Brian Dean Exclusive Interview [+ Why Sell Backlinko?]

Key Takeaways

i'm about to interview brian dean if you don't already know who brian dean is he's kind of a big deal in the seo scene he's got nearly 500 000 subs on youtube he's the owner of exploding topics he has multiple courses on seo and is most prominently known as the owner of backlinko.com a prolific seo blog that ranks for pretty much everything or should i say a former owner brian recently sold backlinko in a multi-million dollar deal to semrush and you can bet your buns i'm going to ask him about it in this interview let's get started brian first up thanks so much for joining us why don't we start off with a brief introduction to who you are and what you're up to in the world of seo so i started i'm most known in the seo world for a blog i started called backlinko that i recently sold to semrush and so i'm not doing as much in the seo world now that i sold the site but i'm still working with semrush on a part-time basis on that yeah nice so let's go through the full timeline like what did you get your education back in back in the day and then how did that end you up in seo well i studied nutrition back in the day that was my thing i wanted to be a dietitian i got a master's in nutrition and i started a phd program in nutrition at purdue university in indiana and i hated it i hated my i hated indiana i hated my sorry indiana people listening to this i hated my advisor it was horrible and i was like i need to get out of here and it was the best thing that ever happened i'm so glad it was horrible to the point where it pushed me to go it wasn't one of those situations where it's like man it's not so bad i can kind of stick it out for a couple years it was like i need to get out it's this sucks so i left and i ended up uh getting a job offer in new york so i'm like perfect as i'm driving there they call me up and they say oh due to the financial crisis there's a hiring freeze so we can't actually hire you this was in 2008. um and i was like okay so i just you know drove instead of driving to new york i drove to my parents house and uh just stayed in the basement just being kind of a bum for a while and i read this book the four-hour work week by timothy ferris and i was like wow okay anyone can be an entrepreneur i thought you know you needed to be some sort of like superhero to do that and i definitely wasn't because i was you know unemployed living in my parents basement so i was far from a superhero and that kind of led me to building websites and learning about seo and you know how to get traffic to these websites that you're building you know i was broke so pay-per-click was out seo was the way and over time i eventually you know created a bunch of sites they failed got hit by an update you know built a bunch of sites those hit by a different update and then in 2012 i sort of put the pieces together with an affiliate site and the personal finance niche that did really well really fast using waiha seo which i had no experience with up to that point and i was like oh this is pretty cool maybe there's you know i want to learn more about this but when when i went to learn more all the advice was vague stuff like create great content build relationships with other people satisfy users there was nothing practical on how to actually do this stuff and i figured if i'm looking for this there's probably more people looking for this than ever so why don't i create a blog that sort of documents what i'm doing in and is the the site that i would want nice nice it's interesting like hearing your story of nutrition being shitty enough to where you were kind of not only forced to look for something else but the crappiness of that makes you dead glued into making a new thing figured out like i had the same experience with electrical engineering kyle roof is a lawyer most lawyers end up hating it after they get the degree and i would say i had to go through that to get to where i am today would you say the nutrition path was a necessary step into becoming brian dean backlinko i think so man because if i didn't do that i would probably have a normal job or something because in my world growing up i never had entrepreneurs in my entire family like both sides up and down i didn't have an uncle that started a business like nothing so for me the idea of starting a business was this crazy idea so it's not like oh if i didn't do that i would have done something else started a sas company or something no it was like it had to be this sort of weird path that introduced me to it because otherwise i had no influences in my life that would have pushed me in that direction yeah god bless tim ferriss right absolutely so what do you what's one thing you wish you knew when you first started with seo uh i think i wish i knew how to like scale up i didn't know how to do that really well i'm still sort of learning it now but i was one of those people who's like i want to do everything myself you know control freak is uh the derogatory term people use but it's accurate that you know and i realized to scale you have to let go quite a bit and if you really want to scale like with a capital s you really have to let go and have you know other people scaling for you so that's something i wish i learned early on i'm glad i was sort of quality control in the beginning but i wish i learned these skills which they are skills to hire people that can create content hire people to help you optimize your stuff hire people to help you build links and then even hire people to you know make the whole thing go it doesn't have to be you totally totally completely agree well let's address that elephant in the room the sale of backlinko to semrush now your site had some crazy stats dr 89 that's freaking hard to do 600 000 traffic per month it used to rank where it still does rank for words like backlinks like that's insane what went into the acquisition and what can you tell us about it yeah so i i can basically talk about anything that's already been revealed at some level publicly so and of course i can always talk about my plans and feelings about it and whatnot but basically it was it was out of the blue an email that i got