Search Engine Optimization for Dummies Author, Bruce Clay (Part 1) | Learn How to Optimize Your Website to Generate More Leads for Your Business + Join Trump & Kiyosaki At Clay Clark’s March 6-7 Business Conference!

Audio Transcription

sounds like both. When people see your pictures. Okay that’s Facebook you’re talking about Facebook. Yeah I’m talking about Facebook. Can you copy Facebook into my new computer? Mom you don’t put it in your computer you just it’s on the internet. What do you mean? Wait a second mom you have a Facebook account I know this because you like almost every picture I post like instantly. I do but I want a new one for my birdhouse business. Okay just log into your account and make a page. I have done that. I log in, I put in all the information, I put in all the pictures, and then the next time I go back, it’s all gone and I have to do it all over again.

When you get on, are you signing into Facebook or signing up? Yes! Wait. What’s the difference? Two men, 13 multi-million dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show. That’s it. Arms away. We started from the bottom, now we’re here.

We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get it to you. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here.

We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year. I’m the father of five kids, and I feel like it’s my mission to help you create both time and financial freedom by teaching you the practical skills that will help you to actually pay the bills. And to teach you the proven systems that will allow you to enjoy time freedom. And so on this show, when possible, I try to interview people that really are the world’s best at what they do.

We’ve had the world’s best public relations expert of all time. This isn’t an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, for Pizza Hut, for Pizza, for Charlton Heston, for Bush’s and the Clintons. The Bush’s and the Clintons. The Prince. We mentioned Prince. There’s just so many. I mean, he’s huge. Well, on today’s show, we have the number one expert in the history of the world ever in the field of search engine optimization. They might call him the Godfather. This guy writes the search engine for dummies each year for, he writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization.

Yeah. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you as a company get to the top, when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results, as an example, if you train dogs and you came up top in Google when you type in Tulsa dog training.

Or if you were a pizzeria in Florida and your company’s name was Papa Gallo’s and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top. If you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top, it would change your life. If you were teaching basketball lessons and you came up top in search engine results, it changed your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top, like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today and you were top in search results, it would change your life.

It’s worth a little bit of money. Well, that’s why for the brands I work with, like Oxifresh, I mean, Oxifresh, let me tell you, these guys are so successful for a lot of reasons. They have great systems, processes, wonderful people, great vision. They have a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers. And sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem.

But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world, but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers. It’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in and understand what is being said. In our Thrive Time Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the Million Dollar Show. It’s going to change somebody’s life and I’m excited to introduce you to my friend Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization.

Bruce Clay, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the world’s number one search engine expert in the house. Bruce, how are you? I am doing great, thank you. Bruce, your book, Search Engine for Dummies, took me, and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlighter to prove it. And then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it. The last version I read was 767 pages long. How long did it take you to write Search Engine for Dummies?

So Wiley approached us and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. The Dummies series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that, that the difference between a Dummies book and a normal book is that dummies will not allow you to use a term that’s not defined in the book. So we wrote it, we sent it to the editors, and they totally tore it apart because we’re used to the jargon of the industry. Right. And they weren’t. So mechanically, the first version of the book took over a year.

Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple of years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish? Well, we were lucky. We do a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works.

So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do is actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard. It was the actual writing. And when I say a year, I’m not talking about part-time for 52 weeks. I’m talking about one year of tracked time for us to actually full-time work on that book. You know, Wiley approached you to write the book. I know about you because I’m big in the franchise world.

I work with a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors. I work with a lot of business owners, and your name comes up in conversations a lot. And for the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google, and in the search engines, and have find the book Search Engine for Dummies, and find your website, can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today? Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996. For those of you who remember that far back, I think that’s when Al Gore invented the internet. Thank you, Al.

But yeah, January 96 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. My bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I thought, hey, this marketing thing and programming and algorithms is right up my alley. So I started doing it. Then it took off. And it just grew. I hired a couple people, kept growing, hired a couple more. I’m now located in Southern California in a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world.

So it has certainly grown over 22 years. You’re right. I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. In fact, if you do a Google search for who is the father of SEO, I show up. Real quick, I have an audio clip from somebody. We’re talking about fathers and father-related conversations. Perhaps the listeners out there aren’t as familiar with Star Wars as I am, but there was a scene in that movie where Darth Vader was claiming to be Luke’s father and you just claimed to be the potential father of the search engine industry. So Bruce, if it’s okay, I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you.

Bruce, are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. La la la Luke, Luke, I am your father. Your father, Lord I love you. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice, my friend. So your credit is being the father of search engines. I know this, because I feel like I’m a, I feel like search engine is like nerd meets practical, you know, because you’re helping grow companies.

Can you please explain to me, when you say it took off, were you cold calling businesses? Were you emailing businesses? Were you, how did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. You have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? Were you starting out of an apartment? How did you start your business? As I said, I started at home, but the way I got my business is I actually optimized my own site.

Oh, there we go. So I have actually in the entire history of the company not had to go out and do a cold call. Amen. I think my reputation is sort of preceding me, but I’m known as the company you go to when nothing else works. People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre and they finally decide they just have to do it right and I’m the guy. So I’ve not had to call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form, we touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here so if you were to go to the form and fill it out I’d be the guy that said, sorry, we can’t help you. Or, that looks like an interesting opportunity, let’s take no names.

Let’s go forward. What’s your website, for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you? Well, my site is, of course, bruceclay.com. I have several sites, but bruceclay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact, the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription fee. The site is just there for people to learn about SEO. And I guess the benefit to me is by the time somebody has gone to the site and learned about SEO, they recognize they just don’t want to do it themselves.

Okay, okay. So, here we go. Now, you’re hitting on a hot button and I want to see if you can unpack this for us. I know you can, but my company, my companies have actually hired you to do work for us, your team, because you have a certain level of mastery. Also, I like to freshen up our approach. We help companies with marketing, and I always want to stay… I believe in coaching. I believe in hiring mentors who really know the path, and you are, I mean seriously, you are in a good way. You’re kind of like the Darth Vader of search engine optimization. I mean, you are the Obi-Wan, you’re the Yoda, you know search engine optimization.

You are the father of the industry. And so, you know, we’ve hired you, but it wasn’t free, and it wasn’t cheap, but it was effective. Why can the listeners out there not hire a search, why is it not possible to hire a search engine optimization company to help your business for $199 a month? Because every listener gets a call from somebody from some foreign country, calling, emailing, saying that they can do your search engine for as little as $99 a month. Why is it just not possible? The fact is that the industry is changing. Google changes the algorithm approximately five times a day.

So it takes time to stay current on technology. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to pay to be current. Well, if you’re not current, I can sell you whatever I want. You can give me a check. Then when I don’t deliver it, you go away and I ended up with a free check. So I think that a great many people take shortcuts. They don’t care if you get in trouble. They don’t care if you get penalized. The flip side of that is would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon. This is the Thrived Time Show on your radio. Stay tuned.

Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to The Conversation. It is the Thrive Time Show on your radio. On today’s show we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, the best-selling author of the book Search Engine for Dummies, a guy who’s worked with some of the largest brands in the country. And his company, you can find more about them at bruceclay.com. I’ve paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars, and I don’t regret it. He is the world’s best for big companies. But I will tell you, there are projects, Chuck, that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization.

And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients are six thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand dollar a month clients. I mean he has big accounts. Chuck, why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month? Why does it never work? Because it takes more time than that. Like it’s a simple math. Like there you can only get a few hours of work for 200 bucks from somebody that knows what they’re doing. And so, ultimately, they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up penalizing you for. And so, if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you, well, what are you doing?

So, you’ve got to be where people are, and that’s on the Internet. So Thrive Nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, breaks down how search engine optimization really works. Would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon. You know, if you wanted a brain surgeon to do surgery on your kid, $200 for the surgery would really make you suspect.

So fundamentally, the problem is that the infrastructure is changing so much that unless you are just taking somebody’s money, you can’t even possibly justify that kind of a rate. It usually takes a few thousand dollars, I’d say, and sometimes many, many thousands of dollars. There’s large companies out there that have 30 to 40 in-house SEOs just working on their own property. Those are the big guys. And, you know, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than $199 a month. If you want it cheap, well, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you. If you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money.

What I want to do is, if it’s possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you. And I want to kind of get into some of the details, so that’s all right with you, and kind of go through them in a linear fashion. And if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall. I’ve seen so many people with a beautiful website Bruce you’ve seen it to where it looks great the site itself visually you go wow that is nice The problem is it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it and then you go to Wikipedia That doesn’t look that beautiful, but it indexes and comes up top for everything Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website?

that is crawlable or searchable by Google and what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and by Google? I can certainly address that. Understanding that Google is changing all the time, the technology is changing as well. The process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider, it’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you’re about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about SEO. They don’t understand how to connect things. They don’t understand how to word things. They’re not writers, they’re people who can build pretty things. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the Ts to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about.

It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help a search engine. The search engine basically is blind deaf and dumb it reads your site There’s three ways they influence ranking But one of them is it will read your site and it will attempt to determine what you’re about by looking at your content and by looking at how page a is connected to page B and the infrastructure and nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about. Now, a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures, and the search engine cannot understand what that is.

Now, there’s two other things that fit, and I’ll just go into them briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well, if your content is pretty, you might be able to get some links, and a great many offshore SEO companies, that’s what they focus on, but that is not going to make you an expert. It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called RankBrain, which is the Google algorithm, and it’s based on click-throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked.

If you don’t get clicked, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality. And so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best ranked sites perform the best. So the only way a website can really get to the top is to build something that a search engine can perceive to be authoritative information, quality information, and then the search engine can put you at the top and then you will get links and then you will have RankBrain like you and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time. So all those things have to play together. You can’t just do one and expect it to be there. But pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Oh we love it. Oh. Google loves it. Yeah. Because the prettier your site, the more likely you are to have to buy pay-per-click in order to get your traffic. Right. Now here’s the thing about it. I hear a lot of people say, this is what people say a lot of times, they’ll say, gosh you know but Nike, Nike doesn’t have a lot of content, Bruce.

They have a lot of pictures. Adidas. And I would say, well, it’s because Nike and Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising, driving. And by the way, people are typing in Nike.com every day. But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name, is probably not going to be there.

I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well, yeah, and that happens a lot more often than you would think. People have this perception that if you build it, they will come. And therefore, if you build it prettier, more will come. When in fact, if you build it prettier, they won’t come until you buy the ads on Google. So, if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the Internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines.

When we return, it’s our exclusive interview with Bruce Slay. Stay tuned. Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, who many consider, who everyone considers, to be the father of search engine optimization. Each year he releases an edition of Search Engine for Dummies, and his firm, which you can find out more about at bruceclay.com, is the world’s authority on big-budget search engine optimization. Now, I have hired his firm in the past, and if you have a big company, I would advise you to check him out as well, but I’m telling you, you are definitely going to be spending – he talks about it during the interview – but $200 minimum per article.

Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking $6,000 a month, $7,000. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to him. Right. And they’ve got to re-optimize and re-write and everything. This is a big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level. And so what I try to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts and actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire.

And so now, without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers, according to Forbes, and we’ll put a link on the show notes, 88% of consumers read reviews online before buying something, right? But they’re not going to read a review unless they find you online. And I don’t know the stats of their, Bruce, you probably know the stats more than I do, and I’m not certainly trying to paint you into a corner about knowing the stats, but I don’t even know the percentage. I know the last studies that I looked at from Forbes, I do write for Forbes, I’m a contributing writer for Forbes, I’ve looked at some of the stats.

Well over nine out of ten people start any product or service, they start their search for any product or service online. Do you have any data that would argue that nine out of ten consumers don’t start looking for things online? Or is it higher, do you think? I mean, I think I’ve read it shows about nine out of 10 people start looking for the products and services they’re gonna buy with an online search. No, you’re right. The number has consistently been, the lowest number I remember is 84%, but I think it’s consistently over that.

I also understand a statistic, which is 94% of all people click on only the first page of Google Which means you have to be in the top 10. So Yeah, you got a you got to be there if you expect to satisfy anybody’s queries I think that probably your entire audience Finds things or at least finds reviews and certainly how to’s and things like that online. Digital is the way of the world now. And yeah, you’ve got to be there. Now, we talk about, you kind of get it, that’s high level. We’ve got to have a website that Google can crawl, that the spiders can index.

I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s a stuff called meta content, which you write so eloquently about in your book, Search Engine for Dummies, that only took you a couple of years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you, that book, Bruce, I’m not sure if you make any money every time you buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome. Search Engine for Dummies with Bruce Clay. Talk to me about meta data, meta content, things like the title tag and the description and the keywords.

I think I’d say the vast majority of our listeners have no idea what a meta title is, a meta description is, what keywords are. They just have no concept of these things. Could you kind of explain it in a way that a simple mind like me might grasp? Most of our listeners, Bruce, are very intelligent people, but if you’re just talking to me, break it down. Make it simple for my cranium. So you want it to be at your level. Right, because I am a shallow Hal. Okay.

So metadata, actually metadata is data about data. So in a portion of your web page, commonly referred to as the head section, the top of the source code, you have a section which has data, these content fields, that describe what your page is supposed to be about. And in that area there’s typically what would be a number of key tags. One is the title tag, most commonly recognized because when you do a Google search, the link that you get to click on, that is actually the title tag of the page you’re clicking. The second part is a description tag, so it’s called a meta description, and it is the part in the Google search results that commonly show up under the title. And that’s where you would put a call to action, that’s where you would describe why people should click to your site. So those have to be balanced out against the content of your site or or there’s a mismatch and Google won’t like you.

