Episode 64 - Using SEO To Convert Sales With Farzad Rashidi

Using SEO To Convert Sales With Farzad Rashidi

We are bringing you an amazing guest who understands SEO as a client acquisition strategy. I’m not just talking about SEO for the sake of getting you rankings on your website. It will do that as well. Because this is a sales strategy program, let’s talk about how you convert sales using SEO. That’s what we’re going to talk about with Farzad. His last name is Rashidi. He is the most brilliant person I’ve talked with when it comes to SEO and link building, but utilizing it for a client acquisition strategy and utilizing it when you’re supposed to and saying, “This isn’t going to work for you as a client acquisition strategy as well.”

He gives you a couple of great questions to ask like, “Is this right for me?” You or you know somebody who has been through this where they’re like, “I got to go get some SEO strategy. I talked to an agency. I talked to this and that.” They go, “You need SEO.” The reality is you don’t. Many of the times, it’s possibly nice to have or not even a need to have. You invest your money, time, and energy into that. It’s not giving you the ROI you want, but you don’t know any better. I’m not saying you don’t, I’m saying most business owners and people do. They don’t know any better because it’s one of those things that’s out in the ether.

You think you need it, but you’re not sure how to utilize it, but you do it anyways because everybody’s saying, “This is what you got to have,” especially people you’ve talked to who sell things like websites, SEO, and those types of things. He breaks it down into practical terms and gives you great strategic advice on the do’s and don’ts. He’s got a link-building software on the back of this, which I’ve already checked out. It’s cool. It’s called Respona. Let’s go to the interview and talk to Farzad.

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Farzad Rashidi, welcome to the show. Thanks for being on here.

Thanks for having me on the show, Doug. I’m super excited.

I love your offering on Respona. Folks, that’s Respona.com. I don’t usually put it right out forth and go promote this, but it’s a cool offering. Check it out. I like the subject because it’s about using SEO as a customer acquisition strategy. A lot of people don’t think about SEO in that context. They think of SEO as, “I’m going to get search engine rankings to my website.”

They’re not looking at it as an acquisition strategy. It’s a thought maybe, like, “I need that. My competition will be on the first page. I got to be on the first page.” You’re an expert not only in this but in many things online. Let’s talk about how to use SEO as the right strategy for the right channel. You brought this to my attention. I thought it was an excellent point.

I’m more than happy to do that. Before we begin talking about SEO as a channel, what’s important for us is to understand if it’s the right acquisition strategy for your business. Lots of times, I see a lot of businesses want to experiment with “SEO.” They go and spend a ton of money hiring an expensive agency or a freelancer or paying someone on Upwork. They’re like, “Do some SEO for us.”

Ninety-nine point nine of the time, that doesn’t work out. They’re like, “This is not the right channel for us,” and they move on. Before you even spend a second thinking about this, I would suggest having a checklist of items to hit before you even start digging into this acquisition channel. Like any other customer acquisition strategy, it’s a lot of work to make organic traffic work.

The first thing you want to answer is, one, are your customers actively aware of the problem that you’re solving? For example, if you sell some expensive, I would say medical device company, it’s unlikely that the stuff you’re selling is necessarily actively something that people are actively searching or looking for. Number two is that if something that they are aware of the problem, where are they searching for it? If the answer to that is Google, it’s almost idiotic not to take SEO seriously. 1) You want to make sure that your customers are aware of the problem you’re solving. 2) They’re actively searching for it on Google. If that’s not the case, then put it aside completely.

Invest your time and resources in SEO. If it seems irrelevant to you, it probably is. Click To Tweet

For example, let’s say you run an eCommerce store, and you sell t-shirts and socks. You can make SEO work in certain ways, like writing guides and holiday gift packages or gift ideas and whatever, but it’s a long stretch. Your best bet is probably going to be paid ads. Stick with social. Run some influencer campaigns through TikTok or run some ads through Instagram and call it a day.

My original example, when it comes to that medical device company, don’t waste your time building and writing blog posts on your website. Go ahead and hire a bunch of salespeople, go door to door, and start selling that thing. The sales cycle for those types of products and services is completely different. For Respona, we sell link-building software for software companies that are reliant on organic traffic from Google, or my original company, Visme, where I was Director of Marketing, which is a presentation/infographic software.

