About This Episode
Victor Karpenko is an affiliate and an SEO expert who owns SeoProfy. He shares a few SEO case studies and another look at how he uses data to make better and fastest decisions for running his sites and working with SEO clients.
I'll share a story within this episode that should inspire people to think differently about SEO.
Take a vacuum cleaner that is high quality but costs $12,000. Nobody is looking for a vacuum cleaner that expensive but maybe you'll find people looking for 'how to start a car detailing business' in which you tell them this vacuum cleaner is the best and needed and you'll be able to make money in no time including getting financing for your business.
Victor advocates that everything is about intent and that is reflected down to your content as well as your design.
Full Transcript
but you just need to be consistent put more execution not just researches you know and like ideas like more execution and I I did fail many many times even then in that presentation like we build uh one website I invested with a couple hundred K and it failed you know I built another website we did something in its well but I wrote Every process we got something good you know we built like two that tracks backlinks like that systemize the process of how I would prefer
people building links for me with the right kpis you know like and like we built Outreach Department like that can build links build links consistently and the links I want not you know the one where people offer so like every time you fail it's it's pretty good because you can get something valuable or there like and use it as an advantage in in the future I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Statute so
welcome to the Philly bi podcast I got a special guest here Victor carpenko he's the founder of SEO Trophy and also link checker.pro I'm going to pass it back to you Victor to tell us what you do your experience in SEO and everything you do in business I basically run a SEO Prof agency it's about 200 people SEO agency that just focused only on SEO so like it's like all in one SEO from like link building to content to Technical to-do's and whatever and uh other
half of my time I invest in my own project and grow them and make money as an affiliate yeah awesome so what what is your story how did you get into SEO and what drawn what what brought you in like what was the Intriguing thing yeah I was uh it was like 2004 2005 I don't even remember like uh so I was buying domain games and I was selling them like on different like auction platforms uh like local and Dot com.org.net and I wanted to sell
more more more so I was like Curious how to create a website so I started my first website like it was in Ukraine and I rank it like in three or four months for the keywords like by domains and stuff and that's how I started yeah awesome so I noticed that you have been a speaker at many SEO conferences and I just went through uh my notes and I found the one from 2019 in Chiang Mai and I was looking through it um the slide is
from zero to a hundred thousand per month in the casino Niche and I wanted to ask about your process for building basic like the spreadsheets and analyzing keywords and using the data and trying to find what the top breaking sites do how to decompose it and basically create this low-hanging fruit of what to Target so I'm wondering is there something you do differently today like I know it's been a short period of time but would this be the same recipe you'd want to create no I
I think a lot of change we grew like a bit but I can't talk anymore about the numbers so I mean it's good but not good because like at the conferences people want like some meet some like you know like a real life story so um I would change definitely uh how I build the team like because all this spreadsheets data whatever stuff it's all about the process of the people that work for you you know if you have smart people that have awake that they
understand uh yeah enough and involved enough in this process they will like get you good results you know so from the point when I was doing this presentation we've got pretty good results and we grew next year pretty good but boy I definitely would build team a little bit in a different way you know just because with the right people you can you know some people run you know like because SEO is not just like quick login quick login fruit spread you know it's a marathon
you know like you need to rank and to be there a consistent time to make a decent money right so okay so a team is like number one priority all other stuff is like you know it makes sense uh but this is the way you organize the process you know know know yeah and I guess it goes without saying I mean Matt uh likes to have guests where they can share stories and even talk about the failures and not just kind of show that hey in
one month I made the success but um you know the common message I hear amongst a lot of seos is that exactly what you said this is a marathon this is not a Sprint and I think uh too many people could go into the space uh wanting the lottery ticket like they want to make all that money in the first month and it just doesn't happen that way yeah yeah but like you know what you just need to be consistent put more execution not just researches
you know and like ideas like more execution and I I did fail many many times even in that presentation like we built uh one website I invested a couple hundred K and it failed you know I built another website with it something in itself but every process we got something good you know we built like two that tracks backlinks like that systemize the process of how I would prefer people building links for me with the right kpis you know like and like we build out Bridge
