Welcome Back Matt

[00:00:00] Crystal: Welcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO Show podcast.

I'm back with an old friend who is just killing it out there in the digital marketing world. Give a warm welcome in your heart. Wherever you're listening for Matt Diamante. He is here again to talk about SEO. Breakdown some myths. Talk about his new book. And just share about what he is been up to.

So Matt, welcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast.

[00:00:27] Matt Diamante: Yeah, I'm very, very happy to be here. It's been too crazy. I think it's been like two years since we did the last episode. Episode and a lot's happened.

[00:00:35] Crystal: Yeah, I see your reels pop up on Instagram. I'm not on Instagram a lot, but when I am, I see you

[00:00:41] Matt Diamante: all me.

[00:00:42] Crystal: I just see like all of the success. And then I've seen some of your ads. So your targetings working.

You were already kind of pushing against like traditional SEO stuff when we first talked a couple years ago.

And I thought you were just such a breath of fresh air.

Like everybody seemed to kind of have a lid on [00:01:00] SEO, you

[00:01:00] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:01:01] Crystal: and you were like, Hey, come over here. I wanna tell you all about it.

[00:01:04] Why Matt Blew Up

[00:01:04] Crystal: So I just wondered like, what happened? Like how did you explode over the last couple years?

[00:01:10] SEO Is Simple

[00:01:10] Matt Diamante: Well, when I'm posting content online and like I know we're gonna get to it, but I also wrote a book that covers all this stuff. But people, business owners specifically. Don't know anything about SEO.

And the SEO community kind of like, gatekeeps it or makes it a little bit more complicated than it needs to be. Because at the end of the day, SEO is just providing solutions to problems, right?

If you are a, I don't know, a nail salon, for example, somebody is like, I need to get a pedicure, like my nails are messed up. Or, you know, I, I'm going to a wedding, whatever it is. The problem that they're having is they don't have nice nails. The solution that you're providing is, I'm gonna help you have nice nails.

So that goes for any service-based business. Any product-based business. And you're basically just solving a problem. And that's, I, I don't know [00:02:00] why it's any more complicated than that.

[00:02:01] Marriage And Business

[00:02:01] Crystal: Well, that also reminds me, I wanted to say congratulations! Because I believe since we spoke last, you also got married.

[00:02:09] Matt Diamante: I did, yes.

[00:02:10] Crystal: So congratulations

[00:02:11] Matt Diamante: Thank you.

[00:02:12] Crystal: Did marriage change your trajectory at all? I know you were already on the entrepreneurial journey,

[00:02:18] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:02:19] Crystal: you know, what's that like? Being a spouse, how, how has that impacted you?

[00:02:23] Matt Diamante: Oh my God, she is such an angel. I am obsessed with, I don't wanna say working, because it's like really a passion for me.

Like SEO, doing any kind of marketing, you know, filming reels, all that kind of stuff.

She has gotten way more involved and more patient with me obsessing over this stuff.

And we have, not necessarily a code word. But I'm like, listen, I need like a week right now.

I just like, I can't do anything else. I need, I need to work on this stuff. And she's, we've, we've worked through that where it's more like, okay, well I'm not just checking out, I'm actually doing this other thing. And I will be back. Right. It's like commercial break almost.

Since the last time we spoke, she is [00:03:00] now working with me at my agency. So that is a whole other dynamic that we are navigating. Quite well, I must add. And it's, it's great. We live together, we work together, we work from home.

So that's a whole other, a whole other thing.

We're just together all the time.

[00:03:17] Consistency Wins

[00:03:17] Crystal: what do you think that you've done differently? To unlock this level of growth that your business has experienced? Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:03:26] Matt Diamante: it's honestly the same thing that like any business can do this, and it's not tough. It's not complicated. It's literally just showing up every single day for yourself. And for your business.

If you have that discipline, you will be successful. You'll watch all your competitors fade away who aren't showing up consistently.

Whether it's daily or weekly or whatever cadence that you can do.

