This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Link Building & SEO Podcast on the Link Research Tools.

All right, this is Christoph Cemper from Link Research Tools with the Link Building and SEO podcast. And I got a great new guest on the show. His name is Stephan Spencer. Stephan, who are you? What is your background and history? How do you connect to SEO, link building, link artists? What does your company do or your companies?

Well, that's a lot of questions all at once. Okay, where do we start? Let's start with the very beginning. Back in the 90s, I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying biochemistry, and I decided to drop out of my PhD and start an agency. So that was Netconcepts. I ran it for 15 years, and I sold it to Cavario in 2010. So, I had a successful exit, and I also, in the process, invented a technology platform for SEO that allowed us to charge on a cost-per-click basis. Very innovative at the time. I invented that in 2003. So we were doing cost per click on SEO using reverse proxy and charging 15 cents a click. And we had clients like Zappos and Nordstrom. Pretty amazing. And yeah, we were making a lot of money versus the consulting. 

I have like seven figures a year from one client in click revenue. Yeah, that was pretty fun.

That was a big reason why my company, my previous company, Netconcepts, got acquired because of that technology called Gravity Stream. I also am the co-author of The Art of SEO. I have actually three books with O'Reilly. Google Power Search is another one, and Social E-commerce is third. So, The Art of SEO is probably the one I'm most known for. It's in its third edition now, and it's nearly a thousand pages. So it's a thick tome. It is the Bible on search engine optimization. So that's me in a nutshell. What else did you have that you barraged me with questions?

Well, that was a lot already.

Yeah, okay.

Well, that was a lot already. And yeah, SEO, for those who don't know that one, I think we've been featured with Link Research Tools and Link Detox there in the second edition. I'm not exactly sure when that started, especially now with all these eight years. When did the first The Art of SEO get published?

2009, yeah. So, I don't think it was the first edition. It was the second, for sure. And then of course the third. Never gonna take you out of the book. So we work on the fourth edition, which will happen this year. We'll, of course, beef up your link research tool section because you guys have innovated. The last edition is from 2015. And it's still mostly relevant, but it doesn't include some things like AMP isn't in there and RankBrain and so forth. But it's still a great book. Yeah, I'm biased.

Cool, cool. Well, well, and I think you had Rand Fishkin as a co-author who was a co-author.

Yeah, yeah, for the first two editions. He dropped off for the 3rd edition. Just too busy. But yeah, it was actually in the speaker room at SCS Toronto that Rand and I started chatting about doing a book together, and that's where this all started. We were going to do the SEO cookbook with O'Reilly and we started work on that together. And it all started when I spoke at the first SMX Advanced and apparently, I really impressed Rand.

I've impressed a lot of people who have given away super awesome secrets in the Give It Up panel at that SMX advanced. And then Rand comes up to me. I'd never talked to him before, comes up to me in the speaker room a few weeks later at SES Toronto and gives me a hug. I was like, wow, nice to meet you. That's awesome. And we just started chatting, and we decided, let's do a book together. We then contacted Danny Sullivan, who happened to be at Foo Camp at the time.

Friends of O'Reilly Conference. And he said, well, let me go talk to some of these O'Reilly folks since I'm here and see if they want to do a book with you. And they're like, yeah, you're in. So it was that easy. Within a few days of that chat, we had a book deal. Yeah, and then it became The Art of SEO. We teamed up with Jesse, and then I brought Eric in a year later to finish the book because it had stalled. So, long history, but it's been a great labor of love. I think we probably collectively earned minimum wage working on it, but it's a gift to the industry.

Well, if you have this one product that uses a reverse proxy to charge seven figures for SEOs per year per client or for a big client, then you can afford to have some labor of love on projects like this, right?

I suppose, but that technology is no longer mine. It belongs to Rio SEO now, which was the spinoff from Cavario. So, whatever happened after 2010, who knows? Because I left shortly after getting acquired. But then I still do consulting. I work with clients, ones that are fun and interesting and challenges, mental, like I've worked with Chanel and Zappos again, and who else? Sony Store, Quicksilver, CNBC, Bloomberg Business Week. Yeah, so those have been some of my clients post-acquisition.

Wow.

But let's not talk about me anymore. Let's give some value to our listeners, some Ninja stuff that will blow their minds.