Department like that can build links uh consistently and the links I want not you know the one like people offer so like every time you fail it's it's pretty good because you can get something valuable over there like and use it as an advantage in in the future yeah exactly I mean that's just compound wins where you get that little Edge and then you just keep compounding it over time yeah yeah uh as someone who prides himself on being a data driven SEO can you share
some compelling data stories that you felt were profound or things you've learned over the last short little while and said wow this has really changed my outlook or changed how I do business and SEO yeah yeah yeah um I mean there is that's why I stopped writing the new sweater like I will continue probably soon but uh like because because because there are some things that you see and you want to use it like you know and not tell about this but here is one thing
I can tell you which way can be like wow for a super like go for your audience for the people like for example people looking for hidden links but um okay even the if they found they still need to replicate them right people look for hidden redirects but they need to see them but here's the one-time type of redirect link that people don't use and even consider as a link it's real canonical redirect so let's say is an uh parasite SEO right you're creating an article
right and you have this super trusted domain I don't know like with the 1000 reference domains nice profile that already with the content and ranking like top 100 for your money keywords right you post this uh parasite uh SEO article and you do Rel canonical to this page without redirecting so URL canonical uh says this is the right page and but if you find it it's cool but probably uh the the problem is people don't find it because you also on your own domain that where
you redirect you do reverse DNS so and clocking so when the you will go and check aha let me see the throw canonical it will show you the normal row canonical but for Google and all the IP network of Google it will show that this article is actually uh ranking and then you like go into hrefs or whatever tool and see wow this article like kicks off I should probably optimize my content and it will rank for sure but you don't know about this so this
is like um this is great and we we find a lot of uh things like this but you know we use it like on our own projects because you need to analyze see and Implement yeah it sounds kind of sneaky and it's very clever but at the same time you're right I think it'd be very difficult for people to reverse engineer and discover what that is you you almost need to start looking at source code to find that Rel canonical you know the public I guess
the service by code it can find a lot of things but even our hidden link finder can find neuro canonicals and also as long as you we see it by analyzing the top and it was alert you know like so well I mean it wasn't like yesterday right because like people use it all the time but this is the way just just to see that there can be many many other tricky things that you don't consider to your strategy and then you fail because you don't
know what's actually going on so the takeaway tip is get yourself a hidden link finder nah it's not gonna help just uh you know try to correlate everything possible you know not not just one like H1 issue H3 or this table of contents or all this elements or like the structure of the page or density or like partial keywords or whatever this like you can do preservers your other tools you know you know like or technical you can do it one time you just need to
see everything is the offers right uh do you have like an advantage if you have review website does this website has uh um like competitive information offers and do they have like now people talk about it okay I do I personally do not believe in all this eat thing but when all your competitors in the top doing it you also should do it just because it's a signal to Google uh come on on on So like So like um some might have driven SEO approach just
to try to correlate any information possible it's not just one thing it's everything you know like know like know like yeah and then it's up to you to kind of put the weights behind and go what is the contributing factor and I guess at the end of the day it's like when you start studying all that data it's a lot of data but it's up to you to make your own conclusion but I think if you take a lot of the points you're probably going to
have success and then whatever you don't have success with you just keep testing yeah yeah we just do with Sprints like every hour like internal affiliating every week Sprint what are we planning for a month how we move what do they need where they need help and just do do do the work you know like that's what what helps I think that's probably another podcast topic for another day about uh your systems and processes processes processes I'm not the best in this uh like our CEO
is good you know in the company but like I do understand like keep your eyes and dashboards that they should help in front of them like every day just to go to the main company goal like what they need to achieve yeah uh we talked previously where I you know we've been chatting for some months and I I wanted to get you some interview questions to do on a blog post and this was obviously for me to kind of uh ask you like all these different
SEO questions because our audience is affiliate marketers and you basically look at the questions that maybe we can reframe them so they can help you and then you gave me a story where you said um like you had this client that had high-end vacuum cleaners and you gave a story about how to kind of put a a concept out there that's going to pull in traffic where it's not the intended traffic but it's kind of like getting in front of people in the right way that's
