Thomas Toles: Hey, guys. I'm Thomas from Single Grain, and today we're looking at five of our favorite SEO tactics from Eric's Growth Everywhere podcast. Check it out.

Jillien Helman: You know, our sort of marketing goal is be omnipresent, so we do all the traditional online stuff, Google, Bing, Facebook, search engine marketing, digital advertising, all that good stuff. We spent a lot of time and energy on SEO, so we've written probably close to 500 blog posts now and those tend to be all educational, you know to drive ... Really twofold, one, I'd say the primary objective there is really to educate our consumer because we want people to be educated about real estate and then two, is to drive SEOs.
When people are searching for real estate terms on Google it will populate through our educational content. And we also do offline stuff. We do a lot of events. We meet, all of the real estate companies that we do business with, we meet in person still. So those offline events help us a lot on that side of our business. We're a two-sided market place because we'll got investors on one side and real estate companies on the other so we're omnichannel and our goal is to be omnipresent.

Glen Allsop: Yeah. So a few different angles I would take. First of all I'd make sure that your site is set up so that if I am going to get you links and traffic and it's actually going to convert for you. It's not just about ranking higher on Google. It's about, if I send you visitors would they go and buy your product, download your service? Do you have split testing in place? It's a little bit more than just ranking in Google.
It's actually making sure how you'll be able to take advantage of the traffic. Another thing I would do is, I would go and analyze what you're trying to rank for, so to make sure we're on the same page. And I can give you content ideas and stuff for the blog that would not only be relevant for your audience but actually have the opportunity of getting you search traffic. We'd go and look at your competitors if there are any, and see what they're ranking for in Google and how they are ranking?
So where are they getting their links from, and are there any places that you can replicate to get links from? And then, mostly just ... Again, when it's a big brand you have to do things differently. When it's a smaller company they don't really care and they can create a new website if they have any issues, the work I'm going to do could be different for them.

Bryce Welker: My background, I guess is in SEO. Ninety-five percent of our traffic is from SEO. And back in the day, I built a website and I did not know how to get people to it. The problem was, there was just a lot of information out there on the internet that just isn't very accurate or it's people talking about it, but aren't actually making money. And so I basically took it under my core competency to actually put up, do a bunch of case studies, and a bunch of tests about what does actually work?
What does actually work? The thing about our traffic, is it's highly targeted so we target very, very buyer intensive keywords like best XYZ, top XYZ, review related terms. So the bulk of our traffic isn't from stuff that people aren't just in the informational part of the buying cycle where they're just researching, it's actually where they're at the very end of that funnel where they've got their credit card out. And they just want to know, which one is the best, and how can I compare the best choices side by side? That's kind of where we come in.

G. Weinberg: You know, people do not start traction early enough and this, people really get tripped up at and the way to see this the easiest is to think of the leaky bucket metaphors. So your product is a bucket and it has holes in it when you start because you're just getting started and it's not the perfect product, and customers are leaking out.
And so when people think about getting traction, they think, I've got to wait until I have my product ready to launch till I plug these holes because if I pour customers in the top and customers is usually money, it's just going to flow out and I'm wasting time and effort. And so that's the intuitive response and that's what many of the people do.
Unfortunately, that is the wrong approach because what happens is, if you don't have a cold stream of customers coming through, there is some little traction efforts. It doesn't have to cost a lot, but some amount where you're getting people in the door day by day, you can not really tell where the holes are in your product.
And so what generally happens is, people launch and then they realize that, whoa I have a bunch of other holes and they gotta do two more product development cycles. Whereas, if they started doing traction right from the beginning, or getting a steady stream of customers, when they launch, they can actually hit the ground running. And moreover, it they were doing the testing right, they know what channel to go after. They know what niche to go after and they know what messaging to use.

Casey Winters: The first step is, you have to identify what are pages that you can group together that are fundamentally the same? So in our case, we've talked about it, pins are fundamentally the same type of page. So then, what you have to do is say, okay now I need a mechanism to randomly sample a group of boards out from the rest or randomly sample a group of pins out from the rest. And one of the things you want to be careful about is, not all boards and pins are created equal.
So you want to make sure that you're looking at, topically are they about the same thing? And the other is just kind of general popularity. And what you want to do, is be able to make a change that only a search engine crawler will crawl in the enabled group and not see it on the control group. And then you have to think about what metrics are you really trying to change here?
Typically, it's you're trying to get more traffic from a search engine so we just have a very simple graph that shows the difference in traffic between enabled and control. We run that data down to check for statistical significance. And in our case, we'll typically run the average experiment for three weeks or so. If we're seeing a gain in traffic, we'll ramp up to more pages and finally to 100% of those pages. And if not, we'll shut that experiment down and try something else.