Yes, see, that's the thing, you know, a tip, a takeaway that you can share for people doing SEO or maybe, you know, having a chance to acquire such large companies. Obviously, you have a lot of visibility by yourself and by your history and by your personality already. But, you know, on the one hand, the question is, you know, what kind of biggest issues to fix do you see in large companies where someone could step in or vice versa? How can you get into big companies in the first place? You know, get someone to reach the right people to get your SEO and online marketing skills.

Yeah, so let's start with if you are a big company or work in a big company, what are the biggest challenges? I think there's a lack of visibility into what is really going on. For example, when I do a link audit, that's part of my comprehensive SEO audit, and it's like three sections. You have the technical SEO audit, the content audit, and the link audit. And I'm looking for a lack of diversity in the themes of the linking sites and the types of sites, the TLDs, top-level domains, the power trust metrics, and all that sort of stuff. I'm looking for a lack of diversity because if it's not sufficiently diverse, it looks engineered.

Essentially, they bought those links or bought the services that yielded those links. So that is a very common issue where the client has no idea that these things are going on. I'll run a Link Detox, which is, of course, a great tool of yours and allows me to triage and see what's going on. If you have a lot of toxic links or suspicious links that need to reviewed, evaluated then. They've got visibility into this now. Suddenly, they know that, "Oh, wow, this is an issue. We had no idea." So, exposing all that and then setting up a roadmap or game plan for them to execute because it seems onerous and like a black box. Like, how do I deal with the fact that I'm in the red zone in Link Detox? 

I didn't even know that that was a thing breaking that down for them, providing a roadmap. And I always do like a three-month rolling roadmap so they know what at least the next several months are going to be focused on. And I try to focus not just on clean up if there are issues, a lot of times these bigger clients don't have issues with clean up. It's more like, let's find you better, more authoritative, more trusted links. High trust links instead of just leaving it to chance or doing the more basic fundamental sort of link building where you request, I don't know, just getting into people's expert roundups and that sort of thing is not exactly amazing. So how do you up level? 

And so I teach them how to do that. How to create link-building campaigns, content marketing campaigns, essentially that are link-worthy, that have the potential to go viral. I had a successful campaign a while back for OvernightPrints.com, a business card for life contest that did really well. And you just have to find a hook or an angle. In that case, the hook was that Jeremy Schoemaker, aka ShoeMoney, a very famous blogger, internet marketer, and internet celebrity, was the MC or the spokesman for that contest. And the contest was focused on designing Jeremy's new business card. He loved the contest. He didn't charge my client any money to run it on his blog, and he promoted it on his YouTube channel and everything. And my client went from nowhere for business cards to number two.

Wow.

So, it worked. Now, not every campaign is gonna be a home run like that. So you have to kind of just do a rinse and repeat and essentially throw a bunch of mud against the wall and see what sticks. So I'd aim for at least a few content marketing campaigns a week that could be really simple, like listicles and personality tests, quizzes, infographics, checklists, worksheets, cheat sheets, that sort of stuff that are easier to do.

Maybe a few hours of work, some good curation work, finding some stuff, videos to embed into a blog post and creating a nice listicle. But you got more involved campaigns you gotta do as well. So you gotta mix those in like the contests or competitions, scavenger hunts, all sorts of more involved things that might incorporate UGC user-generated content the campaign because then you'll get higher quality stuff if you get it on mass, and then you can cherry-pick the best stuff. So yeah, it's a mix. Now, if you are targeting a big company and you want to get in, the best way to do that is to build your authority and the ways I've done that through podcasting, like we're doing right now.

So you can be a guest on other people's podcasts. I use a service called Interview Connections. There are multiple services that do this thing. They'll either get you on podcasts as a guest, or they'll find guests for your podcast and they charge a fee for that. So that's a service that's great. You can have your own podcast like you just started, and that's awesome. I'm a big fan of podcasting. It gives me opportunities to talk to really high-profile people.

 For example, I interviewed Dan Kennedy, a godfather of direct mail. He's a big deal. Also interviewed Jay Abraham. I've had Jay Abraham interview me as well. So, that was an awesome episode. That's a great idea, by the way. Killer idea, Christophe, is if you can get somebody who is a huge name to interview you about link building and put that on your show.

Well, I could come to your show then, to your podcast.

Oh, I'm not that big of a deal.

Oh, okay, okay.