eventually going to be not only sending traffic eventually your way but having it in a more profound way and I'm just wondering how how are you able to replicate this or would you say this is like a case-by-case basis when you look at a company and go okay like how do you come up with these ideas I mean it's like what do you um what problem do you solve right like for example if someone recovering websites they just can't sell like you know SEO Services they
need to show how they recover the website like ways what you need to do to recover checklist in uh like if it relates to SEO bar like with his story is pretty good because um I mean no one wants vacuum cleaner for twelve thousand dollars right like I mean it's pretty expensive but like if you show how you can make money with this vacuum cleaner show you how you can Finance this vacuum cleaner and like by doing car detailing or other stuff and rank uh like
with the keyword how to start Curry detailing business and include this cleaner and say without this vacuum cleaner your business will fail you know so uh it's like a product LED marketing like look at the same rush they bought backlinko and rewrote the post that was their product they can solve this problem right so people who are newbies and they are searching some solution like how to do this they show that with the sem rush and step by step href does the same we know how
to check backlinks how to do like technical whatever so you and it's actually pretty cool because most of the people just Target money money keyword but here is like like for example with this solar uh I showed uh example once uh for example you can do solar SEO company right the search volume is like 70. we we used to rank number one like for the website no leads at all right or you can uh what's actually business owner looking for they're looking for leads they don't
care what you do they want to like more leads to make more business right so you need to tell them how to generate solar leads for right and just write down the process like and tell everything uh like what will help them to achieve this goal right and they're not gonna do this in most cases that's why like you know this articles work but uh and you you you rank this article you like get some Outreach to this article you rank people come see refer and
they already like coming to you uh knowing what to do and they just want you to implement and then what's the beauty of that with that strategy is there it's not just leads they are ready to buy you've you've done SEO at another level in my in my mind yeah yeah okay let's uh change but I will just add it was a tool I forgot the name Google maybe it's still there where you can look 20 previous searches that uh the user before they used to
Google your keyword they've done like for example some people that are looking for car insurance before they look for a car price like whatever stuff and you can catch them there already you know like by creating articles like articles like related because you kind of see what they Google before yeah that would be very useful we're gonna definitely dig for that after this call okay uh so yeah changing gears I want to ask like how do you how important do you think design and user experiences
for SEO SEO um um um it's super important and we don't do we we mostly don't do not use templates we do intent do intent uh design answering design you know like it's not like um first we do the structure then the content and then design for this content okay I mean I know it can be complicated but if you take away because like you're one of your tools um in a gaming industry right and um um um like you know it's hard to compete there
wait yeah it's not easy yeah and you need to find the way how you can be better than the top websites right so like and it's not like you will write a text with the Surfers or other tools and it will be better you need to find like uh what users actually want you know like and first we're trying to understand like the intent what they're actually looking is it offline online or is it like what they want to see there and then like we're thinking
about the design of the page but it's super important important important it's interesting like for example the biggest problem for in Casino Niche uh it's it's it's um on the page with the bonuses everyone put the same bonuses as for uh payment options or whatever like but you need to actually give a bonus uh tell how much you need to deposit what the value you will get in what slot you will play and with what payment method you will deposit this you know like if you
like for example on a CA from gambling.com they just give clear you know like uh wait Vision okay I see and they have really good conversion and they're ranking Wi-Fi you're right because I mean with them like when you go to some of those websites you're not seeing a list of bonuses which is almost standard you're actually seeing like a field that says what are you looking for and it kind of it's all about the intent they they set it up on a platter they say
you know you're coming here for bonuses I mean whatever link you clicked on or if it came from Google you know you're on a gambling bonus related website and it's kind of like well what are you looking for I put in a couple of data fields and we'll give you some interaction correct correct and this is the design right so you first need to understand what they want to see right what will make their life easier by coming on your page click play or whatever review
and they know where to click and they don't need to come back to to look for other offer because you already solved his problem no I think the key takeaway here is uh focus on intent which is literally the same thing as design and let that be your driving force of the SEO yep yep awesome uh what are your thoughts on building SEO dashboards using tools like looker studio looker studio looker studio and if you support it and how should users best configure this for their
