SEO: What’s Working RIGHT NOW In 2023

What this episode is about

The main topic revolves around effective SEO strategies currently yielding significant results in 2023, particularly emphasizing the value of curated collections. By aggregating scattered information into comprehensive lists, such as those of startups by industry, content creators can provide valuable insights, rank for competitive keywords, and drive substantial traffic without necessarily producing traditional, high-quality writing.

Key takeaways

• Curated collections turn scattered info into traffic gold; even mediocre writing shines when it delivers value.
• Backlinks are still the lifeblood of SEO; reverse outreach flips tradition—let seekers come to you.
• Who needs talent? Just curate! Gather hard-to-find data, and watch your site traffic soar without a Pulitzer.
• SEO secret: Bloggers search for data; if you provide it, they’ll link to you—almost like SEO magic.
• Forget fluff content—real value lies in aggregating niche information; be the go-to source and watch rankings rise.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Brian Dean (Host) · 11 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Exploding Topics, Tesla, Inc., Twitter, Uber
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Exploding Topics, ChatGPT
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Exploding Topics
4. 9:00 – 10:39: Exploding Topics, Ross Hudgins

Notable quotes from "SEO: What’s Working RIGHT NOW In 2023"

• Information that's scattered around the internet and putting them in one place for example at exploding topics one of our best performing curated collection types are startup…

  about Exploding Topics · at 0:21

• Providing a lot of value in that curation process another example is from backlinko I created all these company stats Pages like stats about Tesla stats about Uber stats about…

  about Tesla, Inc. · at 1:43

• A real life example from exploding topics that when Chachi PT was first blowing up we realized that a lot of bloggers when they're writing about Chachi BT they would actually…

  about ChatGPT · at 4:46

• Siege media but it makes total sense and it's something I had been doing without knowing the term for it for years time to value is basically how long does it take for someone…

  about Ross Hudgins · at 9:17

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Ross Hudgins — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at 9:15
  Credited with introducing the term/framework 'time to value,' which the speaker uses as an SEO principle for improving on-page UX and rankings.

Companies & orgs

• Exploding Topics — Company · Business focus · 5 mentions · first at 0:25
  The podcast discusses strategies used by Exploding Topics to grow their site and rank for competitive keywords.
• Tesla, Inc. — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at 1:50
  Mentioned as an example of a company whose stats were curated to provide value and attract traffic.
• Twitter — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at 1:50
  Mentioned as an example of a company whose stats were curated to provide value and attract traffic.
  Providing a lot of value in that curation process another example is from backlinko I created all these company stats Pages like stats about Tesla stats about Uber stats about…
• Uber — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at 1:50
  Mentioned as an example of a company whose stats were curated to provide value and attract traffic.
  Providing a lot of value in that curation process another example is from backlinko I created all these company stats Pages like stats about Tesla stats about Uber stats about…

Products & tech

• ChatGPT — Product · Case study · 1 mention · first at 4:33
  Used as an example of how to create content that journalists and bloggers are searching for.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 in this video I'm going to show you what's working best in SEO right now in fact I use these exact strategies to grow my site from zero to over 400 000 visitors per month I also rank for dozens of highly competitive keywords okay so no more fluff let's get right into the steps starting with the first strategy that's working really well right now curated collections trade collections are basically taking information that's scattered around the internet and putting them in one place for example at exploding topics one of our best performing curated collection types are startup list posts here's where we take startups in several different Industries like SAS fintech education and put them all in one place along with statistics about the startup like how much funding they've raised when they were founded where they're located and their growth in exploding topics the big advantage of curated

0:46 collections is that you don't need to hire great writers or even produce great content in the traditional sense you just need someone that's willing to put in the work to find stuff that's already out there and curate it in one place in this curation adds a ton of value because when someone's searching for SAS startups and you have a list of really interesting underground SAS startups they're happy with your results so in that way it is great content in fact we've ranked dozens of these keywords for competitive startup keywords like SAS startups edtech startups and more and even though our startup list posts aren't great content in that sense you usually think where you have some great writer that's an expert in the space and they're putting out their best stuff it still provides a lot of value and that's why these rank because if you're searching for SAS startups you want to know which staff startups are growing