There’s other tags, there’s a keyword tag, which is logically used as sort of a, just a list of words that should be on the page. Can I ask you a question about that for the listeners out there that might have a question about keywords there? Let’s say I cut hair, I’m a haircut, I’m a hair stylist, and I’m in Boise. Talk to me about keywords. If I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise.

I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all. Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show. That’s it. Arms away. Welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year. I’m the father of five kids, and I feel like it’s my mission to help you create both time and financial freedom by teaching you the practical skills that will help you to actually pay the bills and to teach you the proven systems that will allow you to enjoy time freedom.

And so on this show, when possible, I try to interview people that really are the world’s best at what they do. We’ve had the world’s best public relations expert of all time. This isn’t an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, for pizza, for Charlton Heston, for Bush’s and the Clintons. Bush’s and the Clintons. The Prince, we mentioned Prince. There’s so many. I mean, he’s huge. On today’s show, we have the number one expert in the history of the world ever in the field of search engine optimization. They might call him the godfather.

This guy writes the search engine for dummies each year for, he writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you, as a company, get to the top when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results.

As an example, if you train dogs and you came up top in Google when you type in Tulsa dog training or if you were a pizzeria in Florida and your company’s name was Papa Gallo’s and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top, if you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top, it would change your life. If you were teaching basketball lessons and you came up top in search engine results, it’d change your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top, like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today, and you were top in search results, it would change your life.

That’s why- It’s worth a little bit of money. Well, that’s why for the brands I work with, like Oxifresh, I mean, Oxifresh, let me tell you, these guys are so successful for a lot of reasons. They have great systems, processes, wonderful people, great vision. They have a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers, and sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem.

But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers, it’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in, and understand what is being said. In our Thrive Time Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results.

This is the Million Dollar Show. It’s going to change somebody’s life, and I’m excited to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization. Bruce Clay, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the world’s number one search engine expert in the house. Bruce, how are you? I am doing great, thank you. Bruce, your book, Search Engine for Dummies, took me, and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlighter to prove it, and then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it. The last version I read was 760 something pages long.

How long did it take you to write Search Engine for Dummies? So Wiley approached us, and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. The dummy series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that the difference between a dummies book and a normal book is that dummies will not allow you to use a term that’s not defined in the book. So we wrote it, we sent it to the editors, and they totally tore it apart, because we’re used to the jargon of the industry.

Right. And they weren’t. So mechanically, the first version of the book took over a year. Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple of years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish?

Well, we were lucky. We do a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works. So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do is actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard, it was the actual writing. And when I say a year, I’m not talking about part-time for 52 weeks.

I’m talking about one year of tracked time for us to actually full-time work on that book. You know, Wiley approached you to write the book. I know about you because I’m big in the franchise world. I work with a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors. I work with a lot of business owners. And your name comes up in conversations a lot. And for the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google, in the search engines, and find the book Search Engine for Dummies, and find your website, can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today? Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996.

For those of you who remember that far back, I think that’s when Al Gore invented the internet. Thank you, Al. But yeah, January 96 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had, you know, large corporate positions, but I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. My bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA, I thought, hey, this marketing thing and programming and algorithms is right up my alley, so I started doing it.

Then it took off. And it just grew. I hired a couple people, kept growing, hired a couple more. I’m now located in Southern California in a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world. So it has certainly grown over 22 years. You’re right. I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. And in fact, if you do a Google search for who is the father of SEO, I show up. Hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from somebody. We’re talking about fathers and father-related conversations. Perhaps the listeners out there aren’t as familiar with Star Wars as I am, but there was a scene in that movie where Darth Vader was claiming to be Luke’s father.

You just claimed to be the potential father of the search engine industry. So, Bruce, if it’s okay, I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you. Bruce, are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. La, la, la, Luke. Luke, I am your father. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice, my friend.

So your credit as being the father of search engines, I know this, because I feel like I’m a… I feel like search engine is like nerd meets practical, you know, because you’re helping grow companies. Can you please explain to me, when you say it took off, were you cold calling businesses? Were you emailing businesses? How did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. I mean, you have thousands and thousands. You have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start?

I mean, were you starting out of an apartment? I mean, how did you start your business? Well, as I said, I started at home. But the way I got my business is I actually optimized my own site. Oh, there we go. So I have actually in the entire history of the company not had to go out and do a cold call. Amen. It’s, I’m, I think my reputation is sort of preceding me, but I’m known as the company you go to when nothing else works.

People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre and they finally decide they just have to do it right and I’m the guy. So I’ve not had to call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form, we touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here, so if you were to go to the forum and fill it out, I’d be the guy that said, sorry, we can’t help you. Or that looks like an interesting opportunity, let’s take no names. What’s your website for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you? My site is, of course, bruceclay.com. I have several sites, but bruceclay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact, the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription fee. The site is just there for people to learn about SEO. I guess the benefit to me is by the time somebody has gone to the site and learned about SEO, they recognize they just don’t want to do it themselves.

Okay, okay. So here we go. Now you’re hitting on a hot button. I want to see if you can unpack this for us. I know you can, but my company, my companies have actually hired you to do work for us, your team, because you have a certain level of mastery. Also I like to freshen up our approach. We help companies with marketing and I always want to stay, I believe in coaching. I believe in hiring mentors who really know the path and you are, I mean seriously, you are in a good way. You’re kind of like the Darth Vader of search engine optimization. I mean, you are the Obi-Wan, you’re the Yoda, you know search engine optimization. You are the father of the industry.

And so, you know, we’ve hired you, but it wasn’t free, and it wasn’t cheap, but it was effective. Why can the listeners out there not hire a search, why is it not possible to hire a search engine optimization company to help your business for $199 a month? Because every listener gets a call from somebody from some foreign country calling, emailing, saying that they can do your search engine for as little as $99 a month. Why is it just not possible? Well, the fact is that the industry is changing. Google changes the algorithm approximately five times a day. So it takes time to stay current on technology. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to pay to be current. Well, if you’re not current, I can sell you whatever I want. You can give me a check. Then when I don’t deliver it, you go away and I ended up with a free check. So I think that a great many people people take shortcuts, they don’t care if you get in trouble, they don’t care if you get penalized.

The flip side of that is would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon. It’s the Thrive Time Show on your radio. Stay tuned. Thrive Time Show Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. It is the Thrive Time Show on your radio. And on today’s show we are interviewing Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, the best-selling author of the book Search Engine for Dummies, a guy who’s worked with some of the largest brands in the country.

And his company, you can find more about them at bruceclay.com. I have paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars, and I don’t regret it. He is the world’s best for big companies. But I will tell you, there are projects, Chuck, that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization. And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients are $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a month clients for him. I mean, he has big accounts. Chuck, why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month?

Why does it never work? Because it takes more time than that. Like, it’s the simple math. You can only get a few hours of work for $200 from somebody that knows what they’re doing. And so, ultimately, they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up penalizing you for. And so, if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you, well, what are you doing? You’ve got to be where people are, and that’s on the Internet. So, Thrive Nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, breaks down how search engine optimization really works.