If you’re a business owner, you know that you want to create a presentation and write. Normally, what’s the first thing you do when you go to create a presentation if you don’t already have a solution for it? Let’s say you want to create an infographic or a presentation for this episode, and you’re looking for software. What was the first thing you do in your research process?

I’d go to Google and type in presentation software or something like that.

That is normally the case for the type of products that SEO would work for. You’re actively searching for it through Google. Answering these two questions is going to shed some light in terms of, first, is there a reliable strategy here that exists? All this stuff that I’m going to talk about during this episode is going to be an afterthought after that. Figuring out if it’s a reliable strategy for you is number one.

The two questions that people never ask because they’re not thinking of SEO in this capacity is like, “Do I need SEO? Do I need another medium?” A business is thinking, “If I’m visible on page one, then that’s going to get eyeballs and traffic to my website,” which has some credibility to that statement. What I hear you say is, are they searching for the problem or the opportunity online and aligning that with your SEO strategy? The second thing is, are they searching for it on Google? Which is an interesting thing because if you think about it, there are other search engines. Let’s talk about other search engines, like if they’re searching for it on Bing, Edge, Firefox, or whatever.

Amazon, YouTube, TikTok. We all think of search engines as text-based search engines, but it could be, for example, if I want a new pot or kitchen appliances, I rarely ever google that. I go straight to Amazon and look for things on Amazon. That’s where Amazon SEO comes into play, which is completely different from what we do. SEO, from the sense of what we are talking about, is predominantly focused on Google. For example, if you sell something like dad gifts and fun and commerce products, normally people identify those through channels like YouTube or TikTok. SEO, from Google’s perspective, is mainly used for products you would google to find. That is a subset of businesses that operate online.

I’m going to keep asking maybe some basic level questions because I’m in the head of the average business owner that goes, “I know what SEO stands for, but how’s it all work? I don’t know. I’m a business owner. I saw laser-guided manufacturing machines for the XYZ industry.” Why do they need SEO?

You don’t. If you sell laser-guided appliances for the Army, do not invest your time and resources in SEO. The simple answer to that is you don’t. Put it aside. Don’t even think about it. Close this episode. Look for the next episode that’s coming up. What I’m trying to say is that if it seems irrelevant to you, it probably is. Here’s one thing that has been a lot of talk about in the industry. A lot of agencies that unfortunately advertise SEO is a service that is good for any type of business. It’s simply not true.

That is powerful because the reality is it’s like going to school, getting good grades, and you’ll have a good job, and you’ll be happy forever. That’s the old adage of what people are taught. In SEO, that’s exactly what I’ve witnessed. Companies are going to SEO agencies and saying, “Without this, you’re dead. You need SEO, no matter what. Everybody has SEO.” What I’m hearing from you, which is the truth is that you don’t need SEO unless it’s the right strategy for your particular business to go after a client.

Put yourself in the shoes of a customer. Let’s say you sell enterprise-grade software, stuff that you sell to Fortune 1000 companies, some AI and analytics platform. That is a niche market. First of all, those decision-makers are probably not even aware of the problem you’re solving because you’re either nice to have or some improvement to their existing workflows.

They probably already have some way to get around that problem. If so, you want to go find a person out of the company, reach out to them, hire salespeople, SDRs, and AEs, and get them on a demo. That’s an entirely different workflow versus a type of company. For example, you are a webinar provider or some lead generation service that people are actively looking for online from a customer perspective.

We’re talking about how to do SEO the right way. There are people who will come on and are like, “How do I build traffic to my podcast? I’ll do SEO.” Do you recommend it? Do you not recommend it? Does it depend?

It’s a funny meme in the SEO industry where there’s this guy who has this tape and slaps it on a tank of water that’s leaking. It’s like, “It depends.” That sentence they use as an answer to any question. Put yourself in the shoes of a podcast listener. How do you find new podcasts? Do you normally go on Google? “What are some of the best entrepreneurship podcasts?”

Build specific landing pages and blog posts that cater to specific keywords. Click To Tweet

Maybe. Most people who listen to podcasts normally start from a referral, like a friend was like, “I’m listening to this podcast.” They listened to podcasts that normally interview other people who come onto the podcast and learn about their podcasts. That’s normally how they find other podcasts that I subscribe to, as rarely are people who are actively googling about a type of podcast.