If you can outlast your competition, you can beat them.

[00:03:50] Crystal: I feel so convicted right now because I was like,

[00:03:53] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:03:53] Crystal: gonna post every day. I'm gonna go live every day. And I think I went live for like five days. It didn't really feel like I was getting any [00:04:00] traction. And so of course I got a little unmotivated.

And my hyper focus moved on to something else. This is my sign.

I've gotta get back to that.

[00:04:09] Matt Diamante: That's the thing too. It's almost like trend hopping. They're like, oh SEO this week. Oh, I'm gonna do social media. Oh, I'm gonna go live. Oh, I'm gonna focus on email marketing. I'm gonna run ads. I'm gonna do this. And it's like, if you just focus on any one of those things, you'll see much more success than if you trend hop.

[00:04:22] Crystal: So true. Great advice. 

[00:04:24] SEO Advice Is Broken

[00:04:27] Crystal: And then one of the things that I saw that you said, and maybe you say it in your book,

[00:04:28] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:04:29] Crystal: that SEO isn't broken. Most SEO advice is, so what do you mean by that?

[00:04:35] Matt Diamante: So there's a lot of talk about like pillars and verticals. And so much stuff that it's confusing to people who don't know the vernacular. The language, the words.

They don't know what that, that stuff means. If I'm like, okay, well we're, we're gonna have this content pillar.

What does that mean? Right? So I basically break things down in the book where, and on social media where I'm like, okay, all you need to do is solve a problem that somebody is [00:05:00] having, right? So whether you're doing that with a product or service or you're doing that by answering a question.

Like if you just go to answer the public.com, which I'm not affiliated with at all, but it's a free website at least now.

Where you can go in, literally type in what you sell, it'll show you a bunch of questions.

People are asking about what you sell. And like just for example, if you type in hot sauce, it's like, is hot sauce bad for dogs? Right? Very easy question. And if you make hot sauce, you probably know. It's not good for dogs. So you can answer that question. Somebody has a problem like, Hey, I just fed my dog something with hot sauce on it.

Is it bad for them? Do I need to go to the vet? Right? And you can say, yeah, it's bad for them. You should call your vet immediately, or whatever. I, I actually don't know if it's bad for dogs, but, so you're solving a problem for somebody. Where it's like, what is the, I don't know, what's the, the hottest hot sauce, right?

So you can talk about that and then you're helping somebody solve a problem, find an answer to the question that they have. And that's literally all SEO is it's problems and solutions.

[00:05:56] Topical Authority Basics

[00:05:56] Crystal: So how do you form that into a strategy? You know, [00:06:00] if you go there, you see there's a bunch of questions, how do you make that an SEO strategy?

Just answer all the questions until they're finished. Or what do you recommend?

[00:06:08] Matt Diamante: I mean, it's even talking about strategy, like I don't, I almost don't like that word because like, yes, it is a strategy. But it's simpler than that. You're just answering your customer's questions. Right? The more, more content you have on that topic, the more what we call topical authority, which is just Google saying, okay, I know that your site is about this topic.

The easier it will be to rank for pages like your product or service pages that are actually gonna make you money. I call those the money pages.

[00:06:37] Traffic That Converts

[00:06:37] Crystal: I have a funny story for you. Because I know you live in Canada, right?

[00:06:41] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:06:41] Crystal: you live in Canada? Okay, so I have a client who lives in Canada. And she's a a dietician.

[00:06:47] Matt Diamante: Okay.

[00:06:48] Crystal: of the things that she ranks for is a blog having to do with the munchies. And it was hilarious because as I was looking through her Google search [00:07:00] console report it primarily had to do with a certain type of substance induced munchies,

[00:07:08] Matt Diamante: Yep.

[00:07:09] Crystal: will. You

[00:07:09] Matt Diamante: Yep.

[00:07:10] Crystal: and so she's a dietician slash nutritionist. And it's like, oh, this blog is doing so well. But it's funny how sometimes we inadvertently answer questions from people that aren't necessarily our clients. But they drive a lot of traffic.

