Matt Diggity Interview – How to SEO Optimize Affiliate Marketing

Alex Fedotoff:

Hey guys. So today we have a very special guest. We have Matt Diggity. So, Matt is a specialist in SEO, search engine optimization. I always confused like CEO and SEO and so yeah. So, Matt is a specialist in SEO, search engine optimization. He was also a speaker here in Affiliate World Asia and Matt is a guy like that, so everyone is kind of like on this conference everyone is like pretty much like one direction, like media buying, you know, short-term, fast results where Matt is more long term thinking, building the assets that actually increase the value. For example, building affiliate websites, like growing traffic organically, right? Which ultimately adds value to your brand and then selling it. So, I want to ask you some questions. I’m very glad to have you here.

Matt Diggity:

Yeah. Of course. Thank you.

Alex Fedotoff:

So, most of our ideas like these are eCommerce entrepreneurs right? What things you are seeing, because you’re over, you’re seeing different things happening overall. With Google, with search engine optimization, with marketing overall. So, what things you see that people are missing and specifically eCommerce, eCommerce businesses that they could take advantage of, for example, with search engine optimization.

Matt Diggity:

Sure, absolutely. So, the big things with the eCommerce SEO is they have a unique set of problems that typically most other types of websites don’t have because the eCommerce websites are so large, they typically have a lot of pages indexed. It’s a big task for Google’s robot to go around and crawl them and make sure all the pages are considered properly. So, the name of the game with eCommerce is just to make sure you’re not, what they would call bloating, Google’s index. So, you’re only indexing  the pages that really matter, don’t index like search parameters, your search pages, all that kind of stuff. Because let’s say for example, Google decides that they’re going to allocate 1,000, “Resources.” For your website. You don’t want to waste these resources on pages that you don’t want to rank. So, it’s really about telling Google not to waste its time on certain pages and being really good about that.

Matt Diggity:

Another eCommerce issue that comes up a lot as thin content. So, you have a product page, you don’t really want to write a whole bunch of content on it or maybe you want to reuse content that you’re like, for category pages and paste it. So, you might have duplicate content issues or thin content issues. And it’s annoying, especially if you have a thousand products on your site. But having unique descriptions for the products and having full pages with a lot of content is really going to help you in the long run. It’s tedious, but it needs to be done.

Alex Fedotoff:

So, the first thing that you mentioned was that Google kind of like allocate certain resources to growing a certain website property. Is that right?

Matt Diggity:

Sure. We call it crawl budget. So, essentially there’s no real patents on it, but people know from experience that based on a certain authority Google might assign to your website, if you’re an old website, if you’re Web MD, you have a whole bunch of authority in their mind and they’re going to allocate a lot of resources to crawling you. If you’re a new website, maybe less than a year old, a few backlinks, then if you try to index one thousand pages, you’re probably not going to get them all considered. So, you got to be really smart about what you index.

Alex Fedotoff:

And so you would just kind of like tell Google that, just don’t even try to like index these pages, is that right?

Matt Diggity:

Yeah. Typical ones you want to watch out for is, I don’t know, some products, like any product that doesn’t have any search volume, I don’t know, just some little sock, for example. You don’t care about indexing the sock page and then search parameters are the big ones. So, if someone searches on your website, there’s a special URL that comes up. You don’t want Google to waste their time with that.

Alex Fedotoff:

Okay. All right. So, it’s actually like not trying to do too many things at the same time, right? Not trying to rank too many pages at the same time, is that right?

Matt Diggity:

Yeah, because most of them won’t have keyword volume anyways. It’s mostly your category pages. Right? So, blue sweaters or something like that instead of the particular type of sweater that you want to rank.

Alex Fedotoff:

Cool. And then that also relates to the second thing that you said, basically also not trying to … Okay, let’s say you have like a thousand pages, writing the unique product description for each of them will be like tasks for a huge team. Right?

Matt Diggity:

Yeah.

Alex Fedotoff:

So, okay. Just choosing the most important pages that actually maybe your best sellers, right? Or something like that. And just allocating more resources, trying to optimize those. Is that right?

Matt Diggity:

Sure. I mean it all starts with keyword research and just determining which are the pages that have search volume and then focusing on those first, for sure. And writing unique descriptions, having a decent chunk of content and most importantly, like we talked about before this interview is analyzing the competition, seeing how much content are they putting on their pages. It’s not a game of can I outdo them in terms of effort? It’s a game of blending in with page one. And that’s the name of the game right now in SEO.

