Eric Siu is an investor, founder, and advisor to companies.
He is the Chairman of the digital marketing agency Single Grain, which has worked with companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Salesforce.
He also hosts two podcasts: Marketing School with Neil Patel and Leveling Up, an entrepreneurial podcast where he dissects growth levers that help businesses scale.
He ultimately found how to convert his focus and success in gaming into a very successful career in marketing.
Please welcome the author of Leveling Up. Eric Siu!
23:30 – How did you get into SEO?
Eric graduated from college in the middle of “The Great Recession” (2007 to 2009), and the only job he could find was a dead-end data entry job. The story didn’t end there as Eric ultimately found the right path towards SEO.
24:30 – What’s a T-shaped Marketer?
Before this discussion, Eric mentioned the word T-shaped marketer, which got Dre curious about it. In this section, Eric explained that a T-shaped marketer can specialize in different areas and not just focus on one. It’s all about diversifying your reach.
25:35 – Eric’s SEO history
Eric’s history with SEO was a fun one, “learnable,” and a bit on the edgy side too. In this section, he shares his experiences of doing both SEO (by the books) and availing of black-hat services. For him, his biggest lesson was “Learn from the black hats, but do it in a white-hat way.”
29:30 – Eric and Neil Patel’s Working Relationship
If you didn’t know before, Neil Patel was one of the people that Eric was reaching out to. Now, they’re both partners in several different ventures! It’s all about confidence and jumping on opportunities!
29:50 – Buying an Agency for 2 Dollars!
In this section, Eric shared one of the super risky moves he made back then. He bought a company (that isn’t scalable enough anymore or not worth anything) for a low price! The story coming from Eric suggests that it wasn’t easy, but he was able to work through it today because of his resilience.
33:10 – ClickFlow Explained by Eric Siu
Clickflow, as explained by Eric, is an SEO software that helps you grow your traffic while making you look like a genius! But how so? In this section, Eric explains the technicalities of using ClickFlow.
34:40 – Organic CTR Tips by Eric
Eric is an expert in the CTR field as well. One of his greatest tips is to test something for 15 days and look at its before and after results (which he calls Pre-post testing). Also, he suggests looking at headlines that catch your attention from social media platforms (and saving them for the future). That’s not all, as Eric dropped a lot of details to what’s mentioned above in this section.
36:50 – How did you develop Clickflow?
Eric’s inspo for ClickFlow revolved heavily around product selling and marketing. In this section, Eric explained ClickFlow and how it came about in detail.
39:10 – One tip from Eric on Product Launching
One of the best examples that Eric had mentioned is when he got a 45-min call from the CEO of Levels (Health Monitoring app). The scenario is that the CEO asked Eric a couple of questions that are heavily related to how their application works, which lead to customer development. What makes this call impressive is that when Eric asked the CEO how many times he did it, the CEO responded: “over a thousand.” For Eric, one of the greatest ways to launch your product is hands-on engagement.
41:40 – Eric’s quote from a conference “You get a job, maybe you start freelancing and get some clients on the side, and then from there, you start to build out the agency you want. You can take it as far as you want. You just have to keep leveling up.”
One of the key lines from Eric is that if you want to succeed in the SEO career, you have to keep leveling up. “You don’t deserve to be at the next level if you can’t beat the level that you’re in.”
45:20 – How long did it take for you to write your book? (Leveling Up)
Eric had a lot of big inspirations before writing his book. Way back from playing games, leveling up in real life, and doing stuff that improved his life. In this section, Eric gave us a glimpse of what it’s like to level up and his journey in finishing his book.
50:51 – The Level 99 Strategy – an SEO Course from Eric’s book
For Eric, level 99 is the highest level that one can get into. He applies this principle in SEO, and in this section, he explains how you can grow as an SEO and reach your full potential and reach level 99.
52:30 – Eric’s final tip to those who want to become an SEO Professional
Eric has been dropping bombs over bombs since the show started. But as a prominent SEO figure in the community, he had to share something for the community. In this section, Eric gave out his best advice to improve SEO. For him, the connection is key to becoming better.
Links to full videos below:
Google Discover and your website documentation posted in the Advances SEO portion of Google Search Central. They give a rundown of what you need to do to optimize for Discover and at the very end, they mention you can just use AMP. The link is in the description.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/mobile/google-discover
I always recommend getting your content localized in each region you are doing business in. Here’s why https://youtu.be/Qoj7SRvtF4w?t=178
If the content is low for Google to rank, competition is low. Take a look at your traffic geo and if you have a decent amount of traffic from a certain country, localize it!
On the topic of content. Does changing the publish date help with the Google freshness ranking factor? https://youtu.be/8YF3RB46rrM?t=321
Eric Engage posted his 3 pillars of search success. Here’s #1 on the list https://youtu.be/ZqAeX74V604?t=240
Watch the complete video
The CEO of YOAST tells us why User Experience is very important
To get all this technical SEO done you need to get your dev team on board.
Here’s one way to Get Your Web Dev on Board with SEO by Brittany from MOZ https://youtu.be/14FX0xcTLOc?t=42
Tweet of the week.
5 SEO experts share their 2021 predictions: https://twitter.com/RossHudgens/status/1351634850978140160
Speaking of links.
What is the best link to acquire? https://youtu.be/FwNpF1IN1Ew?t=77
Definitely check out the full Traffic Research 216 Backlinks For MASSIVE Google Traffic video on their channel.
Kyle Roof goes over his top-ranking factor test results on
Kherk Roldan SEO https://youtu.be/ySOpNMjuQgo?t=747
Last week I shared Ryan Stewart’s 5 step SEO framework for agencies. This week he gives away his whole project plan.
