Podcast With Charles Floate

Transform Your Brand: Timeless SEO Strategies & Parasite SEO Revealed by Charles Floate

Show Notes

Unlock the secrets to transforming your brand with timeless SEO strategies! In this episode of the Agency Insider Podcast, we dive into the world of digital marketing and SEO with Charles Floate, a renowned expert in both black hat and white hat techniques. Discover how Charles' journey from a young gamer to an SEO authority can guide you to rank your website number 1.

We'll reveal a step-by-step guide to SEO strategies for 2024, helping you drive more organic traffic and achieve a #1 ranking. Learn how to adapt to industry changes, leverage personal branding, and uncover the power of link building and Parasite SEO. Whether you're a beginner or an advanced user, this video is packed with practical insights to boost your search engine rankings and enhance your online presence.

Want to help me rank you number 1? Dive into these proven strategies and stay ahead of the curve. Keep optimizing and subscribe for more expert advice!

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:50 - Early Days of SEO

02:36 - Key Milestones in Your SEO Career

05:36 - Evolution of SEO Over the Years

06:48 - Adapting to SEO Changes

10:18 - Future Trends in SEO

11:58 - Effective Link Building Strategies

15:36 - The Future of Link Building

18:51 - Understanding Parasite SEO

24:25 - SEO for Multilingual Websites

28:10 - Private Blog Networks (PBNs)

30:44 - Impact of AI on SEO

33:04 - Caa

37:24 - Charles Floate Training & SEO Career Paths

39:16 - Building Your Personal Brand

40:20 - Significance of Personal Branding

41:40 - Importance of Niching Down

43:20 - Staying Ahead in SEO

44:40 - Entrepreneurial Advice for SEO Professionals

47:00 - Recommended SEO Resources by Charles

48:13 - Charles' Latest Project

49:12 - Follow Charles Online

Transcript

Intro

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider podcast where we dive deep into the world of digital marketing and SEO I'm your host

0:07 n kosel and today we have a very special guest with us Charles Flo Charles is a

0:12 renowned Su expert known for his Innovative strategies and in-depth knowledge of both black hat and white

0:18 hat Su his journey is nothing short of inspiring and today we are going to explore the journey learn from his

0:25 experience and get his insights or where the industry is headed Charles Welcome to the

0:33 [Applause]

0:38 [Music] podcast it's great to have you here I

0:44 appreciate you having me na and I appreciate everybody at home for tuning in yes let's uh let's talk about your

Early Days of SEO

0:50 background and journey let's start from the beginning you got into an SEO at a very young age and have been in the

0:56 industry for quite some time now can you share with us what initially Drew you to

1:01 the SEO and what were those uh early days were like to you yeah for sure so I

1:08 was always a bit of a gamer and loved video games and stuff so I got into video game forums quite early on and

1:14 kind of uh hacking forums as well to be fair for video game hacking and then a lot of them had marketplaces within

1:20 these forums right and I started seeing SEO come up over and over again on these forums and then one day my mom turned

1:27 around to me and said hey look we've just built this website and we kind of got in a lot of trouble because we got

1:34 essentially scammed for the family by the by this company for our family business and we spent all this money and

1:40 we can't really afford to market the the website but we still need to get sales from it so we've been looking at doing

1:46 ads they're too expensive for PPC so we were looking at SEO and the SEO agencies

1:51 are trying to charge us thousands of pounds per month so could you have a look at it and I ended up having a look at it I spent about 500 of her money

1:58 that she gave me and we ended up generating hundreds of thousands of pounds a month in sales for our

2:03 e-commerce business so it absolutely killed it in the end and from there I just really uh took off from from

2:10 building um agencies SAS tools courses training youtube personal branding

2:15 conferences the hul in a lot so I've done quite a lot of things basically within the S industry at this point so

2:20 which year was it I think it was probably about 2006 around that time that's gives us

2:27 perspective how long you've been almost 18 years into the industry yeah exactly literally yeah literally right so so

Key Milestones in Your SEO Career

2:36 what were some of the key Milestones or basically turning points in your career that really shaped your approach to the

2:43 Su yeah so definitely the the first one would be mentors right so previously to

2:49 to having mentors on things I was just doing a lot of hit Miss kind of strategies and this was pre pre to

2:57 penguin and Panda days so you could get away with a lot more more like you just spamming links and it would work however

3:03 once penguin came out and a lot of my properties got hit and I was just working in my first agency job and then

