In this episode of The Business Owner’s Journey, host Nick Berry sits down with SEO expert and digital marketing entrepreneur Matt Diggity. Matt shares his journey from electrical engineer to building a multi-faceted SEO empire. They discuss SEO strategy, the future of AI in digital marketing, the importance of hiring top talent, and Matt's insights into affiliate marketing and business growth.
If you’re looking to boost your SEO efforts, scale your business, or stay ahead of AI's role in marketing, you need to know Matt Diggity, and you need to listen to this episode.
Matt emphasizes the value of diverse traffic sources for long-term success. He highlights three key traffic channels:
When it comes to SEO advice, Matt cautions against relying on Google’s official guidance or casual forums like Reddit. He suggests following SEO professionals who use a data-driven, scientific approach, giving 3 specific recommendations. Matt explains, "Google leaves too many red herrings. You wouldn’t know what’s real unless you live it."
Hiring the right people is a cornerstone of Matt’s business philosophy. He’s adamant about bringing only 'A' players on board because subpar hires can drag down company culture. Matt explains, "A B or C player in your organization is toxic. It percolates down to your A players, and you lose your company culture."
His hiring strategy focuses on experience, references, and a structured interview process from the book Who: The A Method for Hiring.
He shared one of his favorite interview questions ("When I talk to your former boss, what will they rate you?"), and why it works so well.
AI is reshaping SEO, and Matt believes businesses that embrace AI will thrive. He discusses how future SEO may focus more on AI-generated answers, streamlining user experience.
"If AI search engines take over, it could be a good thing for business owners... quicker, more direct answers with less competition from ads."
Matt stresses the importance of SEO audits and having a diversified strategy. "SEO doesn’t work for every business, but if there’s search volume, you should invest in it." He advises against focusing solely on SEO and advocates for a multi-channel approach, including social media, video, and paid advertising for better rankings.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us bring you more valuable content.
Matt Diggity (00:00)
know, like a B or C player in your organization is toxic. You like if someone's working inside, there's a player, room full of A players are doing their work and they see C players getting away with like delivering subpar work, but getting the same wage as you, it starts to percolate down over to the A players and then you just lost your company culture. But I really feel like it's, it's really A players or nothing.
Nick Berry (00:26)
The Business Owner's Journey. I'm Nick Berry and I've got real business owners telling their real stories, sharing their real lessons and strategies so you don't have to figure it all out on your
Nick Berry (00:38)
Matt Diggity is one of the most well -known figures in SEO and digital marketing in the world. He started out as an electrical engineer and then got into affiliate SEO and then onto digital marketing. And now he's built a portfolio of companies, including Diggity Marketing, the Search Initiative, Authority Builders, Lead Spring, Affiliate Lab, and the Chiang Mai SEO Conference,
He's also got a killer YouTube channel, but I wanted to talk to Matt because I love hearing the best talk about their craft, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to learn how he runs his portfolio of businesses and just what kind of business person he is. And so that's what we spent our time talking about. Enjoy.
Nick Berry (01:20)
how did Matt Diggity get where he's at now and what, how have you changed over time? Because you've been doing this for a
Matt Diggity (01:26)
Hmm. Yeah, sure. I guess we'll start. Not the beginning of the beginning. It's pretty boring story. Grew up in California. We'll skip all that. We'll fast forward to the point where I'm an engineer in San Diego, electrical engineer, and just kind of found myself working 80 hour weeks and detecting within myself. There's no way this is sustainable. I I see the path that leads down. I see my seniors and I don't want that life.
Nick Berry (01:35)
Yeah.
Matt Diggity (01:55)
So eventually I, first I started to figure out like, can I make money online? Cause I want freedom of time and location. And the first thing I ended up with was SEO, getting websites to the top of Google. Great, they make money when you sleep. Great, here's my freedom of time. And then can be done from anywhere, freedom of location. So sign me up for that. And it started working a little bit. I ended up moving to Thailand where I just liked.
I like the place. I like the people. like everything about it. And it started doubling down on SEO. And then it was just, it was kind of eye opening. My first time being an entrepreneur, noticing that, wait, there's no salary cap here. It's just, I can put in as much as I want and I can get out of it as much as I want. And I kind of felt like I landed on this loophole. Like there's this gap in the market where I'm able to do this from my laptop in Thailand. It's going to go away. So I just
went nuts with it. Then here we are today with multiple, I think six or six or seven companies right now there's a lot under the hood. Some are in the process of getting sold. So maybe six, maybe seven. But yeah, it's just about me leaning into that and establishing a personal brand and learning how to work smarter, know, all the all the things you do as a business owner.
Nick Berry (03:16)
Yeah. So you said that you landed on, you found SEO pretty quickly when you started this search, right? What was it? Was that just good fortune? Like why SEO?
Matt Diggity (03:22)
Hmm?