But what I'm saying is, yeah, so Jay Abraham is kind of the godfather of marketing. He's a huge deal. He's amazing, and he's been around forever. So, having an episode where I interview him is great. It's like that doubled my listenership; it was just that one episode. Granted, he did send an email to his big list promoting that episode, so it was really nice of him to do that. And about a year later, I had an episode where he interviewed me. So you have somebody, a big name like Seth Godin or Brian Tracy or somebody interviewing you, Christoph, and then you put that on your show, and people were like, "Whoa, that's a big deal." 

And you go, that's great positioning. So, anything that will build your authority positioning will help you get in as a potential vendor with these large companies. Speaking at conferences, I've spoken at thousands of conferences over the last two decades. Some of the best ones include Shop.org, Internet Retailer, and Content Marketing Worlds. There are a lot of them out there, and you just have to pick your audience and try to go after conferences where you're not just another of the same kind of vendor. So SMX is great and you are just awash with all sorts of other SEOs. You go to something like Content Marketing World, and you're just one out of a very small number of SEOs at that conference. And if you're speaking, you stick out and you speak early in the conference, then you're a celebrity/authority for the whole rest of the conference.

Ah, OK. Got it. So it's basically going niche or going against the mainstream at that conference.

Yeah, so you've got to be remarkable, just like Seth Godin says in The Purple Cow, be worth remarking about. But you do this in the conference circuit. And so you speak at conferences where you are going to be the only one. Right, not just another me too, but the only. And if it's an SEO conference, you gotta figure out a way to be the only one there. So, I know you were just at Brighton SEO. How do you be the only link builder or the only link technologist, or like you find a niche where you're the only there.

Oh, that's actually quite interesting feedback because on quite a lot of conferences, there are so many other different topics that link billing got a lot more niche or a lot more specialized, you know, with all these years that we've been working in link analysis and link billing, link detox, penalties. Just you know, last month we launched so many new features that are for many users above their head where I realized in customer success in marketing and in talking to customers, oh wow, I didn't know that this was possible or required or that this is basically new and the same is, you know, and so in a way, the specialization that we have anyways with Lynx and link building seems to be, you know, naturally developing in a more special skill, if you want. You know, the same is true for outreach. I was about to ask you before, you know, for all your campaigns, how you do your outreach. And when I talk to people how they do their say something like, yeah, Excel and then some Gmail and all that.

Yeah. Well, I love PitchBox. You know I'm a big fan of PitchBox.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I recommend that to clients and it's very scalable. It's kind of like a salesforce.com for link outreach. And you can use it for other types of outreach too. But of course, for link-building outreach, it's fantastic. You got the capability to build your prospect list in there. You can fine-tune it so that it's a minimum threshold like MozRank or whatever your metric of choice is. And you can prioritize from the sites that it identifies and say, well, I don't want WebmasterAt to be the first contact in that company to outreach to, let's put that at the bottom of the list. Let's put the director of marketing first, et cetera. 

And once you get your prospect list. You've got a template library there. You can write your own template. Mail merge it with the template. And you can delegate or outsource to people to build that data repository that's going to be mail merged with, not just the name of the person and so forth, because that's handled by PitchBox. But let's say that you want to have something insightful to say. It's very clear that that email was handwritten and was not just templated and blasted out. Well, that means you have to go to the site. You have to have something insightful to say that makes it clear that you have been to the site that you are a human and a smart human and not trying to just get something. And then always give before you get. So try to add value first.

And don't ask for the link immediately. This is not a sprint. This is a marathon. So, figure out ways that you can add value first. So, for example, I just got a client in the last two weeks, and they had a full article about them in the Denver Post. Now, the only downside of this was the journalist would not link from the article to my client's website. But they've already gotten big deals out of this article. It's all about the company and this grand opening of this building that they did. And it's just, it's an incredible article. And the way it started was, I saw that there was a Denver Post article about apartments and the rising costs of housing a few weeks earlier before the grand opening.

I'm like, "Hey, we got to respond to the journalist on this article." And my client sent me a draft and I'm like, uh-uh, this is not good. This just sounds like a veiled press release, a short one. No, you have to have something insightful to say and not seem like you have an agenda here. Just chime in. And so he came back with another run at it and like nailed it. And so that we didn't use PitchBox or anything for that. That was a laser-targeted, handcrafted email, but it worked. So we got on the radar of that journalist, and he said, this is great. My client also alluded to the grand opening in that message. And so he put, the journalist, put my client in touch with another journalist who attended the grand opening and wrote this amazing article. And it's probably their best article about their company and all their history. So this stuff can happen. You just have to be strategic about it instead of tactical. Tactics are great. But in The Art of War, Sun Tzu said, "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Well said.

