Parasite SEO Strategy & Tools with James Oliver

so basically say if you're like a small or medium business uh and you've got like a limited SEO budget and you've not really got the time or money to build Authority and get links to your site and get it like ranking on the first page because a lot of the times you're competing with maybe like Forbes or home advisor or Yelp whatever whichever your Niche is in so what you do instead is leverage uh third party Authority sites or user generated content sites now which Google

is favoring to help get your content on those sites and basically take up the search dig you instead of other authority sites taking it so it basically skips that kind of curve and piggy piggybacks off a different domain to get your content ranked I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to by stab welcome to the affiliate bi podcast today we're chatting with James Oliver he is the founder of oliver.com but that's more of his personal brand

website uh he does SEO affiliate marketing and he's the co-founder of parasite SEO which means we're going to talk about SEO and Link building today and of course parasite SEO uh James welcome to the show and I just want to get started with like can you share your journey into SEO how you got to where you are today I'm going to assume that affiliate sites is uh part of that answer yeah pretty much so basically I I've done loads of traveling so basically digital Nomad traveling

around everywhere uh and then I left my cozy job in Australia and went around Asia again uh and then basically stum LED across SEO and affiliate marketing basically building my first site out seven years ago now and not stopped ever since so I've like a portfolio around 20 sites uh sold them recently but basically all I do is just buy and build uh and keep them going from there so main focus is affiliate marketing and SEO basically or organic traffic uh touching upon that you said

you buy and build sites so if you're going to buy a site what are you looking for like an affiliate site that's like either a fixer uper or something that's trending up or something that you know you can amplify and add you know your SEO experience yeah a lot of it is is definitely just what I can amplify and just basically take it to the next level because a lot of sites don't monetize enough basically they leave it for a while and they don't actually find

additional programs to promote or courses and stuff like that because they generally offer a high commission so you can literally just buy a site stick a new affiliate program on and uh 10 the revenue and the value of the S that's basically the strategy what I do with buying sites which sounds a bit crazy because you're like that's an obvious Playbook and I know some friends that they buy sites and they're basically doing that they're analyzing and going what networks or programs aren't they working with

like you know are they not working with like media vine where they have a better deal with medine they know they can basically acquire the site and like in six months basically recover the money yeah that's that's the the whole strategy with with the whole buying the site and a lot of the time it's just doing Simple tweaks I don't even do a lot maybe a tiny bit of content internal linking uh checking if the top pages are uh they've got links to them man it's

like um cro optimized and just that and some new affiliate programs and that does it's basically the at20 principle of making your money back yeah now maybe a side topic do you think a filing Network should do stuff like this because I mean your traditional affilate Network looks like this it's one payment method one affiliate manager they get you in theory better deals than if you were to get them on your own or sometimes the only product or Services is just available through that Network I

think networks are kind of very binary like they're just flat but do you think maybe there's like a Marketplace for a new affiliate Network that's going to basically say hey we're in this together like if you grow we grow yeah definitely when with me with affiliate networks I do prefer them compared to like uh and specific networks where they just host it by the themselves because you have that um you basically you know you're going to get paid out and you have that security so I

tend to always go for for networks but having that better partnership and with with the affiliate manager is a thing which I've missed a lot of times I never really get that uh most of the time with most affiliate networks all right so let's get into parisite SEO I've got a lot of questions on there so let's just go right to the basics for those that don't know could you explain what parasite SEO is yeah sure so basically say if you're like a small or medium

business and you've got like a limited SEO budget and you've not really got the time or money to build Authority and get links to your site and get it like ranking on the first page because a lot of the times you're competing with maybe like Forbes or home advisor or Yelp or whatever whichever your Niche is in so what you do instead is leverage uh third party Authority sites or user generated content sites now which Google is favoring to help get your content on those sites