Alex Fedotoff:

Yeah. So, what Matt shared with me was, for me, totally different from what I’ve heard. Lots of people like SEO for example, if you want to rank for some keywords they tell you to write huge, humongous article and just do  tons of research and just make 5,000 words article. And obviously this would take a lot of research, like to organize it, to rank like. But Matt told me that it’s not actually those articles that rank for the biggest keywords. But the articles that kind of followed the pattern on the first page of Google. So, if everyone, the first page of Google for those key words you want to rank for, if they’re creating let’s say 800 to 1,000 words articles, then you know it’s basically you better follow that kind of pattern and just try maybe or do something a bit better.

Matt Diggity:

Exactly. Exactly. So, if you noticed, if you search around a lot and you start paying attention, you’ll see that Google is starting to get a little bit boring with the results that they’re serving up. So, if you Google something like Facebook scaling for example, you might find that every result on page one is a listicle. So, top five ways to do this. Top six ways, top seven, everything’s kind of the same. And if you were to analyze and see what is the word count on these pages, what are the things in common? They’re usually around the same, like what they put on page one is typically very similar to each other because they don’t want to have some weird results. They want to serve up people what they want to read. So, it’s better to just find that pattern and keep serving that up over and over again.

Matt Diggity:

So, we can use this to our advantage using software like Surfer who is also in Poland and they’ll analyze and see what are the commonalities on page one, what’s the word count that people are using, what are the keywords, where are they placing them? Every little detail. How many subsections, how many paragraphs they have, how many images they have, how they optimize the images. And you just follow that. That’s just one of the great things about doing SEO these days. It’s this homogenized pattern that we can take advantage of.

Alex Fedotoff:

Cool. Well, so what you spoken on stage yesterday, right? Like was about the affiliate SEO, right? Can you talk about the whole concept and how it kind of works?

Matt Diggity:

Yeah. Yeah. Affiliate SEO, this is my gig. I’ve been doing it for like 10 years. And basically what you would do is make a content website. Typically, they’re like review websites. You could have a website about golf and you’re reviewing golf drivers and putters and golf bags and all this kind of stuff, and you have your top five list, here’s my top five best golf drivers for 2020 and then when someone gets a click on one of those things, you make a commission. Maybe you’re sending that traffic to Amazon or maybe a private affiliate offer or direct with the eCommerce store. So, that’s the whole concept.

Matt Diggity:

And like I was saying in my presentation, the cool thing about that right now is, cool, yes, affiliate SEO, you can make passive revenue. And once you get that organic traffic, it pretty much stays as long as you’re doing the right things, which is great. And maybe you can get this golf website to make $10,000 a month, $20,000 a month. But the crazy thing right now is that these content websites are looked upon as digital assets and they’re now selling at 40X monthly profit. So, this 20K golf website that you got can now sell for $800,000 and that’s why affiliate SEO is getting super popular right now.

Alex Fedotoff:

Cool. I mean this like massive valuation, right? Even like eCommerce businesses, you probably, it’s rare that you get such a high valuation. For example, Matt has a movement watch, right? Which is the eCommerce company. So, it was grown by mostly influencer marketing, Facebook advertising. So, at the point where they were sold, they were sold for 100 million plus another 50 or 100, kind of like a performance over the next like five years or so. But the revenue at that point was $70 million. So, 70 versus 100, so I don’t know what their profit was, but I don’t think that the multiple was that high.

Matt Diggity:

I’m not sure. Yeah. I’m not sure the multiples on eCommerce, but they say affiliate’s really good because it’s really hands off. It’s kind of a passive aspect. And so investors really like that because even if they’re not that versed in the game, they can find an operator and it’s pretty passive. But then the best model for flipping is SAS. SAS gets a huge multiple. Yeah.

Alex Fedotoff:

And so, if people, for example wanted to do like this kind of … [inaudible 00:10:10] affiliate SEO or just, for example how like eCommerce business that would already have, let’s say a lot of traffic with Facebook advertising, lot of traction and they would have resources and they wanted to see more long-term about this. So, what would be the starting point? Would that be starting a blog on the same domain they have? Or would that be a better solution would be to start a totally new domain, but then rank all of those articles and then drive them to do the main eCommerce. What’s the best strategy in your experience?

Matt Diggity:

Okay, so first thing with eCommerce SEO, if you have an eCommerce store and it has some age to it, it’s got some longevity. The domain isn’t brand new. Stick with that. And another great thing is that in the whole realm of search engine optimization of all these different models, affiliate or lead generation, eCommerce is typically the easiest to do just because for some reason eCommerce, SEO hasn’t really gotten to a high level in terms of who’s operating in these sites. So, you’re in a good position.

Matt Diggity:

What I would recommend doing is doing an audit of your own site or having an audit done for you and looking at what assets does the website already have? Like are there pages that just need some tweaking and to get you from page two to page one. So, start with what you already have and then it’s about developing a plan.

