Ep 177: SEO Strategies All Bloggers Need To Know with Steve Toth

Jaryd Krause: (00:00)

If you own a content website, you must know these SEO strategies. Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Steve Toth, who is an independent SEO consultant based out of Toronto, now Steve has created SEO strategies that have been able to rank number one for multiple keywords with over 300,000 monthly searches, and has driven over 50 million clicks for freshbooks.com which also included a page that generated traffic value of over $50,000 per week.

Steve left FreshBooks back in March 2020 and turned them into one of his clients as he is an SEO consultant. Now, Steve also owns, runs, and operates seonotebook.com, which is a weekly SEO strategy email list. That's sent out to over 13,000 subscribers. Now, enterprise companies around the world trust Steve to guide their SEO campaigns. And he's also the founder of Gscore, which is a WordPress plugin that helps people optimize their content with Google search consults data, which is cool.

Jaryd Krause: (01:00)

And that's going to get launched shortly. Steve and I talk about how he was able to launch 650 articles within one month and how he was able to get that to 50,000 users per month very quickly with fresh books. Talk about that strategy that he created.

We also talk in this episode about, why you should post all of your content now, not banking it up and scheduling it for months to come, and Steve digs into the science behind why you should be doing that, we also talk about how Steve's been creating a new website and finding all the keywords for this website based on his competition in that niche. So he can create 80,000 words of content. We also dive into some more SEO strategies, and tactical things like what click-through rate benchmarking is what it is and how it's done.

Jaryd Krause: (01:50)

We talk about his jealous link building strategy, which is cool that he came up with in one of his chats with some of his clients. We just talk about his internal linking strategy, and the science and strategy behind his internal linking strategy. Then we move into how you're able to use google docs to create featured snippets and get different LSI keywords and all that sort of stuff using Google docs or Gmail. Now there's so much value in this episode around SEO, we dig into little different facets of SEO strategies that you may never hear of before, or you have heard of but can allow you to go into more depth and get better results through the SEO strategy that we do talk about.

So this is such a valuable episode. I know you guys are going to love it. Let's dive in. Do you want to build or grow your content website? Niche Website Builders have helped hundreds of people to take their content websites from a few hundred dollars per month to over tens of thousands of dollars per month with crafted content creation, buying age domains, and link building strategies. These strategies have helped people increase their traffic authority, monthly earnings and their website valuation too, head to nichewebsite.builders/BOB/ to get 10% off, any link building, or 10% more from their content creation services. I'll put a link in the description too.

Jaryd Krause: (03:20)

Steve, welcome to the Buying Online Businesses podcast.

Steve Toth: (03:23)

Hey Jaryd, glad to be here.

Jaryd Krause: (03:25)

The first thing I want to ask you, Steve is just to open up into maybe a bit of story time or examples but what's one of your favorite SEO stories or examples where you got better results than you expected. It can be for yourself or it could be for a client what's one of those stories that you're like, wow, okay. This turned out better than I expected. And if so, why do you think?

Steve Toth: (03:46)

Yeah, for sure. So, before being an independent consultant and working for myself, I used to work at a company called freshbooks.com and we did a lot of really cool things in the SEO department, and we're talking like 2018, 2019, 2020, and one of the challenges that my boss came to me with, he just said, Hey, Steve needed a thousand articles and then just walked away.

Like just, that's all he said to me as I need a thousand articles. And I was like, okay, well, where do I start? I'm certainly like a content specialist now coming up with 10,000 or a thousand article ideas. And I just had this kind of like light bulb moment. This was in 2019 and late 2018, we launched the pages in 2019 but my idea was to start mining the people and also ask questions that were related to the niche.

Steve Toth: (04:41)

So like invoicing, accounting, entrepreneurship, taxes, questions like that, and we didn't have a lot of the tools that we have today. Like SEO, minion, or keyword Cupid to cluster, topics together. We were doing it with like Excel and quite rudimentary methods compared to what we have today. But we ended up sourcing probably close to four or 5,000 people also ask questions, then clustering them together in Excel, and I didn't know what to expect.