I’m talking hypotheticals. I’m not sure I need to look into it. One of the best ways to improve or expand your audience is to go on as a guest on other people’s podcasts because those listeners are already podcast listeners. You’re catering or advertising for free on an hour of work that already has your audience. There are better ways for most businesses to acquire customers and SEO, but as subsidized businesses that are core and customers for Google, it’s the number one channel. Let me give you some numbers that would make sense. For example, Visme was a bootstrap company created in 2013 by my Cofounder, Payman. I was not the Founder of Visme.

We grew the company. It’s completely bootstrapped. We never raised any outside funding. It has over 180 employees, fully profitable, with 16 million active users. The way we’ve acquired these customers is by building specific landing pages and blog posts that cater to specific keywords. For example, if you go on Google and search infographic maker or presentation templates, Visme is normally at the top three, if not the top five or on page one. These are the type of high-intent keywords we’ve targeted and built ourselves up for specific queries with some intent behind them. That’s something that has been built on top over the course of the past few years.

It’s not like something you would plug and play and start working. Once you put in the work and build a repeatable process and start building some organic evergreen traffic to your website, those pages you’ve built already are getting traffic, and you’re building a task. That gives it a nice little hockey stick growth. Visme’s website gets close to about three million in monthly organic traffic. If we were to pay Google through ad words to bring in the same level of traffic, how much money do you think we would have to pay Google? Throw a number out there, Doug.

It’s $3 million.

It’s close to about $1.5 million every month. We spend a lot less now that I’m marketing than $1.5 million a month. It works well for some industries and some types of companies. In Respona, we started the company a few years back. Now it’s getting close to about 100,000 people going to our website every single month even though we don’t have as big of a brand recognition. You haven’t heard of Visme or Respona as a product, but if you have a problem that we solved, it’s unlikely you won’t come across it if you’re googling around to find a solution. It works well if you’re in the writing industry.

This is fantastic information. I appreciate you bringing this forth. Let’s talk a little more about keywords. Let’s say I have a sales team. They’re actively hitting the street, hitting social media, and doing everything they’re supposed to do, but I want to supplement this with some incoming type leads. You were saying 60 million active users on Visme. You guys are also on Respona, bringing in about 100,000 inbound eyeballs to your site every single month.

It’s a nice number of people looking there. I’m thinking now, as a business owner that owns a company, I’ve got a sales team of twelve people. They’re hitting the street. They’re going out there and doing their thing. I’m making money, but I’m like, “I got to do something online. This still works. Cold call works, no matter what people think. All of that still works, but I now need an online strategy.” Is SEO my first play? Does it go back to the sticker on the thing, “It depends?”

Should I look at SEO as a viable strategy if my people are searching online? Let’s say my team is doing medical sales, and our targets are looking online. They’re doing research online, trying to figure out what the best hardware pieces that say we represent as well say a medical device representation company. Several people sell it. We’re the best. My twelve salespeople are the top people who do this. Should I be looking at an SEO strategy in that capacity?

I would recommend not at all. For example, for a medical device company, you’re likely dealing with deal sizes that are higher tickets. You’re talking $20,000, $30,000 minimum up to $100,000 plus. These types of deals require a certain level of human touch and also a certain level of connections and getting your foot in the door that you require to have a sales team in order to be successful. I’ll rock them at not touching it at all and move on with the channels that already work and double down on those. Every penny you spend on SEO, you could spend hiring another SDR. You’re losing money by shifting focus by trying to do everything at the same time. Let me give you an example of a company that would be successful with SEO.

We brought on board a new customer. I had a call with the founder. They sell webinar software. As a podcast host, let’s say you want to start hosting webinars. You’re like, “This is an interesting channel. I would love to have live webinars I’d like to offer to my audience.” Either it could be paid or free. What’s the first thing you do when you want to look for a webinar platform and your customer journey as a potential customer?

In my capacity, I would go to Google. I would type in webinar software or something of that capacity.