I was so random. like, like most people or at least a lot of people in my generation or my, my graduating class, so to speak, that got out of the rat race into entrepreneurship stumbled upon the four hour work week. And so I was in San Diego, I was like, there's got to, I get the concepts in this book, you know, you create this like side hustle, and then it makes you money and fuels your lifestyle. But I was like, I haven't seen it in action. So I found a meetup .com meetup where people were
were going over their books and holding themselves accountable. And the flavor of the month of most of them were doing was SEO. They were doing a course called the 30 day challenge, which taught you SEO over the course of 30 days. And then I was like, I guess I'll do that too. And it just turned out to be perfect for me.
Nick Berry (04:15)
How long had you been an electrical engineer when you had your kind of epiphany and you're like, this is not going to work?
Matt Diggity (04:23)
About seven years, seven years. You know, I gave it a good run. I gave it a solid run. I changed jobs in between that. Let's try to do like a hybrid engineer slash sales job. That's called an application engineer. You know, it just wasn't going anywhere. But I did have a hunch back then. I wanted to move into the marketing team because I just liked marketing in general. They didn't give me that shot. Thank goodness.
Nick Berry (04:39)
I mean.
I mean, you've got to knack for it. But I think, so seven years, think that's, you'd have it a fair shake, but that's also, you figured out like this isn't going to cut it way earlier than a lot of people.
Matt Diggity (04:49)
No
You think, you think, but like I'm here in Thailand and talking to all these young whippersnappers that never even went to college. I was like, I wish I had that foresight because I didn't, I didn't use a drop of my master's degree in anything I do today. Not, not, not saying I wouldn't send my kids to college. That's a different story, but in hindsight, I would have deleted out that a lot of stuff.
Nick Berry (05:12)
Yeah, yeah.
Same. But I mean, they're the 20 year olds today are living in a different world than we were. I mean, it's one of us out old here for a second. so what was your SEO path, like bringing you to here? Like how you got into SEO, it cuts your attention, it seems to me pretty obvious, like your background as an electrical engineer.
Matt Diggity (05:28)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Nick Berry (05:45)
some of those things were able to transfer right over and you could put those to use. And now you've got a portfolio of all these companies.
Matt Diggity (05:52)
Yeah, yeah. So the first flavor of SEO that I started dipping my hands into was affiliate, affiliate websites. So you can build simple affiliate websites, reviewing products, get them to the top of Google and you throw affiliate links in there. So if people read your review, buy the product, you get a cut of it. I just love that right off the bat because it's, it seems it's very scalable. It's passive income. Once you do the work and starts to snowball. And again, I'm,
kind of rebounding off my trauma of working as an engineer 80 hours in a cubicle. So that was like the main thing that I just wanted to stick to, like whatever is going to retain this freedom that I've got a hold of. Eventually, I decided to launch a kind of like an agency service within the SEO community. So I started this company called Diggity Links, and then got a taste for like, maybe I have a knack for like running business and providing service for people.
And then just one thing, especially like in 2019, I just went nuts. I launched two other agencies. I launched a course in 2017. I started a conference and just started leaning into the, or at least taking advantage of the leverage I was getting from building a personal brand. Sometime along the process when I started Diggity Links, I was like, I partnered with a dude who would take care of the operations as it was my job to get the sales and marketing.
And I just started blogging. I started sharing SEO tactics based on the approach I was taking as an engineer, like single variable testing, everything. And people took to it. And I just leaned into that and I realized I can do the same job for all these businesses at the same time. Learn about SEO, really, really, really understand it, teach it to my team so they're the best at it, and then teach it on the internet.
so people can understand the kind of SEO that we're doing and want to buy our services and just kept rinse and repeating that.
Nick Berry (07:56)
What about, what parts of it have been difficult for you? Any challenges or had your ass kicked at all?
Matt Diggity (07:55)
Yeah.
So many times. I mean, yeah, like when you're in SEO, especially the way I started off, was like, quote unquote, black hat SEO. I mean, I didn't look at it myself as like a hacker or I'm, this like bad guy or anything rebel without a cause. It was just the way you did it back then. It was the most efficient way to do SEO is just take shortcuts and manipulate the algorithm. And you, you get penalized. Like what's
Nick Berry (08:03)
Thank
Matt Diggity (08:31)
What works today might not work in an algorithm two years from now when it's better. So I've been penalized. I found myself getting into situations where like I have no skillset in this. Starting a conference, like not only do I have no background in event planning, but I'm also an introvert. So yeah, that was a challenge too. Starting a YouTube channel, also an introvert's worst nightmare. So you get over these hurdles somehow.
Nick Berry (08:57)
Yeah. So I can relate on both counts, but in particular, so we ran industry conferences for, I mean, we run over a hundred of them and, did it for 10 years. And man, it is draining. It's an entirely different business for one thing. events can be a money and energy and morale pit if you're not careful.
Matt Diggity (09:10)
Hmm.
Yeah.
No.
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, you kind of have to do it for the love. There's a lot better, more scalable ways to make money than to create experiences for people, but there is a lot of love in it, which is why I think we get hooked on something like that.