I had asked people, should we use the exact, people also asked the question as to the title of the blog? No one could tell me should I launch all these pages at once? Or should I drip them out over several months? No one would be able to tell me, I asked like really notable people in this space too. And we ended up writing 650 articles, so not quite a thousand but they were all based on what people also asked. And we ended up launching those 650 all within a month. We decided not to wait, just boom, put them out there. And within 12 months we had 50,000 visits a day to those pages.

Jaryd Krause: (06:01)

That's cool, and why did you decide to do it all at once instead of waiting?

Steve Toth: (06:07)

Well, we initially did, I don't know what it was 20 a week or whatever, and then we calculated this and said we're probably not going to be working at fresh books by the time we're finally able to launch all this stuff, so let's just go for it, and that's what we did.

Jaryd Krause: (06:24)

I think it's the same with investing in anything is you could just put it out over a times span but if you've got the money or the investment to just make, and you do it earlier on the piece like you're going to start gaining more rewards more early than just doing it, spreading it out over time. I believe in that philosophy, if you can do it, do it.

Steve Toth: (06:45)

So have a hundred percent and since then, that taught me a great lesson to just go for it. And whether it's not, I have never launched another 650 pages at once but I've launched like hundreds, and I'm seeing success with them I would highly encourage anybody who has a site. Don't drip it out, just put it out there.

Jaryd Krause: (07:10)

This is the opposite of some of the advice that I've been given before with content creation put something out every week, rather than get 20 articles back, just get them live straight away.

Steve Toth: (07:22)

Well, put it this way. The way that I look at it is that content takes time to rank and the longer you wait, you're at zero. So, what I see in the projects that I'm involved with is usually three to six months of basically just impressions, not a lot of clicks and then from six to nine months, we start to see the clicks pick up. And then from nine to 12 months, we see it go exponential.

So, if you're just sitting on the content and it's on a draft and WordPress you're extending that initial period. So to me, I would say, just go for it. And then, later on, three to four months and once you start to gather those impressions, start optimizing it with the search consult data.

Jaryd Krause: (08:18)

That's great. So would you say that's a general rule of thumb for most sites depending like we are talking about sites that have a certain level of authority or we are talking about most like a pretty general rule for most sites? Like that's how long it can take you to start getting out impressions to clicks and then, and then moving on to making optimizations based on search data.

Steve Toth: (08:38)

I mean in my experience I haven't tried to think like, would fresh books be considered an authority site? Not at the time like we had a blog that saw something like 9,000 visits a month and when we launched these pages, it's not like we had a decent Dr., but it's not like when we launched content, it started to rank right away.

So I would say if you have an average size, then you're looking at probably three to six months of only gathering impressions, and then seeing the slow ramp up from six to nine and then nine to 12 is where you start to pick up.

Jaryd Krause: (09:21)

And then how regularly do you come back and look at updating those articles that may need a bit more work?

Steve Toth: (09:29)

I look as soon as I see, search console data come in. So as soon as we see keywords ranking on the second and third page especially long tail keywords and question based keywords, there are some good regular expressions that you can use to pull only the question based keywords.

So keywords that start with like, who, what, where, is, can, does question words like that? You can start to see those within, I would say three to four months just as you're gathering impressions, and then obviously the longer that continues and use the better you start to rank, the more of that data gets to feed in.

Jaryd Krause: (10:11)

I want to switch gears a little bit into a few different things that I've noticed that you have either got content about or talked about. The first thing is CTR benchmarking, click through a benchmarking. What is it and how is it done? Can you sort of explain that process for us?

Steve Toth: (10:29)

There are a couple of good resources that we have at our disposal as SEOs to consider what are good benchmarks. So advanced web ranking puts out a study and they do break it down by niche. I say, niche, some people say niche I'm Canadian. So that's what we say up here on the niche. They actually break it down by industry or by niche. What you can do is with this spreadsheet that I released, if you sign up at seonotebook.com, you'll get a copy of this spreadsheet is you can paste your search console data into the sheet.

And it will tell you, based on the position that you're in, are you way below the benchmarks for CTR or are you above them? So obviously the ones where you are below what that curve of the benchmark is could simple title tag update could really make a difference for your site and it just helps you identify them.

Jaryd Krause: (11:29)

So it helps you identify those changes to make, to get a better click through rate.

Steve Toth: (11:34)

So whenever you have a keyword that has a lower CTR than the benchmark, you may think, Hey, what's wrong with this page? And the sheet that I created basically just highlights that for you really quickly.

Jaryd Krause: (11:47)

There'll be a link to join seonotebook.com in the description guys as well. Now, link building you have the term jealous link building strategy.

Steve Toth: (12:02)

I just came up with the name, I thought it was a good name. So, the jealous link building strategy is, let's say you approach a site, and you would say, Hey, your competitor has an article that's doing well on this topic. I could write that same article for you. So basically, the idea is they would get jealous of their competitor and then allow you to make the guest post.

Jaryd Krause: (12:30)

So it's a bit of ego baiting.

Steve Toth: (12:33)

Who wants their competitor to rank them, and when somebody else is offering to do that for you, for free for just all they want is a link. Why not let them do that?

Steve Toth: (12:46)

It's not a highly scalable strategy. I will say. It's not like you can probably earn hundreds of links from that. But if you've identified a competitor or you've identified a couple of sites some couple of sites that are ranking well and you want to get a link from them, it could be a good strategy where you want to focus on getting specific links and put a little extra into your pitch.

Jaryd Krause: (13:16)

You can tell why it's not so scalable in terms of how much work would be required to create that much content at scale.

Steve Toth: (13:24)

But you know what? It came out of one of my meetings with my clients. We were just talking and I said, why don't we do this? And that's where really all the notes for the SEO Notebook come from is just from my work because I'm still involved. I do weekly meetings with my clients.

We have basically strategy meetings versus like boring reporting meetings. We obviously touch on that too but we get into the work. So I'm not out there selling courses and sitting on a beach, I'm like actually doing every week.

Jaryd Krause: (13:56)

Those people are on the beach selling a course. Don't really get those clients' results because and this is what I tell people when they join my memberships I'm looking at businesses every single day and reviewing them for people that are wanting to buy these things.

If you go out and buy a course from somebody that's not doing that, you're not going to get their support and they don't have any real experience or expertise to offer you support anyway, which is why they're hiding behind a screen on the beach.

Steve Toth: (14:27)

They say like people who do and people who don't teach, I'm not saying that's a blanket statement that applies to every SEO. Obviously, the teaching has to come from a place of having done that but I mean to say that if anybody is interested in working with me as a consultant, I'm still in the thick of it.

Jaryd Krause: (14:49)

Because I was going to say you definitely teach. You do as well.

Steve Toth: (14:54)

But I give it away for free. That's my problem. Maybe I should be smarter about that.

Jaryd Krause: (15:00)

Maybe depends on what your goal is. Money is not my highest value. Not my highest goal.

Steve Toth: (15:05)

No, not. It's about enjoying what you do.

Jaryd Krause: (15:09)

Fulfillment, I think is going to give you better ROI than money. So that's my philosophy but let's come back to link building if that's a really good way to do it but not at scale and you can get some good quality links. What if people did want to go down the scale route of getting a whole lot of links? Do you have some different hybrid suggestions for them or something completely different?

Steve Toth: (15:30)

So basically the approach that I take to link building is not doing it myself because I don't want to be managing outreach teams. I don't want to be doing all these things but what I do is network. So I have people who help with trades or I have people who are very expert in PR link building or like I know like all the people do like niche edits or like I basically just use my network for that, and a lot of the times like I'll refer business to people and then they'll build links for me. Or because I don't enjoy managing an outreach team or anything like that. I've done it and I don't enjoy it.

Steve Toth: (16:18)

So, what I would say is figure out who in this industry, and they're not hard to find, are doing really good work, and network with them, hire them. For example, I'll give you an example of somebody that I've worked with who's been really great. It's a guy named Fairy Keoni, I think he has a company called search intelligence in the UK and what he's been doing is basically PR link building but what they do is they monitor search trends based on news events.

And they blast out a statement from the site in terms of like an observation. So I have a client in the crypto space and when Elon Musk bought Twitter, the surge that the searches for doge spiked.

Steve Toth: (17:18)

And we released a statement saying, when Elon Musk did this, the searches for doge took exponential increase, and we got picked up by, I think 19, like really high authority sites like Yahoo Finance, MSN, the street, zero hedges, like big sites respected sites, all pick this up.

So I don't want to do that. I like it, he's got a team that is expert in monitoring those trends and jumping on opportunities and all that stuff. But those are the kind of people that I want to partner with. And of course, if somebody else wants to try that same strategy, they can just go for it. But I don't have the time to build a team to do that for myself. So I'd rather just work with somebody.

Jaryd Krause: (18:08)

I love your ideology around the networking bloggers are listening to us now. I'm like, I could do the jealous link-building strategy but it's not scalable. I could only probably output a couple of articles a month max themselves or with their team, the ideology around networking in your space, in that niche, and getting familiar with those other bloggers and other people in your space is you can not just links.

Like the value comes. You can get way better ROI with the networking than just backlinks out, rather than just in the SEO. Like there are going to be joint venture opportunities and stuff like that. So I love your idea about networking with people in the industry that you're in for backlinking.

Steve Toth: (18:49)

Networking is just helping people. It's knowing what other people need and just being able to help them at every turn. So when you do that, people want to naturally help you. So, it's networking even apart from link building is like a secret weapon SEO strategy to me because I don't have a desire to build a massive team.

Like I like just being a solo entrepreneur with a couple of VAs and like a scrappy little team but I love knowing the fact that, I've got a guy who does digital PR, I know somebody else who has got like an amazing inventory of niche edits and like all those kinds of things. So content writers or developers or designers or whoever it is contracted. Have that awesome Rolodex of folks you can leverage and save yourself time and get fast results.

Jaryd Krause: (19:51)

I'm all about it as well. That's how I run. I want to switch in from backlinking to internal linking, what sort of tools do you use for internal linking, and do you have some philosophies and strategies that you adhere to and teach.

Steve Toth: (20:07)

I don't use any tools but I know that link whisper if you're on a WordPress site, is a good tool that you can use as my main tool, I guess it's not a tool but just planning out meticulously in spreadsheets before launching any type of content. So when I launch a cluster let's say it's a verticalized cluster.

So what I mean by that is you would have liked the keyword and then for this industry, that industry, another industry, and then in that spreadsheet, as you delegate that work to a writer all of those internal links are put in the way that you plan them. So, I'm very meticulous about pre-planning internal links, less meticulous about going and internal linking old content because most of the stuff that I do is always building something new.

Jaryd Krause: (21:08)

So when you're pre-planning it, before it gets created and all that sort of stuff what's your number like how many internal links are too many, and that's going to be dependent on how big the piece of content is but what's your rule of thumb or do you have a rule of thumb?

Steve Toth: (21:26)

So, I'll just actually take a slight side step on this one and mention something that might be also useful to your viewers and your listeners is that like the idea of having like one brief that can be used for a whole slew of articles that brief could have direction, like these are the pages with the priorities for the internal links, this is how many external links we should have on each page, and it has like a framework that can apply to every article.

So instead of creating one brief and then a specific individual brief for every single one, you can just create like a master brief and then have the writers use that. So in my master brief, I was just planning one earlier today with one of my employees.

Steve Toth: (22:18)

I believe it said these are the five pages that we want to prioritize internal links to, and because we're talking about like, this is going to be a large-scale effort, we're starting with 80,000 words a month and then we're probably going to go up for this client after that. So we needed a way to scale it, and we've basically got, I think these five pages are the main ones that we want to link to from most of the content So that's five internal links right there, and then we want to have at least two respected high authority, external links in each article as well.

So how many is too many? I would hope that most of the listeners know that the more links you have on a page, the less link juice each link gets. So, I would say trying to limit those to maybe five to seven generally on a long-form piece of content and then obviously sticking up the most important internal links higher up in the content.

Jaryd Krause: (23:21)

With the link, the juice is an important one to understand. I also want to talk and maybe have you elaborate a bit about if you got your top five pages that you want to link to and that's in your master brief, how do you sort of track or what's your thought process around using the architects each time you link to that being different? Like how do you take that into account?

Steve Toth: (23:49)

So in that master brief, it talks about how to use anchor text. So I don't really care if it repeats, to be honest, but what I do care about is that anchor text gives the user an indication of what the link is before they click it. So if it's just anchor text that's slapped onto a sentence and doesn't really provide any clue about what lies beyond that click.

That's not a good anchor text but if the anchor text provides the correct context and the user knows that they're going to click, that's the one that I want to use. And to a certain degree, I think it's hard to QA that I will just be honest but it's about also trusting the people who are producing your content. So don't give that to a brand new content writer that you're just trying, give that to somebody who is experienced with you.

Jaryd Krause: (24:47)

The context, rather than I think that's so good because you can have context be different every single time about what that each article is mentioning anyway.

Steve Toth: (24:58)

Yeah, absolutely.

Jaryd Krause: (25:00)

I saw another thing that you had mentioned around featured snippets and using Google docs. So the question is like, how do you get featured snippets using Google docs? If that was a click-baby thing or what it was?

Steve Toth: (25:16)

Well, it worked, I actually did it. So, I can't say that I do that every featured snippet that I earn but what happened there was I'd been basically talking to a prospective client and I was like, Hey, why don't you at least like, they were like we're not ready to do this right now.

Like, why don't you let me like experiment with your site a little bit and let's see if we can improve one page or whatever, and I think the keyword was types of graphs or something like that, and I started just pasting a bunch of like, sort of semantically related words into a Google doc, and then I started typing and I said, Hey, why don't I just see if I can start typing one letter and then seeing what pops up in terms of the smart composed feature on Google docs.

I think it's on Gmail as well because I think the G docs one only works on Google workspace. So if you want to try this and you don't have Google workspace, try it on Gmail, but I just like one letter at a time and as Google began to complete the sentence for me, I just went with it and then used instincts to start it again and then just went with it and went with it, and we got this featured snippet.

Jaryd Krause: (26:40)

And so what you mean by is you got that featured snippet, are you just creating a piece of content on that document, trying to find as many LSI keyword as possible, and then giving a context. Is that what you mean?

Steve Toth: (26:53)

There are a lot of fundamentals, I think when you're writing featured snippets reiterate the question back in the answer. So if the question is who is the world's tallest basketball player, you would start your feature snippet with the world's tallest basketball player is right. So starting it that way, and then basically I just wanted to see what Google would suggest in terms of like writing, and I did that and we earned it.

Jaryd Krause: (27:22)

And with the featured snippets are you wanting to get a featured snippet for every piece of content you create and if not, why not? And the reason I ask is that I'm just thinking about if every single piece of content you create has a featured snippet and it boiled down to this, it's condensed down to an answer and Google can just throw it up on Google.

It can prevent clicks from coming to your and traffic from coming to your page but it can do the opposite at times as well, depending on what your featured snippet is and how it's answered. So what's your take on that? Do you try and experiment differently with different pieces of content for snippets?

Steve Toth: (28:04)

So I've analyzed this and where the featured snippet is ranked. I've never seen a higher CTR without it. So I always go for the featured snippet, if you have a type of con if you're in a C that is one of those zero click searches, then that's fine.

Like you're not going to like sports scores or whatever it is, you're not going to get much traffic but people typically, if you're not going to get the featured snippet, somebody else's, and the person is probably just going to read, what they wrote, but most people, I think, still are going to click on the featured snippet versus not if you really don't, if you feel strongly that you don't want to do that, you can put the no snippet tag around your content, and then you won't be eligible for any featured snippets. You can also force Google to use a specific meta description if you do that, but that's not personally anything that I would do.