That’s where you start. This works our way back to the customer. Normally, we understand that there are some bottom-of-the-funnel keywords that are key. These are what we call parent keyword, where any business owner knows what they are. If you are a webinar platform, webinar software, or automated webinar software, however way you want to define or position yourself in the market, it’s your parent keyword. Go and create a landing page or what we call a money page that describes, “We’re a webinar software. Here’s how our platform works. Go sign up for a free trial,” or something like that.

That page on its own is what we call a money page or landing page that you want to put on your website as a way to get bottom-of-the-funnel traffic. You put the software out in the world. Let’s google this. How many search results do you think show up when you go and look for a keyword like a webinar software? You’re competing against 300 million other web pages. How do we get ourselves into the top ten, ideally the top three?

Targeted high intent keywords build up for specific queries. Click To Tweet

In order to do that, we need to establish some topical authority for that keyword. We want to imply to Google and other search engines that, “We’re an authority to resource on webinars.” What you want to do is to start a content marketing strategy, which is saying, “What are some of the other keywords that are more on the top of the funnel?” For example, “How do I start a webinar? What’s the best time to host a webinar? What are some of the best webinar platforms I can use?” These are questions that people are asking that are not necessarily buying intent keywords, but these are educational pieces that you could put together as a form of a blog post and put on your website.

What happens is that it’s going to imply to search engines that this website is about webinars or has a lot of education or pieces of content. What you want is to build that site structure where each one of your blog posts now also references your webinar software parent page that we built in the blog post as well. This is what we call internal links, where you’re creating one parent page and then creating supporting articles, supporting it, and then each one links to that parent page. As SEO consultants, we charge you about $2,000 to $3,000 to tell you that information and many fancy words. That’s pretty much how you build a website that’s primed for a search engine. Create landing pages, build supporting articles, and create internal links.

In our keyword research process, there are a lot of tools out there that tell you some of the keywords you need to prioritize. By webinars, there are gazillion different types of keywords. You can use tools like HREFs or Semrush that give you more insight about each of these keywords, like how competitive this keyword is, how much search volume they get, and how likely it is you’ll be able to rank. You can use that information to prioritize keywords with lower competition, higher volume, and higher commercial intent. That overlapping of those three metrics is a way that you can prioritize these keywords and create content pages according to that user intent. That’s normally the starting point for any SEO strategy.

Let’s go to the last word you said, commercial intent.

I can dig a little deeper in here. Let’s pick a keyword. Let’s say we have a handful of keywords that we want to target. For example, for our blog, we want to start writing content on, “What is a webinar? What’s the best time to host a webinar? What are some of the best tools for creating a webinar?” Any company has limited resources. When there are unlimited options, and keywords are one of those, there are hundreds of millions of variations of the keyword that you can target. You need to build a process that properly helps you prioritize them to start investing your resources in places where it gives you the most amount of value for your buck in the shortest amount of time possible.

We use three metrics to judge keywords and rank them based on those three factors. One is competition. These SEO tools give you a number from 0 to 100. It’s called keyword difficulty. That’s telling you, “How feasible is this keyword to rank for? Is it dominated by Adobe and Google and a bunch of other big websites, like Microsoft, that you don’t stand a chance at? Are they dominated by some of the lower authoritative websites that you are still competitive with?” As time goes on, you become a more authoritative website, going after keywords that are a little more competitive.

Ideally, I at least want to develop. We developed this formula, which I call the Farzad score. The team was like, “No.” We landed on opportunity score. We put together a score that we take these three factors into consideration. One is keyword competition or keyword difficulty. The second one is volume. This one is easy peasy. You want to prioritize keywords that have a certain level of volume. It doesn’t mean you should only go off to keywords that have high volume.

That’s not it. I’m saying the volume is 1 out of the 3 factors that should be taken into consideration when it comes to picking a keyword. If there are two keywords that have the same level of competition or commercial intent, you want to pick the one with the more volume. It only makes sense. A lot of content marketers get a little defensive when I say a volume is part of that score. They were like, “No.” I’m like, “Yes, it is.”

The last one is commercial intent, which you asked about. This one’s a little tricky because commercial intent in and out of itself is subjective. You can’t put a number on intent except that you can. With Google in particular, since they allow advertisers to run ads and advertisers like to make money, there’s a number called cost per click that these SEO tools give you. For this keyword, for example, webinar software, the cost per click is $24. What is webinar is $0.2. From an advertiser perspective, which one do you think has higher commercial intent value?