business um I mean like I I I do support it some of our teams uh have it like you know Google data Studio Google hookers tweet yeah exactly yeah but yeah you can get like uh basic information from Google search console from Google analytics I'm not sure like because I I do not use on my like small website analytics I use bebik it's I don't remember the current name I know and yeah I remember right and and um like you just like can create your like
um main Matrix that you want to see like for me it's clicks uh like it's uh it doesn't show bounce rate but what from search console clicks uh average position like uh keywords like how many of them appear for a landing page and for the whole website and overall we we take like for example from this week to next week what changed wait uh if especially when it's new website you can't measure it with like big volume of traffic you you can measure okay it was
like 200 keywords now it's 1000 keywords or whatever average position changed yes we are doing the right thing but it's it's many templates with this walker studio and like it's up to you I'm I'm not a big fan of looker studio uh I do my own dashboard where I have like main metrics for affiliate websites where it's you know like as a an SEO in the morning I want see okay how many ftds I have what's the revenue uh if it's not because you already know
how many ftds you on average should have right like if it's less something went wrong you go to the positions in snack next to a dashboard and then to the traffic and then you you kind of see what's going on you know uh so and then the third one is uh tasks how the task flow goes because without all this doesn't make it doesn't matter you know you need to go to like I don't know rewrite or update Pages build links on them like improve them
and it's like it's not just once it's all the time you know so and yeah I'm taking notes here because it's uh we're looking at seeing if we want to build with our tools like the same affiliate marketing data that you have of your your ftds your clicks your sales and go do we want to export that out so you can put it into looker Studio we'll already have the API so that's ready to go uh but we're thinking about maybe doing it inward where maybe
your analytics and your search console can be coming in but it goes without saying I think what you said is probably on point that everyone's situation is different but maybe uh your your one campaign is correlated to a single page so you can actually look at that from a single data Stream Point of View affiliate Network programs hate this when you need to mark up your website and I don't know like for one page you have three different types of reference links then like for the
whole website you have like 100 reference links for the same offer pick you up like but it makes sense because then you actually see where ftt came from you know like so and then like here is also I about Pro canonical really good um way to look what keywords actually convert if you are like just starting it's to start PPC even if the niche is great you still can start PPC there are a lot of teams that can appear in any Market it doesn't matter like
um and just with the postback you get the data like of the first time deposit or right but you also get the data which keyword converts after you spend some amount of money and then you can focus only on these keywords by doing your SEO it's a smart strategy but I'm pretty sure everyone is not going to do that if you love data and if you're comfortable playing with these Advanced uh link tracking tools then these are definitely great ideas yeah all right so next question
is uh it's like two parts it's what do you think uh data science and analytics is going to do for affiliate marketing and then the same question for what it'll do for SEO I mean like help to understand what's going on faster I think this is the main thing why you need to have and so you can make important SEO or affiliate decision faster so you can make more money faster right so you can see problems faster so you can see Improvement faster that's the only
thing the two supposed to give you wait for example when I started my like our internal tool we're already doing almost one and a half year but it's still like I think it's just only beginning you know so but like before we were like wasting so much time on like routine things now like we do these resources like I don't know 100 times faster this is the only Advantage you know like if you did uh Niche research like I don't know faster better with like write
data then you can Implement and you most likely will get some results you know like and faster than other guys that will be so you know like the whole thing Awards while they were they will think we already will try many many times you know so that's that's what data-driven analytics tools should give you you know so they just help you you know to make your business efficient is SEO affiliate doesn't matter doesn't matter doesn't matter uh the the next question I've got is kind of
like a self-serving one for me like I'm I'm curious to know it's I like asking people what AI tools they use and chat GPT and what are the ways you're using it not just for pure SEO but how you're uh trying to automate systems in your business and you know just trying to improve your daily workflow I do not wow wow wow I mean like why do I need uh teams of smart people to use chat GPT if I can help teams of smart people that