Nick Berry (09:26)
Yeah.
When is the one this year?
Matt Diggity (09:43)
November, second half of November in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Chiang Mai SEO conference.
Nick Berry (09:46)
Gotcha.
That's the website, right? ChiangMaiSEOConference .com. I couldn't even start to spell it, but we'll have it in the show.
Matt Diggity (09:53)
Yeah, that's the one.
Nick Berry (09:57)
All right. So something that's interesting to me with you is also something that I could relate to is running a business, being the face guy, this, the, well, there's the face guy and the subject matter expert. really they're probably kind of three heads there. What, how do you handle that?
Matt Diggity (10:17)
Yeah. Well, so I've at least found a way to make the subject matter expert part and being the face, the visionary kind of all pretty overlapped if we're looking at a Venn diagram. It is my job to really understand the algorithm. It is my job because I'm the one who teaches it to externally and internally in the companies. So that's like literally the only job I have other than setting up marketing funnels and that kind of stuff.
Just train learning, train the team and train people outside. And that's hopefully going to keep the marketing engine running. In order to make that work, there's a whole other side of the business, which is fulfilling the work, like the operational part. And so I've just leaned into this whole concept from the book Traction of there's visionaries, there's integrators, people can do both, but there's a lag between switching your mind between each of those. And of course, it's always better to specialize.
So I'd say like one of the biggest keys to any amount of success that I've had is partnering up and finding good integrators that can help execute the vision that I dream up.
Nick Berry (11:26)
Yeah, I'm a big fan of EOS.
Matt Diggity (11:29)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, this should be required reading.
Nick Berry (11:31)
Yeah, it really should.
So with how do you keep your finger then on the pulse of a portfolio of businesses and make sure, everything is going, we're growing, everything's going in the right direction. you're working relationships with the partners in each of those businesses.
Matt Diggity (11:47)
Yeah, yeah, good question. I'm not gonna sit here and say that if you have a portfolio of five companies, any one of them is gonna grow fast as if you only had one. Just very concrete evidence that I have of this is, so recently in the Q3, Q4 of 2023, the affiliate website model was completely attacked by Google. Like they had this helpful content update that made it very, very difficult for the types of websites that
people like me have access to build. Forbes and Reddit, yeah, you can have all that traffic, but we can't whip up a Forbes or a Reddit right now, or maybe ever. So we've had a pivot and I have a course on affiliate marketing. I basically just took all that, like all the marketing attention, you all the sidebar links, whereas focusing on YouTube videos and diverted that over to our SEO agency and then the SEO agency 2X this year. So like it is a game of
Nick Berry (12:25)
right now.
Matt Diggity (12:46)
where are you gonna spend your resources? But the way I try to like manage or compartmentalize and do a good enough job at all of them at the same time is just working on customer acquisition costs. So if the customer acquisition costs for any business is cheaper than the lifetime value, you're gonna make a profit. I think we're really blessed right now because we have three traffic sources that work insanely well. The first is YouTube.
which has a negative customer acquisition costs. YouTube pays you to find your audience for you and then kick you back adsets money. So you make a video and you have a good traction, actually have, it's a $0, you actually make money to reach your customer. So that's the, only problem with that is it's just not that scalable. I used to make one video per week. It was draining my soul. So now I'm back to one video every two weeks and the marketing engine is half as strong. So.
It's that good, but it's also very draining. Then we have PPC, which is also always positive. I mean, you wouldn't run an ad anymore unless it had a positive return on ad spend. So PPC is great. And then SEO, SEO is like the best long -term strategy. It's gonna get you the most traffic, the highest conversion rate on any of the, versus any of the platforms, because people are actually searching for what you're selling. They find you, they're gonna get it. It's just got the longest runway.
an up and front investment cost, but on the back end, once you're actually ranked up high, it's got the best ROI.
Nick Berry (14:18)
Okay. So I want to back up just a little bit to and talk about you in your leadership role and keeping your skills sharp.
what are you doing to continually sharpen your saw?
Matt Diggity (14:33)
At the beginning, a lot of it hinged on my skillset as an engineer. like Google's algorithm is about the black box. They never give you any information. At least they don't give you much accurate information on how it works. So, but if you look at it as an engineer, you apply stimulus here, you don't know what's going on outside, but you see an output. Maybe you can make some inferences there. I really, don't know. Yeah, I guess I did use my college education for some stuff.
I really leaned into that. But as I've leveled up as an entrepreneur, I really found that I get a lot of leverage just from having a great network. maintaining positive relationships with people. Like if I can test the algorithm and I find two interesting things per month, but I can share that with a group of 10 people that doing the same thing. Now I have 22 things, you know, it's just very, very scalable. And you know, like always getting better management.
hiring, all these kind of things, but it's a constant process.
Nick Berry (15:35)
Are you leaning into your network on those things too?
Matt Diggity (15:38)
Yeah, I mean, the network and also the audience. That's one good thing about a personal brand is if someone's a fan or on the email list or part of your course, they get you and it's an easy shoe in.