Matt Diggity:

So, it’s basically on a very, very high level, SEO is just content and backlinks. So, developing a content plan on how you’re going to grow your site and cover more keywords and making sure all your content is relevant to the existing state of the site, and then developing a backlink plan. So, how are we going to get backlinks? Are we going to outsource these or are we going to purchase them, how’s that going to be? And then over time it just grows.

Alex Fedotoff:

In terms of like resources, how much would a typical business, let’s say they have like hundred products on their website and what would be like the typical budget for SEO to kind of … In terms of in the next like six, 12 months to see some kind of impactful results, in your experience?

Matt Diggity:

Yeah, so with eCommerce, I mean everything depends on competition, right? So, it just depends on the niche, right? But typically at my agency with the $2,000 budget to $3,000 budget, we’re seeing customers get a turn around in three to six months time.

Alex Fedotoff:

So, they see positive, impactful results and they can actually see the good positive trending. Right?

Matt Diggity:

Yeah. Yeah. You typically get a spike right away because like I mentioned before, we’ll audit your site so we look at the assets you already have and see what we can do to just reconfigure things and get a quick gain. So, you might just pop up at the beginning. Then after that it’s slow gains as we start to build up content, backlinks, build authority for your site, but typically a spike at the beginning and then after a certain amount of time when we turn the corner and Google really trusts the site, that’s typically around the six to nine month mark.

Alex Fedotoff:

And how do people, like how can people get in touch with you if they want, for example, an audit, if they’re in this kind of like … They want to see what is possible with their current situation or they want to do it for you. How do people find you?

Matt Diggity:

Yeah, that would be thesearchinitiative.com. This is my agency. We’re based out of London. So yeah, just there’s a form on the page. We can have two options for you. One, we can just do an audit. So, we’ll give you what we find and you can carry it out yourself or if you want us to do it all for you, then we have done for you service as well.

Alex Fedotoff:

Awesome. So, if there was like one … So, obviously you know like Google and everything changes over the years. And what is the main trend that you see that people have to watch out for? Like with SEO, is it getting more difficult and people have to … What would be your main advice for people in, say in the next five years?

Matt Diggity:

Sure. So, yes, Google’s algorithm always gets more challenging. So, you really have to stay up on the game and find out what they’re looking for all the time. But as a side benefit of that, because the algorithm gets more challenging, it actually weeds out the competition all the time. So, if you have that margin of knowledge, it actually gets easier. What I recommend is if you’re going to get into SEO, do it full-time, otherwise outsource it. It’s challenging enough. It’s complicated enough by itself. Another trend that happens with SEO is the search real estate gets smaller and smaller over time. So, if you Google anything, there’s the amount of real estate on page one for the clickable organic results is shrinking-

Alex Fedotoff:

Oh, because they have more now.

Matt Diggity:

More ads. More instant answers, right? So, you see the feature snippet at the top. YouTube carousels, all this stuff, right? So, you really need to be in the top positions if you’re going to get any clicks. Right?

Alex Fedotoff:

Oh, okay. And the trend is going to continue, like they’re going to shrink it? There’ll be like few?

Matt Diggity:

I think they’ll probably hit a saturation point where people are just like, what the fuck is this?

Alex Fedotoff:

I was looking for it.

Matt Diggity:

Yeah. I’m looking for some results from people. Right? So, we’ll see. We’ll see. But it hasn’t slowed down for a while.

Alex Fedotoff:

So, if you want to do it it’s better to, it’s long-term, right? It’s not like instant, like tomorrow you’ll have instant results. But if you start today, the next six, 12, 24 months, like a few years you’ll have an asset. And I know that for example, valuation of the business that has multiple sources of traffic, organic traffic, not just paid traffic because that’s good when it’s good, but then when it’s bad it’s expensive. And so having those multiple sources of traffic is tremendously valuable for business long-term for a good valuation.

Matt Diggity:

Absolutely.

Alex Fedotoff:

So, thank you so much Matt. Guys, again, if you want to get in touch with Matt, get an audit of your website or just having Matt done it all for you. He’s been around in the industry for like 10 years. Amazing results. He was speaking here, and shared some of his insights. He does it. He’s an actual practitioner. So, get in touch with him. It’s The Search Initiative?

Matt Diggity:

thesearchinitiative.com.

Alex Fedotoff:

Yeah. Thank you guys for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.

Matt Diggity:

Bye-bye.

Alex Fedotoff:

Thank you, Matt.

Matt Diggity:

Sweet.

Alex Fedotoff:

Thanks man.

Matt Diggity:

Thank you. That was good. That was fun.