and basically take the search positions instead of other authority sites taking it so it basically skips that kind of curve and piggy piggy backs off a different domain to get your content ranked and of course I want to know what are the right and wrong ways of doing parasite SEO because there's been a lot of chatter about people that have done parasite SEO and they've been either hit hard or that those parasite networks have actually just kind of fallen off and they're not important anymore yeah

so there's definitely a few way with this so one is to aim to get an Roi as soon as possible because then if a site does go down in six months time you've already made your money back and it's uh you've already made your rare and capitalize on it but there's a few things it's kind of similar to like a niche site so you want to find um good parasites what are already ranking what the content is doing and reverse engineer the tactics that's always one

of the best ways uh and also parasites tend to be like high Authority sites so they can rank for a ton of keywords so you want to try and leverage that as much as possible so what I like to do is calls and that way you can do a lot of longtails in that article as well and you're not just going to rank through the main title keyword but you're going to pick up l's longtail as well so you want to try and optimize and basically

get as many keywords in there as possible uh some of the wrong ways would be um internal well linking from different parasites to other parasites so say if you got a post on Men's Journal and then one on LinkedIn and your internal link while you're linking those across if something does happen to one say if it goes down for whatever reason you're sending bag signals to that one parasite which is working plus like your competitors can maybe find that site and reverse engineer all the other

parasites what you spent a lot of time doing uh and basically copy your network so they're kind of two kind of big ones also CR is a lot of thing people get wrong like you really want to optimize for conversions because with parasite parasite parasite these tend to rank really well so you don't really have to focus too much on the link building aspect side of things but you do want to focus more on the on page and basically optimizing for conversions because you want to

make an Roi so there there are a few things which uh I basically see a lot of people doing wrong and right that sounds insightful because I mean I don't know too many seos or Philly marketers that actually care about the quality of of content they're putting on another platform like you just basically said it's important to to optimize it for conversion and of course when you do that my opinion is that you're actually indirectly optimizing for SEO and it I think there's people that they'll

either buy links or they'll create articles and they're basically just kind of better than nothing but they're not really extracting the maximum maximum value yeah that because that way like guest posts and stuff like that people are just doing it for the link they don't really care about the content but with parasite it's a little bit different because you are trying to rank this content and you do want good content because the whole point is to make money so if you're helping the user out and

getting solving that problem to find a product you're also getting money in your pocket which is the whole goal of uh parasite really in my in my understanding my terms yeah so I mean I think Times of India is probably the most commonly referenced example parasite SEO where I don't even know it seems like every time I'm on X or Twitter it's like they're still ranking um would you say like Times of India is like maybe not the most IDE example of parasite Su where you

mentioned a site like Men's Journal and I think there's other sites that they're super authoritative and it's not like they're going to compete in my space let's say I'm building an igaming affiliate site or something in you know that that relies on the Amazon um you know Marketplace would you say it's kind of like good just to have like uh like these are the types of content pieces you want high quality and on reputable sites that no one even thinks twice and says no Men's Journal

that's not parasite SEO parasite SEO yeah exactly because well that comes to plays conversions as well because it just looks like an avator just a normal post so obviously helps with conversions but no one really realizes it's just basically a paid guest post but uh relevancy does play a big part in it like you say like Outlook India or Times of India or Men's Journal like each website kind of ranks well for different things a bit like an N site like you build up auor in

one aspect like LinkedIn actually does really well in most niches but generally the tech sort niche as well it does well in and uh there's like midday which does well in like CBD so you want to find these parasites which really well uh do really well in whatever U Niche you're trying to rank in and then optimize that way that's the best way to uh it basically helps obviously the content Rank and it sticks with a brand it all works well together so I think it

would probably matter more to like what is the keyword or phrase you're trying to rank for so I mean a perfect example here's my situation we're trying to rank for Casino fail programs because we're we got a soft for um that's targeted for IG gaming Affiliates and so we're currently three or four in America for rankings and the number one is business of apps and it's a pure parasite SEO article it's basically like a top 10 list but I actually think that's the right article it's

