Steve Toth has been doing SEO for over a decade. He was the full-time SEO Manager at FreshBooks, but in February 2020 I took the company on as a client after ranking #1 for a 300,000 search keyword and quintupling organic traffic in under a year. His consulting company, SEO That Ranks, current clients include Mejuri, Format.com, FreshBooks, UpLead, BrainStation, Celtx, Carpages.ca and more. As a former agency SEO employee, he worked on brands including Porter Airlines, Toyota, KPMG, Intercom and EMI. Steve is a go giver and trusted resource to over 4000 subscribers of seonotebook.com where he emails strategy notes weekly. Please welcome Steve Toth!
13:04 – How did the SEO Notebook start?
For Steve, the SEOnotebook started as a daily habit of writing down important notes for himself on Slack, Evernote, Google Keep, etc. The SEO Notebook draws a lot of inspiration from Steve’s daily note-taking habits.
17:06 – Battling for a Position with a Friend
Steve was always a competitive SEO. There was even a time before where he battled out a good friend of his for a particular position! In this clip, Steve explains his experience with this specific topic.
19:40 – “How am I going to come up with a thousand topics?”
In this section where Dre and Steve discussed ranking keywords, Steve mentioned his past task from his previous client where he and his team were asked to make a thousand articles. Steve explains how he managed to gain success with that task.
21:00 – What were your strategies in scraping topics for your writers?
Writing many topics was never easy before, but with good strategy, anything’s possible! In this section, Steve explains how he managed to pull through, scraping various topics for his writers.
21:57 – What are Jump Links?
In this brief section, Steve explained “jump links” and how important it is to search optimization.
22:48 – Paid Search Group Working Strategy
Back in time, Steve worked with his dynamic paid search group (his team, which he refers to as the “Dream team”) to strategize ranking in SEO.
25:00 – Using Trends as an Advantage for Creating Topics
One innovative & efficient way that Steve developed for coming up with topics for clients in determining the latest keyword trends. He used several different apps like Keywords Everywhere and many more.
27:40 – How did you go from SEO In-house to an SEO Agency?
For Steve, his history of being an In-house SEO was more of a learning phase. After learning so much from being an in-house SEO, it was that time when he thought about transitioning to a proper SEO Agency. In this section, he explains his journey on how he manually got to that point.
30:20 – Steve’s Professional Tips for all Budding SEO Practitioners/Marketers
As a prominent figure in the SEO community, Steve shared his best tips on becoming a better SEO. He shared some tips on how to get started (if you’re unemployed) and how to continue with the journey while stepping on the right path.
32:55 – How has SEO Changed in 2020 – for Steve
In this section, before ending the show, Steve gave out his insights on how SEO changed from the past couple of years up to this point. He also shared things you need to expect in SEO for the upcoming years.
Links to news mentioned on the show:
HTTPS | WMConf Lightning Talks
MOZ Meta Title testing
Apple Search Engine Ranking Factors (Apple Search SEO)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683
Barnacle SEO – PR and SEO
Edge SEO
Google ticker links:
Make the licensing information for your images visible on Google Images
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/08/make-licensing-information-for-your.html