What I’m curious about is, would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon. You know, if you wanted a brain surgeon to do surgery on your kid, $200 for the surgery would really make you suspect. So fundamentally, the problem is that the infrastructure is changing so much that unless you are just taking somebody’s money, you can’t even possibly justify that kind of a rate. It usually takes a few thousand dollars, I’d say, and sometimes many, many thousands of dollars. There’s large companies out there that have 30 to 40 in-house SEOs just working on their own property. Those are the big guys. And, you know, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than $199 a month.

If you want it cheap, well, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you, if you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money. What I want to do is, if it’s possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you, and I want to kind of get into some of the details, if that’s all right with you, and kind of go through them in a linear fashion. And if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall, I’ve seen so many people with a beautiful website. Bruce, you’ve seen it too, where it looks great.

The site itself visually, you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is, it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it. And then you go to Wikipedia that doesn’t look that beautiful, but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by Google and what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and by Google? I can certainly address that. Understanding that Google is changing all the time, the technology is changing as well.

The process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider. It’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you’re about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about SEO. They don’t understand how to connect things. They don’t understand how to word things, they’re not authors, they’re not writers, they’re people who can build pretty things.

And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the T’s to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about. It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help a search engine. The search engine basically is blind, deaf, and dumb. It reads your site. There’s three ways they influence ranking, but one of them is it will read your site and it will attempt to determine what you’re about by looking at your content and by looking at how page A is connected to page B and the infrastructure and nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about.

Now a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures and the search engine cannot understand what that is. Now there’s two other things that fit, and I’ll just go into them briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well, if your content is pretty, you might be able to get some links. And a great many offshore SEO companies, that’s what they focus on.

But that is not going to make you an expert. It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called RankBrain, which is the Google algorithm, and it’s based on click-throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked. If you don’t get clicked, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality, and so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best ranked sites perform the best. So the only way a website can really get to the top is to build something that a search engine can perceive to be authoritative information, quality information, and then the search engine can put you at the top and then you will get links and then you will have RankBrain like you, and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time.

So all those things have to play together. You can’t just do one and expect it to be there. But pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Oh, we love it. Oh. Google loves it. Yeah. Because the prettier your site, the more likely you are to have to buy pay-per-click in order to get your traffic. Right.

Now, here’s the thing about it. I hear a lot of people say, this is what people say a lot of times, they’ll say, gosh, you know, but Nike, Nike doesn’t have a lot of content, Bruce. They have a lot of pictures. Adidas. And I would say, well, it’s because Nike and Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising, driving, and by the way, people are typing in Nike.com every day.

But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name, is probably not going to be there. I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well, yeah, and that happens a lot more often than you would think. People have this perception that if you build it, they will come. And therefore, if you build it prettier, more will come.

When in fact, if you build it prettier, they won’t come until you buy the ads on Google. So, if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines. When we return, it’s our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay.

Stay tuned. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, who many consider, who everyone considers to be the father of search engine optimization. Each year he releases an edition of Search Engine for Dummies and his firm, which you can find out more about at bruceclay.com, is the world’s authority on big budget search engine optimization. Now, I have hired his firm in the past, and if you have a big company, I would advise you to check him out as well.

But I’m telling you, you are definitely going to be spending, he talks about it during the interview, $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking $6,000 a month, $7,000. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to him. Right. And they’ve got to re-optimize and re-write and everything. This is a big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level.

And so what I try to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts into actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire. And so now without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers, according to Forbes, and we’ll put a link on the show notes, 88% of consumers read reviews online before buying something, right? But they’re not going to read a review unless they find you online. And I don’t know the stats of their, Bruce, you probably know the stats more than I do, and I’m not certainly trying to paint you into a corner about knowing the stats, but I don’t even know the percentage.

I know the last studies that I looked at from Forbes, I do write for Forbes, I’m a contributing writer for Forbes, I’ve looked at some of the stats, well over nine out of ten people start any product or service, they start their search for any product or service online. Do you have any data that would argue that 9 out of 10 consumers don’t start looking for things online? Or is it higher, do you think? I think I’ve read it shows about 9 out of 10 people start looking for the products and services they’re going to buy with an online search. No, you’re right. The number has consistently been, the lowest number I remember is 84%, but I think it’s consistently over that. I also understand a statistic which is 94% of all people click on only the first page of Google, which means you have to be in the top 10. So, yeah, you got to be there if you expect to satisfy anybody’s queries. I think that probably your entire audience finds things or at least finds reviews and certainly how-to’s and things like that online.

Digital is the way of the world now. Yeah, you’ve got to be there. Now we talk about, you kind of get it, that’s high level. We’ve got to have a website that Google can crawl, that the spiders can index. I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s this stuff called meta-content, which you write so eloquently about in your book Search Engine for Dummies that only took you a couple years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you, that book, Bruce, I’m not sure if you make any money every time you buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome. Search Engine for Dummies with Bruce Clay.

Talk to me about meta data, meta content, things like the title tag and the description and the keywords. I’d say the vast majority of our listeners have no idea what a meta title is, a meta description is, what keywords are. They just have no concept of these things. Could you kind of explain it in a way that a simple mind like me might grasp? Most of our listeners, Bruce, are very intelligent people, but if you’re just talking to me, break it down. Make it simple for my cranium. So you want it to be at your level.

Right, because I am a shallow Hal. Okay. So, metadata, actually, metadata is data about data. So, in a portion of your webpage, commonly referred to as the head section, the top of the source code, you have a section which has data, these content fields, that describe what your page is supposed to be about. And in that area there’s typically what would be a number of key tags. One is the title tag, most commonly recognized because when you do a Google search the link that you get to click on, that is actually the title tag of the page you’re clicking.

The second part is a description tag. So it’s called a meta description. And it is the part in the Google search results that commonly show up under the title. And that’s where you would put a call to action. That’s where you would describe why people should click to your site. So those have to be balanced out against the content of your site or there’s a mismatch and Google won’t like you. There’s other tags, there’s a keyword tag which is logically used as sort of a just a list of words that should be on the page. Can I ask you a question about that for the listeners out there that might have a question about keywords there.

Let’s say I cut hair. I’m a haircut, I’m a hair stylist and I’m in Boise. Talk to me about keywords. If I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise. I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all. We have hundreds of thousands of people that download this podcast. I want to make sure nobody gets left behind. If I cut hair for women in Boise, what kind of keywords would you be talking about? I would think hair cutting, certainly Boise. These are things that somebody might string together in a query. Like a search. Like a search. So an interesting statistic is 70% of all searches have not been searched on in the last six months.

Yes, repeat it again please. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody. Please repeat. 70% of all searches have not been searched for in the last six months. What does that mean? So, if I am in Boise and I need to find a dentist because at 2 a.m. I broke my tooth, you’re not going to just search for emergency dental repair, Boise, right now I’m in pain. That is a string of keywords that most often are not on any websites. So when you come up with keywords and content and things for your webpage, you need to think about how somebody might actually try to find you and use those words on your web page.