And so I was just wondering like, how do you help people identify the questions that are worth answering? 

[00:07:31] Matt Diamante: Well, just in using your example, like somebody having the munchies, we all know what they're doing to have the munchies. That person is looking for a solution.

Maybe they're like, every time I do that thing and I get the munchies, I don't want to get the munchies because I'm gaining weight.

Right, like they have a problem. They know that they need help with it. So they are looking for somebody to help them. Looking for information to help them. And in that blog post, for example, you could have like, Hey, if you [00:08:00] want to, I don't know, get your life together or whatever the, the verbiage you want to use is.

If you wanna get your life together, like, talk to one of our nutrition coach or talk to me like I can help you come up with a plan to help you either lose weight or gain muscle or whatever, whatever it might be.

[00:08:15] Crystal: So that's a great idea to still capture the traffic and then try to convert it.

I thought it was so funny. Because the initial intent behind the article was just somebody who was kind of a binge eater.

[00:08:27] Matt Diamante: Yeah,

[00:08:28] Crystal: And so I thought, wow, you really captured a whole different demographic.

[00:08:33] Matt Diamante: I don't like having like, here's your avatar for the person that you're trying to target.

Because you might have an idea, but then, you know, say you publish something about munchies and you're like, whoa, there's actually this whole other avatar.

This whole other person that I can be targeting or attracting as a client that I didn't know before.

So it's almost like, don't just assume. Go with what the data says and keep adjusting from there.

[00:08:56] Crystal: Okay, so. 

[00:08:56] Google Maturity And AI

[00:08:56] Crystal: talk about that.

Google has matured. [00:09:00] And most strategies haven't. I think that might've been something else that you've said before. What do you think people are still optimizing for that doesn't exist anymore?

[00:09:08] Matt Diamante: one thing that people do is like programmatic SEO.

Which is basically just creating a whole bunch of pages, automatically swapping out keywords, doing all that kind of thing.

And that kind of stuff just doesn't work anymore. I haven't seen that working recently.

Google's getting smarter. And I know you're saying Google's matured, but I feel like Google's always changing. Right?

And now we have you know, all these AI tools as well where people are actually going there and asking questions and trying to get recommendations. Like I was just in Portugal.

I got back last night and on the entire trip it was my wife and I and two friends. And they were all on their phones going, where's the best place?

To get whatever dish in Portugal? Or on this island that we're on? Or in this town? Or where's the best hike? Stuff like that.

Where it's like, Google's not necessarily gonna give you all of that information. Like you'd be a lot more specific with [00:10:00] AI or asking AI chat PT questions, right? So it's, it's forever changing and like doing this.

Like basically unhelpful content, which is like the programmatic SEO. Or you know, just creating pages because you're like, oh, I want to game the algorithm. It's like help people. That SEO is helping people with and I've said it a couple times now. But helping people find a solution to their problem.

That's it at the end of the day.

[00:10:25] Programmatic SEO Debate

[00:10:25] Crystal: So I have to tell you about an idea I have for programmatic SEO

[00:10:29] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:10:29] Crystal: I feel is helpful to Shopify store sellers.

[00:10:33] Matt Diamante: Yep.

[00:10:33] Crystal: when we are creating collection pages,

[00:10:36] Matt Diamante: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:37] Crystal: know, a lot of times there is similar information for products within a collection

[00:10:42] Matt Diamante: Yep.

[00:10:43] Crystal: and, and I think about Lowe's mulch. I saw

[00:10:46] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:10:46] Crystal: the best with Lowe's mulch, you know, because you go to Lowe's and you see the different types of mulch. But then you also see like a specific type of mulch in multiple colors. I thought, wow, from the user experience [00:11:00] perspective, that's actually very helpful because

[00:11:01] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:11:02] Crystal: I may not know the scientific makeup of mulch of what I'm looking for. But I do know that I want black mulch, you

[00:11:10] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:11:10] Crystal: to be able to see that, and so I've been studying like how they've created those pages.

