Mastering SEO with Steven Schneider

Tim Melanson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Work at Home Rockstar Podcast. I’m excited for today’s guest. We are talking to the co founder and CEO of Trio SEO. And what they do is they help to create high intent SEO content that drives targeted organic traffic to businesses. So I’m excited to hear more about this.

we’re talking to Steven Schneider. So Steven, you ready to rock?

Steven Schneider: Let’s do this, Tim.

Tim Melanson: So tell me a story of success in your business that we can be inspired by.

Steven Schneider: Oh, wow. I think it’s just more or less about kind of how I got through into SEO and kind of just originated in that. I started out long ago in college and didn’t really have a path or kind of like what to do, just kind of like studying finance was like, okay, let’s do this. MBA, like sell my soul to corporate finance, like just go down that track, make some money and, you know, retire.

My, one of my friends in college showed me SEO. He was doing like Amazon affiliate websites back in the day, kind of in the wild west era of SEO. He was already making like 10, 15 grand in college per month. And I was just like, [00:01:00] this is bananas. Like you’re making this much money from your dorm, like what’s going on.

So I kind of just absorbed everything I knew and tried to just go down the rabbit hole and SEO and very kind of like, just through the way of life randomly. he. And I joined forces with his other partner and we had 40 websites in our portfolio. We all own together. We we’re doing about three to 400 articles per month and, scaled that up and then left that company.

And then I kind of like randomly met these two guys, Connor Gillivan, Nathan Hirsch, who are now my partners through LinkedIn, just networking. So I feel like it’s always been kind of a fun success story to see where life takes you, going with the flow and riding the wave, so to speak, and just had a lot of fun doing it.

Still am.

Tim Melanson: Yep. Wow. The wild west of SEO. I remember way back when, so I, I’ve been in this world for a little while too, and I remember that we used to have these article spinners and so you’d like write an article. [00:02:00] And it would automatically create a bunch of different permutations of that same article, and you could post them on a whole bunch of different sites and drive traffic.

Like, is that kind of stuff still, like, can you still do stuff like that?

Steven Schneider: I don’t know if I would recommend it, but, yeah, I was just looking through someone’s site the other day and I noticed it’s like, you know, 50 iterations of one blog post with the same URL and you open it and it’s just like a couple words are changed. I’m like, why am I just finding this now? And it’s all these backlinks, like, obviously on other people’s websites, I kind of link back and trying to, you know, spin up backlinks and it’s just like, so.

Long answer. Yeah, I probably wouldn’t do it. People, you know, they’re going to try to cut corners no matter what.

Tim Melanson: Do you think it, because I think, the impression that I have now is that, Google has figured that stuff out. And, and you could potentially even be penalized for doing stuff like that, trying to game the system, right?

Steven Schneider: a hundred percent. I mean, yeah, SEO is very lucrative. And so people are always going to try to figure [00:03:00] out how do I get as much traffic to my site for as little as possible? And Google obviously has their one policy is to like do good by humans using their site and using Google.

those two things kind of butt heads at the end of the day. And it’s important to make sure that Google, is trying to ensure quality is the number one priority.

Tim Melanson: Well, I’ve got a bunch of questions about that that we’ll get into a little bit later because, it is, you know, as a, you know, web developer, that question gets asked all the time. And also people do spend a lot of money for seemingly nothing a lot of times. So it’s kind of like this Weird question that people keep on asking, like, what about SEO?

but first I want to talk about the bad note as well. So, you know, on your journey, is there something that didn’t go as planned that we can learn from?

Yeah. so, this was in my first company. We were kind of at our peak. Like I said, we were doing like three to 400 articles a month, just a massive operation. And, we had three black swan events hit. In 30 days, 1st, [00:04:00] was Google released the 2021 affiliate product review update, which specifically was intended to target all the sites that we had in our portfolio that hurt, Amazon also cut their commission tiers by half overnight.