You’re making me cry. This is so good. This is so good. Oh, you’re preaching the good news. Yes. I’ll tell you right now, most people, I’ve had cases where people come to me and they don’t understand why they don’t have a better ranking for a particular keyword. And when I do the analysis, they’re not even using the keyword in their content. Google isn’t going to believe you’re about anything if you don’t use it. So, you know, it’s a self-defeating action if you don’t use your keywords properly on your web page.

Now, in terms of just the amount of content, just content, I think a lot of people don’t grasp this idea. This is a funny thing I did, Bruce. This is back in like 2004, 2005. It was 2003. I owned a company called DJConnection.com. And for the listeners out there, if you go to DJConnection.com, you can see it’s still a company that’s thriving today. I sold it and moved on to open different ventures. But DJConnection.com, one of the things with that company was that I was starting to figure out how search engines work.

And this was early stuff. I mean, Yahoo was huge at that point. Yahoo was like a dominant player. Thrive Nation, stay tuned. We come back. We’re going to learn why content matters for your website. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and The Thrive Times Show. Thrive Nation, you are in for a powerful training today. We have Bruce the Truth Clay on the show. Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies.

His search engine optimization firm is the number one search engine firm on the planet. His firm represents massive companies that have over a million pages of content that are making billions of dollars. And he’s here to teach you the principles and the fundamentals of search engine optimization so that you can implement these systems and strategies in your own life and business. Without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay. And I didn’t realize just how much content matters.

So I had decided to write the most amount of high-quality content in the world about the phrase, chocolate fountains. Bruce, so I wrote an insane amount of content because I owned a company called Chocolate Elegance and we owned chocolate fountains. It’s like the fondue, you know, weddings, that kind of thing, you dip fruit in it and lo and behold Bruce, I got Chocolate Elegance to the top of search engine results as a result of writing something like 80 pages about the origins of chocolate, chocolate fountains, how chocolate fountains work. It was all really well done.

It was almost disturbing. Can you talk to me about why the volume of quality content really does matter? Sure. And this should be pretty clear if you understand what you would want when you do a search. There’s a concept called siloing. We invented it 18 years ago and what siloing does is it says that you should have organized the content on your website in a clear hierarchy. That’s actually one of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. So in a clear hierarchy, what Google is looking for is a bunch of interconnected pages that are on the same theme.

So what you did is you created a large group of pages that were clearly different. They had different purposes, but they’re all about the same topic, the same theme. And so what Google does is it looks at your website and sees that you have these connected pages, and therefore they assume that you are more of an expert than somebody that doesn’t. So if your site is poorly structured, you’re not going to rank as well as somebody that has a properly structured website. The architecture and the way your pages are tied together make a lot of difference.

So we’ll go and use that as an example. If I wanted to find a site about chocolate fountains, if there was a site that had one page about them or another site that has 20 pages about them, that user would prefer the 20 pages. It’s more content, more information, better able to satisfy them. And we all have to believe that Google knows that. So Google is looking at how much content that is quality, it has to be quality, how much quality content is interconnected to build a theme that matches what people are searching for. And if you build that correctly in a nice hierarchy, connected correctly, then you can perform very well in search.

And that’s what you had done. You know Bruce, I actually was the head of a group called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was the group that threw the wedding shows in Tulsa. You know, we started the Tulsa wedding show where brides would go and gather at these banquet halls. You get maybe a thousand brides in one banquet hall at one time at the Renaissance Hotel. They’re all trying to find their wedding vendors. I remember a vendor in particular pulled me aside one time and she says to me, she had a wedding bridal store, and she says, how did you find the time to write hundreds of pages of content on djconnection.com?

And I said, well, I didn’t find the time to write a hundred pages, or hundreds, I actually wrote thousands, and I did it myself. I usually, Bruce, did it between the hours of 5 a.m. or 4 a.m. You know, usually 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. About five hours a day, I’d write content every day. And, Bruce, I’d do it in the bathtub, which I know is a disturbing visual, but I’d sit there in the bathtub and I’m just writing content, just writing, I mean, about how to throw a bouquet, how to catch the garter, when the first dance was, when the father and the bride dance was, what’s the etiquette behind the toast, why we have a toast, why we do the cutting of the cake, the history of the cutting of the cake, why we have DJs, who the first wedding DJs were, I mean on and on and on. I mean all that the dollar dance, the waterfall dance, the Soul Train line, the cha-cha slide, the Cupid shovel, how to do it, the electric slide. I mean I was like the Wikipedia of DJs, which is why I became the top ranked company in search engines. Can you explain to me what percentage of your clients say to you, hey Bruce, can you just write the content for me?

And what percentage of them actually are willing to sit down and write the content themselves? I believe I have a psychological problem called I enjoy grinding. But I have very few clients I’ve ever worked with who want to write the content. What percentage of your clients prefer to have your team write the content versus the ones that want to write it themselves? Well, we have large projects where they don’t have the team to do it. Under normal circumstances, I would look at you in that particular case and think of you as the subject matter expert. So we would partner with you and we could write the draft, you can finish it, we can editorialize it and make it ready for SEO and then as a partnership we publish it. That’s the way most of our writing projects are actually structured because when you’re doing that for a technical business at all then you’re not going to be the subject matter expert. If you went to somebody and this is my opinion but if you went to somebody and said hi I want 200 pages on this topic you’re going to get 200 pages of absolute garbage.

Oh yeah, total garbage. Complete and total garbage. And that really annoys me. You have to spend the time to do the page right, to do the research. The average 1,000-word page is supposed to take about three hours. It isn’t just writing, it’s editing and it’s making sure that you have sources and which image do you put on the page. It’s far more complex. What we find with our clients, be it good or especially the small guys, what we find is that they absolutely commit to doing it and then they unconditionally don’t. Okay, repeat that again. That right there, I’m going to put that on a t-shirt, I’m going to put that on a hat, I want to embroider that on my head and get a tattoo on my leg.

Can you please repeat that? That was powerful. The companies absolutely commit to writing the content because they’re the experts, they want to do that, but then they don’t write it. It is unfortunate, but that is the case. We’ve had many projects where we become the company’s writing team, but if it is technical at all, we still need them to read it. What do you charge to write an article? If you’re going to write a thousand words for somebody, are you going to charge them $6, $12, 7 cents.

I mean, there’s a lot of companies in India right now, and you’re aware of this, Mr. Bruce. I mean, there are companies in India, companies based in China right now, companies in the Middle East that will say, I will write you an article right now for $9. What would you charge somebody to write a thousand-word page of content? Well, we’re back to the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. I think that one of the problems that you run into internationally is they do not have a shared experience with you as the author. And so they make assumptions about your target persona person. They assume things about what it is that you do for a living and what your product should do and why people should use it and it hardly ever matches reality in a different country. So we believe that every country has to write their own product content. So in our case what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article you think, $200? Is that is like a low average you think?