Nick Berry (15:53)
Yeah, You can crowdsource a lot of different things, right?
You mentioned with your portfolio of companies, you essentially have an operator, or you called it an integrator, I call it an operator, but that they partner with you. What does your org chart look like in your organization?
Matt Diggity (16:07)
it looks like this. Here's me and then here's a head of sales and here's head of marketing and here's operations. This is my branch. And then here's my partner's branch operations. And I don't know what he has underneath him. We just don't, we don't fiddle with each other. We don't question each other. I think we will, as long as you're partnered with A players, like that's the best way to.
Nick Berry (16:28)
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So what is that? What's the plan for the future with your businesses just to keep finding those opportunities for partnerships, build more businesses?
Matt Diggity (16:44)
Yeah, I mean, right now I've had a little bit of a diversity kick in 2024. So I launched a PPC agency. launched a video agency. And those are great because, you know, like high leverage once again. And I've amassed a skillset in these areas that I just have never had the opportunity to share. So super excited about those. But I don't have, you know, I got a business exit on the horizon, but I don't really know where I'm going.
This is a very turbulent time with a lot of questions up in the air, especially with AI and all these crazy changes that Google's making. Are we going full AI answers up top or is a search GPT gonna compete with them or is chat GPT gonna start taking market share? Like we don't really know. So I'm kind of making plays, but not big plays. And I'm trying to like look at it as if here's a full pie chart of
how much my attention is going out to something. I'm only spending 60 % of it. I'm leaving 40 % for just keeping my eyes open to make the next move.
Nick Berry (17:47)
Keeping a reserve on hand. So what does your week look like managing a portfolio of companies like this and fulfilling your role?
Matt Diggity (17:58)
Yeah. So I always manage my direct reports. So weekly meetings and I follow Mad Singers, like weekly meeting format, which is 30 minutes, 30 minutes to an hour with each direct report. The first section of it is building rapport, asking them like what they've been up to lately, checking in on them. Second part is checking in on the projects and KPIs, making sure that's all getting met. And then the third part is
where would you like to develop and how can we get you those skills? Then besides that, working on the vision, if I need to test out new things, that's one thing. If I'm trying to figure out if we're gonna acquire a business or partner with a business, of course that's on me. And then lastly is a lot of advisors. I've really started leaning into advisors and consultants and
Yeah, almost to the point where I question myself is like, do I even have to think anymore? Like, I get a hard question to shoot it over to someone. It's a little bit hamstringing and a little bit brain atrophying, but I really have gotten a lot out of learning from people that I just would have no possible possibility to learn what they have because of their background.
Nick Berry (19:18)
Yeah, I think that's amazing. I think that's how it's supposed to go.
Matt Diggity (19:21)
Again? Yeah, I'm really good. I'm super good at it.
Nick Berry (19:21)
Are you good at asking for help?
Yeah,
Not me. I mean, I've always had to work on that, I've always had a great network and I do leverage it, but I know just my own behaviors. I've limited myself in areas. I've just always have to be aware of that and work.
Matt Diggity (19:42)
Mmm, yeah, fair. Yeah.
Nick Berry (19:44)
Gotta be able to ask for help.
So what about all this shit that's gone on with Google and the HCU and everything? So when stuff like that happens, are you just like, it's fine. It's just another day. It is what it is. Are you more of like, what are they trying to do to us here?
Matt Diggity (20:03)
You get used to it. mean, I've been doing this for, I don't know, since 2009. Yeah, like I've been penalized so many times and you get just completely used to it. That's why you build a portfolio. It's not like in an update, all your sites are gonna get hit at the same time, maybe between 10 and 30%. And like, I'm good at SEO. I still get 10 to 30 % drops every time there's an algorithm upside.
So it's like, it's a very normal thing. like to, we sometimes like to think of Google as just random. Like there's literally the same websites that I don't touch at all. They might go up in an update. They might drop up and drop it. Like literally change nothing, but the algorithm's acting like this. So we, kind of, there's a random aspect to it. So you get used to it over time. Although I will say this, this last September, 2023, helpful content update did seem like they're just attacking them.
And like they've purposely went after the model at the expense of their own search results. So that one was kind of like riding on the wall that this won't work. At least it's trending in the direction where it's going to eventually die off.
Nick Berry (21:14)
Are you talking about affiliates specifically or even broader? Yeah.
Matt Diggity (21:17)
Yeah, mostly affiliate. mean, in other spaces, the thing with Google is it's like a zero sum game, right? So if affiliate websites lose search volume for these particular keywords, someone else has got a game. And so if we look at the search results, we see who did gain its e -commerce. So old review keywords like best wireless router, that would usually go to review websites that reviews routers, right?
But now if you look at the search results, you might find a bunch of e -commerce sites that are selling routers exactly. So it's an easy pivot once you just take a look at things.
Nick Berry (21:56)
So, I mean, can we trust Google at you advise that we play this game?