And trying to recreate something similar that an artist can implement on a Shopify store. As they're moving from Etsy. That's one of those projects that I'm working on right now. But I feel like programmatic SEO as an application in that situation might actually be helpful.

[00:11:32] Matt Diamante: Yeah. I think to an extent it can be helpful. But basically what you're talking about are like long tail keywords that probably have very low difficulty, so. When we're looking and when I, sorry, when I say low difficulty, if anybody's listening doesn't know what that means, that just means it's an easier keyword to rank for.

All these tools give you like different scores and stuff like that. But if we're talking about like a specific type of mulch and in black color, people know if they're typing that [00:12:00] in or any variation of that, like they're looking to buy, right? Again, they have a problem. You have the solution. And on those pages, like if it's a really easy keyword to rank for, nobody else is trying to rank for it. You can get away with doing less SEO or like having less content on the pages.

And that, that, that's actually like a really good strategy that some people that I know are applying right now. 

[00:12:22] Crystal: you've kind of moved into like a teacher role. Your empathy towards somebody who might be listening, like, oh, I might have said something you don't understand.

What have you learned about communicating your knowledge?

How has that changed over the last couple of years?

[00:12:36] Matt Diamante: If you can't explain what you do to like a 10-year-old, and for them to get it. You're being too complicated with it, right? Like I had to, and I still dunno if they know.

But like for my parents, like for years. They're like, what? So what? You build websites? And I'm like, well, that's like part of what we do.

And I had to like dumb it down. I forget who I was talking to, but they said, it's dumb not to dumb it [00:13:00] down. Because when you're being hyper-specific with like industry language or jargon, whatever you want to call it. You're kind of eliminating a whole bunch of people who want to get into it. Or have a problem, but they don't know.

What to type in, right? So if you can appeal to the lowest common denominator, you'll widen your net. And capture more people who are then kind of gonna get into your ecosystem, right? So whether you're a dietician or a nail saloner or whatever it is, like you can take all of that stuff, dumb it down, and really attract more customers to your business.

Now when I explain what I do, I don't do SEO. I help businesses show up higher on Google. That's like, everybody can understand that. 

[00:13:41] Crystal: I feel like AI and AI search, or at least a large language model search has really benefited the industry in general.

Because this idea of burying the information in order to win the click, like that's never been great for the user experience, you know?

And so it's like, [00:14:00] okay. I feel like at least with using a chat GPT or Gemini, you're getting to like the answer. Which is what people are actually looking for.

What do you think is a specific outdated SEO belief that people are still trying to hold onto.

[00:14:14] Matt Diamante: I think it's that like you, you need to do a lot of SEO, right? Like you need to launch a website with hundreds of pages. You really don't. So what I say, and like, I also cover this in my book as well.

And this is also what we do for our clients, is we publish two blog posts a week, or we update or create two new pages a week, right?

That's all we're doing. Like we are building back links as well. Which again, back links are just links from somebody else's website back to your website. But it's, it's about being consistent, right? It's not launching a website. You have a hundred pages or like 500 pages. And hoping that Google picks it up and you know, AI starts picking it up and you start getting traffic.

It's more consistency. showing up over a longer period of time. I'm [00:15:00] talking like six months to a year or longer. And getting that snowball kind of rolling a little bit. Like Google's not gonna let you rank for a keyword that's getting 10,000 searches a month, if you're a brand new website. They don't know you.

They don't trust you, right? So it's building up that trust over time and like kind of ranking for these keywords that everybody else is ignoring. That's, you know, that snowballs. You know, maybe it's five visitors a month from that one keyword.

And that might not seem like a lot, but. Five customers could be, you know, really great for a business.

And if you do that twice a week. All of a sudden you have eight pieces of content getting you five to 10 to 20 to a hundred, you know, visitors a month. That snowballs, right? So the days of, okay, I need a massive website, I'm just gonna launch this thing. That doesn't really work anymore.