3:09 and I was only 16 that really changed my perspective and I realized that I really needed to

3:15 step up my game and I kind of realized that the entire industry probably was going to have to step up their game as well and a lot of agencies went bankrupt

3:21 as a result so i' I looked out for the best kind of people who were doing what

3:27 I thought was the right style of SEO going forward after Panda and Penguin and I started just trying to associate

3:32 myself with them as much as possible and learn from them as much as possible and that's what really stepped up my

3:38 understanding and knowledge was because they were already making good money had very successful websites had successful

3:43 agencies things like that right and all I had to do was kind of see how they were doing things and try and adapt it

3:49 into my own plays essentially okay so so who were your

3:54 initial mentors yeah so Todd Foster was the very first one I met him like from

3:59 day one when I was probably like 11 or 12 years old on forums and he himself was only like 15 or something at the

4:06 time but he was already doing like made for AdSense websit like 2005 2006 and

4:12 they were doing you know very well you know several thousand dollars per month off of AdSense at 15 years old back in

4:18 those days as well was was killer money you know he was outperforming his parents and then he ended up moving to Canada and I stopped having as close of

4:25 a relationship with him and so I started learning more from online mentors so I start I met Nick Eubanks who's the

4:31 founder from the future and so I started learning lot from him because he has ADHD as well so we both kind of uh have

4:37 this a similar brain pattern thinking so he taught me quite a lot about how to handle that and how to think slower and

4:44 process information faster and things like that and then I also met a couple other people who were like James douy

4:49 and stuff as well who ended up hiring me as a consultant when I was very young as well okay so that's uh an interesting

4:56 story I of course the mentors helped a lot % I really don't think I'd be anywhere near as this high level or or

5:04 or have the as near the level of success that I've had if it weren't for them because they really literally they level

5:09 me up by years you know inste I think I probably would have still been working for an agency three or four years ago if

5:16 I hadn't have met those people and they hadn't have inspired me to even run my own business and things like that right the entrepreneurship Vibe like a lot of

5:22 people in my family have a very happy blue color and white color jobs but I I

5:28 uh and and I think I would been happy in that position had I not been inspired So Young by these people

5:34 so of course Su has evolved significantly over the years after Panda

Evolution of SEO Over the Years

5:40 penguin updates and now as well from from your perspective how has the industry changed since you first started

5:47 and uh what are some of the biggest shifts you have seen yeah 100% so when I

5:52 first started it was all just like I said link spam and things like that right you you we had meta keywords and

5:57 stuff right where you used to spam them Google no longer even counts meta keywords or meta descriptions as ranking

6:03 factors anymore so there are fundamental shifts in what what are actually ranking signals and right it's weird how the

6:11 industry has shifted from links to Links

6:17 right so it's basically gone from being like this very spammy link nature of

6:22 like manipulating page Rank and stuff like that in the very early 2000s and mid 2000s into nowadays just having a

6:29 higher authority as possible and being able to rank for basically anything right we've all seen Forbes and Reddit

6:35 and stuff like that these sites just ranking for hundreds of millions of keywords right the only reason they're

6:41 doing that is off of Link Authority right right right and uh as so as

Adapting to SEO Changes

6:48 someone who's always been at the Forefront of SEO Trends and of course with all these changes you looking how

6:54 do you adapt to these changes and are there any strategies or principle you have found to be timeless regardless of

7:00 how the industry evolves yeah so the Timeless strategies obviously are things like personal

7:07 branding and stuff like that where you're always going to do well if people like you and you're popular you know

7:13 like that's just I think it's part of our like societal game and things like that so I definitely always recommend if

7:19 you can especially if you're in agency jobs or your uh starting a fairly new agency if you can start getting quite

7:27 big on LinkedIn and Twitter these days you can have a consistent flow of clients for basically forever just off

7:33 of that small personal branding on the social networking sites you need to be

7:38 consistently posting on them to get that consistent source of leads however you don't need to be that massive right I've

7:44 seen several agencies now that the founders have got you know 40 maybe 50,000 followers on LinkedIn and they're

7:50 running $10 million a year agencies now right purely off of the back off of that

7:55 one account which is absolutely absurd if you think about it right it's absolutely crazy so I definitely think

8:02 that the the most timeless thing would just be investing in your own personal brand especially when it comes to agency players and if you're in an agency job

8:08 you can demand more money by having that kind of level of personal branding by

