work. All right. So, we're in New York City and something that I something that I think about on this rooftop looking at these buildings and actually I think I I used to work at a this was a long time ago. I was at a co-working space right around here. It might literally have been across the street. Like it's super close to where we are. And I'm just remembering what it was like to hustle so hard trying to get clients. And so I want to ask you, David, for SEOs who are just starting out, who who are trying to get work, who are trying to to do SEO for other companies, what would your advice be to them? So my advice is before you jump, make sure you've got a couple of projects to go first of all, right? If you can have have a project to, you know, get yourself up and and pay your basic bills. Um, one of the things that I did is I spoke to a couple of uh um PR agencies um and a couple of web design agents that said, "Look, I can do some SEO for you, right? And if you start getting more leads, will you recommend me or I can come in and do SEO for your clients?" I had a lot of PR agencies that didn't want, for example, to recommend full service agencies because that was a threat to them. They liked having someone who was just a good SEO. Um, and I made sure I delivered. I made sure even if I was doing an hour's worth of work for someone, if I had to do 39 hours of work to make sure they were ranking, uh, because then they would start introducing me. And then I whenever I met people who had questions about SEO, I offer to help them for free. I'm not saying you should work for free. This is not a go out and work for free. I I hate to see people being taken advantage of, but these were really genuinely nice people who wanted me to do work, but they were scared. And if you can remove those barriers, like is this about trust? It's not normally about money. It's more about like how much time are we losing to our competition. We can't afford to lose nine months on the wrong person. So, as long as you can deliver and you know how to deliver and that's why I focused on that that niche because I was a software engineer, I know the industry, I have a lot of contacts in the industry and so I was confident that I could deliver and we said look if things go up in in 60 days this will happen and uh luckily it it happened and so that's what I would say to people uh go out and build your portfolio. There is nothing like having someone recommend you, especially another CMO or VP that you've helped light their career up. They're going to want to repay you. That is amazing advice because so when I was when I was figuring out how to get clients, what I found was I wanted to go to meetups and events where I could meet the type of people who would give me referrals and then I would go and I would actually become friends with them. I used to like bounce around at events trying to meet everyone just having like surface level connections and hopefully they would remember me. No one would remember me. But when I actually took the time to meet people and especially people who connected with other people who would want SEO, those connections converted really well. Those referrals converted really well. And you're basically saying just find existing agencies who you know will be able to give you referrals and just offer to do SEO for them for free. be the problem solver, right? Companies are pragmatic, right? They um one of the the best things I did in my career was work, you know, um I I supported Limick Open Coffee. I eventually hosted Limick Open Coffee. I did this for years in in in Ireland. Um when people had a problem with their website, whenever they went to new web agencies, the web the the web design agency wanted to start from scratch and they just wanted to keep repeating the process and they were like, "This doesn't solve my problem." And so what I was doing was helping them understand marketing. I was helping them find um freelancers who could fix their website or move to better hosting companies and I started solving problems and that builds trust and eventually they start recommending you to people because they're not just recommending a person. They know that you're going to solve the problem because you're going to put the time in. Be the most sort resourceful person in the room. Answer those problems. People will keep you in their network. Mo a lot of the people I've worked with, we're on like project six and seven um because we work well together. I understand what they need and I know how to get there. I don't do things I can't do. I don't try to do things I can't do. I'm color blind. I can't do design. I can't help people. Um, if I can't do something in HubSpot, I'll find the person who can help them. And and I think that's one of the best things you can do. I also think that you should run a local networking group. you know, if you're a web agency or or a solo, you know, doing social media marketing or email marketing or or SEO, host a local group where you can help, you know, local businesses do better online, help them with their YouTube video, help them with whatever. Build up those relationships and and I think you'll be busy pretty soon, actually. Um, so I I I started and ran the New York City Search Engine Optimization Meetup group and um, but I also had a bunch what I would do is I would I would join I was I was part of a lot of different Meetup groups and then organizers would step down. They would get tired of running the groups. They didn't want to pay the fees to meet up, whatever. They would step down and then I would take it over and I would consolidate all these different meetups into my SEO meetup group and I would have everyone come into my group. Uh but actually what's really interesting is that one of these groups there's a um there's some big tech event that's happening and here in New York and and one of the groups reached out to me and they're like hey can you promote our event to your meetup and I'm like yes can you list me on your community page and I check their community page and it's all do follow links and it's a great domain with a lot of traffic and it has a very I mean you're saying ignore DA but it is good. It's good DA where the pages are ranking, where the pages are ranking. And so, yeah, now like just by having this group and putting out the invite to them and I I don't even I literally haven't done anything with this group in years. So, it's just like this free really high quality back and they're paying me as well. They are paying me to give me a really great backlink just because many years ago I took over all these different Meetup groups because you solve problems for them, right? That's what it is. Business is about avoiding problems that would otherwise add up and knock you out. And what what businesses don't want to do is keep repeating the same mistakes. They they need people who can think out of the box, be creative, not I want to say also, sorry, this is it's also a link that is going to pass referral traffic and literally and I get to control the language with it and it like people are going to see my site as a provider of SEO for something that is very within an event that is very relevant. It's just uh Yeah. And that's how M Matt Cuts used to talk about it. He used to say, you know, if you're building a business, um how does Google know who you're networking with and who you trust? If if if people don't link to you and and to to Google, the the world is a is an interlin web. And so if you're doing work for a company, ask for a case study. Um feature them on YouTube, have them link to it. They want promotion as well. There's there's so many opportunities. Um, you focusing on DA as a solo metric is bad, but like you said, if there's real referral traffic that will work. I think those are the best links. What was the term that we opened the episode with the una oh uh uni channel? Yeah, I think I think SEO is so big. I remember one stage um at at Twitter's height when when Google was uh accounted for 70% of the world's traffic. I think it was eight times all the social media networks combined. Since then, it's gotten even bigger. So, yeah, SEO is a uni channel. Yes, you can do all forms of marketing, but you can completely build a company inside SEO or inside page search. There are so many examples. I work with so many companies that all of their business comes from SEO. Not saying that they can't shouldn't also do PR or they shouldn't also do something else. They don't need to. They've got enough business coming from Google. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Uh, I've spoken to a lot of companies that have said they they're all in on geo. It's always always important to have your eye on the ball. But a lot of them are saying, "Look, we're seeing more people come from discovery in SEO after writing pages that are only people high up in the funnel we look for are coming through." And, you know, geo just isn't more than 1%. if in the best cases I can find. I found cases where companies are generating 2,000 leads a month from SEO and they're not even getting 200 clicks a month from chat GPT. So, keep an eye on it, but I I think Google is still the biggest channel. And don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of Google. Um Google knows everyone's doing SEO. They're not trying to watch you. They're not trying to trip you up. All of their policies, spam policies are in one document, right? So, they don't have penalties for having a long page title or a long meta description. They don't care. Um, they want to just get the most relevant document out to people. So, test um, and try again. There's nothing wrong with like trying a page. If it doesn't rank, come back and do it again. You're not going to get in trouble. Uh, Google's not an evil company that way. All right. We'll end it with that. David, thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. This was uh, yeah, the first time doing this doing this here. meet actually this was we met in person a couple hours ago and David has been on the show as a guest more than I think any other guest and David's first time on the show is my most popular guest episode so right David thank you thank you again for meeting and for doing this and uh yeah that is everything for episode 1040 of the Edward show 140 days in a row doing this podcast if you watch us on YouTube thank you so much for watching if you listened on Spotify or Apple podcast. Thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow.