Generate More Leads, Generate More Customers - SEO Secrets with Kris Reid
For this episode, I welcome Kris Reid to the show. Kris is a business growth expert and founder of Ardor SEO. He developed a simple system to get your message in front of your ideal audience to predictably grow your business. Now, he works with diverse companies and brands all over the world to help them get customers and make the profits that they've always envisioned. His own passion for entrepreneurship, small businesses, veganism, and helping sustainable, ethical businesses directs his vision for Ardor and the company's impact on the world.
Kris first shares with us his background story. After getting his degree as a Software Engineer, Kris moved from Brisbane, Australia to London, UK, and worked with investment banks. When the 2008 global financial crisis hit, his career was destroyed. He moved back to Australia and decided to build an online computer game. Like many online businesses, he struggled to get visitors to his website to play the game. So, Kris put his analytical mind to work and by learning the rules of search engine optimization (SEO), he developed a simple system to get people to his website. He then started building websites to sell backlinks and that started his SEO journey.
Without having any previous knowledge about SEO, Kris is completely self-taught. We talk about the importance of backlinks, which Kris believes are fundamentals of how Google works. The more backlinks you have from more credible sources that are in your niche, the more trusted you are and the better you are going to rank.
We then move on to talking about Google making changes in their algorithm and how it can affect SEO marketing. Kris then goes on to explain the difference between two different types of SEO: whitehat SEO (things that Google likes) and blackhat SEO (things that Google doesn’t like). If you are doing blackhat SEO and Google discovers it, you will receive penalties and you can lose all of your traffic. Google’s algorithm is getting better and better at finding good websites and good, quality content online. So, if you have a good website, changes to Google’s algorithm will not affect you.
Kris shares with us some of the most common mistakes that people make when it comes to SEO. One of the most noticeable things for him is that he believes people spend too much time on their websites talking about themselves. Your page needs to be simple: show the person that you can solve their problem, show examples of your work, and make it easy for people to do business with you.
Kris believes that most marketing is a waste of money. He says this is mostly true when it comes to traditional marketing: TV ads, radio ads, paper ads because it is almost impossible for you to track if anybody is paying attention to your ads. With digital marketing, you can track everything and you know exactly where your customers are coming from. SEO is the best form of digital marketing because it has a compounding type of return.
I also asked Kris for his advice on how to grow a podcast. His main advice is, just like with SEO, to do some keyword research. If you have a podcast once a week and you rank it for a hundred search volume keywords, it is a hundred searches a month. In the span of a year, you have a website that is generating 5,200 visitors a month and that translates into a million-dollar website.
Our next topic was marketing agencies. When looking for an agency you want someone who is going to focus on your goals and help you grow your business to where you want it to be. You want an agency that will show you a report of your revenue growth, tell you where your leads came from, and where your money came from. You want that type of personal approach in a firm for the best possible outcome.
Kris also talks about how often a website represents a part of the problem. He explains that there are two ways to generate more customers: to increase traffic or to increase conversions. The easiest way is to increase traffic and once you get enough traffic then you focus on the website to see if the conversion is good or not.
Do not miss out on this amazing and super informative episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with business growth and SEO expert, Kris Reid!
Notable Quotes:
“When you are building a business, you are building it for the long game.”
- Kris Reid
“The longer you are around, Google appreciates that and trusts you more.”
- Kris Reid
“Backlinks are super important. They are the fundamentals of how Google works.”
- Kris Reid
“The more backlinks you have from more credible sources that are in your niche, the more trusted you are and the better you are going to rank.”
- Kris Reid
“A website is designed to get in front of people who don’t know who you are.”
- Kris Reid
“Google’s algorithm, all it is ever doing, is getting better at finding quality websites and getting rid of the crappy ones.”
- Kris Reid
“Your action needs to be equivalent to the amount of value that you provide.”
- Kris Reid
“One part of why SEO is better than all of the other forms of digital marketing that you pay for is that it’s compounding.”
- Kris Reid
“That is how you grow a podcast. Don’t go after massive keywords, just rank each episode for a hundred searches a month and in one year you are going to be sitting pretty.”
- Kris Reid
“What you need to do is grow in a sustainable way that is right for your business.”
- Kris Reid
“One keyword might generate more leads, but another type of keyword might generate more customers. That is where we want to focus on.”
- Kris Reid
“You have two ways to generate customers: increase traffic or increase conversions.”
- Kris Reid
“Generally, fixing your ugly websites is not the most important thing; it is getting people to your ugly website because ugly websites still convert.”
- Kris Reid
Links:
Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months