So we've got to be strategic about it, and you add value first, and amazing things can happen. So, PitchBox facilitates this whole process. You can do this en masse. You can kind of semi-automate and you can scale it. You can't completely automate it because you still have to show that you've got a brain and that you're not a robot. You're not an algorithm; you're a human reader or viewer, and you've got something interesting and powerful to say.

This is why we integrated with Pitchbox over three years ago already. I remember using the first editions and went completely nuts with my campaigns. And it's also funny to hear when people complain about how this extra work is needed, or the extra cost for the sophisticated solution is needed a fancy result and actual impact of the work in eyes and would rather go with whatever $50 spam bulk emailing Windows app instead of that. 

And I think this is where, you know, this is also a good example of where you need to have, let's say the perseverance or endurance to go through a process of higher complexity to get to a better result in the overall end. I think the same is true for everything in SEO, which puzzles me sometimes how the big companies that we mentioned before actually more short-term thinking than some small businesses that have there.

Yeah. It's that old adage, penny wise and pound foolish. Like, well, let's save a few dollars on some tools, and then we'll just do it the hard way. How silly. Oh, we've got to do this by hand.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And then stuff gets missed and falls through the cracks. Like with PitchBox, you can have it send an automated follow-up. 10 days, 14 days, or whatever you set it to. Okay, we didn't get a response. Let's send a follow-up. Like, "Hey, I'm about to hit the deadline. I really want to include you in this article, but I'm gonna have to turn it in."

Yeah, you know that I also used Pitchbox actually also for fight trademark violations of Link Detox when Link Detox was fairly new, like in 2012, 2013. We got these trademarks, but we got all kinds of piggybackers and basically trying to copy the same thing. And some of them even had Link Detox, our trademark or brand name in whatever, the landing page or the product. And using Pitchbox and a proper sequence in there, I could even get people in Belarus and White Russia to stop doing that. Not even human rights are working in that country. Trademark law. And that was my basically most impressive success from using the automation of pitchbox in different ways to different recipients over time. It's lovely, really lovely.

Yeah, it really awesome. I use it for getting ebook contributions for compilation ebook for clients, just all sorts of different things.

Yeah. Or making people aware of the browser extensions that we have, the Chrome extensions for link redirect trace and for the SEO toolbar that shows all the LRT metrics. This was also quite an interesting use case just to mail out people to show them that it's there. It's a tailor. Tailored and very laser-targeted promotion of free stuff, but with the intention of getting people to talk about it, to promote it. That helped us during the launch last year as well.

Yeah, I think the trick, though, is to make it more relevant to their audience because, yeah, that's relevant generically, but if their audience is, let's say, I don't know, industrial engineers, and you provided examples where an industrial engineering company could use it to get more PR. It's like, ah, okay, this is highly relevant. Okay. And it's not like you blasted this out to 10,000 companies. You have something very focused on my niche. And that's a little bit more work because then they have to create it for all these different niches. But you'll get way more uptick from there. You'll get more play from it. More people will say yes to featuring you.

Well, in my case, you know, when we're talking about this free browser extension, it was easy because there were other browser extensions that were actually the reason why I built my own. Because the other ones were broken. They didn't handle the real canonical and HTTP headers properly. And they've been around for five years. So I just did a backlink profile and link research tools, looked at who will link to that other extension. 

And the company of that other extension just sent all of these people an email and saying, "Hey, I got something that is actually better. And the only reason I built it is because of this, this, this, this, this. You want to give this a try." So that was basically everyone who used that other extension already and gave it a try. And so installs. Rolled up really, really nice, really, really fast, autopilot basically. And the Lynx came, of course, with that.

So, let's figure out how to take it even another level up. Let's say that you wanted to get on TV with talking about your tools. See now, that's a whole other ball game. I mean, even getting in a major newspaper is hard, but TV, that's like I had 11 TV appearances last year. And there's a whole process involved. Yeah, you're cold calling, cold emailing TV producers, just like you would for webmasters, but it's a different process. And you have to come in really strong and differentiate yourself and have a hook that is timely, that's local, that's even emotional. 

Like for example, the hook that made it timely. Like I got on Good Morning Arizona last year, which was Phoenix is a top 20 market. So it's kind of a big deal to get on TV in Phoenix. So this is a morning new show, Good Morning Arizona. And I cold called them. I cold-called the TV producer and followed up with an email with the segment proposal; I had to have a great hook. I had to make it timely, make it local, and have something that was engaging beyond just timely and local. Like, "Oh, I got a new book out; it's just been released, I'm on a book tour, and I'm gonna be hitting your city." 