8:14 having a stage Presence by having all of this kind of stuff because you're representing your company as well so

8:19 they have to pay you more for that representation and that awareness of your personal brand as well so it's it's

8:24 from both sides of coin whether you're in a job or you're or you're owning your business I I highly recommend doing that in in terms of how the industry has kind

8:32 of shifted in strategies and things and stuff I definitely think that a lot of agencies have actually started buying

8:39 links more now than they were like five or six years ago the funny thing is it's

8:44 actually quite St it's actually quite funny but it's I I think it's kind of two two reasons but I speak to most link

8:50 marketplaces and most link budy agencies and they're at like alltime highs every single month right now right they're

8:56 doing like half a million dollars or up to $10 million a month as link building agencies right as like some agencies

9:02 like the ho and facto and stuff like that white press and and other

9:07 agencies yeah exactly they're they're they're killing it and I I think that like I said it's because of two reasons

9:12 one because of AI content so AI has just massively reduce the cost and the and

9:18 the signals in Google of content link signals even if link signals haven't been boosted because content signals

9:25 have been devalued in turn link signals are more valuable right if you reduce signals in an algorithm even if you

9:33 don't increase the other ones the other ones are now more valuable because you decreased other ones right that's how

9:38 algorithms work links now which is more valuable than they ever have been before Google continues to make Authority link

9:43 Authority that is the most the number one metric there is in SEO and I think

9:48 that that will be a continuous Trend so I've seen a big Trend towards either link building agencies or digital PR

9:54 agencies is doing very very well these days or having that as a bolt-on service to your own kind of thing and doing the

10:01 whole I like fat Joe Davis's style of doing the productized agencies right of having of services that you can just

10:07 sell and upsell and stuff to different agencies and potentially refer other agencies other clients and stuff like

10:13 that but I definitely see a shift more towards links than that ever has been really

Future Trends in SEO

10:18 before right right and what do you think is the reason specifically

10:23 now yeah so I think like I said AI content signal has been devalued but also in general Google's just moving

10:31 towards site Authority so on the higher end of the coin if you're in really really competitive keywords right most

10:38 sites have got the on page they've got all the pages they need they've got the on page done they've got the schema

10:43 they've got the technical stuff they've got all of that stuff done right there's very limited stuff especially in certain

10:48 topics like car insurance and things like that there's very limited new pages that you can create if you're a dr90

10:55 site already right so the the difference is Links at that point when it comes to

11:00 the difference in those major keywords it is links so and generally speaking what happens in the biggest surfs tends

11:07 tend to transcend down to the little ones because they tend they tend to get copied and things like that right the

11:13 biggest players tend to get copied the most however that's also then just dripping down into everyone else so

11:19 Google's baked in consensus into the algorithm as well about two years ago and if it means that everybody else is

11:24 building links in this up right then it means that you probably need to be building links as well because of the

11:31 consensus so there's all these different reasons that have just pushed now this this main thing and it's quite funny

11:37 that in the first place a lot of like the penguin algorithms and things like that and even in I think the December

11:42 2022 core algorithm Google said specifically they're trying to Target buying links right and they seem to have

11:51 inevitably done the opposite where it's just grown that industry more than anything yes right right so let's talk

Effective Link Building Strategies

11:58 more about Ling building I know it's kind of been your first love when you started with link of course got hit in

12:04 2012 with the penguin but yes links are here to stay I still tell to everyone

12:10 the the the intensity might have changed but they are not going anywhere Google is based on links eventually the crawler

12:16 is actually crawling the links only right so now yeah the algorithm originally right pay drank is what

12:22 separated Google when it first came out right all the other algorithms weren't based on Links at all and that's what

12:28 differentiates Google made it a better algorithm was that it was a pay Dr based algorithm right right so uh let's talk

12:36 more about Ling buing of course an area where you have also demonstrated significance expertise you had an agency

12:43 for some time where you were also selling links and of course you sold it so what were are some of the most

12:48 effective strategies for building high quality backlinks in today's Su L yeah so I definitely think that

12:56 digital PR is a massive straty if you're at the higher end of the stick it's just that a lot of agencies are are charging

13:03 a lot of money for them right you can be paying like $15,000 for one project or something like that and that project

13:09 might get you four links it's not that uh crazy of a deal generally speaking I prefer to do kind of the more shotgun

13:15 approach of of digital PR where you're trying to find multiple trending topics

13:20 around that it might not even be that it's related to your Niche but you can somehow relate them to your Niche then