Steven Schneider: Because the third one was COVID hit the economy. So all of this kind of shook and we were just like, sweet, now what? We had lost about 60 percent of revenue and traffic overnight. and we knew that the affiliate Amazon SEO space was not a sustainable path by any means. It was very much a. right place, right time opportunity to kind of take hold of. But we also thought we had probably five to seven years to figure out, like we had started building e commerce sites and we were actually building affiliate sites that were sister brands of those and using the affiliate sites, direct traffic to the calmer sites and kind of starting to create more of an ecosystem within that business.

we thought that was gonna be a kind [00:05:00] of a good path to come more of like Brand authority quality, like really look at how to create these little mini brands instead of just like micro niche blogs. so yeah, I mean that that kind of like really just shook us and had to kind of think fast and kind of figure out like what was next.

But yeah, I mean, through conflict comes change. And so that’s kind of, you know, one of the things I keep trying to remind myself whenever I encounter, obviously that one was a little bit bigger, but, yeah, it was interesting time.

Tim Melanson: lot of people had to do a little bit of pivoting during that time. I know as a musician, I was doing a lot of gigs and so when they shut everything down, I lost good 60 percent of my income too, maybe a little less than that, but it was definitely 50%. So, you know, you have to make some changes when that happens.

Steven Schneider: So what did you do? Yeah, we just kind of let the dust settle for a little bit and we were still cashflow positive for sure. affiliate sites were so profitable. The team was lean at the time. And so we just kind of figured it out and I realized that it was A good time for me, to step away.

I’m great friends [00:06:00] with my partner still to this day. I went golfing with one of them yesterday, still stay in touch. And I think it was just a good time to figure out what was next. that high risk, high reward strategy of business worked really well when I was a college kid.

Like, you know, I was in that era of like pedal to the metal, whatever happens, I could afford to kind of be a little more risk on. but when the risk kind of, slapped me on the wrist, it was like, Oh, okay, this is what can happen. is this going to be a 50 year business?

And I started really thinking long term. And so that’s kind of where I, I just stepped away and I took a year off and just kind of figured out what was next, dabbled a little of this. So I did a little of that and then around that time I was like, okay, time to figure it out.

And so I kind of started poking around LinkedIn and LinkedIn was kind of evolving into this like new social media platform that’s kind of becoming nowadays. And just started networking a lot, just kind of like figured out what’s next. I didn’t know what was going to come of it, but I just kind of always had this good gut feeling.

thankfully, obviously trio SEO kind of spawned from that.

Tim Melanson: So, I mean, taking a step back is always a good thing. I like what you [00:07:00] say about the high risk, like when you’re young, too. it’s funny that, you know, I was sort of the same mentality when I was young. I was working at a big company as programmer. And when, they were laying other people off, I just didn’t even care.

I was like, yeah, whatever. If I get laid off, I’ll be fine. And it turned out, it worked out. I did end up getting laid off, got a severance package and started some businesses and, you know, it’s funny looking back on all that stuff and you’re like, man. I just had no worries about any of that stuff.

And then when things, you know, as time goes on, though, you start to, you know, build a certain lifestyle. And then all of a sudden you get attached to that lifestyle. And so when things don’t go wrong at that point, that’s when you really have to start thinking about it. Right?

Steven Schneider: Yeah. I was just talking to my wife about this the other day And it’s crazy to think that when we were in college and I lived with two buddies our split rent per person was 385 per month. my first affiliate site was making like [00:08:00] three to four K a month in college.

And I was like, I’m rich, you know, like I’m making three grand a month in college. I could resell this thing for 30 X that and make a hundred grand with my partner. I’m like, I’m retired 29. this is going to be great. obviously things change, but you know, it’s kind of like what you’re saying.