from someone at semrush that said straight up like we're looking to acquire somebody do you want to be acquired um and i was like maybe like i had been asked about that from other software companies in the space before but i wasn't really interested i was kind of like this is my baby i don't really want to sell it it makes a lot of money you know it's easy like it's not stress it's not a stressful business like it's the perfect business model really so why would i ever want to sell this thing but over time i built this other project called exploding topics and have been spending more time on that working with my co-founder joshua i loved work love working with and it was so it was different it was this new challenge it was a subscription business it was building something from scratch building something that's not a personal brand that had no tie to me now this is cool this is fun and with baklinko i was trying to manage both and it was pretty stressful trying to run two businesses at the same time and this came at a time where i was sort of debating what to do with backlinko should i just you know maybe try to scale that up and have other people involved like um brian uh like has been done with copy blogger back in the day you know try to like make it more of a platform for other writers and other people should i just abandon it and just go all in like i didn't know what to do and this came at the perfect time so i was definitely open to it and within like a week we had the terms at a high level ironed out and then of course due diligence and whatnot took a long time but yeah it was it was perfect timing and i also wanted i didn't want to sell to like a private equity firm you know i wanted to sell to the right partner and semrush was perfect because they have a ton of authority in the space they have a lot of knowledgeable seo people and they really wanted to keep it kind of backlinko as it was as opposed to just absorbing it into some bigger thing so on all levels it was just like a no-brainer for me to say yes yeah that kind of makes sense because i look at dignity marketing itself too and just that's just gonna die someday unless this unexitable personal brand type blog gets the right opportunity and the right opportunity showed up for you you saw an exit you took action it's awesome uh this you touched upon a question that i wanted to ask next like what do they plan to do with the domain are they going to 301 it's let's sit stand-alone or what uh i mean as of right now you can go to the site it's still up um there's no set plans on what to do uh in terms of that can you talk numbers seven figures eight figures nine okay i can't talk numbers because they're a public company it's not even like i can't talk about it contractually which i can't it's also legally because um they're public companies so can't reveal any sort of insider stuff like that but uh it was definitely it was a great offer i think and i'm really happy with it well i guess people will find out eventually because public company they have to show their numbers what they bought and stuff like that so yeah what do you ever look back and think like how the hell did i get here like you were in your basement not too long ago trying to figure out how to do this seo thing you started a blog because you wanted to provide value that didn't exist do you ever think you're going to sell that blog for seven figures oh no no way in hell i didn't think it was going to be anything i mean i thought i didn't think i thought it would be like maybe a couple seo people would read it and it would be interesting and it sort of just took off i mean i i definitely never planned for it to be my main thing at all never mind a business that i would sell to like a public company someday uh that's crazy yeah it's it's absolutely crazy to me so no no it wasn't in the plan at all um and towards the end it was more like it felt more deliberate like oh i wanna you know go from x from point a to point b and i was able to do that from you know seven years of working on the site but in the beginning no it never felt uh it was never planned to be anything more than a little side project yeah it's crazy well all the best ones start off with that way moz was like that too just people blogging about filling a gap for knowledge i'll ask you some more questions about the acquisition later but i want to move on and ask you about your various income streams like where does your income come from if you don't mind giving like a proportionate breakdown of each well until recently it was pretty much 100 courses with backlinko so with backlinko i stopped doing consulting like six or seven years ago i don't do any services so everything was it was 100 course revenue um you know if you don't count crypto and things of that nature but uh and then exploring topics which i launched about two years ago that started to to generate money and became became profitable at a year about a year ago so but that was still only like 10 of my income at that point so i would say exploring topics now well now that semrush just bought back linko it's you know it doesn't bring in any any income for me anymore but with exploring topics at it's you know backlinko's height and exploding topics is you know where it was when i sold it was around 30 of my revenue 70 was backlinko got it i i didn't know the courses went along with the sale that's that's crazy so are you going to continue supporting the courses and creating content for them or is now their baby uh it's going to be collaborative i mean i'm part time working with them for the foreseeable future so that's one of the things that that i hope to be working on actually where that has been announced i'm working on a new course for them that's going to be a seo crash course for beginners which i felt kind of the space lacks is a a video version so to speak of the moz beginner's guide which everyone reads and should read if you're getting started with seo there isn't like a course version of that that like kind of walks you through some of the steps and holds you by the hand so that's essentially what we're creating and that should be ready pretty soon nice nice so i didn't want to let you off the hook and give you a completely free uh free ride on this interview i wanted to give you some challenging questions and the first one i have for you is one piece of criticism that i hear about your content is that a lot of the strategies that you recommend would only work for someone like you someone with a dr89 website that already has traction returning visitors someone with a name that can get data studies out there and stuff like that what do you think of that criticism do you think that it's there's any grain of truth that your tactics don't work for the everyday site and only work for certain types of sites i think it's definitely true that it works better if you have a name and authority and your site is known and you're known as as a an expert in the space for sure i mean i think in business and with seo it's hard man it's hard to build things from scratch and grow it and build it so you should use every advantage you have whether that's an email list a twitter following a tick tock whatever you have you should use it so i it's funny you mentioned that because with exploring topics i'm purposely not you know putting myself out there with any of the stuff we're doing partially because i don't want to do that anymore but also because i kind of want to see how this stuff works without any name recognition so a couple of things i want to point out with that first of all when i started doing these things no one knew who i was and most of the people that i reach out to even today have no idea who i am like we're in this sort of seo bubble like i'm not famous man like no one knows like outside of our little world no one knows who brian dean is so when i email most people they don't know who i am so with exploring topics we tried out two strategies recently that worked well and josh my co-founder did all the outreach or some in some cases we hired basically a va on upwork to do them and they worked great one of them was we found all these pages that listed four or four pages that were cool cool and interesting four or four pages interesting four or four pages um you know four or four pages that are funny and what we did is we looked at all the pages that were listed on those and a lot of them weren't funny or interesting anymore they were just generic four or four pages so it's kind of like broken link building but we had to actually check each link because they were broken because there were four or four so we checked each one and a lot of them maybe 10 of the ones listed were just generic pages now and they had a screenshot of the old one this is so interesting because of x y and z so what we did is at exponential we created an interesting 404 page which was uh you know a page that brings up a topic from our site and you can click on a button and it generates new topics and then we reached out to all these four or four page lists and said hey you have this list from intel intel is on your list it used to be this interesting thing now it's just a generic 404 page if you need a replacement here is our replacement with a screenshot and a little description and again this is the va doing the outreach of josh i didn't do any any of the outreach whatsoever and we had like a 12 conversion rate on that campaign so i think if you if you're creative and provide value this stuff can still work but there's a hundred percent true to the fact that if someone knows who you are knows your site it's gonna work way better it's gonna everything's gonna be so much easier so yeah there's definitely some truth to that well you can build your own recognition and your own brand while you're doing that stuff too it might even be the fuel to what built your brand is these crazy data studies and stuff like that so i mean yeah exactly it's the same thing it's easier to rank in google if your domain rating is you know 100. like of course well you should get your domain rating to be 100 then like what's the point of saying of kind of complaining like go and do it and get there and like you said a lot of this stuff will help build your authority along the way like if your site is not well known and you publish an interesting data study a lot of people can will share that on twitter even if you're not known and then that'll help you get that authority and start building it up will you get fewer shares than if you publish on backlinko of course we get fewer links because people don't know your site of course but it's still a really effective strategy even for smaller sites yeah you gotta start somewhere and you touched upon something that i have a personal maybe a self-doubt about i have this doubt that you could plug me into like a fortune 500 business and i'd be a good marketer for them just because i've always leveraged my personal brand when i start a new business here there or there it's interesting that you're going into exploring topics purposefully trying to handicap yourself is it because you want to see if you can do it or is it because if you want to exit exploding topics it's harder if your name's attached to it yeah it's it's mostly that that i want to have it so it's a business that has no personal brand attached to it for an exit or just scaling in general like you found matt like you can scale a personal brand like gary vaynerchuk you know he's a personal brand but he's also a walking empire so it's possible to do it but i just don't really i don't even want to do that anymore to be honest so for me i want to build a company that doesn't need my personal brand plus like i mentioned outside of the seo world people don't really know who i am so for me to step out i don't think it would even help all that much um so it's not really to be like oh i want to prove it that i can you know build a site without a personal brand if i thought it would help a lot i would probably still do it but i think what really helps with certain businesses if you want to grow them to scale is like a sales team uh you know a funnel that works that's tested and tweaked lowering your churn rate building a great product like those things i'm more focused on now than any personal brand stuff yeah it's not like exploding topics is a direct seo tool where you would maybe disadvantage disadvantage not to use your name and use that to market it like it's kind of a separate separate but similar business yeah yeah yeah i mean yeah if we're targeting seo we branded it as a keyword research tool then of course like i would change my i would do the complete opposite and my face would probably be on the home page but for this it's really for investors and enterprise people to discover trends before they take off some people do use it to find topics to write about but it's not really our main use case yeah sure cool well let's start to dig into some of your seo strategies and practices i want to start off with niche selection how do you decide what's a good niche to get into like why did you decide exploding topics would be a good business to start i mean for me it was also to scratch my own itch a little bit i had seen some trend spotting things out there but nothing really that good like it was more of a i think this is a cool area to get into and i don't see anything solid out there so let's start something now to be clear with exploring topics i bought basically a beta version of it from josh my co-founder and it was an aquahire so he i hired him and now we work on it together so he started what was essentially the beta version of it but i was already working on something similar on my own which was going horribly i hired a developer it was like trash software it didn't work and then i saw this i was like okay well this actually works it's way better so let me just buy it and it's it's worked out great so for me i was already in that space because i knew that like there's google trends and there's other tools that you can use keyword research tools that will show you how a keyword is trending but there was nothing really good for topic discovery like these kind of weird trends that are happening that i wasn't aware of that i should be aware of whether it's in business or marketing or technology it was like these unknown unknowns there really wasn't anything out there to do that so our job is really to bubble up these unknown topics that's what i was trying to build and josh built something way better to start with that was a question i had for later on like what is the difference between exploding topics and google trends it sounds like exploding topics is for discovering what you don't know you don't know because how do you search for that in google trends like what do i not know but uh exactly yeah google trends yeah google trends is fantastic if you want to dig deep into a topic you know already like you can get all the data state by state and country by country and you can compare two trends and see how the trend lines compare over time it's fantastic for that but like you said the problem is you're just staring at a blank search bar and if you don't know about it then it's not really it's hard to discover new trends so yeah we're more of a discovery platform as opposed to a search we're adding more features for kind of a google trends ish thing that you can search for trends and whatnot but for the most part our bread and butter is a technology can find the trends and then we manually curate them to discover the best ones and then add them to this database that people can search through and then we email um and whatnot so yeah it's really just for those unknown unknowns that you every time you see a trend on exploring topics should be like well i didn't even know that existed that's crazy yeah i see tremendous use case for seo like if you have any kind of authority site in where in health and fitness or if you have golf or whatever like you want to monitor health and fitness what is the new supplement that's trending what's the new diet what's the new workout like that's super uh helpful to jump on early so i see tremendous yeah it is we yeah we have we have quite a few media brands that use it for that exact reason especially with product reviews right like what's this product either a specific niche product or a product category that's trending and they could jump on it before you know anyone else does so their competitors are writing about a year later but they're already ranking for it getting traffic doesn't show up on a keyword research tool for like a year because of such a lag period with a lot of those nice nice speaking of keyword research what is your keyword process let me guess you use semrush of course of course so i mean i used to i used semrush way before this ever happened i mean i i posted a screenshot back in the day uh which i had to look up i knew i'd been a stem rush user for a while but i didn't realize i had been a paid customer since 2012. so basically i had been a paid customer for 10 years before the acquisition so i definitely used semrush as my go-to keyword research tool well before this and basically yeah i use two different strategies and that's pretty much it one is uh competitor analysis still probably my favorite it's it's a little bit copyish and you don't get that first mover advantage but nothing beats just putting a competitor and just getting all the keywords that they rank for at the end of the day that's usually the best approach um but also i use you know exploring topics or other tools to try to find uh these kind of lesser known trending topics and then i put them into semrush to get more of a detailed breakdown of them and from there it's just keyword selection i'm getting a little less picky about keyword selection because i'm finding those keyword difficulty estimates are relatively accurate but sometimes you'll find one that seems like impossible to rank for and you rank for it instantly and then you'll find one that seems easy and you can't get near the first page so it's not like that as simple as it seems so for me i'm more looking at commercial intent i'm more looking less at search volume less competition and just looking at the monetization potential that keyword the higher the cost per click the more makes sense for my business yeah the keyword research tool shows it gets 10 searches a month who cares let's go for it it's perfect for us and that's sort of my keyword research processes yeah i still juggle the search you know the search volume the keyword difficulty i look at that stuff but i'm tending to emphasize more and more cost per click got it got it so after you do your keyword research like for a new website what kind of content would you suggest someone starts on first the absolute lowest competition stuff you can find like you want to find negative keyword difficulty if possible like you want to really find something that's super easy because you have no authority but you can still rank for these count if there's nothing there you can rank for it like even if you have no authority yeah um so i would definitely focus on the lowest authority possible i wouldn't worry about that much about search volume about cost per click i'd really just try to just get something out there because if you go after something that's competitive there is a chance you can still rank for it it's very unlikely though and it'll take time so in the meantime you're getting no traffic no traffic no track because i think you go from page seven to page five to page three to page it doesn't make any practical difference like your rank tracker is going crazy like oh your ranking for all this stuff it doesn't bring one extra visitor to your site makes no difference to be on the second page of the fifth page in practical terms but if you target a trending keyword you can get in the first page pretty quickly start to get some traction get some traffic and then and then from there you can build up so that's one of the first things that i would do and for exploring topics when i launched a site it was brand new no authority no nothing and we went after these really low competition terms to start with and now we're starting to target the more competitive stuff but that's only after two years of building up authority and we have a pretty good domain authority and only now we're going after really competitive stuff yeah yeah well it makes sense too i'd like to look at it as like a rock climbing analogy like you have to get those footholds the lower ones in order to reach the top uh taller ones you have to start somewhere it starts with getting like the the little bits of traffic you can um you're a big advocate of what i'm i don't know what to call it home run content like the ultimate definitive guide big statistics pieces and stuff like that data studies what's your argument for these people link to them at the end of the day i mean uh yeah for the most part i mean for the guides it's a little bit different i put them in two separate categories for me the studies are great for getting that little that surge of traffic in the beginning and links over time because studies are just people like talking about them no matter what you find uh people are gonna argue about them on twitter probably especially in our space people are gonna argue about them yeah especially seo twitter they're gonna argue about the findings the people are gonna talk about it people are gonna share it with their colleagues which is an underrated share dark social share you know an email to their people oh i saw the study that found x y and z but more importantly over time people are going to link to that because people really tend to link to data if you look at most links on your competitors they're mostly data i discovered this by accident i was looking at moz and the beginner's guide to seo and seeing who linked to them to see you know how to who's linking to this thing and what i was shocked to find is that literally like 75 of the links were citing this stat from the guide that said like 60 of all google uh searches had never been searched for before and everyone's just citing that stat citing that stat and i was like man this guide is amazing it's provided value so many people i know a lot of the links are citing this one statistic so with the study you have that but like in spades because you have a lot of stats and it's original like their their stat was from google that they they found it so for for you you're actually generating new data that people can use and people start searching for you know click-through rate or you know average diet length or whatever they'll search for these things and because you have so much authority it may not be optimized super well uh for these keywords but you'll still tend to rank for them google sort of shoehorn you in there when possible and you get in sort of this virtuous cycle you get linked to and then you rank better and then every time journalists search for this thing they're going to find you and link to you for guides it's a little bit different guides are more to rank directly because for a lot of these introductory keywords or people don't know where something what something is or they're just kind of learning about it a guide is a perfect format for them they don't want a list of 10 tips uh they don't want a case study they kind of don't even know what the thing is to be honest like that's why you put the what is x it's partially for the featured snippet but also because that person may not have they may have heard it before with you know read it on reddit or something and they go over and like oh let me see what this thing is so you can provide the intro a little bit more intermediate and then advanced all in one page so that's why guides i think are a great format for those specific type of topic keywords okay going back to i guess statistics i don't know what to call this one you're one of your most famous posts at least in my eyes is the we analyzed 250 billion ranking factors and here's what we found the correlation studies like what goes into a piece like that like what's the whole process and where do you get the data from who writes it how do you get it all dressed up and looking good like what's the whole operation look like yeah that is a tough one to cover in a podcast there's a lot that goes into it uh but i could give you sort of the broad strokes the the number one thing is yeah finding the data i recommend if possible finding a data partner this is probably one of those unfair advantages that you talk about you know email uh semrush or another tool and say hey i want to do a study would you provide the data and a lot of times they will now they're not going to provide the the data you can just use they're not like oh here's all the findings and just publish it they'll provide the raw data and then you need a data scientist to go through it and run the correlations i work with someone in germany that did those for me and they did a great job so no matter where the data was whether it was raw or whatever and sometimes it did scraping at the end of the day scraping can be good but if you if you're like i i wouldn't start with one of these like i analyzed x million things and we discovered why that's what i did when i started my first one was that and it was a nightmare i did well at the end of the day but it was so stressful i had no idea what i was doing uh and i was like next i stopped doing them for like a year and a half because i was like that was horrible that was a horrible experience then i realized you don't need to go do the millions of things like two of two studies that we did that were relatively easy um did super well one was a voice search study where we analyzed a bunch of voice searches and literally my someone on my team i bought i sent i bought him a google home and he just asked questions over and over again and recorded the answers with audio and then got them transcribed and our data was done so it didn't you know that's all it took and then at the end of the day we just ran some simple correlations we hired someone from upwork to do them and that was it we did another one which was looking at b2b content marketing where we just had someone manually look at i think it was like a couple hundred b2b blogs and look at some of the factors that they had whether they have comments whether they have share buttons the content length simple stuff and that was interesting that was cool because no one had done that and it only required a sample size of like so it didn't require this massive data set or all this crap so it was much easier to do and with the visuals i mean that's just finding a good designer to turn them into charts someone that's really good at data visualization you can find someone at upwork or 99designs to do those for you and then you have a pretty awesome piece of content you have some original data you have some cool visuals that people can use that's going to be better that's probably going to perform better than uh you know 10 tips for whatever generic post yeah yeah how about the writing itself do you actually take the data analyze what your data sciences serves up for you and actually do the writing for the content or do you hire writers if so okay so it's you do you write every single piece of content that went on backlinko uh for the most part there's a couple i didn't and i always cite when someone contributed or wrote um for the site for the sake of transparency but like 95 plus percent was me like for example with i have this thing called the content marketing hub on backlinko and that's something that kyle buyers from growth badger helped me with uh he wrote a lot of the content he helped me find a lot of the topics so that was a collaborative effort so when i you know announced that hub i said thanks to kyle buyers for helping you know contribute a lot of the pieces for this so yeah i mean it's 95 me and whenever it wasn't i always made sure to cite that person so yeah people knew that damn what an effort dude congrats what about exploding topics because brian dean's not running the show anymore you're getting some no i'm basically editor-in-chief of the blog uh i don't write anything for that i think i wrote one post maybe when we first started but now um it's just 100 freelance writers and we scaled that up we're writing we're publishing like three or four posts a week now um but as of as of now they all get edited and approved by me i just don't trust anyone else to you know have that level of that standard that we need for everything to get published on the blog and it's working that's another reason like it's working we've you know right now the blog gets about 100 thousand visitors a month and that's about 10 times what it was at this time last year and we're probably on track for like 200 000 at the end of the year so i don't want to mess up that process and it's not that hard to i realize how much easier it is to edit something than write something it's infinitely easier especially when you hire good people you know if you're getting people are sending you crap it is really difficult to edit it's time consuming and frustrating but at this point from hiring a hundred literally a hundred writers probably for exploring topics we're at like five or four that deliver great work consistently so it's just a matter of like me being nitpicky about x y and z and sending it back and usually it's pretty good to go after that um the hardest part is just finding topics sending it to and make sure all writers have something they're working on making sure it actually gets published like it's really just an execution game at this point and in a scale game yeah where do you find the writers though where do you find your a player writers on upwork hmm okay sweet cool um i got some more questions about content one is a challenge for this idea of the definitive guide right so there's this movement right now for it's been around forever but topical authority is like a hot topic in seo right now where if i wanted to rank for best protein powder it's not going to work to write the definitive guide on protein powder and just do the best piece of content you have to write all the supporting content and become a topical authority on protein talk about what is protein can protein get you fat does do chestnuts have protein like all this different stuff do you think that simply writing the best piece of content single piece of content when something is good enough where you do you need to get into this whole topical map type stuff i'm not a big believer in the topical map and the reason is just because i've seen so many exceptions to the rule that i don't think it's required i don't necessarily i'm not saying it's not it's without merit i think there's merit to it but i've seen you know like jamesclear.com rank number one for like intermittent fasting for years even though the site has nothing else about intermittent fasting on the site uh backlinko we created a lot of stats pages last year about different companies like how many users they have and things like that and we have ranked number one in google for like how many teslas are sold each year we have nothing else about tesla anywhere on the site not even mentioned and these are pretty competitive keywords so i don't i think it helps like it's always better if you can do that but i don't think it's like i like for exploring topics i've never once mapped out any sort of topical authority which we just go after individual keywords because at the end of the day why would google rank a page better just because you wrote a bunch of stuff related to it it doesn't mean that's any good like i published this guide to protein and then i publish six other articles about protein on my site that are garbage or even if they're good they don't have any links or any authority why would google say oh this guy must be an external protein he wrote six articles about protein that's impressive he must know what he's talking about that's not really how the algorithm works it wants to find the best result for that keyword and most of that comes from how people interact with that specific page and also the authority of the site and the page neither of which has a ton to do with how many supporting articles that you wrote so for me i think it's it's nice if you can do it and usually that'll naturally happen anyway because you just usually cover one topic pretty thoroughly but i don't think it's required to rank sure yeah the reason i wanted to ask you that is because i remember when backlinko was small like there's only a few 30 40 pages or something like that yet you were ranking for backlinks like that's challenging and there's probably 50 articles or 200 articles you could write about backlinks anchor text and all this type of stuff so it's an interesting um yeah approach i i i guess you could say like everything is an seo technique right topical authority is an seo technique backlinks are an seo technique if you're doing only one of them maybe it'll work by itself maybe it won't but when you combine all these things together like if you have a bunch of backlinks if you have dr 89 maybe you don't need to worry about that kind of stuff if you don't want to build backlinks then you do need to have perfect topical authority or whatever that is i i guess it's just kind of like looking at these things in isolation but in real world practice why would you ever do anything in isolation seo you get all the guns running right away you know yeah that's a good point matt i think that's probably what it comes down to when you see these exceptions they're probably you know exceptional in some way um but i want to answer your question specifically because you're asking if it's required and yeah yeah i don't like i said i don't think it is but like i said it could probably help and and why would you not do something that could help you if you want to get it all together but in my opinion like i said most of the time you're gonna hit the stuff naturally anyway like if you're selling protein powder on your site you have an ecommerce protein powder site and you have a blog you're going to be talking about protein all the time so you don't need this keyword mapping stuff i think it's just going to happen sort of naturally fair point fair point here's another question about like the data studies and stuff like this we kind of touched upon this earlier so i've done a data study or two on dignity marketing but i would never put that kind of investment in for like one of my rinky dink affiliate sites that only gets like organic traffic and doesn't have like a brand unless i had like a pre-ordained and pre-planned like outreach plan with journalists lined up and stuff like that do you think that there's a risk for the everyday like affiliate blogger to to put all this investment into a data study yeah i mean there's always a there's no guarantee that anything you do in marketing is going to work so and that's and with a marketing with a big study that's why i don't recommend doing these million things because they're really expensive and time consuming to run and like you said it could be a total dud you know you reach out to these bloggers you're talking as journalists and it's just crickets i wouldn't say you wasted your time but it was it's pretty close and you wasted a lot of time and a lot of money so if you're an if you're a rinky dink affiliate site first of all i wouldn't recommend being a ricky link affiliate site because you're so at risk of getting destroyed in an update but um the more you build up authority you're a little bit more durable to update so the number one thing i would recommend in that case is creating like original data without a lot of effort like i mentioned those sort of scan 100 websites in the protein powder that sell protein powder and come up with the average price of protein powder now you have that piece of data on your site so when people search average price of protein powder you're going to show up and a lot of those people are bloggers and journalists and that's what i'm finding from doing a lot of this for exploring topics is we're creating stat pages like crazy some of it's original some of it's not but the key is to get in front of people as they're searching i call it reverse outreach so instead of reaching out to journalists you're getting in front of them when they're searching for for data and a lot of times if you're targeting like protein powder stats it's probably going to be competitive and you won't have a chance but average price of protein powder that's something that journalists are searching for that you know there's almost no competition for it and there's a high link intent like those people are probably searching for a source um or what's the biggest protein powder company what's the biggest supplement company those are journalists and then they're going to cite you and a lot of times they'll cite these random sites like if you look at these they don't they're just rushed or lazy or both they don't care what your domain writing is they don't know what domain authority is they just see a stat that they can cite in their article it makes it look a little bit more legit or maybe their editorial process requires you know four external links so they add it um and that so that's what i would recommend in terms of stats not this huge study like you said matt because there's a huge there's a risk that it could just fall flat and we've published some that didn't do well uh that and it's totally unpredictable i have some that i'm like yeah let's give it a try it's you know pretty we have a data provider that'll hook us up with the data i can write it in like a couple hours let's put it out there and it crushes and we have others that i'm like press release uh journalist plan i'm gonna do all this stuff and it doesn't work so it's not totally in your control a lot of it's randomness so that's why i recommend if you're gonna go this route definitely start small yeah i got it here's a community question regarding content what's your thoughts on this emergence of ai content writers and how does that fit into the content game [Music] um i mean i have mixed feelings about them every time i try one at first i'm always like this is unbelievable this is skynet like we're all gonna get taken over by robots like we're dead then when you actually use it for a little while longer like this doesn't even really make sense uh it's it's a little hit or miss but for most topics they don't really deliver anything that great so my feeling is there's there's content that's just like beginner here's the basic information on something here's sort of a summary of what's out there it can actually do that pretty well you're basically already if you hire people on upwork or anywhere else who just regurgitate they're basically an ai that's just doing it for you right they just have five tabs open they're having it processed in their brain and just regurgitating it it's exactly what the ai is doing it's just a human this is the only difference if you want something truly original and researched that's what can separate you that's why for exploring topics we're really focusing on like highly researched content that ai can't do ai never cites a source they never link to anything they don't self update they don't have they don't add visuals like we're just trying to do that stuff so it's we don't have to worry about ai if you're going after stuff that if you see ai content and you're like oh my god our entire site is like this you might be in trouble honestly um so for me i think there's for that sort of introductory stuff it actually does a pretty good job especially with human editing or for creating content briefs or outlines it can do that pretty well um but i'm not i don't see it as a huge threat sure sure no skynet yet folks let's talk about um on-site optimization how do you do you define like silo structures like this perfect silo tree and like uniform interlinking like how do you go about that not at all man i am i am though i like to keep things really simple when it comes to seo i you know do interlinking basically with editors when they edit stuff i tell them just link to whatever makes sense for the most part and maybe there's a higher priority page that we want to add an internal link to but that's about it for me i'm old school with internal linking it sends authority from one page to another it keeps people on your site longer those are my two goals i don't map anything i don't have silos or or what are they called content hubs or anything like that i mean i have hubs on backlinko but they're not there was nothing strategic about the topics they were just what about content marketing would people want these sort of introductory sort of wikipedia style articles about and then they're interlinked because they're all in the hub so i think that probably helps maybe a little bit but i haven't seen a huge difference in how those perform versus like a random blog post that has some you know internal links pointing to it sure keep it simple um let's get into link building i heard you like it my first question is how big is your pbn network i'm just kidding what was the most pivotal backlink technique that helped backlinko it was 100 to skyscraper technique okay yeah i was starting out with oh go ahead matt sorry no no please i was just going to ask you about skyscraper go ahead yeah i mean i was just starting when backlinko was a rinky dink blog that no one knew about and i was starting to you know i was posting on the warrior forum to get traffic like that's where i was at and i would check my google analytics and it was pretty flat for a while because you know seo just takes time to kick in so i was like i knew this stuff would probably rank but i was like in the meantime kind of what do i do so i created this 200 ranking factors post infamous now google ranking factors post and did a bunch of manual outreach to get people to link to it and it worked great and that gave me the fodder that i could write the skyscraper technique case study and that's really what sort of put the site on the map and put me on the map was that case study but the technique itself was also huge because i built like a dozen links that were pretty good to this page and when you have two links a dozen new links can make a huge difference to your rankings and traffic and it did sure nice nice dude when i try skyscraper these days first off i don't try it anymore because i gave up but when i try it these days the only websites that respond that i would actually accept a link from counter with money is that just how it is or am i doing something wrong i mean it's how it is if you the quality of your applies to outreach is usually a reflection of your quality of your outreach so garbage in garbage out like if you send a generic hey i was looking up blah blah blah today and i came across your thing and i found this other thing yeah that's that's sort of transparent stuff is just gonna get a generic reply in return but if you're able to do something creative unique like i said with the four or four page uh campaign that we did that can work or even just old school broken link building where the blink is broken and you have something that's better than the original then a lot of