Matt Diggity (22:02)
goodness, so there was a Google leak this year. There's debate over, so a Google algorithm leak. were a bunch of like code, code -ish notes with a pseudo code and a bunch of comments in there. And we can argue whether or not this whole leak is actually integrated into the algorithm. It could just be notes, but a lot of what they found in there was a direct contradiction to what they tell the public on how the algorithm works. One is they always said that we don't use
click on user behavior in our algorithm. Really, it says right here, you exactly do. So they leave, I would not get my SEO advice from Google. They leave too many red herrings, you wouldn't know what's real and what's not, unless you live it. Where I would recommend getting SEO advice from is from anyone who looks at the algorithm with a scientific mindset, like black box, let's run tests, let's look at the output.
We're having control groups, we're having experimental groups, we're A -B testing. It's gotta be a full -time operation.
Nick Berry (23:08)
That's probably a short list of people who meet that criteria. It's not just anybody that you go find on Twitter,
Matt Diggity (23:16)
Yeah, mean, on Twitter, you're going to end up with a lot of enterprise SEOs that are really good. They're really good at what they do, but they're dealing with websites like, let's do SEO for Toyota. It's a different game. It's a different game completely. yeah, it's hard to say. It's really hard to say who to follow here. There's a lot of stuff to dig through.
Nick Berry (23:39)
So who would you recommend? Do you have anybody? other than you that are doing the testing, as you described, making sure it's producing reliable information.
Matt Diggity (23:49)
Yeah, yeah. I have a testing group. I alluded to it before, you like you get this network effect of sharing test results. And some of the people in my group were Robert Nischel, Kyle Roof, and Corey Tugberg. They're all very, very scientifically focused people to get your SEO strategy from.
Nick Berry (24:08)
Okay. how much of a priority do we need to be making SEO right now?
Matt Diggity (24:15)
You gotta get an audit because SEO doesn't work for any business, You don't know unless there's search volume. If there's search volume, definitely invest in it because in the long run, SEO is the best traffic source. It's got the most searchers. More people are on Google than any other platform and it's very, very high conversion rate from search. So I definitely think it's worth it. But in this day and age,
I wouldn't just do SEO. I would never just do SEO anymore, even if your niche or whatever has tons of search volume and like most of your competitors convert with SEO. The reason being is we had a Yandex leak. Yandex is another, it's the Russian search engine. And although I know that Yandex is not Google, it's very similar to it. They say that ex -Google engineers went over to go help with the Yandex, so we can assume there's a lot of overlap. And there's two ranking factors.
that kind of hinted to me that Google organics, so to speak, don't like just pure SEO traffic. One is a negative ranking factor if a website just has its traffic from search. And another is positive ranking factors if they have traffic diversification from social media, from video, et cetera. So you get a better result if you're full stack, if you got traffic diversity and stuff like that. You'll perform better on Google anyways. And who wants to put all their eggs in one basket?
Nick Berry (25:37)
then, other than putting all their eggs in one basket, what are the main mistakes that small businesses, small and mid -size anyway, are making right now that you're seeing the most?
Matt Diggity (25:48)
So yeah, the agency, like I can say like the top three or top five SEO mistakes we see with new clients that haven't done good SEO so far is one is like index management. Like if you're a website selling widgets and you have 15 product pages, sometimes like they would over index our website and have 2000 pages indexed and that basically wastes Google's resources and time. So they'll start to ignore you.
So it's kind of like keeping track of like, are the important pages we want Google and our users to see and calling off the rest of them. That's a big one. And then there's something called the three Kings. The three Kings is just places to optimize the most high priority places to put your keywords, which is like the URL, the title and the H1. And so optimizing that perfectly is like a good getting 40 % of the way there. And then backlinks, Google is an algorithm that was built off of backlinks.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were trying to figure out how to sort documents and the way they found what was the best is if they're linking to each other. Of course, there's ways to manipulate that. And that's what most people use to manipulate SEO these days is manipulating backlinks. But the algorithm's married to it. And so if you can get good at backlinks, you can get good results.
Nick Berry (27:05)
Yeah. So, I mean, those seem like that's the pretty standard advice, right? So there really shouldn't be any reason that someone is missing those. You can find that advice pretty easily,
Matt Diggity (27:18)
Yeah, I would say so, it's almost a guarantee when we have a new customer sign up for us and we perform an audit. It's almost guaranteed. And I think the issue is that I can just imagine trying to like find SEO advice and you Google how to do this or that and you end up on Reddit. What kind of qualifications does, you know, rainbow scrotum 69 have, you know, like it's just, it's just.
Nick Berry (27:45)
Okay.
Matt Diggity (27:47)
Like you had to sort through so much stuff and even on YouTube, mean, YouTube, there's a little bit more credibility you can get by just looking at subscriber count. like if YouTube someone, see 200 ,000 subscribers versus 2000, that maybe that should lend more credit to what that person's saying.
