A six-figure SEO flip story, Matt Diggity [Nomad Summit 2020]

This past weekend in Chiang Mai, Thailand, was the 8th Nomad Summit.

I attended the full conference day on Saturday & then taught a writing workshop on Monday.

Below are my notes from Matt’s presentation on SEO marketing.

For an overall review of the Nomad Summit event, venue, high-level takeaways, book recommendations, and links to all the other speaker notes I took, check out my main review:

Nomad Summit 2020 Review

• Why purchase a website instead of building from scratch = know minimum earnings, avoid sandbox (Google’s leash that minimizes performance), efficient use of resources
• Human Resources & time are biggest loss of resources
• Look at Google Trends to see if niche is trending or consistently successful (health, wellness, etc)
• Reverse engineer yourself & your competition: figure out main keywords for each of your categories using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
• CTR (click through rate) optimization with titles and descriptions
• CRO (conversion rate optimization) with featured images on posts, good headlines, keywords, urgency & emotion in writing
• Strong intro paragraphs = hook reader (can use fear, entertainment, passion, expertise)
• Contrasting CTA (call to action) colors = find opposite, complementary colors to use for CTA and only for CTA
• Google trusts backlinks to determine if a site is quality = critical to get this correct, wants it to happen naturally but that doesn’t happen (you have to make an effort to get them), realistically will have variability (not linking exact perfect SEO anchor text keywords you want)
• Content is still king
• Goal is to get into “authority mode” so your new content automatically ranks in Google, then keep cranking out even more quality content
• Commercial (affiliate links / product sales) vs informational content (CTA for lead magnets)
• Know where people are in the sales cycle & give them the right content / info for that phase (info earlier, product to purchase later)
• SEO is a slow burn, takes time (9–12 months to see results), but if you get help writing content or backlinks, can be like 6 months

Matt talked about SEO being a “slow burn” and focusing on right priorities to increase ROI. Too often, people want a quick & immediate pay off, and also spread our attention too thin, so I really appreciated his transparency on that.

Matt Diggity explaining how to improve SEO and site rankings.

Katherine Conaway is a digital nomad, working remotely while she travels the world — on the road since June 2014.