1:34 right now and probably startups that you don't know about already that's really the idea behind you searching for them so when our writer quote unquote writer puts this stuff together they're providing a lot of value in that curation process another example is from backlinko I created all these company stats Pages like stats about Tesla stats about Uber stats about Twitter and these brought in thousands and thousands of visitors because people are searching for for this information about these companies and they were hard to find they were in a report from McKinsey that's behind a paywall they were in an S1 filing that's a PDF and just the fact that we put all this stuff together in one place and curated it provided a ton of value and brought us a lot of traffic so how can you do this for your business well the number one thing is I would look at stuff in your industry and say what information are people looking for

2:21 in my industry that's currently hard to find or scattered around and can we put it in one place the advantage of this is twofold one these keywords usually are a little bit underground and not as competitive second you don't need to hire amazing writers to put these together you need someone that is willing to put in the work and put in the hustle and put in the research to find this stuff and put it together in one place in a way that provides value the next strategy that's working really well right now is reverse Outreach so I probably don't need to tell you that backlinks are still super important for ranking in Google maybe even more important than ever before because Google is really wanting to show users trustworthy authoritative information they don't want to show their users content that may be untrue or not 100 accurate and how do they figure out which sites can be trusted which ones

3:07 are an authority well they use backlinks it's just a great metric to determine which sites are the most authoritative and trustworthy on a given topic so despite the fact that people for years have been saying backlinks are not important backlinks are less important backlinks don't matter it's clear that they still do and I see Google relying on them almost even more in the future and the best way to get backlinks right now is definitely reverse Outreach the idea behind this strategy is instead of sending thousands of Outreach emails to bloggers and journalists you're figuring out what they're searching for when they're doing research and getting in front of them there that way you're flipping the script and really you're getting bloggers and journalists to come to you I first learned this when I was running backlinko and I realized that to catch up to my competitors in terms of getting the same amount of backlinks

3:49 they have or more it was never going to happen with traditional Outreach like if someone had 10 000 more backlinks than I did and I had a 10 conversion rate on my Outreach emails which is like legendary I'd have to send 100 emails and to keep that lead because they kept getting more and more links I'd have to do that almost every single month which just doesn't make any sense and that's when I realized I needed a different way to get links passively I needed people to come to my site passively and link to me and there's a certain element of just if you do put out good stuff and get a lot of traffic you will get links but if you want to get a lot of links and especially really authoritative links you need to be very strategic about this and that's where reverse Outreach comes into play so in terms of tangible steps like what do you do well the key is to find keywords that bloggers and journalists are searching for in your

4:30 Niche why is this important because imagine you're a journalist you're writing an article about chatgpt and you want to prove that this is a big deal you want to put how many users they have but you have no idea how many users chat GPT has so you're searching Google number of chat GPT users in fact this is a real life example from exploding topics that when Chachi PT was first blowing up we realized that a lot of bloggers when they're writing about Chachi BT they would actually write about how many users they have so we just basically put all those stats together and specifically the main stat have how many users they had it made it easy for journalists to find so all you need to do is figure out what keywords are journalists and bloggers in your Niche searching for and what stats are they looking for and not able to easily find and then fill that Gap with your content the next thing in SEO that's

5:14 working really well for us now is bottom of the funnel content so this is something that I kind of slept on when we launched exploding topics we're really focused on this top of the funnel content which is content that people are searching for when they're not searching for what you sell so this is basically informational content in our cases it was things like business Trends SAS Trends technology Trends so these are keywords that our target audience is searching for because they're interested in Trends but they're not searching for like an actual solution to a problem only recently did we start publishing and really focusing on the bottom of the funnel content this is where people are much further along and pretty much ready to buy right away keywords like Trend spotting software and Google Trends Alternatives and answer the public Alternatives and these have helped us get in front of people that are much

5:58 closer to actually and as a bonus these keywords tend to have almost no competition whatsoever so just by creating a good piece of content around them you can usually rank now the downside obviously of these bottom of the funnel keywords is that they don't get a lot of searches if you look up these keywords in your favorite keyword research tool they might only get 20 or 40 searches a month but if someone's searching for like Trend tracking software that's such a great fit for what we sell I'm totally okay creating a piece of content around it even if only 20 or 40 or 50 people search for it every month in fact looking back at exploding topics I'm glad that we focused on top of the funnel in the beginning because that helped us get from zero to four hundred thousand visitors a month but I kind of regret not going after bottom of the funnel stuff earlier because once we started mixing in more top of the funnel and a