Maybe. That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now I’m gonna go out on a tangent here and give you some additional data. Oof. And I know you hate it when I do that. No, it’s good. This is good. This is going to blow someone’s mind here. When you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them. Thrive Nation, do not get overwhelmed by search engine optimization. Just leave us an objective review on iTunes.

Just subscribe to the Thrive Time Show podcast on iTunes. Leave us an objective review and email us proof you did it and we’ll send you free tickets to our next in-person Thrive Time Show two-day, 15-hour workshop. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrive timeshow dot com. Hey Chuck. Hey there man. Are you familiar with that thing called the internet? Enter in the net, that’s when you catch fish in a net, right?

Chubb, I’ll tell you this, man. There’s people out there starting to use this thing called Google. Oh, I don’t know if they do. They’re on the Facebooks. And I’ve heard that people are going on there to buy products and search for goods and services on that Google. Now, we boys from Oklahoma. Hey.

I know there’s three things I know about search engines, Chubb. One is the word search is the first word. That’s right. The second word is optimization. And the third is I ain’t knowing nothing about it. No, man. You want a V8. I know that about engines. Chup, you think I should grow out my perm or just kind of let it be?

Yeah, you got to let it grow. Should I put the lightning bolts on the side of my mullet, Chup? Yeah, yeah. Perm mullet with the lightning bolts, Clay. That’s what you want. You know, Chup, you know, Chup, you know, Chup, I don’t know if you’ve thought about this very much, but one thing that we like to say in Oklahoma, Chup, Chup, you know what we say?

What is that? You know what they say, see a broad to get that booty act, leg it down and smack on the act. All right now, Thrive Nation, if that’s about, if you’re saying to yourself, when it comes to search engine, I’m serious, if you’re sitting there at an office party or an office event gathering a networking event, you’re talking to a buddy of yours who owns a business and he says, well, you know, search engine optimization is key to our success. And you find yourself saying, well… You know what they say, see a broad to get that booty, yack him. Lay her down and smack him, yack him.

If that’s all you know about search engine, if somebody put a gun to your head and said, teach me how to get to the top of Google, and you immediately said, la, la, la, Luke, then you need to listen in because Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, is going to be dropping knowledge bombs on you like your name is Saddam. Thrive Nation, without any further ado, back to my conversation with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Mr. Bruce Clay. In our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think $200 is that is that is like a low average, you think maybe?

That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now, when you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them, pages. Bruce, I want you to help me on this. This is my six year quest. John Kelly knows this, my right-hand man. We have been working to be top of the world for the phrase business conferences for about six years.

We’re at the top of page two now. We have a podcast that’s ranked in the top ten on iTunes in the business section. We have thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of downloads, but we’re competing against Tony Robbins. I mean, Tony, for everybody out there that is not aware of Tony Robbins, welcome to the planet Earth. But Tony Robbins, I mean, this guy, Bruce, he has tons of backlinks from news and media agencies. The guy has a team of bloggers writing content every day. And he’s a beautiful man, too, I’m sure.

But it’s taken a long time to be, and I know it’s just, so every week we add content at a rate that exceeds his rate of adding content. And I’ve kind of timed it out, and I believe in probably January of this year we’re going to beat him finally. But, I mean, is it normal where you go into an industry and you go, Wow, this industry, I mean, because Tony Robbins, when we decided to do it, I knew it would take years and years and years. Do you often sit down with a client and explain to them, like, Hey, to be top of Google for your term, my friend, that’s going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time. And many times that’s the case. And it depends upon what is missing.

And I want to make sure everybody understands how it works. It isn’t also whoever dies with the most backlinks wins. It’s who has the best backlinks. And are the backlinks appropriate for that one keyword? And am I spamming the backlinks? Am I buying them? Am I getting backlinks from garbage sites? Those are the kinds of things that matter the most. Many brands, by the time you become a brand, you’re going to get backlinks to you by your brand name, not particularly what your brand does.

That contributes a lot of power to your homepage, and then your homepage distributes that power to your subpages. So, when you think about a Tony Robbins, you’re competing, and a Wikipedia, you’re competing against a brand that over time has acquired a lot of link value. That doesn’t mean that you need to publish more content than them. It just means your content has to be better than them. And it has to be more of a solution to that user than them.

We have a blog. And at one point I felt that we have to publish a lot of blog posts. And when I did the analysis, I decided it isn’t how many you publish, it’s how good it is. And so we focus more on, is this blog post solving somebody’s problem? And then, how do I tell that person I have the blog post? That is far more important than just publishing things. You have to kind of advertise that you’ve published it, and you have to advertise to the people that matter.

But it isn’t an issue so much of quantity. It is far more an interest in quality that’s going to cause the search engines to perform well with you on your content. Now having said that, I do believe that if you have too little content, you’re not going to succeed. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much content. We do projects large and small, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the high end and $500 a month at the low end. So it really will vary, but we do them all over the board. Now, Bruce, this is a concept that I would like to see if you can share with the listeners.

In your book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, you discuss the amount of content that needs to be on a page in order for Google to count it, or for Google to really care about it, or to index it, or to think it’s not a waste of time. You can’t have two words on every page. You talked about certain industries, and you alluded to it earlier, certain industries you might have to have 1,500 words of content to be relevant, and certain industries you might have to have 350 words of content on a page for it to be relevant. Why do you have to have a minimum amount of words on a page for Google to care enough to index it? I know the Google algorithm doesn’t care, but in order for Google to index it, why do you have to have a certain minimum number of words per page?

You can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well-performing pages that have fewer than 100 words. They have like 80 words. The issue with words is you need a sufficient quantity compared to your competition to prove to search engine that you are a subject matter expert. In some industries where all your competitors have 400 words, 400 might be a really good number. But if I am competing for an information source against Wikipedia, Google, government.gov’s government pages, university pages that are writing about it, and they all have 2,000 words, my 400-word page isn’t going to stand a chance. Hi there.

My name is Stephanie Pipkin. I am 24 years old, and I own Black River Falls Cleaning Services. We opened in April of 2019, and it is now mid-June of 2020. So I wanted to talk today about the success and growth I have achieved by implementing the Proven Path with Clay Clark’s team and my business coach Luke from Thrive Time. It has been insane to say the least. I started working with them in mid-February of this year, so we’re about four months in of working together and it has completely transformed my business in pretty much every facet. So I’m gonna check my notes here. So in four months, my leads have tripled.

I was getting probably like two leads a week, now I’m getting more in the like 10 to 15 leads a week. I have doubled my number of employees. I’m now hitting the highest revenue weeks in the history of the company, week to week it seems like. Do what they say, even if you think it’s stupid or ridiculous, just do what they say because it will work. You know, people, when they look at my business, people in my town, they think I’m lucky. They think I’m just, you know, things just happen for me.

And you know, maybe I am lucky, but it has a lot to do with hard work and perseverance and working until you cry sometimes. That’s just being an entrepreneur, which if you’re a business owner, you understand that. But it’s having these systems in place of, of course I’m gonna be successful. It’s an absolute, because I have all this stuff in the background happening, and I have Luke and Clay and everybody on their team working really hard to make sure that I’m a success.