like if someone's looking for Casino affiliate programs the intent is they're kind of expecting a list so I guess you would suggest that whatever the keyword or the intent is that's the content piece you'd ma uh you match for it it yeah definitely and another thing we've doing um like parasite SE right which I didn't touch on before is when it is a list and you're trying to get as many keywords in as possible you do want to segment these keywords so like you do like

best casino in America or whatever but then you'd have like best Bitcoin Casino best casino with legit pay payouts or all these extra keywords which you can stuff in the headings and obviously it helps with conversions and you stuffing more keywords in as well yeah I guess it's a mixture of I mean you can look at it one side as being its keywords but on the other side it's really becoming a more helpful article like people that actually care about that list they genuin genuinely would

read what you just wrote and you know you can look at it from both sides of the coin it's uh one is SEO optimized but the other one is it's product user optimized yeah 100% that's uh that's how I did my Niche sites and a lot of the affiliate content which I did on the niche sites just transl it's just the same thing but you're just hosting the content on a third party site and you can just use more of them rather than just a single

domain all right so I always like to try to ask tough questions from like how does a small startup affiliate kind of get off the ground because I mean usually when we think about SEO we think about okay you need budgets you need talented SEO people you need uh budgets for link building how would you suggest someone get off the ground to say okay what are the the low cost uh parasite uh SEO tactics that people can make use of yeah cool so like I said

before you want to uh do multiple domains so even if you are doing like a completely paid approach and you have a budget you still want to be using these free domains because a lot of them are ranking really well so you've got LinkedIn medium Reddit which is getting a little bit tougher but you can still use that quar as well uh and then it depends on the niche because there's tons of Niche spec specific forums like there's like Steam commity and there's there's a ton

of pet ones which rank for multiple keywords so it's very n specific but you just want to basically do a bit of research you can use obviously our tool which we made or just Google and just spend the time looking through and trying to reverse engineer what people are doing now in terms of trying to get like you know these Men's Journal I mean like what are the ways in which you're getting that I mean I've got a friend who is excellent at um befriending journalists

like is this the route you have to go because it's like you need to get the journalist attention to get them to you read your message and and then try to convince them that hey you've got a like an interesting article to to talk about well with these a lot of them they they want the money because they have the fees there and is quite just a normal process for them but you do have to do it tactic fly you can't just go in and just

try and just get a guest post so a lot of the times what we do um is basically say that we're an agency and we're looking to get a peace publish for a client and that way it basic it goes across that you are uh you're going to buy multiple posts which they obviously love even if you are just going to buy a single one you just want to pretend you're an agency and do it that way because they're going to think you're going to buy

more uh and that kind of gets the conversation going and then they'll come back with the prices and then you can just negotiate and talk to them but generally if you do buy more than one article as well you are going to get a bigger discount um but you can get one offs and you just approach it as if you're going to buy a few basically okay um I'm pretty new to the to the parasite SEO tool so I'm going to ask a some dumb questions

like I'm assuming that it's both a bit of a marketplace where you could acquire links but I'm assuming there's maybe a bit of analytics and insights in there is there yeah so we've actually spent a lot of time in our devs uh pulling his hair out now trying to get all the categorization and do everything right because we're scraping like I don't even know how many keywords I think it's in the millions now but we pulling all the keywords in and then obviously the data base

of parasites to work out all the data and do all the data analytics it goes It goes above my head uh but as for the Marketplace side currently we are just offering the contact details of the person you need to get in touch with to reach out yourself this is something like what people are requesting because no one really wants to do the Outreach and do that so we are going to implement uh basically just a click to go for a vendor and go purchase it

rather than having to do it yourself uh but we currently haven't got that yet okay but it makes sense to to do that work for people because I mean I think one of the most common pain points in SEO is is Outreach and I come from like we're both in the affiliate space but I I work with a lot of affiliate managers and I'm sure you see this too it's I think affiliate managers have some of the the worst Outreach skills in the world I'm like

go to the SEO space to learn it but even an SEO it's still there's still a lot that could be could be could be done yeah definitely I'm I'm one of those people as well I hate emailing people and never jump on calls or anything like that so yeah it's one of those things which is definitely a pain point for a lot of seos and affiliate marketers but there's a big difference between you emailing someone and someone who who got less than two years experience in

