Growth Newsletter #105

Wish you could get more traffic from Google?

Well...

A lot of the SEO industry are agencies/freelancers charging for very expensive audits and 6-month contracts. They keep saying "just wait for it to kick in."

Because of how slow SEO is, it can take months to realize that you're overpaying.

The funniest part? A lot of the audits can be done using free and low-cost tools.

Our favorite is Ahref's Webmaster Tools.

A cost-friendlier alternative to expensive audits. 

AWT shows which keywords your pages rank for, how Google sees your content, and what changes can boost your traffic.

We've been using it for years to increase the visibility of our playbooks and articles. And Ahrefs has a ton of free content to teach you a ton about SEO.

Visit ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools to try it out.

Imagine this: You’re not an expert in SEO, and are rather mystified by it, so you decide to hire an SEO consultant. You find an expert on Upwork (for example).

They seem confident, so you decide to work with them. Because you're inexperienced, you're totally unaware that there are gaps in their SEO knowledge.

Later, when someone else offers sound SEO advice that contradicts to what your Upwork consultant told you, you’re more likely to take it with a grain of salt.

This is caused by "the anchoring bias." 

We trust the first piece of info we’re given more than newer information.

That first piece of info (Upwork SEO consultant) acts as our reference point—we judge new data against it, letting it skew our opinions on quality. 

We naturally lay the burden of proof with the new information, even if we never validated the old information.

Oh humans.

Applied to creative work, the anchoring bias can make us complacent. We get stuck on the same process, messaging, and copy we’ve used for years—unaware that switching things up could lead to better results.

To avoid a stagnant marketing strategy, run interesting experiments. Or try a new SEO consultant, different freelancers, or an AI copywriting software. 

We’re not suggesting that you fire any loyal employees or partners—only that you try something new on occasion. See if your marketing efforts benefit from a fresh spin.

Each year Google kills tons of its own products.

Why?

Because a company like Google needs each product to generate hundreds of millions in revenue (or be strategically relevant) to justify relative to their other products.

It doesn't mean they're bad ideas, they're just too small for Google.

Killed by Google shares every project sent to the graveyard by Google. It's worth going through it regularly to see if there are any ideas worth replicating.

Often these have many thousands or millions of users who suddenly need a new alternative—making them an attractive market to target if you can act fast.

As you've probably noticed, at the top of every newsletter edition, we tell people how to break up with us... err I mean unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Seems counterproductive, right?.

We tell people how to leave after we fought so hard to convert them to a subscriber. 

So why do we do it?

It's one of the many things we do to make sure our emails keep ending up in people's inboxes. And that they have a positive impression of our brand.

So first, it builds trust—we’re not here to hold your inbox hostage.

And if someone doesn't want to receive our emails, we don't want to keep hammering them until they're so upset that they mark our emails as spam.

Spam complaints hurt your emails’ future deliverability. That is, they increase the chances of your future emails landing in people’s spam folders.

So make it easy for people to unsubscribe. You’ll be doing both readers and yourself a favor.