13:26 building those pages on your site and trying to create create as big of an awareness about them as possible that

13:31 might be that might mean outreaching to journalists it might mean posting them on Reddit it might mean going and posting them and paying through places

13:38 like connectively and mutra and stuff like that right there's all sorts of ways to get these pieces of content in front of journalists and in front of

13:44 editors and bloggers and stuff that might cover it that generally speaking is the most white hat clean way of

13:51 naturally getting links right the other way is to just buy them so just go and Outreach sites that you want to get

13:58 linked from go find the biggest links that your competitors have and go in Outreach to them and see how much it's going to cost you for them to delete the

14:04 your competitors's link and put your link there instead there's some like that where you can start taking the link juf that other people have already that

14:11 are already using and just copy it right so that's probably the easiest one and again because consensus is based into

14:16 the algorithm normally it's the most guaranteed play because if three of the sites in the setup that are top five

14:22 have got the same link then you also probably want that link as well so does does the does the quality of the links

14:28 in terms of the Nish where you getting link matters or right now everybody says the more traffic sites you get the link

14:34 from that's what it matter it doesn't matter if it's exactly in your ntion so what is your take on that yeah so I

14:41 think there's kind of a like axis where one side you want relevancy and the

14:47 other side you want Authority right so if you've got a Dr 99 linking to you it doesn't really matter if it's an each

14:53 relevant site and Link or not right because it's a d99 site that's linking to you however if you've got a Dr site

14:59 you want that to be as relevant as possible so that it still sends a signal because it obviously doesn't have enough

15:05 signals on its own as as a website to be sending link juice signals so you need content level relevancy signals for it

15:11 to pass juice and Pass and Pass signals so there's that kind of axis of if the higher authority the uh the less

15:18 relevancy and the lower Authority the more relevancy but ideally you want the highest on the on both ends so you just

15:24 want to be right in the middle of the axis where you have the most relevancy and the most Authority you know r99 and

15:30 perfect relevancy but that also doesn't really exist so right right so of course link

The Future of Link Building

15:37 building has always been crucial as we discussed but it's also an area that's constantly changing how do you think

15:43 link building will evolve in the next few years and are there any upcoming Trends or techniques that you are

15:49 particularly excited about uh besides of course digital prer yeah so I definitely think that

15:55 Google from what I can tell Google's becoming more Reliant on links and because there's just so many pages now

16:03 in the index I think again AI has just created this ability to mass generate

16:08 Pages where one person who didn't have much technical ability used to take you

16:13 know a month to create 10 pages they can now create 10 pages an hour so that that

16:18 level of produ of productivity has massively increased the amount of index bloat that Google has so I definitely

16:25 think that links will again continue to be more of a factor and that just seems to be the case with every single update

16:32 and again that means that links a big more of a service more economy around it more business to be had if you're not

16:38 buying and selling links probably should be kind of thing um because that side of the industry will just continue to grow

16:44 as a business model and a business size and and economic growth and things in terms of the style and quality I do

16:51 think Google will continue to adapt their algorithms to so far from what I

16:57 can tell they used to be a lot more toxic links right and nowadays about 90%

17:04 of the links that used to be toxic are now just neutralized so they just don't pass any signals so they used to pass a

17:10 negative signal now they just don't pass any signals but that has now become the case more and more with just more links

17:15 in general so Google has neutralized the effects of more links and I think that the reason behind that is to do with

17:22 like triggers or Flags within the algorithm so if they think that this link is manipulated or bam or shouldn't

17:30 count towards the relevancy and signals and authority of your domain and page

17:36 that is linking to then they will just neutralize that link and that's becoming more and more the case so I think that

17:42 as link Builders the best link Builders and the best linking agencies and the best agencies in general will be able to

17:49 build links that don't raise those flags and triggers as much so they they look very high quality there's also other

17:55 things that go into that though because if you're doing a Linkin campaign then they can be triggers by the number of

18:01 links that you're building in one day exactly link see right so you need to take into account a lot of different

18:06 things when you're doing a link building campaign and I think that will continue to be more and more important so I think

18:12 that the number of expert level link builders in the world will actually reduce because it will take a lot more

18:19 effort and a lot more knowledge and depth to be able to execute these Ling campaigns successfully and be in mind if

18:25 you're just paying money to build neutal links then you're literally just wasting

18:31 money so those link builders that are doing that will their clients will get pissed off they won't do it for their