I would say the $24 one.

Advertisers wouldn’t spend that much money if they were not making money out of that keyword. Even though we’re talking SEO here, which is about organic traffic, not paid ads, we’re still taking metrics from paid ads into our prioritization process. That’s why we want to make sure that we have a process where we take all three into consideration. We plugged those three numbers that we have into a nice little formula. I explained this entire process from A to Z. There’s a free eBook I wrote. We don’t upsell you on anything. It’s completely free. It’s called Visme Marketing eBook. You can download that free eBook. I wrote it myself. It practically gives you an A to Z on how you go about building the right website and doing proper keyword research.

I personally like the Farzad score a heck of a lot better than what they are now.

Thank you. That’s what I’m saying. We should get that going.

I need to talk about the rest of the company and put some persuasion on this. You are the smartest man I’ve ever talked to on this subject. I don’t say that lightly. I have talked to a lot of people. You can explain this in a practical way and lay it out step by step. I appreciate doing this. I want to go to link building because that’s what your company does. Conceptually, they understand, “Link building makes sense. Connect to another higher domain authority website. That raises my awareness because it’s like hanging out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. You get more people talking to you than if you hung around with Doug Brown.”

Different strategies call for different tactics. Click To Tweet

It will depend on the commercial intent of what you’re trying to accomplish and what it is because hanging out with Arnold may not give you the response than hanging out with me would in that regard. A lot of people think about link building as, “It makes sense. If I can get to these high authority sites, it gives me better results in the process,” but probably it depends. Is that the case?

You described it beautifully simply because that’s pretty much it. Put yourself in the shoes of Google as a search engine. Let’s say you have a keyword like a webinar software that has 300 million web pages that contain that keyword. You can argue that quality of content is the number one metric. I want to make sure that the site that loads the fastest and has the best content on it, and it’s optimized for everything. It’s user-friendly, and everyone loves this page. Let’s say you’re in the top 1%. That’s a pretty good percentile for any competition against any webpage. Let’s say at the top 1%, if there are 300 million web pages, you are still in the millions of search results.

You’ve done all the things well. You’ve gone through the process of finding the right keyword, building a web page, making sure you spent a lot of money on content writers and SEO people, and you’re still ranked three million. Nothing outside of that top ten gets any traffic. How do you go about going through 3 million to the top 10? That’s where link-building comes in. Once you have the right foundation for your website, it’s still competitive to get yourself on the search results. What Google does is like a Mean Girls’ popularity contest. That’s the basis of how Google became a company. They came up with this algorithm called page rank, which looks at other web pages in your space.

They’re like, “If other authoritative websites start talking about you by these links that they’re mentioning you and reference to you in their articles, that means that you must be a credible resource.” It becomes interesting, isn’t it? Now your rankings are not only dependent on the content that you put on your website, but that’s also dependent on what other people think about your content and if they’re talking about it. That radically improved the quality of the search results. That’s how Google became the number one search engine in the world. Getting other people to talk about you is pretty much what we define as link building.

There are a lot of negative connotations in the market around it because there’s a lot of spammy stuff that’s been done in the market. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t work simply, this spammy stuff in the long run, because Google is becoming extremely smart and figuring out. It used to work, but over time, they become smart in figuring out what’s naturally done and what’s a fake spammy marketing hack some SEO guy has done. Getting out of the publication of your space on top is pretty much what link building is.

I’m assuming Mr. Page didn’t intend to be the Mean Girls thing in the beginning, but that’s well said. Let’s talk about responding. I know your company does link building, but can you give us a walk-through? I can imagine I’m on the other end reading this, and going, “This is fascinating. It’s overwhelming. Potentially, I got to become an SEO expert in order to understand what Farzad’s talking about,” which you’re breaking down into such simple terms. It’s cool, but I want to get more authority. I want to have better rankings. I get that it depends. Let’s say I want to use your software and your platform. What should I be thinking about?

You can take a free trial, which I highly recommend everyone reading this goes and does. Those of you who know this show know I don’t make that recommendation every time on this show. I have looked at what you do. It’s a credible and top-notch process for what you do. I’m an owner. I’m thinking, “This sounds smart. I need to get some link-building in there. I need to get some more people talking about me through that and need to get more visibility.” What do they do?