SEO because if you email me out of the blue and say hey John uh we offer XYZ for services for link building I'm G to go look you up I'm going to find that you've got you know your own branded domain you're on LinkedIn with a lot of connections in common like you have your own brand Authority that you've built up over time by doing like podcast things so I mean that's not easy for everyone to just kind of pick up but you have that no

yeah that is true and that definitely does help without as well so just like simple things like a an email signature as well with just a picture of yourself and a bit of information that goes a long way for to help get the responses as well yeah got no excuse for the email signature part so that kind of ties into the next one about reputation management is that something that you think goes hand inand with parasite with parasite SEO yeah so parasite seo's basically viewed a

bit more of black hat but online representation management is more white hat but they're more or less the same thing so it's still leveraging third party domains to take over the Ser as much as possible and for example if you if like an agency has a client come to them with like a bankruptcy and filing or something like that and they want to push that bad press basically out of the Surs they're going to use that with third party domains or even a press release which

still leverages newspapers High Authority domains to push that down uh some sometimes it is a little bit different though so like a lot of the affiliate parasite domains are going to be different to the OM parasite domains because they're kind of rank for different things like uh well like company terms or personal name terms so like it's just exactly the same of trying to find a relevant domain but yeah it's the still the same process and I've seen a lot of these agencies they charge a

lot of money like 20 to like 25k just for online reputation management as well which which is crazy especially if you can uh leverage this find the right domains to to basically get your name out there and likely do it even better as well without having to go through these companies where they're probably doing okay how do we take that 25k and spend the least amount of money yeah it's probably uh one of those free press releases of those uh spamming little sites of the the

Fox News I've seen it before but uh yeah that's basically it um online reputation management is basically just parasite SEO leveraging third party domains to take over as much as the serp as possible and you can still use medium LinkedIn and there's a few of us like about me and IMBD and even like udemy and stuff like that there's uh there's a few creative ways you can get around and do it yeah I definitely need to start uh combining the list I mean my way of

reverse engineering what that list is is basically I follow people like James dly and Craig cample and they're always up to tricks of of trying to push their you know their names and higher prominence so I I'm going to take that as a tip it's like go look at uh all the seos and go where are they mentioned in uh interesting places and yeah Udi I haven't thought of that one IMDb I see you know Craig Campbell's on there I mean Craig yeah yeah so yeah

I need to do it for oh oops sorry I was gonna say I need to do it for my uh my name as well but because it's James Oliver Jamie Oliver literally ranks for everything so if I ever try and do anything it's always him so I'm just not even poed with my name well I have the same problem as well because my name is very common so I work in affiliate marketing and I gaming in I gaming there's another person named John Ray which is

frustrating and I talked to uh Jason Barnard the um you the the the L or it's the the knowledge panel guy so he was telling me he's like I recommend you change your name or use a different name or your full name with initials I'm like I don't want to do this this is a lot of work but um what would you say like in terms of how do you use um parasite SEO in the white hat sense like what would you do for for someone

who's let's say an affiliate startup where there's one or two people behind it as people that trying to push their own personal brand but they're also trying to grow company brand would you tend to mix this all up and say okay we're going to do one article that's founder focus and just kind of like try a different array of content yeah so I definitely do founder focused company focused and then a lot of people do like uh guides or white papers and put them in like