18:36 own projects etc etc etc so they'll just eventually kind of burn out and again

18:41 that's why I think that the the higher number of linked ERS or the number of links in general will reduce because it will require a higher level of

18:48 expertise right right so recently you have been focused on something called as

Understanding Parasite SEO

18:55 parasite ASU of course you do a lot of talk about that so can you walk us through what that involves and why you

19:02 find it effective yeah so as we were just talking about Google has massively moved

19:08 towards link Authority and site Authority and things like that as just a signal in general and even with things

19:14 like The Helpful content update if you're a certain Authority level you could get away with the helpful content

19:19 up there seem to be a filter where you could have lowquality terrible pages that maybe didn't even match the intent

19:25 of the surup that Gogle wanted to show and they would still show you because you dr90 right if you at dr20 you got

19:32 wrecked you lost your traffic right you lost your like life savings and things in some cases it was that bad right with

19:37 helpful content it was really quite terrible for some people however I do think that that that I don't think that

19:44 the helpful content update style effects will occur again so I do think that

19:50 parasite SEO is going to essentially beat the algorithm forever because

19:58 parasite o is the ability to build pages on authoritative on authoritative sites

20:04 right and that basically means that you go onto a free blog site like medium or LinkedIn post or something like that or

20:10 you pay a newspaper even a large site like CNET or something like that you pay them off to get a sponsored article on

20:18 their site Authority on their domain allows that piece of content to rank for basically any keyword and you can go

20:24 into niches potentially you know whether your average competitor might be a Dr 40 50 60 something like that and you'll

20:30 rank the same day for that keyword on a page that goes live with with a minimal

20:35 investment right so you could be investing ,000 to rank for this keyword or this topic whereas it might have actually cost you hundreds of thousands

20:42 of dollars to rank for the same topic on your own website because you need to build out this gigantic about topical

20:47 content and links and authority and time and history and have all this staff and Trust signals and things right but these

20:53 websites already come pre-loaded with those that you're buying or building on so you kind of Abus the fact that Google

21:00 relies so heavily on these signals and allows you to just rank for basically

21:06 anything so did the things change after the my Google so-called my update which

21:13 went after these type of sites or they still are same so they did change in

21:18 some niches right so for example in online casino in the UK in the US they changed quite heavily but it was it

21:25 wasn't because of the algorithm it was because Google went in and manually penalized a lot of the players in there

21:32 or they sent specific emails to the sites news organizations like the Telegraph and USA Today who had emails

21:40 from the Google search quality team saying you need to delete this or we're going to manually penalize your

21:45 subfolder however that is kind of one rule for these large news organizations

21:52 and it's not even a crazy rule because they're saying they're going to penalize that subfolder just the folder that is

21:58 abusing it not the entire domain right which is what everybody else would get

22:03 if they did the same thing so again Google's just like continually showing this one rule for us another rule for

22:10 everybody else kind of thing um and if you're in the corporate Boys Club then you're protected kind of thing right so

22:16 I definitely think that the only things that were really affected were the sites that got manually cleaned up but every

22:22 other set that was affected by par SEO is still affected by Paras SEO it just might not be affected to an extent

22:28 because some of the biggest players got manually removed but the algorithm is still playing into it and there are new

22:34 players in the game that you can buy or there are new players using it with their own sites and things like that and

22:39 even there is a company called Phio I don't know if you know about Phio they bought Investopedia techopedia

22:45 reader.org a bunch of other sites as well and they basically just use these sites as parasites now for their uh

22:53 crypto and stock offerings and like Financial offerings and casinos and crypto casinos and stuff like that and

22:59 they're raking in tens of millions of dollars a month from these sites just from their own like it's not an

23:05 affiliate it's Tech technically promoting their own services and products and in some cases are promoting their own like shitcoin mean coins you

23:12 know like terrible like crypto coins like they're their own ones of them and stuff like it's really quite dodgy stuff

23:18 to be right so what it practically means that Google is Google algorithm is not

23:24 able to control or manage these links it's which clearly means that they have

23:30 to go out and ask people or do it manually the algorithm as people say

23:35 that sophisticated is not exactly that sophisticated when it comes to filtering

23:41 out these links right no because again because they so heavily rely on these specific signals like link Authority and

23:48 the fact that these organizations and maybe news organizations from 30 years and they've got a million index pages of

23:54 generic content across so many P all this kind stuff and history and age and etc etc etc just so many signals backing