can use whatever tool they want you know like as long as they do everything like right and like implement it and deliver right so my of course I see like prompts I talk with seos where they show pretty good ideas but they are the one if for example product owner of the tool here's uh this ideas they can implement it it's good we have in our own tool like you can generate like like a lot of stuff and it can even give you a conclusion about
uh what do you need to do but this chat GPT is not like something you know um AI definitely helps and it's probably undervalued right now 100 it's like people just do not understand but what what I see like we we we're getting better better and better with our tools and just AI can just speed up some you know summaries uh according to our data that we have on the servers you know like what do we do so but I personally try it try it try
it as everyone used I don't know for naming purposes like find like brand names or whatever uh I stopped yeah because I think what you're doing that's probably different than a lot of people is people is people is um I think you've been focused more on the business intelligence aspect for a long time like you're you're more focused on data and I think when you do that you're probably gaining more insights where you have those insights now and maybe people won't even get them with using
nab's AI tools I think there's always an interesting correlation with AI and business intelligence that it'll always be there but if you just focus on business intelligence you might touch upon AI but you don't have to well we just do it not not because we just like like you know like to analyze stuff I do like to analyze but like we do it because imagine you rank number one uh for a super good keyword you get into sustainable Revenue all the time and here's the new
guy that did like this cool strategy like but if I would do it on my own I probably would do it in one month maybe never will do it you know like maybe we'll just talk and like trying to implement and then you still need time what I have uh I have a team that responsible with this project we just discussed and put this task in the spring so I know in one week we'll change something in two weeks we'll change even more in three weeks
we probably will get back to number one position and we'll use the strategy that's where I see like you know um um um okay I can identify but to implement it's more important than to identify it yeah and I think the key takeaway here is uh it takes time to become a good analyst and you pretty much need data to um get good at that and you also need to have a really good understanding of what you're looking at in the first place I mean just
looking at tables of data I mean yeah you can put it that through now chat GPT or code interpreter and say yeah give me some insights but sometimes it helps to have like you can't replace you know your 10 years of uh background in affiliate marketing and SEO with just uh AI it's just not really going to happen I I think it works it works mostly mostly mostly um where for example team lead has Equity or percentage in a project and when they make some money
right and they drop they look for everything possible just to go back there and I'm also like I want them to fix it right like like like so this is like and then you're just trying to correlate correlate everything possible like you know like you we are they have more content let's write more content they are more optimized let's optimize them more they did this let's do this too you know like end result is still like you know like why we do this or what just
to keep ranking there and wait I don't know yeah accountability is uh it will solve a lot of things and AI is not going to solve accountability yeah accountability yeah uh last question I'd like to ask everyone is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence really interesting question I think the more more more people will grow as a like teams companies the more they will start to analyze the more they will start to see like where they
are spending money uh where they're losing should they not at all do this stuff and with the this analytic tools basically that's the answer just answer just answer just just track things uh that they will uh start track uh everything possible like from the business like for example we have dashboard in Agency for every Department with the p l for every hitching lead so they know like for example project a head of project says I want to do this team building you know like I need
5K and now they go and see can we afford 5K to do this team building or we should like postpone it later and figure out this in a different way you know like because they see the numbers as long as you're like tracking the numbers you can do some changes if you don't track come on like data that is everything you're you're right and it sounds like you guys uh track more than the average company and I I think what might happen in the next few
years is as more people start seeing not just case studies but when they see other companies grow and they realize what's behind it and it's not necessarily AI tools it's a lot of business intelligence tools um you know I think what you're saying is very true it's the people that take the time to look at data and say how can I use this data to make a smart better decisions you can't make better decisions if you're not having if you're not using any data or not
measuring anything at all right right awesome uh Victor how can people get a hold of you if you want them to get a hold of you just go to data driven seo.com subscribe and um I'm not promising regular newsletters but I will definitely uh will continue sometime soon awesome and also includes uh some links in the show notes for maybe LinkedIn as well as SEO profie and linkchecker.pro thank you thank you all right thank you okay let me thank you for tuning in to the affiliate
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