First of all, thank you so much for the kind words. I appreciate that. What Respona does is that it helps you find and reach out to any website on the internet. The way link builders in the SEO space use that is by first understanding, “What are some of the websites in our space that we need to build a relationship with?” Respona helps you identify these websites they need to reach out to and then automatically finds the right person in charge at each one of these websites. You can connect your email to connect with the right person at each website to collaborate with them. That was pretty much the basis of the Respona.

I do this thing on Respona, and it connects with them. It shows me their connection components. I reach out to them. What do I say?

There are different strategies you can follow. I’m happy to give you a couple of examples. We have an average strategy guide that I like to send people to normally. It’s step-by-step instructions on what you can do with Respona. Different strategies call for different tactics. Let me give you an example that would make more sense. One of the strategies is going as a guest on other people’s podcasts. A disclaimer here, I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but this is not the only reason why I’m here. It’s a great way for me to meet smart people like yourself and build great relationships. That’s number one.

Also, as a side effect, what happens is that now you’re going to turn this episode, put it on your website, and transcribe this episode. You’re going to have to mention Respona and put a link to our website because it makes sense. Anybody who lands on that page would potentially want to learn more about Respona. You’ll say, “Farzad, Founder of Respona. Here’s the website.” Your website is a high authority website, and you’re getting a link to our platform. Nobody spammed anyone. I added value here by providing you with some content that you can put out. You add value to Respona by talking about us and referencing our website. These types of mutually beneficial collaborations are the type of things you can do for Respona.

For example, the way I landed this interview is one of my colleagues, Vlad, Respona helps you find podcasts interviews that other people in your industry have been on. Say you are a CEO of a webinar company. There are a gazillion different webinar companies where their founders and CMOs are going out to people’s podcasts all the time. Respona helps you find those episodes and then helps you find the contact information of the host of those podcasts.

It gives you their latest episodes and some material that you can send them a personalized page saying, “Doug, I came across your interview with Farzad. I love the fact that he talked about SEO and content marketing. That’s not something that we are looking to implement over at our company. I’m not sure whether you’re still accepting guests. I would love to hop on a show and talk about X, Y, and Z if you’re still open to it.” That’s the type of collaboration from the response. That’s one out of a bunch of different types of strategies you can run.

Folks, for those of you who believe that is true, that happened. That’s why we’re here. For people who are like, “This is great. I want to check this out,” how do they do it?

Go to Respona.com. We offer a free trial, a demo. I highly encourage people that before you go into even start a free trial or sign up for a tool, it’s $99 a month. It’s not going to break the bank or anything, but I recommend you to watch the videos and first understand if this is the right fit for you. We have lots of free educational material, like the Outreach Strategy Hub. We put out a lot of good stuff on our blog. Take a look at those and see if this is something that’s worthwhile for your team to even spend time investigating. If so, then we were more than happy to help you be successful. We offer free onboarding sessions and all that good stuff to help you get up and running ASAP.

Farzad, I want to thank you for being here on the show. You’re opening up and telling people how it’s done. You didn’t hold back. I appreciate that. I know the readers will as well. Maybe you were hoping, “I hope he asked me this question,” and I didn’t or something like that.

You nailed it, Doug. If folks want to connect with me personally within the capacity of Respona, if you have any questions or anything, I’m more than happy to help out. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Farzad Rashidi. There aren’t a whole lot of us out there in the world. We have to practice with Doug a few times. I’m pretty easy to spy on. I stick out like a sore thumb normally everywhere. I’m pretty easy to find. Feel free to reach out. I would love to connect with folks.

Thanks again for being here. I appreciate it. Folks, go up and check out Respona.com. Check out the information first. It’s great content. Therefore, you’ll know if this is right for you. Thanks again for being here. I appreciate you being here.

Thanks for having me, Doug. Thank you.

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That was a heck of a lot to unpack here. He gave me a couple of questions right out of the beginning. I tried to go right into strategy into the right utilizing the strategy into the right channel. He rightfully backed up and said, “Let’s talk about this SEO as a strategy first and if it is good for you.” The first question is, “Are your clients aware of the problem? Are they searching for that in Google?” Those two questions are the questions that you’ve got to ask. Are they aware of the problem that you serve? Are they searching for it online on Google?