Nick Berry (28:06)
Okay. self -serving question here. What would be the best way to leverage a podcast for SEO? Anything specific to podcasting that is effective?
Matt Diggity (28:15)
So you have a podcast, right? And you're gonna, you probably are gonna like put each episode out in the blog, right? Yeah. I mean, they're link magnets. it's, yeah. Like if you can get high profile people that you're interviewing and that gets shared enough, then it'll get linked to.
Nick Berry (28:22)
Mm -hmm.
Matt Diggity (28:37)
I mean, hopefully, you know, this interview goes well and then some SEO journal picks it up and says, here's the best SEO podcast this week. And then they link to you and then that's SEO bonus for you.
Nick Berry (28:47)
All right. So going the other direction from like the common mistakes, any low hanging fruit or untapped opportunities that business owners just, you keep seeing them overlook? Fixing the things that they're doing wrong?
Matt Diggity (28:59)
yeah. Yeah, one of the biggest ones is, and this one's completely understandable because all the rhetoric you get from Google on how to do SEO is just write quality content. Like if you read anything, focus on the reader, don't optimize for SEO, just write good content and you'll rank high on Google. What people believe that because it came out of Google's mouth, but what is right under their nose and it's really simple once you look at it this way is that,
Google's an algorithm, it's based on math. It can't read your meatloaf recipe. doesn't know if it, even if you wrote, it could read your meatloaf recipe. It's never eaten meatloaf, so it doesn't know what you wrote is good. So it has no clue. It just looks at this whole thing like Neo looks at the matrix, a bunch of numbers and stuff. if we think about like how an algorithm would analyze if a piece of content is good, the way it does it is, so like if you wrote a meatloaf recipe, it would look and see,
Who are the top articles on Google? And is this meatloaf recipe like them? Is it like what I've already put high up, which has gathered a bunch of links, which has been quote, social proof of these being good meatloaf recipes. Is this article like these? So there's tools and software like Surfer, one of the companies that I'm an investor in that will analyze these guys and tell you how to write your content. So it's similar to them. Basically that comes down to like entities. Entities are nouns.
people placements and things and these words should have similar frequencies and should show up in your article similar to the ones that are at the top of Google. And it's just, once I figured this out, I was like, my God, yeah, of course it works this way. We didn't think that running Google is super expensive. Are they really gonna like toss their most expensive computational AI algorithm at every single article or are they gonna use heuristics like this to guess their way if an article is good?
Nick Berry (30:54)
So I heard you mentioned entities and a question that I've had is like structured data. what role is structured data going to play moving forward?
Matt Diggity (31:03)
I'd say structured data has given you like between a two to four, two to 5 % ranking boost versus if you didn't have it or if you did have it. Like I've never really seen a in single variable tests, like a huge ranking gain if you add structured data to something that doesn't have it. And I think the reason there is because like what's Google gonna do? Penalize the 80 % of the internet who just doesn't know what that is and only reward these things.
So yeah, I don't think it gives that much of a gain. Well, at least I haven't seen it in tests, but you do these things. Like we have the motto, do all the things. Like we don't know how much these things truly stack up. So just do them all and then move on so you can think about something else.
Nick Berry (31:48)
the recent changes keep coming up. Where's SEO going? What's it going to look like in a few years?
Matt Diggity (31:54)
Ooh, I think we have like two different scenarios. The first is nothing changes. Google keeps their monopoly and search, people just continue to search on Google and they expect websites for their answers. just nothing's changed. I think that's probably unlikely. I think the way we search for things is pretty archaic. You know, like.
I want to know information. I Google something. I'm giving a list of places I might find my answer. And then I got to open each of them and dig through them and then decide if I liked it or not. That seems, even talking about it like that, it seems archaic. I think once we start getting used to LLMs more and we start trusting AI, we'll lean more into getting AI answers. And so then the question comes, who's going to maintain the monopoly? Or is it going to shift over to search GPT or?
know, a perplexity or something like that, or people can use chat GPT for answers. We don't really know that yet, but if it is, if it is the AI search engines, I think that's a good thing for business business owners, especially because you search for something like, where can I get a router that will do this, this or that AI answers will give you an answer straight up. It's quick. You find the answer real quick. And they're at least a search GPT demos. Like they're giving
clean links to where to find these things. So that would send you straight to your website if you came up in the AI answer and no ads so far. So it's like less cluttered, faster to answer and then directly to you. So that would be a good thing if that took market share away from Google, at least for small business owners. But any keywords that are top of the funnel, like which
how to install a router, for example, that I think is like a lost cause. Those people are gonna get answers from AI answers and they don't need to dig in further. It's just how many calories are in an apple? You can't build a website like that anymore. AI answers are just gonna like take that over.
Nick Berry (34:05)
That's interesting. hadn't heard that or thought about that. are you doing things now to prepare?