Your lens. Of what things could be. And you’re obviously a little naive, which is kind of an advantage also to really lean into. so yeah, it’s kind of interesting to just think back to that and ride that wave and just feel like it was also so energizing Like that is what fueled a lot of the, future success because you get a taste for it and you’re like, Oh, this could work. I can see how this play out.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. And I think the big takeaway that I’m taking from your story and probably even mine is that back then, you know, it’s a matter of like, this had been a leaning expenses, you know, you’re, you know, if something were to happen, you would lose everything. Well, okay. I’ve got 300 [00:09:00] in rent, you know,

Steven Schneider: Yeah.

Tim Melanson: Okay. I’ll be fine. You know, I could probably go pick up a job at the coffee shop and, you know, be fine. Right. and it sounds to me like something similar happened with your first business as well. You had a lean situation. So when you lost 60 percent of your income, you still were making money, right?

and that’s probably something to take away from that, because I think that a lot of people might make the opposite mistake of, like, gathering up a whole bunch of expenses and now, all of a sudden, if something happens to the income, now you’re going in the hole every month. Right? So, like, On that, sort of cashflow, where did that mindset come from?

Steven Schneider: First of all, like, what was that just by chance or did you have a strategy in that Yeah, so a couple things come to mind. one of the things is that, I was very, very lucky in that my good friend who kind of showed me SEO, he and his other partner had two very, very successful affiliate sites. They were cash flowing [00:10:00] probably at our peak around 50k each a month, which in the Amazon affiliate world for anybody who doesn’t know, it’s like you’re doing volume at that rate because each sale is maybe, you know, 20 or something like that.

So you get commissions at that rate. You’re doing, it’s pretty big sites. And those were Predominantly the cash cows of the business. And so when the portfolio kind of got, you know, Turned upside down, we still knew that, okay, we could do this. And the nice thing about it too, is that since we own the entire portfolio straight out, we weren’t really like having to meet these KPIs or these obligations to anybody who was kind of like, Could potentially say, well, we’re not going to just throttle down content if we need to.

It’s like we were spending, like we were spending like about 25, 30 grand a month on content. And it’s like, cool, we’re just not going to spend that?

much next month. Like we’re just going to do five grand. And like we say 20 grand. And So it’s like, you can start, when you have all the leverage in that scenario, you have the [00:11:00] ability to control your cashflow and realize, okay, like primary priorities.

Tim Melanson: Take care of the team, take care of ourself, take care of all the tools that we need to survive. And then everything beyond that is, you know, variable. So how did you learn all that stuff? you have good mentors or

Steven Schneider: Yeah. So the same guy, he’s just as like, yeah, he still is kind of like a mentor. he’d been an SEO for about six or seven years before he even taught me. He was making sites and like. Early 2010s off of like exact match domains, trying to rank for this obscure terms. And, yeah, I just kind of like, he just always had a very, logical mindset, which sounds weird to say, cause you’re like, yeah, of course it makes sense.

But I think that one of the things that gets blurred in business is. mixing emotions. And it’s like, that’s my weakness. And I would say is I’m almost a little too much on the emotional side of the spectrum when it comes to making decisions. And so you kind of [00:12:00] really have to like remove all biases and situations like that and be like, what makes the most sense right here, right now for the company, instead of trying to make decisions around, well, what if it changes six months?

It’s like, don’t worry about that. Let’s worry about this month. It’s like, you really have to kind of control the situation at hand and isolate yourself. And then kind of start playing chess instead of checkers.

Tim Melanson: those logical people are, they can be a little tough to deal with, especially when you’re an emotional one,

Steven Schneider: no, no, they’re, they’re great to deal with. anybody who doesn’t see that I was nodding my head while saying that, It definitely, I had to be, I just always was mindful of the fact that one, I’ve never tried to, Lay down the law or try to like lean into ego when making decisions like that was something that we really took to heart at the first company and something that we still do today at trio seo where it’s like [00:13:00] we’ll hear everyone out in the room but at the end of the day if someone just has a better decision like It’s a better decision.