6:42 lot of bottom of the funnel stuff our trial started to explode we went from literally a couple hundred trials a month to over 600 trials a month so the next thing that's working well for me right now is going after AI proof content and publishing as much AI proof content as possible so what do I mean by that well as you probably know there's a flood of AI content being published right now and most of it is generic right because by definition AI synthesizes information that already exists it doesn't bring anything unique to the table so when I see a keyword like what is X I usually avoid those types of keywords now because I know an AI could probably do a decent job writing that article and yeah I'm sure if I hire like an expert that's a human could describe what something is a little bit better but it's not going to be like leagues better than what the AI can produce instead I'm focusing on

7:26 keywords that AI can technically do but they don't do a good job with for example one of our best performing pieces of content is about business Trends now technically you can go to chat GPT or an AI writing tool and say write an article about the nine biggest business Trends but the quality isn't going to be there especially if you compare it to the post that we have on the site right now by a market research expert who looked at all the business Trends was able to synthesize information and bring their own expertise to the table that's something AI can't do in other words I'm really focusing on why keywords not what keywords what keywords are things that AI can do very very easily they can describe what something is very well but to describe why something's happening or to link to pieces of information together that might not seem related that's something you need a human analyst to do the next tactic that's

8:11 working really well for me is to ride the wave and basically what that means is going after keywords that are trending up that aren't competitive yet and this is really important if your site doesn't have a lot of authority yet because everyone and their mom is doing SEO right now organic clicks from social media are going down more people are turning to SEO in fact when startups get funding now a lot of times they don't just funnel that all into Facebook ads like they used to they take a big chunk of that and they put it into SEO and content marketing which makes most keywords really competitive so another factor I consider when choosing keywords is is this keyword something that's probably going to Trend up in the future if so I'm more likely to go after it as opposed to a more established keyword that already has a lot of searches and all the tools those keywords tend to be really competitive and I do Target those

8:56 keywords once in a while but I really focus on these ride the wave keywords now as a Shameless plug our tool exploding topics is the best way to find these trending keywords because our technology constantly scans different sources online to find trending topics before they take off the last technique that's really important for SEO right now is known as time to Value I first heard this concept from Ross Hudgins at Siege media but it makes total sense and it's something I had been doing without knowing the term for it for years time to value is basically how long does it take for someone that lands on your page to get what they want so if your page has a long intro or it's hard to scan time to value is really high right because someone lands on your page they have to go through this long intro they have to go through a bunch of BS and they have to really dig to find what they want as opposed to Investopedia

9:40 which as you can see in this example provides time to Value within like a second you land on the page and you already get an answer to your question and that's one of the reasons that they outrank other sites because when you land on there it's not like one of those recipe pages that has like 2 000 words of nonsense about how they discovered the recipe before getting into it it's actually the complete opposite it puts the value value at the top of the page and the more you can do that make time to Value one two three four five seconds the better you're gonna rank in Google at exploring topics we do this in two ways first of all our intros are really short our intros are essentially just to let someone know that they're in the right place then after that we basically start the content right away someone can see the first Trend the first startup a lot of times above the fold they don't even need to scroll down that way our

10:23 time to value is like five to ten seconds Max so now I'd like to hear from you are there any strategies that I missed that are working really well for you or maybe you just want to share which strategy you want to try first either way let me know in the comment section below and I'll see you in the next video

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "SEO: What’s Working RIGHT NOW In 2023"?

Brian Dean (Host).

What is "SEO: What’s Working RIGHT NOW In 2023" about?

The main topic revolves around effective SEO strategies currently yielding significant results in 2023, particularly emphasizing the value of curated collections. By aggregating scattered information into comprehensive lists, such as those of startups by industry, content creators can provide valuable insights, rank for competitive keywords, and drive substantial traffic without necessarily…

What is mentioned in this Brian Dean episode?

6 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Exploding Topics, ChatGPT, Ross Hudgins, Tesla, Inc., Twitter, Uber. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "SEO: What’s Working RIGHT NOW In 2023"?

The episode runs 11 min; the transcript is about 2,436 words in 15 timestamped sections.

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