Matt Diggity (34:10)
Yeah, so I think like the businesses and the sites that stand to gain right now are selling real products. like I said before, the affiliate keywords have moved on to directly being answered by e -commerce websites. So we've pivoted a lot towards e -commerce. And so I have like two companies that are actually doing SEO. One is our agency. So our agency has really started to target both e -comm and SaaS, which are
or gaining a lot in these algorithm updates themselves. And we were able to 2X in 2024. Our portfolio company, which has traditionally made affiliate content sites, the ones that got clobbered in 2023, and their informational keywords, which is a lot of the revenue source, is getting eaten up by AI. So we've had to figure out what to do there. And we've moved into this JV model where I'm not going to learn Ecom.
right now, at this point, I'm not gonna like start from scratch and learn how to drop ship or anything. So we're partnering up with existing businesses, not just Ecom, but like law firms, real estate agencies and say like, you guys do your thing. We're gonna plug in on the marketing level. We're gonna do a trial for six months. If we double your traffic, then let's do an equity share and we'll take it to the moon. And that's worked out really good for us because I can't start a law firm.
I can eventually work with one and get a piece of that pie.
Nick Berry (35:42)
Yeah. So if you're really good at what you do. If you've got a good product, then there's somebody out there who is in a position to be able to take it to the moon. And that should be part of your strategy. so it's always now a bad time to try to start a business in SEO. Well, like what advice do you have there?
Matt Diggity (36:01)
I don't think, well, certain types of business. I wouldn't start a content website right now. I would definitely start, like any other business except a content business is doing fine at Google right now. But like I said before, I would never just do SEO now. Either way, you get a better SEO result if you have other traffic coming in other places. For example, if you're running PPC ads,
It's just a natural by -product that your brand search volume goes up. If you're Acme widgets and you're, know, the people are seeing ads all the time for Acme widgets, they're eventually gonna review at, or Google Acme widget review, is Acme widget good? That's brand search volume. And that just got cranked up in Google's algorithm. Yeah, so this whole thing like works holistically, it works together.
Nick Berry (36:53)
Okay. I want to circle back to early in our conversation tonight, you mentioned one of the keys, hiring A players. how did you have your epiphany? How do you hire A players? what's your angle on making sure that you're getting A players?
Matt Diggity (37:09)
mean, the biggest part of it is experience. So when you're first starting out and just like, all right, we have this new role we need to hire for, we're gonna like train up some intern or some, you know, like a VA and we're gonna get a great deal on them or train them up and you know, it's gonna be great. That works in the beginning where you're bootstrapping and making money. But like when you're at the higher level and you can't afford to the time sink of like putting into something.
putting investment into someone and they don't work out. I think it's just not worth it. So the key thing I hire for is have they done what we need done before successfully? And that just really structuring interview process around that. And a lot of that is checking references. One of the game changer book that I had when it came to hiring is called Who? The A Method for Hiring, HWO. And it just took all this like mysticism out of the hiring process. It's just like breaks down.
at this stage ask this question, there's no way to lie around it. Something like, when I talk to your former boss, what will they rate you on a scale of one to 10? And like they have to give an honest answer. And if they say seven, know, eight players aren't seventh, eight players are eight, nines and tens. So you just immediately filter them with one single question.
Nick Berry (38:25)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
I love that. I've read that book where they took the top grading methodology and made it probably more practical. using the references is a big part of it, right? And then just kind of making it clear to them, even the phrasing that you used of, when I talk to your boss.
Matt Diggity (38:38)
Mm
Nick Berry (38:45)
So you're telling them right there, like it's going to happen. So you may as well go ahead and let's get it all out on the table. And I think what you said at first, which I also agree with, and I think it's really important is at a certain point, you just need turnkey. Let someone else pay to train them, go through like the learning process. You need turnkey and early on, that's fine. You don't have to do it that way.
Matt Diggity (38:45)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mmm.
Nick Berry (39:10)
You probably can't do it that way, but the goal should be you need turnkey people on your team.
Matt Diggity (39:17)
Yeah. Like, you know, like a B or C player in your organization is toxic. You like if someone's working inside, there's a player, room full of A players are doing their work and they see C players getting away with like delivering subpar work, but getting the same wage as you, it starts to percolate down over to the A players and then you just lost your company culture. But I really feel like it's, it's really A players or nothing.
Nick Berry (39:44)
I love it. it's ambitious, but I love it. this is the second time this week that I've used this Nick Saban quote he made the comment or made some quote in a press conference, I believe about, mediocre people don't like high performers and high performers don't like mediocre people. And that's what's happening in your culture when that A player sees somebody getting away with B or C level shit.
Matt Diggity (40:00)
Mmm.
Nick Berry (40:06)
They don't want to be in that environment.
Matt Diggity (40:10)
Yeah, yeah, totally. Another funny thing along that same line of thinking is like, if you're trying to get references for a new hire, like you don't ask your B players, B players will never recommend someone that's gonna make them look bad. A players refuse to work with B players like you said, so, and they're worried about their reputation. So A players recommend A players. And that's probably one of the best places where I've gotten hires is just asking my existing A players, like who do you know?
