Joe Troyer 0:51
Hey everybody it's Joe Troyer, and welcome to another episode of show me the nuggets. Today we have Justin Smith here, fellow Ohioan. And actually just found out right before the show, he's like, literally right down the street from me. Hilarious. Super excited to have Justin on the show. Justin, man, without further ado, welcome, brother.
Justin Smith 1:11
Yeah, we should just done this in person.
Joe Troyer 1:12
That would've been a little better. So man, you are the CEO and founder of OuterBox, you want to talk a little bit about what you guys do over there?
Justin Smith 1:23
Yeah. So at OuterBox, you know, we really focus on we started as a website development company. So I guess, almost 18 years ago now, just about so when we started it, our focus was really, you know, building great sites, like most web design companies, 18 years ago, you're building a lot of informational sites, things like that. And then we quickly got into e commerce and started focusing on that, as we saw, that would be the growth of, you know, where, where marketing was going and an opportunity. After that, we realized, okay, well, once you have an e commerce site, you need to do the marketing. So we got into the search engine optimization side of it, and really took off from there. So now we're really a full service agency from planning to design development, search, marketing, paid search, all that kind of stuff.
Joe Troyer 2:15
Okay, perfect. And it's ecom your guys's bread butter these days?
Justin Smith 2:17
Yeah, it really is. So you know, again, we practice what we preach. So if you go on Google, and you search ecommerce, SEO company, you're gonna find this right at the top. So yeah, ecommerce is probably good 80% of our business.
Joe Troyer 2:30
That's cool. Our show's producer, Eduardo did some research and found you guys have a team of about 80 plus people. I'm curious, what's that team look like? What's the org chart kind of look like for you guys?
Justin Smith 2:39
Yeah, we hired a president this year, he was one of the partners that we've had. He's been a partner for, I don't know, 13, 14 years. So it's great to bring him on is acting president now which is made my job a little bit easier, I get to focus on the marketing side of the business instead of just talking with employees all day long. So it's kind of freed up my time to work on growing the company. But as far as the org chart, we really have, you know, a director over each department. So director over account management and over paid search and over SEO, in SEO, we kind of have that that's our biggest division, probably 50 people in the SEO department. So we have probably three or four managers there, but really just a director for each department. And then, you know, we have strategists, we have specialists underneath them and departments as well.
Joe Troyer 3:29
Yeah, man. Sounds like you guys have grown like crazy mad over the last 18 years or so. You got 80 plus full time people. I mean, that's crazy. What would you say has been kind of the 80/20 of your guys's growth and success?
Justin Smith 3:41
Yeah, I mean, really, the biggest, you know, COVID helped. We were already on a good growth trajectory. We were growing like crazy. But, you know, obviously, everything went nuts with e commerce sales, online marketing, so that it only benefited us once we realized the world wasn't going to end. But you know, it's been, it's been a good good mix of really, you know, the biggest growth for us is just practicing what we preach, you know, we rank really well for what we're doing. We get inbound leads coming to us every day, we get people calling us every day, and makes it a hell of a lot easier for our sales team.
Joe Troyer 4:22
So before we got started on the show, I was telling you about how we came across an article that you wrote about white hat link building, and developing what you call link magnet pages. And one of the big reasons I wanted to get you here on the show today, and one of the things I wanted to focus on and to be honest, kind of pick your brain about so I'm really curious, like, what are the main strategies that you guys are employing to rank for these obviously, Uber competitive keywords, you know, SEO is doing SEO, you know, gets pretty competitive.
Justin Smith 4:52
Yeah. You know, there's a, there's a lot of things. I mean, one is, obviously have to have great content. I mean, you still see us To companies or suggestions where like, you bring him a site, and all they want to do is link building. And there's some value to link building, for sure. But at the end of the day, you still have to have great content. First, you have to have great technical site, to say you can't really rank a site just from doing technical things, right. But you can definitely kill a site from doing technical things wrong. So you have to make sure that's all buttoned up. But yeah, great content. And then, you know, when we're using this strategy that we're talking about with statistics, it's really building an awesome page that deliver some value. And then it's, it's ranking that page. So it's kind of the what comes first, right? You rank the page, and then you get more links into the page. So it's, it's that balance of how do you get that ball rolling a little bit?
Joe Troyer 5:46
Perfect. So when when you build a link statistics page, which I'm assuming is like one of your types of link magnet pages, right? Where do you get the statistics from? Is it just aggregation? Is it you guys doing your own statistics? what's what's worked for you guys?