24:01 them up when they go into a new keyword or go into a Ser most of the competition

24:08 don't have all of those signals so they are just going to beat the competition because Google again is so heavily

24:14 reliant on them and the only way that they clean it up is by manually removing it because the algorithm is so reliant

24:21 on it right right right right now you have also talked about the potentials I

SEO for Multilingual Websites

24:28 mean you talk about Potentials in foreign SE which of course uh you've been in non-english languages how do how

24:36 does these Market differ from the US market or the English market and uh what challenges have you faced and what are

24:43 some of the tips you can give to our listeners yeah for sure so number one

24:48 the algorithms in the other languages are just so much easier than Google in

24:53 like Thailand or something you know where I am right now is so much easier than Google in the UK or us um and

24:58 that's just because they don't invest the same level into the algorithms they don't do the same NLP stuff that they

25:04 have in English they don't have all of these things for these other languages so they just don't do them secondly some of these markets aren't even worth it

25:11 right because they don't have the ad spend again like you know the I think Google us is something like 90 out of

25:17 $136 billion dollar of AD spend for Google if you go to somewhere like Thailand it's probably like $40 million

25:24 or something you know it's it's pennies for Google literally they're like they pay bigger fin stuff

25:30 recently than they're getting from some of these countries so they just don't really care um so you can get away with

25:36 a lot of these and again Paris SE and some of these other languages works even better if you can get you know the

25:41 number one newspaper in that country to build Pages for you in your Niche you will just dominate that country

25:48 completely in terms of doing business in other languages and stuff most people think that other countries outside of

25:54 the U UK and US and Canada maybe Australia and stuff right aren't going to be as profitable as those countries

26:01 but actually some countries are more profitable than the US and the UK and stuff right if you go to places like

26:07 Norway or Saudi Arabia or Singapore or stuff like this right where they're predominantly still using Google but

26:14 they're searching in other languages and they have a higher GDP per capita and sometimes they have lower taxes than

26:20 these countries as well in the west they tend to actually be a lot more profitable so you can for example if

26:26 you're doing um fin finances right you're doing loans or something like that payday loans short-term loans Home

26:32 Loans all stuff like that in the UK and us you were talking maybe like $500 for

26:38 a for a monthly loan for somebody for like a payday loan a short-term Loan in Norway or Saudi Arabia you're talking

26:45 like 10 to $5,000 for one loan so it's not just five times it's like in some cases it's

26:52 like 20 or 30 times more money so the commission payouts for those types of

26:57 deals are sometimes 20 or 30 times bigger than what you would get in the UK or the US

27:03 so a and sometimes they're even bigger than that you can get like 50 times because there's less leads and less flow for them and less and there's less

27:09 competition so they pay you out more um so a lot of the time we tend to go into these markets it's easier to compete

27:15 they pay you more money and you have less competition so in general we're just printing money versus being in

27:22 these niches in the in the US where there's you know all these competitors where you daily have to be checking what

27:27 some other competitors doing where they're trying to negative suo you and they're doing this and that right in these niches you can make the same level

27:33 of money without the headache so so does foreign links or

27:40 links from foreign sit still works links in English from so so if you're building

27:46 English linked to foreign sites that works the vice versa tends not to unless

27:51 you are getting the big sites so if you can get you know like the biggest newspaper in Brazil or France or Germany

27:57 or something like that to link to your site in the UK then that's totally fine and they will still pass juice but if

28:04 you're talking about like dr30 or 40 blogs in Spanish linking to an English site that's not going to work

Private Blog Networks (PBNs)

28:10 unfortunately normally and uh what is your take on pbn now yeah we we use pbns quite a lot it's

28:18 just normally we don't directly link them to sites because they can be additionally risky if you're doing your

28:23 own private blog Network so it's your own sites you're not buying them from vendors and stuff like like that then

28:28 the risk level goes down significantly but the main risk of buying off of other links is that there's other people

28:34 buying links so those other people could be absolute idiots they could be

28:40 building the most terrible links ever right or they could get hacked or they could like there's so many things that

28:45 can happen to other people that it's too risky so generally speaking we never buy links off of vendors that selling pbn

28:53 links we'll just do them in house even in house there's still an additional level of risk because they tend not to

28:58 much traffic and all this kind of stuff so we tend to just use them for tier tws so if we get a big Dr 80 or 70 or 90

29:05 linking to our site will'll often Power It Up by getting pbns to link to that link okay okay and uh do you uh but I