[00:15:43] Crystal: Okay. Before we jump into your book, I have one last follow up question here. So you. Mentioned, you know, the six months to a year like that traditional SEO timeline, it takes a while to get momentum get things working. What do you recommend that business owners do in the meantime [00:16:00] while they're improving their SEO?

[00:16:02] Matt Diamante: So it, it, that really depends on the business. Like if you have a budget, you can run meta ads. Or you can run Google ads. Like Google ads will get clicks. You know, that's like the highest intent there. 'cause somebody has a problem and you're basically saying, I have this solution. And I'm gonna, you know, bet real money on it, that you're gonna come to my site and buy my thing.

So you can do that stuff, but that stuff costs money. And I don't know about you, but most small business owners don't have a bunch of cash that they can just burn through.

So it's, do anything that you possibly can. I, I was reading, I think it was Alex Hormozi, one of his books, and he was saying, work four hours a day on your business, not in your business, like on your business.

So marketing your business, getting the word out. All this kind of stuff. And for me, what's really worked, and I recommend this for all small businesses. Or all businesses, post organically on social media every single day.

I'm talking about film a 30 second to 45 second clip. Post it [00:17:00] on Instagram, post that same clip on TikTok. On YouTube shorts. On Facebook.

Also, by the way, Facebook has something like, it's like 3 billion users. It's a lot of people. And not enough people are publishing content on Facebook. So your reach on Facebook can be insane and everybody's ignoring it.

[00:17:17] Crystal: I promise this is the last follow up question before we move on, but I love that you said post the same clip across all those platforms. What about the haters who are like, you need to create it specifically for the platform? What's your feedback to that?

[00:17:32] Matt Diamante: I've been doing this for like over three years at this point. The same clips on all the platforms. And I have like followers on Facebook. I have followers on Instagram. And a lot of followers there. TikTok as well. YouTube. Like I posted the same video that I posted everywhere else on YouTube. I got like a half a million views. And I'm like, okay, well if I just, if I would've followed the advice that I heard from somebody saying, you need to go platform specific, [00:18:00] I wouldn't have got all those views.

Right? And that video did well on every platform I posted it on, right? So what's wrong with doing that?

[00:18:06] Crystal: I love it. I'm just so, I'm glad to hear someone say that who's actually had tangible success. Doing that because I feel like a lot of business owners, they get trapped in that idea that you have to create more. And you have to create specifically. And I call it like a brand resume. Of all of the platforms to be the same You.

Wherever people find you. And most of us are working with small teams, if not, you know, a team of one.

[00:18:34] Matt Diamante: Yeah.

[00:18:35] Crystal: It's very difficult to put the same type of expectations on that team of one that you might have for a brand that has entire departments. And so I'm, I'm glad that you shared that. I'm glad that you've had success with it, and I'm glad that people can say, Hey, there's somebody who's done it a different way,

[00:18:55] Matt Diamante: well, so the thing too is like I'm doing all of this myself. Like I am filming the [00:19:00] videos. I'm editing the videos, like on my phone, posting them. I don't schedule anything out.

If you're like, okay, we'll spend two days a month. Just recording videos and you know, editing them and scheduling those out to me, I'm like, that's so much more work than waking up in the morning and being like, oh, I have this project that I'm working on. And I can talk about a piece of that without revealing who the client is.

And I'm just gonna film and educate people on that specific piece. Takes maybe like 20, 30 minutes to script something. And when I say script, I mean I'm literally typing on like the notes app on my computer. And. Just saying, okay, here's roughly what I'm gonna say, and then you read it, and then you look at your camera, you click record, and then you try to remember that.

And then you can clip that all together. Like, you don't have to be somebody reading from a teleprompter or like a professional speaker. You can clip things together. And yeah, I just, I, I'm doing it on my own at this point. Maybe I'll get some help in the future, but it's, it's very possible to do. 

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