You might say, “They’re aware of what I’m selling. They got a problem here. They’ve got an opportunity here.” The second question is important when dealing with anything online, whether you’re building a quiz online, trying to do a workshop online, or trying to market something online. The question is, “Are they searching for it in the way you think they should be searching? Are they searching for in the way that they are searching?” This is a different play there because if they’re searching for it but you have the wrong keywords or think, “It’s coming from my head. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I know what my clients want.” Maybe or maybe not online.

These two questions he gave you are gold if you ask these two questions. If you figure that answer out, now you’ll know whether SEO is right for you or a different type of strategy. There are all kinds of SEO. You could have Amazon SEO. Maybe your clients are searching for it there. Maybe they’re searching on Google, Bing, or in a different place. Maybe they’re not searching at all. Maybe they’re listening for it on podcasts. Where are they searching? Does SEO fit in your play? Does it fit in for the right channel for your client acquisition? Remember, this is not just about let’s get rankings. As we talked about Respona, the company he has, it’s about different link building.

It’s about using link building for client acquisition. It’s about finding that target by using link building. It’s different than if you talk to a company that goes, “Let’s connect you up to the highest authority sites we can connect you out and bump up your SEO.” That’s great, but if people aren’t searching for what you have online, you’re going to spend a lot of money on SEO and link building, and it’s not going to work for you because they’re not responding.

It’s like training companies or a big company that says, “I have a million people on my list.” Great. How many are responding? When that comes down to it, that is the question. How many are responding to the actual ad you’re putting out? How many people are responding to what you’re trying to get them to do? That’s where the rubber meets the road.

Farzad is an expert in this. This is why I’m glad I brought him onto this interview and that we got to get the opportunity to go there. If you found value in this, please reach out to me at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com and let me know, “This was a great episode.” If you want additional content on anything, let us know what that is because we started this show just to give great content.

We never realized it was going to grow into this. We kept delivering great content. Real people, bringing them on. It’s grown in that capacity. You, as the reader, you’re driving this in many places. People are sending stuff and saying, “I want this. I want that. I need something good on SEO. I need something great on SEO.” There’s a difference between those two comments.

Third thing, if you’d like to be a guest, if you are a CEO or a business owner, or you can provide high, heavy content that’s going to knock people out of the box, and you want an option to maybe be a guest on the show, reach out to me at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. My team will pick it up. They’ll have conversations with you, and we’ll see if it’s a fit. Last thing, if you need anything regarding building your teams or getting yourself into the top 1% of sales earners globally or in your market. For example, if you’re in West Virginia making $350,000 a year as a salesperson, if that’s who you are, a coach, a consultant, or a solo business owner, that’s pretty good cash in West Virginia.

If you take that to San Francisco, it’s going to be closer to $1 million. If you take that to Poland, it’s going to be a different number. If you take that to England, it’s going to be a different number, Africa, Australia. You name it. We look at this and say, “How do we get you into the top 1% of earners in selling your products or services for yourself or your company? How do we get your whole team to get selling, so they’re in the top 1%?” As a business owner, you make a ton more money. If you have any desire on and around that subject matter, let me know. Again, reach out to me at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com and @Doug Brown123 on LinkedIn.

The last thing I would ask is if you love this show and haven’t subscribed to it, please, give it a great review. Subscribe to the show. The more subscribers we have, the better our rankings get, the more we can get out to more people, and the more we can help people. If you have friends, refer them, please. I would be grateful. I’m signing off on another excellent episode we had, not because of braggadocious, but because this guy brought the content and delivered it. I’m grateful he did so. Until next time, go out and sell something. Go out and sell a lot of it if you can. Sell it profitably and change people’s lives because sales is about improving other people’s lives. You have the power to do that. To your success.

Important Links

• Respona
• Farzad Rashidi – LinkedIn
• Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• @Doug Brown123 – LinkedIn
• https://Respona.com/link-building-software/
• https://Twitter.com/The_Farzad
• Help.Respona.com/en/collections/3195481-outreach-strategy-hub
• Visme.co/marketing-strategy