Nick Berry (40:31)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah. the whole strategy begins to snowball and perpetuate itself, right?
Matt Diggity (40:41)
Mm -hmm. yeah.
Nick Berry (40:43)
Okay, so partnerships, Can you tell me about what's going on right now, partnership wise? Give a little insight to your approach there.
Matt Diggity (40:50)
Yeah, well, partner wise, so I do angel investments and partnerships. In any kind of angel investment, I like to look for something where I can have an impact. for example, Surfer, the SEO SaaS tool I told you about before, like we grew to 50 million ARR. And I think a big part of that, or at least a non -zero part of that is what I could help them with in terms of marketing and leveraging my audience and getting it in front of people.
And also, you know, we did a lot of product feedback too. like with Angel, you know, I'm going to help you work with your business, but I'm not going to work on your business. With partnerships, like I talked about before, is like when we partnered with law firms, real estate agencies, I'm going to be your marketing department. And you can, you worry about, you know, selling condos, right? I'll take on your marketing. So these, I really don't have a spec for a business that I...
I like to look for, but really into e -comm, SaaS, and then any high ticket in local business, real estate agency, law firm stuff.
Nick Berry (42:00)
Okay. You got any success stories that you can share, experiences that you've had with those companies?
Matt Diggity (42:07)
Sure. It's still in the portfolios pre -condo. They're Toronto real estate agency. We started with them from ground zero. I knew my partner Jordan just because he was like an ex -SEO and he's like, hey, I got to focus on this agency. Do you want to take over on the SEO and see where we can take this thing? We just got acquired by IRISE Realty last year. Yeah, little bit last year sometime.
I mean, it's exactly how it sounds. know, like he was able to grow the business, hire agents and all that stuff, sell condos. And we just took over the marketing and eventually ended up as the top pre -construction condo seller in Toronto, just by pure SEO. And also he's focused on YouTube as well.
Nick Berry (42:55)
And got acquired, you said?
Matt Diggity (42:57)
Yeah, we got acquired. It was awesome. Yeah. Thanks, man
Nick Berry (42:59)
Congrats. Yeah, it's not bad when that's not even the main goal,
Matt Diggity (43:05)
Yeah, it's just a bonus. Well, I mean, the thing with the thing with SEO is like most of the time you're doing agency work for other businesses, you're helping them grow, which is fantastic and good for them. But like the downside for an SEO agency is a lot of times they'll just leave you when they got the results. We're at the top now. We don't need you anymore. Thanks for your help. When you're doing partnerships like we are is like, well, we don't stop when you're at the top. We'll find other keywords. We're just going to...
again to the moon, and then we get to participate in the upside. It's a solid one plus one equals three compared to the agency model, which I'll take the agency model, but it's better for a partnership.
Nick Berry (43:47)
yeah, that makes sense. So, I mean, it seems like the everything in the organization is moving in a good direction. Is it starting to take more and more of you or do you like have everything compartmentalized staying balanced? know that I know it's something that's important to you. That doesn't mean that it's easy to keep it that way.
Matt Diggity (44:07)
Yeah, no, I did a podcast with your wife and it was all about like mental health and balance and moving into this next stage of life where I'm starting to do things that my soul is asking for rather than my brain or my wallet, right? And so it is a battle because for this last like 15 years, I've fashioned my psyche into like this productivity machine that is just hungry and
thinks that they can launch five businesses in a year. Now I'm trying to scale back and it is a struggle, but I feel like I'm starting to get through the other side on that struggle.
Nick Berry (44:47)
I'm somewhat familiar with that myself.
Matt Diggity (44:50)
Humans are so weird.
Nick Berry (44:51)
Aren't we though? It's like, spent 15 years or however long trying to turn myself into this machine who could do this stuff. Even though I knew that I was probably kind of broken. And then one day I woke up and it was like, fuck that. I think I am broken. yeah, then you've got to try I mean, that's, that's part of it, right? You're taking care of yourself. And that's great.
Matt Diggity (45:09)
Preach into the choir.
Nick Berry (45:17)
All right, man. Matt, this is fantastic. you're a great conversation. I know I covered a lot of things. I wanted to take the opportunity that I had with you to pull some things out that I felt like everybody was going to be able to get something out of this I just want to make sure that like the people who are listening that are in my audience are
becoming more familiar with you because of the value that you create for them. So thank you for the time. And I appreciate what you do. Appreciate the time.
Matt Diggity (45:40)
Thanks, that's very kind.
Yeah, my pleasure. I hope help some people and thanks for the opportunity, Nick.
Nick Berry is an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO, whose track record includes founding and leading numerous companies since 2002.
He is also a mentor and coach to other entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for a trusted (and proven) advisor.
Among peers, colleagues, staff, and clients, Nick has been referred to as both 'The Business Guy' as well as 'The Anti-Guru', due to his pragmatic approach and principled leadership.
He shares his insights and lessons learned, along with those of his expert guests,
on his podcast, 'The Business Owner's Journey'.
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