And I can tell that they are just so excited every single week when I’m having all these wins and things like that. They’re so excited for me. So it just it’s the best thing ever and I would suggest to anybody to work with them. So sorry for the long-winded reply but I just had so much to say and I could go on for hours probably about how amazing they are. But thank you to Clay and Luke and the entire team there. Everything you guys have done for me, and I am so excited to continue to work with you for years to come. Thanks so much for watching. What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system, and it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around.

They’re the ones that people can work with on a day-to-day basis, and that simplicity brings power with it. So it shocked me how simple some of the stuff is. And at times I’m like, why didn’t I think about that? Workflow creation, systematic marketing, and coaching has helped our church so much. You know, the workflow creation is what it really is, is they’re going to look and see every moving part of your church, of your ministry, what needs to be done. And it’s going to go up on a massive board. And so now what it does is it takes what you know needs to be done out of your heart and out of your head. It really takes the pressure, the stress off your shoulders and it puts it on the board where your entire team, your ministry, can see exactly what you want them to do every day. So they know this is the playbook, this is what we’re doing.

And then there’s a laser-sharp accountability with a meeting afterwards did it get done or not. I’ll tell you it’s changed the way we execute as a church so fast. My name is Kevin Thomas, and the name of our company is MultiClean. We are a commercial janitorial service, and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma and Kansas, and soon to be Arkansas. We have probably grown probably five times. We’ve added, I think when we first started with you, we had 60 to 65 employees. And now we have a little over 300 employees.

Before we got involved with Thrive Time, we didn’t really have any systems or processes in place. I’ve probably been to, oh, in six, seven years, I learn something new and I’m so excited to bring it back and show the team about marketing and how to help you guys implement the SEO and the coaching is just great because there’s accountability and it’s just a fantastic way to grow your company. Having a relationship with Thrive Time, it’s just been amazing for multi-claim. Clay Clark is here somewhere. Where’s my buddy Clay?

Clay’s the greatest. I met his goats today, I met his dogs, I met his chickens, I saw his compound. He’s like the greatest guy. I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs. So this guy’s like the greatest marketer I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs. So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. Okay, Aaron Antis, March 6th and 7th, March 6th and 7th, guess who’s coming to Tulsa, Russia?

Ooh, Santa Claus? No, no, that’s March, March 6th and 7th. You’re going to be joined by Robert Kiyosaki. Robert Kiyosaki. Best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad possibly the best-selling or one of the best-selling Business authors of all time and he’s going to be joined with Eric Trump. He’ll be joined by Eric Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki in the same place in the same place Aaron Why should everybody show up to hear Robert Kiyosaki? Well, you got billions of dollars of business experience between those two not to mention many, many, many millions of books have been sold. Many, many millionaires have been made from the books that have been sold by Robert Kiyosaki. I happen to be one of them. I learned from the man. He was the inspiration. That book was the inspiration for me to get the entrepreneurial spirit, as many other people. Now since you won’t brag on yourself, I will. You’ve sold billions of dollars of houses, am I correct?

That is true. And the book that kick-started it all for you, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Rich Dad Poor Dad, the author, the best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki, the guy that kick-started your career, he’s gonna be here. He’s gonna be here, I’m umped. And now Eric Trump, people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. There’s not 50 employees. The Trump Organization, again, most people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees and while Donald J. Trump was the 45th president of these United States and soon to be the 47th president of these United States He needed someone to run the companies for him. And so the man that runs the Trump Organization for Donald J. Trump as he was the 45th president of the United States and now the 47th president of the United States is Eric Trump. Eric Trump is here to talk about time management promoting from within, marketing, branding, quality control, sales systems, workflow design, workflow mapping, how to build.

I mean, everything that you see, the Trump hotels, the Trump golf courses, all their products, the man who manages billions of dollars of real estate and thousands of employees is here to teach us how to do it. You are talking about one of the greatest brands on the planet from a business standpoint. I mean who else has been able to create a brand like the Trump brand? I mean look at it and this is the man behind the business for the last pretty much since 2015. He’s been the man behind it so you’re talking we’re into nine going into ten years of him running it and we get to tap into that knowledge that’s gonna be amazing. Now think about this for a second. Would you buy a ticket just to see Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump?

Of course you would. Of course you would. But we’re also going to be joined by Sean Baker. This is the best-selling author, the guy who invented the carnivore diet. Dr. Sean Baker, he’s been on Joe Rogan multiple times. He’s going to be joining us. So you’ve got Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Eric Trump, Sean Baker. The lineup continues to grow, and this is how we do our tickets here at the Thrive Time Show. If you want to get a VIP ticket you can absolutely do it. It’s $500 for a VIP ticket. We’ve always done it that way. Now if you want to take a general admission ticket it’s $250 or whatever price you want to pay. And the reason why I do that and the reason why we do that is because we want to make our events affordable for everybody. I grew up without money. I totally understand what it’s like to be the tight spot. So if you want to attend it’s $250 or whatever price you want to pay. That’s how I do it and it’s $500 for a VIP ticket now We only have limited seating here with them the most people we’ve ever had in this building was for the Jim Brewer Presentation Jim Brewer came here that the legendary comedian Jim Brewer came to Tulsa and we had 419 people that were here 419 people. Yeah, and I thought to myself, but there’s no more room I felt kind of bad that a couple people had VIP seats in the men’s restroom.

No, I’m just kidding. So I thought, you know what, we should probably add on. So we’re adding on what we call the upper deck, or the top shelf. So the seats are very close to the presenters, but we’re actually building right now, we’re adding on to the facility to make room to accommodate another 30 attendees or more. So again, if you want to get tickets for this event, all you have to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. When you go to Thrivetimeshow.com, you’ll go there, you’ll request a ticket, boom. Or if you want to text me, if you want a little bit faster service, you say, I want you to call me right now.

Just text my number. That’s my cell phone number. My personal cell phone number. We’ll keep that private between you, between you, me, everybody. We’ll keep that private. And anybody. Don’t share that with anybody except for everybody. That’s my private cell phone number. It’s 918-851-0102. 918-851-0102. I know we have a lot of Spanish-speaking people that attend these conferences, and so to be bilingually sensitive, my cell phone number is 918-851-0102. That’s not actually bilingual. That’s just saying Juan for a Juan. It’s not the same thing. I think you’re attacking me. Now, let’s talk about this. Now, what kind of stuff will you learn at the Thrive Time Show workshop? So Aaron, you’ve been to many of these over the past seven, eight years. So let’s talk about it. I’ll tee up the thing and then you tell me what you’re gonna learn here, okay?

Okay. You’re gonna learn marketing, marketing and branding. What are we gonna learn about marketing and branding? Oh, yeah, we’re gonna dive into, you know, so many people say, oh, you know, I got to get my brand known out there, like the Trump brand. You want to get that brand out there. It’s like, how do I actually make people know what my business is and make it a household name? You’re going to learn some intricacies of how you can do that. You’re going to learn sales. So many people struggle to sell something. This just in, your business will go to hell if you can’t sell.