So it's timely, it's local, but there's no emotional hook. So one of the emotional hooks is that I'm going to transform your host on live TV, and I'm going to turn them into the ultimate geek. I'm gonna bring all these gadgets. I'm gonna bring my Comic-Con costume, the Iron Man Patriot costume that I wore at Comic-Con, and we're gonna make your host the ultimate geek with like a sleep tracker strapped on their forehead and all this other stuff. And they loved it. So that emotional hook made for great TV. So how do you take this idea of like you got this great set of tools, but it's not gonna be of interest to a general audience on TV, but it will take your business to another level if you get lots of TV appearances. Trust me on that.

That's a good point. Let me think about that. Okay. Wow. Oh, man. I think we're talking for 29 minutes now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like yet another chat that went way beyond my time budget, where I tried to keep this short and sweet on 10 and 15 minutes. Maybe to wrap this up, just one favorite trick or tip or golden nugget that can make our listeners rich overnight, filthy rich and beauty and whatever, lifehacker, something as a giveaway. Because you mentioned the sleep tracker, sleep is super important. We have this conversation.

Okay. So one of my go-to resources is, well, okay, so vendors and experts, consultants and so forth are a backbone to any business because we can't be experts at everything. Right? If you have a process for finding amazing people and amazing companies, so I'll start. For example, I might ask on the Facebook group Internet Marketing Super Friends for recommendations on a vendor in a particular area. Let's say, I don't know, infographics or explainer videos or whatever, right? So I get all these recommendations, but then how do I screen these folks? What I do, I have a whole process. Oh, and I also will put out, if I'm looking for like a full-time person or something, I'll put out a job advert on different city Craigslist and then some other places as well. But I include a riddle in the job advert, which cuts down on a lot of the noise. A lot of the riff-raff won't bother responding to the instructions and solving the riddle. 

And if they don't solve the riddle, then it's just automatically deleted. I have a process where there are trick questions inserted into the interview. If they get to the interview stage, so there are trick questions there. I even have a document of trick questions. If you're looking to hire an SEO, use these trick questions; they're amazing. And it's a great starting point for creating other trick questions, too, if you know a few things about SEO. Now, if you are an SEO and you're gonna get interviewed, then use the opposite, like make sure that you stand out from the rest, become remarkable compared to the other people that they're interviewing by offering these answers that only you could answer, right? 

For example, "What's your favorite SEO tool?" And no, they didn't say Link Research Tools. So that was already a strike against them. But then they said, Majestic. And then, oh, okay, Majestic. Tell me a bit more about Majestic. For example, what are the metrics that are the main metric they use? And I was kind of leading the witness here, right? And he took the bait, and he said, AC rank. I'm like, okay. So, the interview was already over. He just didn't know it, right? Because it's TrustFlow and TytationPhone has been for years, and he just blew the interview. So this is your favorite SEO tool, and clearly, you haven't been on there for a couple of years since you're talking about a metric that's been deprecated like three years ago. Okay. Yeah. We got to wrap this up here pretty quickly.

But you can come again. I think I'll have you again in a future episode if you want. Oh, good, good. I love it.

OK, so I made the cut.

OK, cool. All right, well, then wrap this up. I say thank you very much, Stephan Spencer, out of SEO. And we're going to talk more in a future episode. All of you at home or in the car listening to this with your wonderful day, night or weekend. My name is Christoph.

Wait, wait, do you want everybody to have a free gift? A free, awesome gift?

Oh yeah, you have a free gift?

I have a free gift.

Oh, wait, okay.

They're going to love this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

CMchapter.

And guess what this is? This is the content marketing, aka link-building chapter of the latest edition of The Art of SEO Free.

Oh, sweet. That's the fourth edition, then?

No, the third edition. The fourth edition is still in my head.

Got it. OK. All right, that was great. That was a great giveaway. Hype-free data-rich, loaded with insight and essential reading for anyone who needs a deep understanding of SEO. Say, Seth Godin. So that's something. Well, thank you very much for that. And now again, you guys have a great weekend with this. And thank you very much, Stephan. And looking forward to having you again.

Of course. Bye bye.

Bye-bye everyone, bye-bye Stephan.