Evan not and stuff like that and they don't necessarily link out to their brand but they mention their brand and obviously the more entities and everything getting Google mention your brand it's going to get picked up by the llms and it's going to get picked by Google so everything kind of helps with that okay now you mentioned white paper which is something I thought about doing so how would you do that for let's say an affiliate site or a SAS company like what would your strategy

be of where would that white paper go and how would you kind of like would you do PR or different articles like in prominent sites to try to link towards it as well yes so for that you would kind of want all the PDF kind of sharing site so like the Evo and the subcribed and you just got to make sure they're indexable and so I would check all kind of those sharing sites make make sure there is other content like online sharable uh and you

can even do it with a Google Docs making that sharable uh and that's kind of how i' go about it linkwise I wouldn't really bother too much if it's especially if you're doing white hat obviously if you if you really want to push stuff uh you can just send pbn to it because pbns are very cheap and it's not on your domain so it doesn't really matter so that's probably the easiest way to like kind of but kind of trying to find as many sites as

possible and get that get that and as many different entities as possible picked up and crawled okay and then I've got another question that more relates to Affiliates where every FCO I've been talking to in the past year that I've had on this podcast that kind of say what do vets need to do when Google's been kind of shaking the the space up it's literally been a whole year in which these updates are constant and some of the answers I hear from people is that you

need to build a better product that like are you going to do like 10 pbn or you going to focus on one quality site uh what's your take on it from what you've seen from both personal experience and uh other seos you talk to yeah well it's an absolute pain because I've got I'm mainly in the mattress and sleep Niche uh and it's not in the US but my entire serup is taken over by us sites and they're not even promoting that country's mattresses or products

so like it doesn't make any sense whatsoever so for me like there's nothing I can physically do to like outrank Forbes when they're ranking in my Niche even though it's they're not even that is that country uh so far I've been changing directions a little bit and just leaving it for now and focusing more on YouTube SEO so I've been sending like the products to a create content creator which are found new to me getting them to do a video review of like ample Boll and

then I'll publish that video review on my main Channel and then with all the b roll I'll get extra voiceovers or AI voiceover people or AI voiceovers should I say uh and post overs on different channels so basically I'm doing the same thing with YouTube because that's all obviously a parasite as well and just trying to take over as many spaces and that ranks in in Google and obviously uh YouTube which is the second biggest search engine so I've shift focus a little bit to YouTube

more than Google at the moment yeah and it makes sense because I mean I think Google's already seen the the writing on the wall where you know people are using Tik Tok as a search engine you know they're using social signals as part of their search going you know do I trust Google anymore to give me the answers or do I trust someone else in what is YouTube It's the video that's going to rank is the person talking saying hey I'm the expert Authority um and

funny enough do you actually think a lot of people are still not tapping into YouTube like is like a massive opportunity yeah definitely especially in the review space so a lot of people do more informational kind of personal branding stuff but for the reviews it's not really touched on and if there are reviews there it's kind of the more of the The Boll sort of AI voice over or just a voiceover thing it's not really someone actually showing the product and doing it so there there's

huge potential there and to be honest with with you that's kind of because I did that just before as well getting the updates and that's kind of kept my Revenue steady just because I've had YouTube ranking the whole time still i' I've been using YouTube a little bit um I'm kind of too lazy to to get bothered with Tik Tok but I picked my own channels it's basically LinkedIn and YouTube a little bit but um yeah it's uh I'm actually looking at a lot of sites

that haven't done well and um I'm trying to identify what are the patterns of sites that are kind of rising to the top and YouTube seems to be a common answer uh one thing I've noticed recently I just wrote an article about how affiliate sites that have forums The Forum traffic has actually taken off I mean we've got Reddit in the corner over here which is basically a forum but sites that have their own Forum it just looks like the traffic's uh it just it's not

stopping are you seeing something seeing something similar yeah I think Glenn also also published a case study of this big uh K and then a lot of them was forum sites which he just shut up uh my friend OB who who who co-founded uh parite SEO Alex he started doing a lot of fors just before we launched the tool and he did really really well with them so it was just as simple as just uploading The Forum plug into the site and then just using it