Like it’s not about trying to, hook up your feathers and say, well, we’re taking my choice. It’s like, if your choice is way better than mine, like let’s do it. this is a team thing. And so that’s kind of how we naturally operated. And I think it’s because we were friends first and friends first, who just happened to make a lot of money together second.

And so that’s kind of like where that mentality came from where it’s like, the more that we can kind of tread down a path together, the better it’s going to be. why would I try to butt heads with you or vice versa? that’s not going to do any good. So just kind of set that stuff aside and do it special to company.

Tim Melanson: And when it comes down to it too, like if, if, you know, I find that these emotional things that come up, you know, a lot of it happens to be, you know, whatever, emotional spending, you know, keeping people on the team when they probably shouldn’t be on the team. You know, all that [00:14:00] kind of stuff. You know, not being clear with the outcomes.

You know, all those things that you’re like, well, you know, when you have that logical person on the business that’s like, no, no, no. We need to do what’s right for the business in the end. If you do what’s right for the business, the business makes profit, which allows you to spend more money on the people that you have an emotional connection with in the first place.

Right. So,

Steven Schneider: percent.

Tim Melanson: it is one of those things, but, it takes a lot of, kudos to you for that, emotional intelligence, I guess, to kind of go, all right, fine. Maybe that’s an emotional reaction.

Steven Schneider: Yeah. I know when I’m being emotional, I feel I can get upset. I’m anxious. try and do all sorts of stuff. And I’m like, these are a mode, like you really have to kind of be a little introspective at that moment in time.

he was definitely more, risk on, like, he’s very good at making an educated beds. He’s good at like thinking through things like that. And so that was where a lot of the business growth came from he’d have to figure out [00:15:00] when’s a good time to do an acquisition?

When’s a good time to do an exit of a site? Like when’s the kind of the like buying, building, flipping model come into play? Where I look at it as like, well, let’s just cashflow these sites forever. And he’s like, no, we’re selling This thing next week. We got to get out of this And I’m like, it’s just a different mindset.

Cause I’m more emotionally tied to stability, like making sure everything’s comfortable, making sure that there’s no, like, you don’t rock the boat. And he’s like, but we could sell this thing, sell one of the sites and we’re getting two years of cashflow up front. And I’m like, Yeah. that makes sense. Okay. I guess we’re selling.

Yeah, that’s really cool. And I think that what you said about just you kind of do get attached to businesses, right? It’s like, this is my baby. I can’t sell it. Right?

well, each business, like each. Website, I guess, in the portfolio or each blog had to be treated as a separate business. So we essentially even though we owned 40 blogs, The way that we kind of mentally operate, it was that we owned 40 businesses and we had to figure out how each strategy [00:16:00] performed relative to its own strategy.

If that makes sense.

Tim Melanson: that’s really, really cool. Okay. I like that. So let’s talk a little bit. I mean, work from home is. It can be challenging, right, to, you know, I know that, like, when you go into an office, you know, you’re at work, all that stuff, when you’re working from home, you know, everything kind of blends and mixes together.

And so, have you found a sort of a groove working from home? And how’d you do that?

Steven Schneider: Yeah, that evolved kind of in that same era. I love working from home. Actually, there’s a moment in time for six months where I didn’t work for myself and I hated it and I just was like, I didn’t think I can do to get back to that. But yeah, my work from home routine is, perhaps a little bit unconventional, but I like wake up and like.

Within 20 minutes of waking up, I go straight to my desk and I just start working. I’m not like a cold plunge, stretchy, read a book before 5am type of YouTube guru like people some are. but yeah, I just, I like working in a dark [00:17:00] space. Like you can see like all of this is very closed off. I have a couple of mood lights in the corner.

But, Anything that kind of like just like tunnel vision focus on that sort of stuff and then, take breaks. Obviously, like, I worked out middle of the day. I kind of break it up for my day where I get like 4 or 5 hours of good focus work or meetings, whatever I need to do in the morning. And then I go to the gym, kind of break away and then come back and kind of work on all the later on stuff.

But, yeah, work from home is hard. It’s, it’s definitely a unique can of worms to be thrown into, which I appreciate them.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, especially when you have a family, right?

Steven Schneider: Yeah, for sure.

Tim Melanson: So, how do you navigate that situation? do you have, Work hours or how do you not get interrupted?

Steven Schneider: yeah, thankfully we don’t have kids yet, but I have a dog and I’m glad he’s not barking right now during any of this, Yeah, I mean, I work. I’ve always been up early, definitely early bird. So that’s kind of where I get a lot of my good, good hours in. back in college, I would wake up really early.

Like I’d wake up at like two or three in the morning so I could get a good, [00:18:00] good, solid couple hours before I go to class. And I would work like all night. And then I kind of just through practice and a lot of good communication with my wife learned that there has to be a cut off time, which has also helped a lot of like mental health wise because I’m not, you

know, Always attached to it, so to speak.

But, yeah, I create normal working hours and go six to 10, work out from 10 to noon and then noon to four. So it’s a very like structured day. And then I live hour by hour, my calendar, you know, whatever I have to do.

Tim Melanson: right on. Okay. So before we get to your, your guest solo, I want a little Just kind of dive in a little bit more to the seo type stuff because I do think it’s an important topic and a lot Of people are misunderstanding it and maybe i’ve got a question What’s the wrong way to do seo?

Steven Schneider: quantity over quality,

Tim Melanson: And what does that mean?

Steven Schneider: I think people who often Think about SEO don’t know what it is, and they’re just kind of like going about it. Like, what is this weird, mysterious thing that people [00:19:00] talk about? it’s difficult because SEO takes So much time to get up and running. for example, if we’re working with a client at Trio SEO, we usually only take on clients who want to work with us for at least six months.

We’re not locking them into contracts, but there has to be a verbal and mental agreement. They’re like, This isn’t going to be an overnight thing. And then here’s why. people are very antsy for results, especially in this immediate gratification society that we have now turned into.

And so, you know, after 45 days or 60 days, 90 days, and they’re still little results compared to what, you could be doing on PPC or some other lever that you pull and you get this immediate reward. it’s hard to continue doubling down and being able to like see the long term vision in that. And so it’s easy to want to like triple down on content using chats with BT and go more to a quantity standpoint when really like.

That’s the last thing you should do. That’s really quality, letting Google kind of like adjust to your brand, understand the content, understand your authority. [00:20:00] And then overall, like the kind of snowball effect of this hockey stick pattern starts to take off where it’s really, really slow, slow, slow. And then it just kind of tips and starts to compound.

And you see this upward trajectory that you never thought would happen.

Tim Melanson: So what would you say if somebody, in any industry just said, I want to be on page one of Google, like is that something that’s possible? what would you say when they say, I just want to be number one on Google?

And that’s it. Okay. And why is that

Steven Schneider: it’s unrealistic expectation. And we turned down probably 30 percent of our clients because they either say that or they don’t have a long term mindset. SEO, there’s no for sure bets. And so, if people are coming in and, they’re like, well, this other company said that they can get me ranked top three in 30 days.

I’m like, go ahead, go. Yeah. Like do your thing then. Like, that’s great. Like they’re probably way cheaper too. So when people start throwing out these promises and SEO, it’s a very big red flag. [00:21:00] And so we’ve always been very transparent and we always like come from the mindset of we’re entrepreneurs first.

We built businesses of our own driving success through SEO. Now we’re taking our strategies and implementing for clients. And so people who want to just rank first and not really, you know, care about anything else. It’s like, okay, that’s fine. But there’s also a lot of other, there’s like 10 million other variables that go into just like ranking for that keyword.

So it’s like, about if you don’t rank for this keyword, but how about you rank for the other a hundred keywords we’re going to add to your site? And so you kind of have to just like, there’s usually a lack of education. When it comes to things like that.

And so part of it is just evolving the conversation to ensure that people see the big picture and understand the full landscape of what you’re engaging in.

Tim Melanson: I think that’s probably because my inbox is literally full on every email address that I have people saying that they’re gonna get my website ranked on page one or whatever, it is in, Google or whatever So I guess, do you have any visibility on [00:22:00] what those companies are going to do?

If I were to contact them and say yes.

Steven Schneider: They’re probably going to build some pretty shady backlinks, I would guess because backlinks definitely move the needle. the more votes of confidence, quote unquote, that you can get from other sites, linking to yours, kind of vouching for that definitely helps. but with that, like it goes back to the quantity versus quality thing.

So if you get a hundred. low quality links overnight. It might be a good short term overnight fix, but is it going to be a three year solution? Probably not. so that’s kind of my guess is they’re probably like going in that black hat, gray hat, kind of sketchy area to get you those results, to get you happy so that you continue.

But you’re going to look back in maybe a year or six months And, be like, why is my site all of a sudden like get tanked by Google’s last update? I’ll pay by the book.

Tim Melanson: And, you know, that’s sort of what I saw too, is that you might jump up the ranks quickly, but then [00:23:00] over time it’ll go lower. Now, is there any sort of long term damage though? Like what, what would happen if, let’s just say that I did that. And it wasn’t a scam. It was actually somebody that just got me up on whatever first few pages of Google.

And now all of a sudden it’s falling out, you know, company is nowhere to be found. I come see you. Can you help me?

Steven Schneider: yeah, I mean, we always do an audit of the site and that’s more or less to protect ourselves too, not just to see what you guys are working with. So like, if you have been engaging in practices that are maybe a little unethical, not saying that like the client didn’t do this knowingly, but maybe a previous SEO did, we’ll just be upfront and be like, Hey, Really unfortunate.

I like, there’s some things we’re gonna have to change for. We’re going to have to pretty much like go under the hood, rework a lot of this stuff, and it’s just not going to be as quick as you’d like it to be. So normally I say our sprint is three to six months. Like it’s probably realistic to think about your [00:24:00] sprint in a 12 to 16 month timeline, because we kind of have to redo it.

And I think that like, obviously that’s going to change things depending on how severe it is. But, there’s just so many barriers we’ll play. Like we have to. Kind of, and obviously it’s kind of like a under promise, over deliver thing. It’s probably going to happen sooner, but at the same time, like, I’m not going to promise someone their site’s going to be fixed in three months.

It’s like, there’s a lot of work to be done. So we have to rebuild your brand from Google’s point of view.

But that can be done. Like, it’s not like, okay, this domain is now just toast, Google hates it, and we can’t do anything about it. Yeah. You definitely don’t want to just kind of go with that mindset. Cause like every time you switch a domain, you can, I mean, obviously you have 301 redirects and all these like technical things that you can do on the backend, but you’re asking Google to like relearn. This entity online and URLs are kind of like the real estate or the plot of land for your company.

if you’re constantly doing this over and over and over again, it’s kind of [00:25:00] like, you know, as if you were to have a really Good. business in Texas and you’re like, Oh, by the way, we’re moving to Michigan. Oh, by the way, we’re moving to Washington. It’s like every single time your customers then have to like find you.

And it’s just kind of a pain. You can slowly crawl your way back, but it’s, definitely not gonna be an overnight thing. You’re gonna have to really get into good graces of Google.

Tim Melanson: Good. And so it’s my impression, and just tell me if I’m right or wrong, is that as time goes on, I mean, Google does employ quite a bit of technology and AI and all that stuff. And so, its goal really is to understand your business. And offer it up to the clients who are most likely to want to hire you, right?

Is that how it works? so really when it comes down to it There’s not a whole lot of like gaming that you can do on your site. You just have to make your site as authentic as possible to what you do, right?

Steven Schneider: Yeah, essentially. I always like to describe it as an [00:26:00] iceberg. if you picture an iceberg, there’s this little piece of. Ice or snow above the water and that’s going to be your primary things like your home page, your contact page, your about page services page, all that sort of stuff.

as you get lower down the iceberg below the water, you start to think about, these tiers of. Where you can start doing SEO things. you have your technical SEO. It’s probably your base tier. It’s the closest to the water, but then as you get down, that’s like your content.

And that’s what adds depth to your site. And so as you’re adding more content to your site, you’re adding more keywords. You’re adding more context to your business. Who you are, who you serve, all this sort of stuff. And then Google picks up on that. So over time you add this like authority perspective to your brand and just you as an industry leader amongst your peers.

And that’s easier than to associate search terms with your site. So as Google picks up on the searches, they’re like, Oh, we know that ABC company does all this sort of stuff. But if your [00:27:00] competitors say don’t have that content. Google doesn’t have enough as much context to kind of decipher.

Tim Melanson: Okay. And so now let’s just say that, I’m a regular, brick and mortar business owner. I have a shop or whatever it is, maybe like an auto glass shop or something. That’s a plant that I’m working with right now. and so, As the business owner they’re more like a mechanic.

They’re not online writing blogs and doing Tik TOK videos and all that kind of stuff. this is not what they do. but they want their clients to be able to search for autoglass and find them. What do you mean like content? what does that mean?

Steven Schneider: how are you going to help them to do that if you’re not even in their business? That’s kind of another misconception is like local SEO as an umbrella is like a whole different can of worms. Like we’re a content SEO company. And so we work primarily with like B2B, SaaS services, all that sort of stuff. if you’re like a local brick and mortar, Find a local SEO expert.

you want to work on [00:28:00] your Google listing, like your Google business profile, like making sure that’s up to date, like that is kind of like your secondary website, making sure you have all these directory listings nearby, like your chamber of commerce, it should probably be added there.

Like all these things that tell Google. Hey, I do business in this area. And here’s the proof of that. So like map, which is an acronym for like your name, your address, your phone number, that should be identical amongst every single spot on other websites, like yellow pages, Google, my business, like all these little things that you don’t really think about until you start to kind of like think through and you’re like, Oh, yeah, it makes sense that my phone number should be the same place on every other place that mentions my name.

So, stuff like that. And Google picks up on it, of course, and that’s how you can rank locally.

Tim Melanson: That’s very interesting. so then really, the local, cause I, that was sort of like one of the things that I thought was like, you’ve got a local business, people are going to search you on Google and it’s probably because, You’re not competing with the businesses out, [00:29:00] you know, on the other side of the country.

You’re only competing to the businesses that are local to you. that’s a really good explanation of that. And that’s something that I think That’s a huge, huge nugget. So now what you’re talking about, though, is more or less like a digital business or like a global business, something that is a business that can compete with anybody all over the place, like my business more, right?

So now I don’t necessarily have a physical location. I work with anybody anywhere. And so in that case, I do compete with everybody around the world. So it’s not as simple as someone just going like, Graphic design in my city. They’re looking for graphic design, which means they’re going to get anybody anywhere, including overseas.

Exactly. So, if we take, Trio SEO, our company, as an example, we treat our company as one of our clients. we do an ongoing content calendar. we publish content monthly and treat it just like any other client. a lot of the topics that we cover are going to be, How to choose an SEO agency how to do B2B SEO or how to [00:30:00] learn SAS SEO, all these things where you have to assume that a CMO or founder or co founder or someone in that C suite executive level is searching because they either have a lack of experience or.

Steven Schneider: There’s someone who has that role and they’re looking to kind of level up that skill set and they can potentially bring on a partner like us. So we’re writing blogs, we’re writing content that meets that person on the other side of that conversation. And then it’s using that traffic to, insert CTAs, newsletters, all that sort of stuff that builds people into the brand.

Tim Melanson: Steven, that’s gold. That’s fantastic. All right. So what’s exciting your business right now?

Steven Schneider: I think just the high pace, high energy success. I mean, we’re only, a year in and we just crossed 25 monthly ongoing clients. So, it’s really fun to get a variety of clients to work with and see. What everyone’s doing. I always like to say I’m a jack of all trades, master of none, just doing [00:31:00] strategy for so many different types of clients it’s kind of fun to put on so many hats and then also work with the team and, build the systems.

And that’s kind of like a lot of the things I nerd out on is like. Automations and content systems and like making sure that there’s a. fully turning cog every step of the way to kind of like make sure things don’t fall apart. So, yeah, I could go on for hours about systems and content systems and stuff like that, but I’m sure that’s where people will start to blaze over.

Tim Melanson: so what’s the process if someone wants to get to start to work with you?

Steven Schneider: So we always start with the discovery audit, which is free. we’ll take a look at your website. We run through a checklist of things like we’ll take a look at your competitors. We take a look at your currently ranking keywords to see what your site is all about.

Obviously services, et cetera, take a look at any opportunities. And this is like a, less than an hour high level skim of what we would potentially go after. any CRO or UX. Things that we’re looking at, because that’s a huge component of SEO. and just run through fair, good, priority fixes that we would kind of run through.

And that’s [00:32:00] obviously there’s to keep regardless of what we work for. and then we just kind of like, see, is this a good fit? Technically, does it make sense? Like from a content point of view, in some cases we’ve worked people or. Attempted to work with people where they come to us and we’re just like this material is so dense like we’d have to go hire an expert writer and that’s going to severely impact the cost of your budget or it’s just not a good fit and like some cases like blogs don’t work for everyone and like As much as I wish they did, they don’t.

so like we’re very upfront about that. If it’s not a good fit, it’s not a good fit. Hopefully there’s someone else we’re going to refer you to. we do a lot of due diligence to make sure it’s a win win for both cases. and we want it to be a win at the end of the day for them.

Tim Melanson: What be like the sort of range of cost if someone was looking to hire somebody?

Steven Schneider: Yeah, so we have a couple of different packages, our full service, which is everything from strategy to writing 100 percent human written, no AI editing, uploading. We even do on page and like publishing fully hands off for [00:33:00] them. That’s seven articles per month for 3000 ongoing.

and then we also offer a one time strategy for 2, 500 bucks. And that’s pretty much just like a, Hey, maybe you have a writer on hand. Maybe you have a team. We’ll do a complete keyword research strategy. And then we’ll actually create a roadmap for you for 90 days.

And that’s like, assuming you went after five or 10 articles per month, here’s 15 to 20 articles per month landscape wise. you could potentially target, and then you get that full strategy. it’s also a good foot in the door because people get to see How we think and the process internally, and then they can determine where to go about that.

if someone has a writer on hand, but they don’t have strategy, we’ll do the strategy plus all the outline briefs or any of the blog skeletons, and then hand that over to them and they can finish the race.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Okay. That’s really, really cool. Because I think that there are people that probably just don’t know how to do it and you can help them with that.

so what do we do? How do we find out more?

Steven Schneider: So you can Google trio SEO, T R I O S E O. I always like to joke that if you can’t find us on Google, we’re doing [00:34:00] something wrong, so go there and look us up. I’m also super active on LinkedIn. I post daily, my partners as well, Connor Gillivan, Nathan Hirsch. so yeah, if you kind of just start throwing those words around, I’m sure you can find us one way or another.

Tim Melanson: Awesome. That’s cool. right on. Well, thank you so much for rocking out with me today, Stephen. It’s been a lot of fun.

Thanks Tim. Great. And to the listeners, make sure you subscribe, rate, comment, and go to workathomerockstar. com for more information.