So we’re going to teach you sales. We’re going to teach you search engine optimization, how to come up top in the search engine results. We’re going to teach you how to manage people. Aaron, you have managed, no exaggeration, hundreds of people throughout your career and thousands of contractors, and most people struggle with managing people. Why does everybody have to learn how to manage people? Well, because, first of all, you either have great people or you have people who suck. It can be a challenge. Learning how to work with a large group of people and get everybody pulling in the same direction can be a challenge.

But if you have the right systems, you have the right processes, and you’re really good at selecting great ones, and we have a process we teach about how to find great people. When you start with the people who have a great attitude, they’re teachable, they’re driven, all of those things, then you can get those people all pulling in the same direction. So we’re going to teach you branding, marketing, sales, search engine optimization. We’re going to teach you accounting. We’re going to teach you personal finance, how to manage your finance. We’re going to teach you time management. How do you manage your time? How do you get more done during a typical day? How do you build an organization if you’re not organized? How do you do organization? How do you build an org chart? Everything that you need to know to start and grow a business will be taught during this two day interactive business workshop.

Let me tell you how the format is set up here. And again, folks, this is a two day interactive 15. Think about this, folks. It’s two days. Each day starts at 7 AM and it goes until 5 PM. So from 7 AM to 5 PM, two days. It’s a two day interactive workshop. The way we do it is we do a 30 minute teaching session and then we break for 15 minutes for a question and answer session.

So Aaron, what kind of great stuff happens during that 15 minute question and answer session after every teaching session? I actually think it’s the best part about the workshops, because here’s what happens. I’ve been to lots of these things over the years. I’ve paid many thousands of dollars to go to them. And you go in there, and they talk in vague generalities, and they’re constantly upselling you for something, trying to get you to buy this thing or that thing or this program or this membership.

And you don’t, you leave not getting your very specific questions answered about your business or your employees or what you’re doing on your marketing. But what’s awesome about this is we literally answer every single question that any person asks. And it’s very specific to what your business is. And what we do is we allow you as the attendee to write your questions on the whiteboard. And then we literally, as you mentioned, we answer every single question on the whiteboard.

And then we take a 15 minute break to stretch and to make it entertaining when you’re stretching. And this is a true story. When you get up and stretch, you’ll be greeted by mariachis. There’s going to probably be alpaca here, llamas, helicopter rides, a coffee bar, a snow cone. I mean, you had a crocodile one time. That was pretty interesting. You know, I should write that down. Sorry for that one guy.

We lost him. The crocodile. We duct taped its face. So that’s right. We duct taped. No, it was a baby crocodile. And we duct taped. Yeah, duct taped around the mouth so it didn’t bite anybody. But it was really cool passing that thing around.

In fact, I should do that. I should. We have a small petting zoo that will be assembled. It’s going to be great. And then you’re in the company of hundreds of entrepreneurs. So there’s not a lot of people in America today. In fact, there’s less than 10 million people today, according to U.S. Debt Clock, that identify as being self-employed. So if you have a country with 350 million people, that means you have less than 3% of our population that’s even self-employed. So you only have 3 out of every 100 people in America that are self-employed to begin with. And when Inc. Magazine reports that 96% of businesses fail by default, by default you have a 1 out of 1,000 chance of succeeding in the game of business.

But yet, the average client that you and I work with, we can typically double the size. No hyperbole, no exaggeration. I have thousands of testimonials to back this up. We have thousands of testimonials to back it up. But when you work with a home builder, when I work with a business owner, we can typically double the size of the company within 24 months. Yeah. Double?

And you say, double? Yeah, there’s businesses that we have tripled. There’s businesses we’ve grown 8x. There’s so many examples. You can see it throughout timeshow.com. But again, this is the most interactive best business workshop on the planet. This is objectively the highest rated and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. And then you add to that Robert Kiyosaki, the bestselling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

You add to that Eric Trump, the man that runs the Trump Organization. You add to that Sean Baker. Now you might say, but Clay, is there more? I need more! Well, okay, Tom Wheelwright is the wealth strategist for Robert Kiyosaki. So people say, Robert Kiyosaki, who’s his financial wealth advisor? Who’s the guy who manages, who’s his wealth strategist? His wealth strategist, Tom Wheelwright, will be here. And you say, Clay, I still, I’m not gonna get a ticket unless you give me more. Okay, fine. We’re gonna serve you the same meal both days. True story.

We cater and food and because I keep it simple, I literally bring him the same food both days for lunch. It’s Ted Esconzito’s, an incredible Mexican restaurant. That’s gonna happen. And Jill Donovan, our good friend, who is the founder of Rustic Cuff. She started that company in her home and now she sells millions of dollars of apparel and products. That’s rusticcuff.com. And someone says, I want more! This is not enough! Give me more.

Okay, I’m not going to mention her name right now because I’m working on it behind the scenes here. But we’ve got one guy who’s given me a verbal to be here. And this is a guy who’s one of the wealthiest people in Oklahoma. And nobody really knows who he is because he’s built systems that are very utilitarian, that offer a lot of value. He’s made a lot of money in the… It’s the… It’s where you rent… It’s short term… It’s where you’re renting storage spaces. He’s a storage space guy. He owns the… What do you call that? The rental… The… Storage space? Storage units! This guy owns storage units. He owns railroad cars. He owns a lot of assets that make money on a daily basis. But they’re not like customer facing. Most people don’t know who owns the mini storage facility, or most people don’t know who owns the warehouse that’s passively making money.

Most people don’t know who owns the railroad cars, but this guy, he’s giving me a verbal that he will be here, and we just continue to add more and more success stories. So if you’re out there today and you want to change your life, you want to give yourself an incredible gift, you want a life-changing experience, you want to learn how to start and grow a company, go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Go there right now. Thrivetimeshow.com. Request a ticket for the two-day interactive event. Again, the day here is March 6th and 7th. March 6th and 7th. We just got confirmation. Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author, rich dad, poor dad, he’ll be here. Eric Trump, the man who leads the Trump Organization. It’s going to be a blasty blast. There’s no upsells.

Aaron, I could not be more excited about this event. I think it is incredible and there’s somebody out there right now you’re watching and you’re like, but I already signed up for this incredible other program called Smoke Your Way to Thin. I think that’s going to change your life. I promise you this will be 10 times better than that. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. Don’t do the Smoke Your Way to Thin conference. That is, I’ve tried it, don’t do it. Chain smoking is not a viable, I mean, it is life changing. It is life changing.

If you become a chain smoker, it is life changing. Not the best weight loss program to fight. Right, not really. So if you’re looking to have life changing results in a way that won’t cause you to have a stoma, get your tickets at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Aaron Antis, I’m Clay Clark, and reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show workshop right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you it will be a life-changing experience. We can’t wait to see you right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.