How to outrank a billion-dollar company — Damon Burton // SEOnational

Quotes

• A big thing you want to tackle is intent. Whether that’s your call-to-action to your page and making sure you’ve guided your audience to your right intent action to buy a thing or click on a button.” -Damon“Part of where that website collects that data is from search engine queries and auto-complete. You know when you go to Google andtype something and say you might want these other five things, that’s Google saying here is varied literal data that when other people search those things, they usually want one of these.” -Damon“That is a very clear insight into what the masses are searching when they type in those keywords. This is the customers telling you exactly what problems they have and the questions they want to be answered. So you want to answer those questions that can connect the dots between the problems that you’re having and the solutions that you offer.” -Damon“The point is to identify the buyer intent and align with the mentality of your audience.” -Damon“Use tools to look at the data to see what your audience is already searching for. Write content about that, produce solutions, and write answers to solve those existing problems.” -Damon“The reputation component is all relative to your industry. There’s not a magic number that you need a thousand or ten thousand backlinks because it’s going to be relative to your market and your competition.” -Damon“When Google came on to the scene, other search engines would use meta keywords and things that can be artificially stuffed, inflated, and abused. So Google came along and said let’s use external signals. Let’s use links from other websites and count them as a vote in the popularity contest so that presented more accurate results.” -Damon“Once SEO caught on to the fact that backlinks are signal, that’s when they start to get more backlinks and that’s where you marry a bunch of things. That’s why you do good content so you can track good backlinks naturally.” -Damon“I think that SEO is an interesting game because there’s the notion of the chip stack. Just like in poker where the companies that have been doing it for a long time just have a distinct advantage.” -Ben “A lot of our clientsdon’t even get into the backlinks because we can accomplish so much more on content strategy or better user experience. What you want to focus on is where you can monetize quicker.” -Damon“Establish credibility somewhere and then scale that to the nextcomparable term is or parallel market and take that reputation and leverage it to broaden even further.” -Damon“Head, belly, tail. There are some really big important keywords in every industry. Most of the keywords get a good amount of traffic and then sometimes you get a very long tail of complex keywords and the advice that I’ve always heard is, you start with the tail keywords things that are a little bit more complex that larger brands haven’t really focused on andwhen you start ranking highly onthat, you aggregate those pages to rank for your belly terms and you aggregate the aggregated pages to hopefully rank for the head terms.” -Ben “I would rather have something that has less competition, less search volume but has higher buyer intent, higher clickthroughs, and higher conversions because I would rather convert 1 in 10 people than convert 1 in a 1000 people. Just because it has low search volume doesn’t mean it is less profitable.” -Damon“You don’t have to overcomplicate this and if you have to and even as SEO gets more complicated now, at its core it is still about core user experience and solving a problem.” -Damon“At the end of the day, understanding the user intent and creating the content that solves their needs is what Google is looking for and they are factoring in what your reputation is but you can balance your reputation with quality content to really improve your rankings.” -Ben Free resource mentioned: www.freeseobook.com