Eric Siu: In this video, I'm going to show you how long it takes for SEO to work. My name's Eric Siu. I'm going to show you how to grow your fricking business. Here we go. I'm not even just going to talk about SEO, I'm going to talk about my podcast first. "What, what, what, what? I thought we're talking about SEO." We are talking about SEO. Let's look at my screen really quick. This is a podcast I have with my cohost Neil Patel. Well, we have $8.6 million so far. We've been doing it for a little under two years or so. Oh, yeah. You're seeing a lot of downloads here, right? Where last month, January 2018, $589,000. We're probably on track for about $640,000 in a 31-day window, which is not bad. 640, you look at 589, that different, it's a pretty good growth rate, right?
You're looking at, it's like, "Oh, that's easy. Well, Neil has a brand. He's got a big email list, da, da, da." Like, "Eric, it's easy for you to say, you get good traffic, you have an email list, whatever." When I look at this podcast and I look at the other podcasts that I have, Growth Everywhere, which gets about $80,000 a month. The issue is it took me, well, after an entire year of effort I was getting nine downloads a day, and then the second year I was getting 30 downloads a day. I was spending six hours a week on it for the first two years. Six hours per week while I was trying to run the business. That's one thing and it's the same thing with SEO too. If I look at SEO, if I look at our ... If I look at singlegrain.com, which is one of the websites I have, I can see in the last 16 month period, and by the way, this is Google Search Console right here. The new one has 16 months of data plus, okay?
I'm looking at 16 months of data here. You can see that the graph is going up into the right. We're looking at impressions, we're looking at clicks. You can see it slowly going up into the right. Not only that, if you use a tool like Ahrefs, you can look at my website, you can see that the keywords are increasing, the top three keywords are increasing. Everything is just going up and to the right. It just takes a lot of effort. It takes a long time to get the flywheel going. If I didn't do the first podcast, if I didn't slog it out for the first two years, there's no way I would have the second podcast that's doing really well. I love both podcasts. Now, it's the same thing with his YouTube channel too. You're watching this YouTube channel right now and as of this video, we're at about 6,200, 6,300 subscribers. I started with about 1,500 or 2,000 or so in the summertime and we built out our video team, Noah's sitting over here helping out. It just takes time.
There's no shortcuts with SEO. People need to be patient. Most of the time when you're reporting to other stakeholders, let's say, you've raised venture funding, your board is going to want you to move really quick, either [inaudible 00:02:18] spend it on paid advertising. The more you can be in control of what you're running, you're not reporting to a board, to a bunch of co-founders that they're not patient, the more patient you can be, the better. That's easier said than done, but I think if you can be ... Have a big sense of urgency in the short-term, so you're just trying to get a lot of things done, but you're okay with things taking time, at the end of the day, it's going to pan out. What you have to do as well is, if I'm going to give you some practical advice, is you also got to look at your on page SEO.
You got to think about things such as skyscraper technique, which is from Backlinko. Skyscraper technique is the idea that you're creating a 10, 20, 30X piece of content that's better than the top 10 results for whatever specific keyword you're trying to rank for. The more epic you can have it, the better. That doesn't just mean more text, it means well-designed and also any other element that's going to give you a leg up. You got to think about that first. The other thing with proper on page SEO too is whatever kind of content you're creating, make sure you have good internal linking structure going on too on the website. A lot of people forget about site architecture. Also, keeping in mind too that there's two things that matter most when it comes to Google, it's content and it's links.
Don't forget about links. If you've really created a good piece of content, the idea is if you make a skyscraper piece of content, it's really easy for you to request to other people and say, "Hey, what do you think about this?" Obviously, you're not just going to go request to them all the time, "Hey, come link to my stuff, come link to my stuff." Ideally, if you could build a relationship, even better. I was at a conference a couple weeks ago. I sat down and then someone from Intercom sat down. Her name is Sarah and she's on the content team. Just like that, we started to build up collaboration. She actually followed some of the stuff that we do and now we're building a collaboration, and then easily that's a link from Intercom, for example, and we're going to be doing other stuff with them too.
The flywheel starts to build. We all start from somewhere and I'm telling you, even if you're starting from the very beginning right now, I've only had some of these sites for less than a couple years. It just takes time. You have to be patient. The thing is, most people aren't willing to wait and most people aren't willing to ask for help. You've got to be willing to do that too. If you enjoyed this video, just go ahead and hit subscribe and we'll see you at the next one to help you grow.