Jaryd Krause: (29:04)

Obviously, because you've seen that you're going to get the clicks anyway.

Steve Toth: (29:09)

You're going to get the clicks and you're still ranking number one, you've got the biggest result. It was nice for a while there, when Google gave the featured snippet and gave you another position but took that away sometime in like 2020.

Jaryd Krause: (29:26)

I want to ask about SEO tools. If you were to only use two SEO tools, even if you were only allowed to use two SEO tools, what would they be paid tools?

Steve Toth: (29:40)

Probably is pretty easy actually for me. Ahrefs, and like a beefy subscription too, and then keywords everywhere just because I love it. I rely on it so heavily. I do a lot of keyword research just on Google itself, like on google.com and auto-suggest, and all the sorts of different features that they have there.

People also ask for related searches but with ATFs, one of my tops go to things is always to check out the top pages of another website like this, one of the first screens I always look at, and without that, I would feel pretty lost.

Jaryd Krause: (30:20)

It's funny when you're in business for a while, you understand how valuable competition is and how much competition can help you win as well. This is something that I teach everybody that's in my mastermind as you don't need to go away and reinvent the wheel. You can go away and see what other people are doing, that's working and make it better. And I think that's why that tool can be so valuable.

Steve Toth: (30:45)

So I'll give you a quick insight into one of the things I actually did today with one of my employees, she was able to follow along with everything and I was super pleased so we have that 80,000 words that I mentioned. We have to create a lot of content for that, and what I suggested we do was basically pick all the top sites in the niche and then get the top pages for all of those websites in the niche, then get the organic keywords for every single page of those top pages.

And then basically we're using as the API, and to do all this but after you have the top keywords for every single page for like these 10 sites, we are actually taking all of those keywords and then going to put them into a keyword, cup it to cluster them all together.

So basically instead of the old way that I would've done this is by just looking at all the URLs for those top pages but that doesn't work that well because you could potentially have like duplicated articles on each of those sites but if we just throw that to the wind and only look at the keywords that are ranking for all those pages and then cluster them, that eliminates that duplicate issue and actually gives us a lot better data to write those articles based on that.

Jaryd Krause: (32:18)

And you can rank for so many keywords there.

Steve Toth: (32:21)

Pretty much guarantee like topical authority doing that.

Jaryd Krause: (32:26)

All the ones, all the keywords that are already being ranked that's awesome. Steve, where can we send people to find out more about SEO Notebook and what you are doing?

Steve Toth: (32:34)

It's just seonotebook.com basically what I have is a notebook of strategies that I've been doing for three years now. So we have over 150 different pages of that notebook. And then each week I email one of them out and each week as well, I do like a throwback email.

So you basically get two notes per week, one from the archives, one that's new and fresh and it's free to join and there are almost 13,000 subscribers on it. S, it's free, and if you want to help me out you can hire me as a consultant, and then I have another project as well, called Gscore, which is a WordPress plugin that uses Google search console data to reoptimize the content. And that's currently working on that right now in beta but hopefully, launch sometime in the next year.

Jaryd Krause: (33:29)

Congratulations on that. I hope that the launch goes very well. It sounds quite interesting I'm sure it's going to be very valuable for people that are wanting to get their hands on it already.

Steve Toth: (33:38)

It's fun to develop a SaaS but it's also hard when you're kind of like a creative type with lots of ideas and you want to make it huge and it's like if you wanted to do it that like that your budget would probably be close to a million dollars and I'm not ready for that just yet but maybe one day.

Jaryd Krause: (33:57)

Well, thanks so much for coming on, Steve. Everybody is listening. Thank you for listening. If you know somebody that has an online business and doesn't know anything about SEO, make sure you share this podcast episode with them. It'll be so enlightening for them to hear that's it for me, I'll speak to you guys.

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