Justin Smith 6:02
Honestly, yeah, we kind of did it the cheap way, when we built our first page, doing it, it was kind of a test, we never realized that the page that we built would be as big as it is. And it really has helped our domain authority, cuz we're getting a ton of links into it all the time. But yeah, we just, we just aggregated it from different sources cited some different sources put it all on one clean document that honestly the pages in anything crazy, you know, it's got some bullet points, and it shows some things, we've got the super basic infographic, you know, probably took 20 minutes. And yeah, that was really it. I mean, I think you if you have the time, and you have the ability to do that research and get your own statistics, I think there's some great value in mixing the two together, you know, blending in some authority sources and your own.
Joe Troyer 6:50
Yeah, it's really interesting. In our space in the in the agency marketing world, Bright Local, I think, has done a really good job of doing their own statistics and their own research, one of the only companies I've really seen do it. And if you look at the backlinks and their competitors, it's like, there's no wonder they're smashing everybody, because everybody's linking to their content over and over and over, and they keep refreshing it every year. So I mean, it's just a, it's just a wheel that just keeps a flywheel that just keeps spinning.
Justin Smith 7:19
Yeah, it's definitely important to keep it updated. You know, once, once it's working, you can kind of just let it sit there and forget about it. But you'll realize that the billing start falling off, or the ranking start dropping for that page as well. So but yeah, the page that we really have had a ton of success on is we built statistics around mobile online shopping. So how many people are you know what percentage of people are buying on mobile devices, that kind of stuff. So if you go to Google, and you search, probably just something like mobile e commerce stats, you'll probably see our article right at the top. And so we get tons of everybody from GoDaddy to Forbes, the, you know, like da 90 sites linking to it all day long, just referencing it when they're talking about online sales.
Joe Troyer 8:03
Yeah, that's beautiful. So if you are going to start out again, and you had to rank that page, what would you do? Like, would you buy some links to it? Would you? How would you get it ranking initially? How would you get that traction?
Justin Smith 8:16
Yeah, I mean, we had, we were lucky when we did it, because we already had a high da site, we, you know, we've been around for a long time, a lot of content we write, we can write new articles, get them indexed, and ranked on the first page of Google in a matter of an hour. So we definitely have that advantage going for us. Now, if you're a brand new website, it might not be the best strategy to use because he got to get the page out there. And you got to get some rankings with it.
But I guess that's with any new site, and anybody who builds you know, sharing it on social media, trying to get some, you know, just some people you know, to link to it, hey, put it on your Twitter feed for us. Can you share it on Facebook, we always do that within our company. Again, it's nice, we have 80 people that can share something and get a bunch of shares right away, but try to use your network just to share that content piece. And once you get a few going, if you can get it, you know, it's just the snowball effect. So yeah, yeah. I mean, can you do some guest posting in placements like that? Yeah. I mean, that can't hurt,
Joe Troyer 9:17
got to do what you got to do, I guess to get it ranked. I even heard somebody was driving Google Search Ads around statistics, keyword phrases around statistics to their page to get the backlinks to kind of boost the organic listings as well, I thought was a really interesting strategy. Yeah. So best practices, anything that we haven't covered on building these statistics page that you would say like, man, I'd be really be remissed. If I didn't tell you you need to do this or don't do this.
Justin Smith 9:46
I would, you know, definitely cite credible sources. I think that's beneficial. It's also beneficial to do some external linking. You know, I think with any blog post or any article External links help to authoritative sources. But it This makes it really easy to do External links because you can cite other websites, only thing you have to watch is, you know, a lot of times you're citing other sites that are probably trying to rank for the same thing you're trying to rank for. But it's still, we haven't had too many issues with that. But yeah, that's, that's really what I would say is just make sure you, you know, include sources that when someone else wants to link to you, they're gonna say, okay, their their research was, well, well founded, and not just, you know, pulling stuff from everywhere.
Joe Troyer 10:34
Yeah, I think the only other thing that I think about is like just going after a search phrase that you could probably rank for your page, right? Because if you do it on too big of a topic, you're never gonna rank, and then you just kind of did it in vain. So
Justin Smith 10:49
yeah, you got to look at and say, like, Do I have a chance? If if the people ranking for those keywords, now, let's say you're going after, you know, that, if you're a, if you sell football gear, right, a great article would be like around concussions, statistics? And like, how can football helmets health, and like, that's a huge topic, people are referencing that all day long. But if you search that in the top 10 results are like ESPN, and CNN and things like that, like you're not going to beat them. So like you said, you have to pick a topic that you feel like you have some ability to rank for.
Joe Troyer 11:22
So I know on your site, on one of your case studies you're talking about, you're getting about 100 links per month with a strategy to one of your pages. Yeah. So is that kind of normal? Are you doing any outreach for that? Tell us a little bit kind of about that?
Justin Smith 11:36
No, we're at we're doing absolutely nothing. It's really funny. I mean, it's, it's honestly, just that that page, again, we built this page, just as a little test. I think, I don't even know honestly, if we built it so long ago, I don't even know if we built it to try to get links. Or if it was just like a blog topic idea, like, hey, let's write about mobile e commerce and it's growing, it's probably what it was. And it kind of just turned into this thing where, yeah, I mean, we probably get more than 100 links, we're probably getting 10 a day to it. From good sources. It's just, but again, it ranks number one on Google when you search for that. So people are literally just like, Oh, I need to cite something, they're doing what we said, like I need to put an external link into my blog post, they search for a stat, they find it, they throw that External link in and like satisfy their external, you know, their two or three External links when they're doing SEO themselves.
Joe Troyer 12:25
I love it. I love it. I don't see near enough marketing agencies actually doing marketing for themselves, right, actually doing what they teach what they preach. And I think this is a great example, that somebody could take and apply to their own niche, their own vertical and do it themselves. So I absolutely love this strategy.
Justin Smith 12:41
Yeah. And I always tell people to just like, ask, ask your sales team, what are what are things people are wondering, you know, what are what are some, you know, instead of always doing keyword research use? And, you know, you can use that for other things, not just that's pages, but you know, blog post ideas and stuff to what are what things do your clients want to know when they're when you're in the sales process, and then put some good statistics about that and build a good piece around it.
Joe Troyer 13:09
Beautiful, man. So moving on a little bit past just this type of page. Are there any other type of kind of link magnet pages that you guys build?
Justin Smith 13:19
Um, you know, really, it just comes down to great content. So it's more of what I just said, what you're answering questions.. I love pricing pages. That's something people don't think about a lot. Yeah. What two of our biggest pages that drive a ton of leads for us, we have an article around e commerce website pricing, how much does an e commerce website cost? And then around SEO pricing, you know, again, you probably search SEO pricing on Google or probably number one, you know, or you search, you know, e commerce website, design costs, or anything like that. So those articles work really well. People are always wondering how much something costs. But really just thinking again, like we said, What to sit with your sales team? What are questions people ask when they're wanting to buy your product? And if they have those questions in their head, inevitably, people are going to be searching on as well.
Joe Troyer 14:12
Beautiful. So when you guys write out the content for those, do you kind of give best practices like what should go into SEO? When what should a good SEO company do and then just kind of give general estimates of what that could cost? let's format the page or,
Justin Smith 14:26
yeah, I mean, it's different for each one for that one. I think we kind of broke it down into like, here's what consultants might charge. Here's what people overseas would charge. Here's where the US company would charge. You know, the difference between a basic SEO package and like an enterprise package. You know, what's the difference between $500 a month SEO and $10,000 a month SEO A lot of people don't know that. What's the difference between a local SEO campaign and you know, an SEO campaign for an e commerce site? So I think it's different for every topic, but really just trying to, I guess, probably use Searching those main keywords that main topic like SEO pricing in Google, and then looking at what are the suggested searches? And you answer the suggested searches as well around the topic.
Joe Troyer 15:11
Yeah, that's great advice. So it seems like it would be fair fair to say, let me know if I'm wrong. But you guys are really, really focused on content at OtterBox.
Justin Smith 15:19
Yeah, we are. There's two things. I mean, we build a lot of content, because we have a lot of clients that have been SEO clients for a long time. And at some point, right, you've done the the fix the technical things, we've gotten rid of bad each ones, and we're hoping and you got set up and you've done all the things you can do, really, at some point, then it's how do we tackle keywords? We don't rank for keywords, we don't even have a page for how do we make category pages better by having good content at the bottom of them? How do we do more internal linking, we need more content to do internal linking. And Google just wants to see that you're also putting out good content on a regular basis. So yeah, we inevitably, you know, we're great at technical SEO, we're great at link building. But you still have to be an authority need to be putting out good content all the time. And I don't think there's any way around that.
Joe Troyer 16:11
I completely agree. How, what would you say are some of the biggest tips in finding writers, I imagine that you guys have to have quite a writing team and have been hiring writers for for a long time. And curious kind of what that process looks like. Or if you give us some tips of what to lean towards, or what to stay away from?
Justin Smith 16:30
Yes. So for us when we were smaller, I think a lot of smaller SEO agencies deal with this problem is they have their SEOs, they have their specialists and their strategists, you know, SEO, also doing content writing, because they have to, and you run into a lot of content, that's just not great. They don't, you know, they don't know how to use brand voice and all those kind of things. So really, what we've done at this point is we've hired English majors, you know, we have a good content team, they, they understand SEO, and they're learning more about SEO every day. But that's not really the main goal, the main goal is for them to understand the client, the brand voice, and be able to really write awesome content, and then our SEOs can optimize it or put keywords in or change links around if they need to. So I think it's really, you know, my suggestion would be find a great writer. Don't worry so much about SEO, you can always optimize the content once it's written.
Joe Troyer 17:27
Completely agree completely agree we used to do everything exactly the opposite. But I couldn't agree now more. So what kind of what kind of on page SEO tools do you use? Do you use any or?
Justin Smith 17:40
Yeah, I mean, it what do you mean by on page SEO tools like to do what specifically?
Joe Troyer 17:44
I feel like like Surfer and all these tools as of late last year have become super, super, super popular. And I'm just curious your take, if you use them, don't use them or
Justin Smith 17:54
Sure, I've used Surfer and some of those, they can give you some good tips. I think like the LSI.stuff is beneficial. What words do you need to be using, you know, Hey, everybody on the first page of Google use these 10, you know, words on their page, it probably makes sense that you talked about those same things as well. So I think there's definitely some good pieces there. You know, for the price, a lot of them aren't expensive. So I don't you know, for 100 bucks or a couple 100 bucks a month, I think it's worth it. I would say as far as some of the things that gives you like, Hey, you should go get these links, or everybody has these links, that stuff I haven't used as much, but from a content perspective and an LSI. You know, data point, I think it's pretty beneficial.
Joe Troyer 18:42
Yeah, for sure. Cool, man. So this has been really awesome. I appreciate your insight. Again, we're gonna link up to the examples that we talked about in the show notes, I think you're a great example of a marketer that's actually doing marketing for themselves, which is really hard to find these days, I feel like nobody does. So I definitely want to highlight you and showcase you so others could go and find you and see this and have something to model for themselves and their own business and their own agency. And I want to wrap it up and asking one question.
So instead of asking you to recommend three books, like I feel like every podcast does, I'm either a voracious reader, and I can't put a book down once I started, or I get like halfway through the first chapter. And I'm like, man, No, thanks. So I always like to ask the people that I think are smart, the people that I like to follow the people I get on my podcast, like what's the one book that's made the biggest impact on the way that you do business? And why?
Justin Smith 19:36
Yeah, I would say, you know, I, I like doing sales. So I'm always into sales books. And I think everybody should be into sales, whether their, they have a direct sales position or not, you're always selling something, even if that's just selling yourself, or you're trying to sell a content piece when you pitch it to a client, and you're a content writer. So my my favorite book would probably be The Ultimate Sales Machine. This thing gets in an absolutely awesome book. There's so many actionable pieces in it. So like, even if you read a chapter here and there, I just have that book highlighted like crazy, where it's just like when you when you do this, make sure you do this. And it's, it's a great book for selling ideas. And like I said, no matter what job role you have, you're always selling an idea.
Joe Troyer 20:21
Yeah, that's awesome. That's a super oldie. Super goodie. And I haven't read it for quite some time, actually. So Justin, great, great recommendation. Good referral, definitely pick that up and read it again. And man, thanks so much for for coming. And being on the podcast. Again, we'll link up everything in the show notes. And if somebody wants to reach out to you personally, maybe do some business with you has any comm site. What's the best place the best way to get ahold of you?
Justin Smith 20:44
Yeah, I mean, my emails just justin@outerbox.com so that's easy enough. probably could have guessed it. But yeah, that's that's the best way or look up a phone number on our site,give us a call.
Joe Troyer 20:55
Perfect. Sounds good. Thanks, Justin.