AI like common generator to actually just do all fake uh fake threads and fake stuff and he he ranked really well with it so for is definitely a thing uh personally I wouldn't put it on my main side just because I'm a bit risk adversed with that but it's it's definitely working but would you put it on your main site if you felt that it helped you if it would help you become an authority where you're not going to use is like the AI tactics that

could get the site penalized like you'd actually say okay we're going to do like a one-year plan hire Community manager and and put out the the content map and saying this is what we're going to attack yeah I think it would definitely work what I am actually testing now is more uh using Reddit and just creating my own subreddits but doing it that way you have a lot less control so I probably would rather do the publish a forum on your website just put a plugin

in and actually you just have to spend the time that's that's the thing you need to hire a manager or someone to actually look after it so I I helped work on a site a few years ago and they uploaded a forum on their website but they didn't have any spam filtering or anything like that and it just got flooded with Spam and it it tanked the site so you got to be a little bit careful and you have to be on top of it so

if you're willing to put the work in you can definitely leverage it and get traffic from it yeah and it's definitely work like I I said okay what am I going to do on my space like in my situation uh my users are problem aware but not solution aware so I created a subreddit called affiliate software and it's like without any effort it just started ranking so of course I did this in March when everyone was buzzing about Reddit and it's slowed down a little bit

but it's it's still going like I'm not even trying and it's still got a little bit of traffic and sure enough every time I look at igaming subreddits it's like they don't even look like they're trying and they're still like oh this one has 200 monthly visitors which is still worth money and I I think there's something there where it's your right it's don't do it for the sake of it without moderating it but actually have a moderator yeah it's it's the same thing if you

want to spend some time actually doing it it can it can go a long way so it's just a different skill to have and just putting the time in and then you can leverage that into Niche sites because Google is favoring user generated content sites now so you might as well take advantage of it big time and so the last question is I want to ask you what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as inter with business business intelligence uh so AI is

literally taking over like we've got so much AI in our tool as well like like I kind of touched on before is data driven tools is a big uh big thing going forward and the SEO affiliate marketing it only helps us we can do research faster like plan content do outlines do all that with very little minimal effort and like one of the main things like me as well is tracking results and making sure like each page is uh getting click on which is's working and

which isn't so you know where to focus uh and I only can see that getting better and just basically evolving into something to help us out more and it helps the user getting better content as we touched on before yeah I I like that answer because I mean it's an answer that complements what we're trying to do in the background which is like we're an app for Affiliates but we're also working on some re research projects that are said can we get some data to users

that isn't available in the market it's like you know kind of like when you start asking questions like well what are the interesting pairs sites that focus on this topic you know it's kind of like what you guys built it's you start with analytics to get the answers and then you basically have a customer willing to buy and I think we're trying to do the same and I think a lot of Affiliates they don't think that way they're not like hey can I build a product

it's like they're I think most of them are still thinking of the old way it's like I build content I get my tracking links and then that's how I make money they're not thinking how do I get one level up which is Prada yeah definitely like uh with a lot of my sites now even just I've been putting many tools on them like calculators or uh well stack Pages I've always done but uh calculators and trying to put some maps on and just little bits like

that which just basically give you a little product and it obviously helps draw in links as well lots of little notes in there but uh very useful uh James thanks so much for doing this I want to pass it back to to ask how people can get a hold of you yeah thanks for having me on it was uh it was great so you can find me uh well you can join my newsletter at oliver.com newsletter that's the best way to uh stay in touch and

then you can check out parasit seo.com the Tool uh for basically finding parasites and helping you with that and before I go a little tip as well Blackfire Friday is around the corner so you want to make sure you're getting all your affiliate content and getting everything optimized if it's updating or doing anything like that it is the biggest time to make some money that is very true I'm definitely going to be checking these things out I'm a newsletter fan for SEO so I'm definitely I'm

going to check this one out and um yeah this new tool looks very interesting that's on the market parasite parasite SEO you all right thanks for for joining thank you mate cheers F thank you for tuning in to the affiliate bi podcast I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a raing and review wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners