263: Why Your SEO Strategy Isn’t Working - with Alan Silvestri

Matt Wolach: 0:10

Have you ever tried to start something new that somebody said was going to be great like SEO? And you're like, Okay, we're gonna do it, we're gonna write all these articles, and then it just doesn't work. But there might be something that you're missing that everybody else knows, or at least the top players know that you don't. And with SEO that can be link building because you need backlinks back to your content for it to actually get seen and to start working. But how do you do link building? How do you even set that up? Or where do you go? Well, I had Alan Silvestri on he is awesome. He's with growth gorilla. And what he does is he helps B2B SaaS companies set up link building so that they can get an awesome bit of quality backlinks to their product to their content so they can get amazing SEO results, he actually lays out the exact step by step on how to do this. So you can go do it yourself. You're gonna love this one.

Intro/ Outro: 0:58

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach.

Matt Wolach: 1:14

Hello, and welcome to Scale Your SaaS. Thank you very much for joining us. super glad to have you here. My name is Matt. And my job is to help you scale your SaaS that's through growing with unbelievable marketing tactics and strategies, great sales, closing strategies, ways to grow your team and have other people doing this for you and all combining that. So definitely subscribe to the show. You're going to hear all kinds of tips and tactics and strategies for doing all those fun things and scaling your SaaS and today I am super elated to be joined by Alan Silvestri. Alan, how you doing? Hey, Matt. It's

Alan Silvestri: 1:45

great to be here. I love the intro super enthusiastic. And like you almost scared me there for a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Glad to be here.

Matt Wolach: 1:54

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Alan, you are in the UK, of course, as you know, and everybody else out there now knows. But if that's the case, when I meet with somebody who's in Europe, I need to get up early. So it's 7am. And I had to get up and I get myself mentally ready to be energetic this morning for you all. So Alan, let me make sure I share with the audience who you are. So Alan is the founder and CEO at Growth Gorilla. Really what he does, he helps B2B SaaS companies promote their content to get high quality publishers to link to it. This increases traffic signups and it really helps you win the SEO game. And one thing I really love about Allen personally, he's a Back to the Future fanatic, one of my favorite trilogies, and he drives a DeLorean daily. So that's his real car is what he told me, which I think is pretty amazing. That's awesome, man.

Alan Silvestri: 2:39

Yeah, like we go grocery shopping. So it's kind of fun every time to see people's faces when they see the car. Yeah, it's nice. I can

Matt Wolach: 2:47

imagine I would be lighten up myself. But well, super, super glad to have you here. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you very much.

Alan Silvestri: 2:53

Yeah. Thank you for connecting. And yeah, it's great to be here and looking forward to dive into some Sask on the promotion and growth. That's,

Matt Wolach: 3:00

that's awesome. So tell me for yourself. What have you been up to lately? And what's coming up?

Alan Silvestri: 3:04

Yeah, so we just recently launched our like, our own podcast for growth gorilla, which is called promoter die like a whole 80s vibe as well, which kind of makes sense, because that's my whole obsession, right? So really happy to have finally launched this thing. It's been like, like I've been procrastinating for like a year. So it's live. Now we are like, like an episode three or four, something like that. So yeah, super glad to be doing that. And I'm also working on launching an online course later next quarter, that's going to cover exactly what we do our process and everything. So that's going to be something cool for people that maybe don't have the full budget to work with us on like a full project or monthly retainer. So yeah, be quite busy in q1 this year with these two couple things are yet it's all kinds of stuff.

Matt Wolach: 3:44

Yeah, definitely a podcast keeps you busy. I know that but it's a lot of fun, and definitely a great learning experience. So kudos to you on getting that going. And good luck with that as you go. And by the way, I love that you're such an 80s fanatic for those of you who are listening and not able to see on YouTube. He's got a bunch of posters back there. And I see Home Alone posters got a lot going on. That's pretty cool, man. Are you have you ever read the book? Ready Player One session? Oh, sorry. Have you read Ready Player One?

Alan Silvestri: 4:07

Yeah. So I read the book. And I also loved the movie. So yeah, I loved the Back to the Future references in there. Now there was a great book. Yeah, definitely my vibe.

Matt Wolach: 4:15

Yeah, for everybody out there who hasn't read that or seen the movie ready. Player one is all about the 80s It's futuristic people in the future. But they realized that really the 80s was the peak of civilization. So everyone loves stuff from the 80s. And so it's filled with all kinds of 80s Great stuff, but Okay, back to real real stuff. Let's Let's grow some businesses. So I know that what you're doing with growth gorilla does awesome stuff with helping people grow, especially around link building and getting content promoted. But why is link building so important?

Alan Silvestri: 4:43

So the way that I got into Link building is I have a background in affiliate websites. That's how I got started into SEO. Essentially, after working nine years in an office job. I had like a career change, and I started working with affiliate websites. So I noticed specifically in more competitive spaces, the links were are like the ultimate weapon, you know, like to rank for difficult topics, you need to actually be proactive and build backlinks. So this is how I sort of came up with my own process and framework that we do today is still similar. We like improved a lot of things. But it's still kind of the same process that I developed when I was working on your affiliate websites. And then the the other thing that kind of got me to start a link building specific agency is I saw an article by Ahrefs, there was a research study where essentially, they found how 91% Of all the content that gets published, don't get any traffic from Google. And the number one reason that they found in this study is because the content didn't have any backlinks. So backlinks is still one of the main kind of ranking factors. So yeah, I think it's a real need. And people really should think in a proactive way about it and not just treat it as like a latest kind of thing to do basically down the line, you know, so yeah, this is how I got involved into the link building world.

Matt Wolach: 5:54

I love it. So you created growth gorilla from that, and I'm sure that some of those early days were pretty interesting trying to figure out how you would help people and exactly what you would do for them. Was that pretty interesting in those early times to start working with some of your new clients?

Alan Silvestri: 6:08

Yeah, definitely. I think I started, it was only me doing all the work. And I found the first client on our Facebook group that was all focused on SAS founders. So I was like, Hey, I saw that you have a lot of like good quality content, I could help you with your link building for like $400 a month, you know, something like stupidly cheap. So obviously, they accepted as like a trial. Because started I was working for them just me doing everything for like six months, we started seeing some good results. And so at that point, I was able to charge a little bit more so that then I could delegate some of the more repetitive parts of the process to one VA essentially, and this is how I got started, I was like, this is interesting. If I can do this at a bigger scale, then I might be able to start an agency. So at that point, I just was able to use the case studies and the results from the first client to find more people that were interested in the mind need the service in the same kind of niche SAS. So the reason why I also got involved in SAS is because my brother was already working as a copywriter in the SAS space. And so he was telling me a few things how, for example, most of the SAS founders as marketers is young people, you know, they know what SEO is, they know what Link building is. So I didn't need to do the hard sell with them. So so it was very self explanatory, essentially what we do. So that helped in the beginning to get started. And yeah, got the first few results, I was able to slowly scale up with clients get more team members, and now we are 10 people with between like 10 to 15 clients at any given time, essentially,

Matt Wolach: 7:32

that's awesome. I love that story. And it's something that we can learn from several different pieces there that I want to point out. So if you're out there listening one, when you get started, it's totally okay to charge something less than you actually will in the future. In fact, I know a few people who give away their tool or solution or in your case, as an agency, your service for free even just to prove you can do it, get some people thinking about okay, this is this is pretty cool. And to get some great testimonials, some case studies, some awesome stories from clients so that you can use that with other clients to grow and get other people attracted to your business. And so you definitely can go in for free and or like you said, very cheap, right and do things that don't scale. So obviously, it wouldn't work to get 10 or 15 clients for you to do all the work on that. But initially, when you get started, you have to and you got to do some things that maybe aren't going to be the way you do it in the future, the way you do it at scale. But if you do it that way that helps you learn the process, make sure that you're over delivering for your early clients, and you're able to get some awesome results. I love how you did that. Alan, I just want to make sure everybody out there understands that sometimes that's what you have to do when you get started. It's a little bit cheaper than you'd like. And it's not exactly as as scalable. But it helps you get to that point, right. Yeah, obviously,

Alan Silvestri: 8:42

I mean, you need to have something to support you. Right. So I did still have the affiliate website, given me some revenue. So I was able to kind of justify charging less, you know, the beginning otherwise, I would have like really been able to do that. So yeah, make sure that you have some kind of support so that then you can start whatever it is that you want to start new product, new business and you can afford to charge less essentially in the beginning. Love it.

Matt Wolach: 9:02

Okay, so can you walk us through the process of building some high quality backlinks? How would somebody even do that? Yeah. So

Alan Silvestri: 9:08

the main thing that I like to always mention is a lot of companies that just focus when it comes to backlinks, they focus on metrics, you know, so they think, oh, we need 10 backlinks domain rating or domain authority 20 Plus Whatever 30 Whatever is the metric. That's because there's a lot of articles out there that have popularized this notion that metrics are everything and they tell you the quality of the backlinks. That's not necessarily true. For me, the most important thing is number one to figure out exactly figure out which pages do you want to promote? Right so the reason for this is because if you build backlinks to pages that are super top of the funnel, those might bring in traffic maybe if they rank higher, but the traffic might not have a lot of buyer intent. So that one doing like really well for your business. Okay, so for us the main goal is to bring in more signups and more revenue for the client. So what we do first is to figure out which basis we want to promote to do that we start off By like defining what keywords are pages pages that already have some existing backlinks, you know, some existing traffic maybe ranking bottom of page one, page two, then we can essentially push them higher with just a couple of extra backlinks. Because those are pages that Google essentially likes already, you know, so it's typically easier to push those higher than pages that are ranking position 100 into beta one. The second thing is, once you have established which pages have some potential they already ranking well, you need to figure out whether these pages have some business potential. So if you have, like 30 pages, then do like a shortlist to come up with the 10 pages that have some actual business potential, some sign up potential, some conversion, you know, so you should have some data on that we usually get input from the clients on this. So at this point in the analysis, we get in touch with the client, and we tell them, Okay, we have this 50 pages when you please mark like 10 or 20 of these that you think are the ones with the most business potential. Once that's done, we have this shortlist of pages that already doing quite well that have business potential. So the next step is to figure out the link capability or the rank ability potential, right. So the competition essentially find pages that have low competition in between the batch. So to do that, we have a look to make sure that the page is matching the search intent behind the keyword that we want to rank it higher for that's matching the content type and this matching the content quality. So these three things are key, essentially, to make sure that you can actually rank because otherwise, if you're not matching the search intent, the content type and your content is not up to par to what's already ranking, then it's going to be very difficult, even with good quality backlinks to be able to rank in there. So once that's done, we have a list of the best possible pages to rank higher. Right. So the next step is to figure out the types and the quantity of backlinks that we need. That's another three step process. So number one is to figure out the link gap. So how many backlinks do we need to be able to close the gap with the competition. To do this, we take a look at the average like referring domain for the top 10 ranking pages. And we also have a look at how many new backlinks these pages are building every month, then we did this calculation that can tell us more or less how many links we need to build per month for the next six months, for example. Okay, then the next two steps is to determine the Link Type. This is in terms of domain level metrics and page level metrics, because a lot of people only think about domain rating domain authority, but they forget to remember that your link is going to be placed on in like an individual URL, right, so an individual page. So if the domain is very high domain rating, but the page is ranking nowhere, it doesn't have any traffic and doesn't have any backlinks pointing to it, your link is not going to be as effective. So we look at specific domain and page level metrics that we can use to target then the last thing is topical relevance. So making sure that your links are placed on pages that are relevant to your target topic, and that the anchor text that's being used is relevant as well. These are the key things that you need to do to be able to even start right. So like before you even started doing the outreach, this is everything that you should be thinking about, then the next step is obviously to do prospecting, find all the sites that you want to reach out to find the email accounts and then send out the emails to these people to convince them to link to you.

Matt Wolach: 13:01

I love that it's an amazing process. And it looks like by the way, folks, sometimes people come on the show, and they like yeah, here's kind of the general idea. Elon just gave you the exact step by step for what to do. That's pretty fantastic for him to do that. And I hope you guys have taken notes and hopefully pause and go back now. It's amazing what he does. But it's also a lot like there's a lot in there happening for me, I'm like, Yeah, I'll go get some links. And then you started explaining that I'm like, I don't want to do that. And I don't want my team is like so focused on other stuff, there's no way we could do that. So that's why I would highly recommend just contact Alan and just have his team do it's gonna be cheaper than what you can afford, probably a lot better. But if you want to try it yourself, go ahead and give it a shot. I just read these out loud. So but what I heard in there, Allen, a lot of good stuff. And it sounds like a lot of it starts with good content. And so do you advise your clients on some of the best things to do with their content or some of the best topics based on their niche?

Alan Silvestri: 13:52

Yeah, so I would say content quality is very, very important. One of the things that we look at in the roadmapping process to select the best possible pages is also as I said, to make sure that the content is matching the content quality in there with the top 10 ranking pages. Because if your content is not the best possible resource on the given topic, then it's going to be more difficult for us to get links to it. So there's a couple of things that we do. We run the content through surfer SEO, which is a content audit tool that gives the client some recommendations on things that they can fix on the page to improve the on page optimization, but also things like internal linking to like get the link juice to flow better throughout the site. That's always helps. So yeah, I will say the main thing is to make the content actionable to make it some kind of like newsworthy, and that doesn't mean that the whole article should be newsworthy. You can have some examples, small paragraph inside the article with some new statistics, some new data or quotes that people can actually use to mention in their article with the link. So yeah, this small things. The other thing is media elements. So have like custom graphics, custom images, shareable kind of elements, all these things that make the content more linkable and easily shareable with people. There's always help me the best thing and also to make sure that content matches the search intent and the content type. That's the most important thing. So you really need to figure out what the person that is looking for the target keywords is expecting to find and try to anticipate that. So the usual process is just have a look at the top 10 ranking pages try to do better than what they're doing. But that's not necessarily true. Sometimes you might get away with just having a contrarian view or like a different perspective on the same topic, because Google is always testing results, you know, so it doesn't necessarily mean that what Google is showing you on page one is what it will show you in three months, for example, it's always good to try and be different, right? So either better or different. Those are the two key factors. I think

Matt Wolach: 15:37

I love that. So what are some of the mistakes that early stage companies are making with regard to their growth strategies.

Alan Silvestri: 15:43

So I would say in terms of the mistakes for growth strategies, in general, the key thing that we've seen a lot is in terms of content strategy, if we're talking about content marketing, they don't really have a content strategy well thought out, right. So they're just publishing content, targeting random keywords that they find interesting, or that they think they might want to rank for. But at the end of the day, you really need to cover the three stages of the funnel, I think so having a top of the funnel kind of content strategy, then a middle of the funnel and a bottom of the funnel, so that then you can guide your audience throughout the funnel, and all the way to the conversion. So that's the main thing, having a content strategy that works. Otherwise, the links that we build are not going to do anything for you. Because we can't really build backlinks to articles that are like, Oh, we just launched this feature, you know, that doesn't do anything for anyone. So the other thing is finding product market fit, some companies come to us and then we look at the website. And it's not really clear what they're doing. The product is not very well defined yet. So So we tell them like it's too early, make sure that you find your product that you find your audience first. And then once we have the content for that, then you can come to us. The other thing is maybe some companies rely too much on just one strategy for growth, right. So maybe they just rely on SEO. And so I think in the early stages, it's important to experiment with a few different things, maybe not too many, but just a couple of different tactics or strategies for growth, figure out which ones work best for you. And then maybe you can do 80% on SEO, for example, if that's the best one for you, and then the rest 20% Spread it out between maybe two other kind of tactics, you know, and the last thing is, I will say they don't track metrics, or they don't track anything at all. So a lot of companies when they come to us, and we ask them for their input in terms of which pages have the most business potential, they don't even have anything in place to be able to measure that. And so we're kinda left in the dark, you know. So I will say these are the main kind of mistakes in terms of growth in terms of content promotion, in general. Some other mistakes is some people focus too much on quantity versus quality. So maybe they use too much automation, they do like a shotgun approach in their campaigns. And that doesn't really bring them results. So what happens is they get discouraged. And they simply quit. And they stopped doing promotion, which this leads to what I call the content graveyard. Basically, they say link building doesn't work, content, promotion doesn't work, it's too difficult to do. So what they do is they simply get to a point where they quit and all the content will will be left into page one and not really doing anything for them. And they will simply keep pumping out content in the hope they will magically rank. But as you know, that doesn't happen very often. So yeah, I will say these are the key things. So a lack of strategy or lack of maybe experimentation. And the other thing is finding product market fit. That's probably the first kind of mistake. Wow,

Matt Wolach: 18:22

it was super awesome breakdown. So as we wrap and as we close, if you were to give one piece of advice to software leaders who are trying to you know, grow and they've got SEO as a strategy, and they want to make sure that they include link building in that what advice would you give to them? I will

Alan Silvestri: 18:35

say to start out Yeah, make sure that you have product market fit. So you know, your audience, you know, the pain points are the audience then create content that's targeting those pain points, because those are typically low hanging fruit keywords with less competition, try to rank for those because that can give you some revenue, like traffic and revenue pretty fast considering the low competition and yeah, then you can typically scale up from that. But yeah, start with the low competition, pain, point driven content and build up from that. A lot

Matt Wolach: 19:00

of great advice. This has been awesome. Alan, how can our audience learn more about you and growth gorilla?

Alan Silvestri: 19:05

Yeah, so the best way is to reach out to me on Twitter at Allen G gorilla. Or you can find us on our website, which is my growth gorilla.com or LinkedIn as well. I have my LinkedIn page which is honestly the best.

Matt Wolach: 19:16

Okay, perfect. And we'll put all that into the show notes or in the description down below. So well thank you. This has been awesome. Allen, really appreciate you coming in and laying it all out for us.

Alan Silvestri: 19:24

Yeah, thank you, Matt. It's been a pleasure. And yeah, it was good to connect as well.

Matt Wolach: 19:28

Likewise and everybody out there. Thank you for coming. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel. You do not want to miss out on any awesome tips and tricks coming up in the next few weeks. Like what Alex just

Intro/ Outro: 19:37

shared. Finding great leads and closing more deals go to Mattwolach.com