29:14 heard the pbn still helps in local SEO or they don't yeah yeah so so let's say you're doing um local SEO if you can for

29:21 example you know you're doing New York SEO you're just trying to do New York local SEO number one you can charge a

29:26 lot of money to clients New York if you start ranking their sites you know if you're ranked like New York lawyer number one you can charge them $10,000

29:32 $15,000 a month kind of thing maybe more and you can even do like lead sh uh lead sharing so you can get paid hundreds of

29:39 thousands of dollars in some cases per month if you're doing really big stuff and you know like construction and things like that but the main aim with

29:46 that is that you try and buy New York specific pbns so you'd go after a city

29:51 or a States specific pbns and you start building 10 20 100 sites that are all

29:58 Authority age well built around this specific city or state and again they're

30:04 expired on the age so they're pulling from previously businesses that used to exist or their previous like

30:10 administrations or government domains or schools or Charities or anything col like that right and in general you're

30:15 just building up this kind of localized Authority that you can point to any client and those types of links and

30:21 those types of sites do tend to work amazingly well and because you tend to have lower levels of competition in

30:28 and in cities than you do nationally they tend to work even better okay so that's a good tipe you

30:35 need pbn you want high quality pbn it better be a city or state specific y

30:41 exactly right right right let's talk a little bit about AI of course how can we have any SEO discussion these days

Impact of AI on SEO

30:47 without AI yes so AI is becoming a big part of SEO so how do you see AI changing the

30:54 landscape of SEO and uh what tools you find uh most uh useful and this is a

31:02 time you can also plug in your kaapa as well yeah for sure so as soon as AI kind

31:08 of got released I'm not talking GT3 I'm talking about GT2 and stuff like that kind of clocking onto it and trying to

31:14 use it as much as possible and I realized for Content generation it was a much more advanced content spinner and

31:19 we were already using content spinning at black app so we will you know we how do we plug this into our tools and we've

31:26 still got gpt2 and gpt3 content on pages that are ranking and have feature Snippets and things like that that we

31:31 generated three or four years ago and they ranking now so we tend to use AI

31:37 for image generation content generation small amounts of video editing transcribing knowledge generation

31:44 perplexity is absolutely insane for finding basically anything out um all sorts of things like that research and

31:50 content creation basically every aspect has been augmented by AI to some degree

31:56 now and it it means that we're fact we're better we can produce more at a higher velocity at a at a higher quality

32:02 at higher rate and then we can just make more money with less with less people and less uh spend generally speaking

32:08 like I said we've got AI across the board and we've got like 20 different AI tools or something but I own CER AI

32:14 topical map Ai and a couple other tools that are currently in development and that will be released soon and CA

32:20 specifically has grown to being probably one of the biggest and best AI SEO

32:25 writing tools in the industry and about to launch V 2.0 which will actually turn

32:30 us into a just a Content generation tool for digital marketing so we'll be doing like newsletters and social posts and

32:36 all sorts of things not just SEO so it's going to be a much higher level um once

32:41 that releases but in general I think like I said it's augmented every part of our industry and it will continue to do

32:47 that and once the next models come out with GT5 and they're going to be like video based and stuff like that that's

32:52 when I see the industry really taking off with some of the capabilities and stuff because we'll be able to produce

32:57 you know like movies and stuff in five minutes It'll be absolutely crazy right

Caa

33:04 so so how has been your journey with the Kaa in terms of the uh user base and

33:10 revenue now and of course the quality yeah for sure so we're currently

33:16 um at I think like a th000 power users or something like that and 5,000 normal

33:21 users or something so it's absolutely crazy in terms of the size our Discord server has about 1100 people and it's

33:28 really active and we've got some really crazy users actually who um are just

33:33 actually showing us things about using the tool and stuff right and constantly giving us feedback and Innovation and

33:38 stuff but the main thing for us has just been development we're trying to force adoption within the industry because

33:45 there's so many other aiso writing tools out there we've got you know 10 101 different competitors that I could

33:50 probably name off top my head kind of thing we need to be different and we've tried as much as we can to build around

33:58 not only what our team thinks and our team has got you know people who have been in SEO in digital marketing for 15

34:04 years not only what we think but again what the community thinks and we're just trying to build what we would use in our

34:10 day-to-day life as much as possible um and I think we we're getting there and I think with V2 that will be the next step

34:16 up uh but we again we because there's so many competitors I think in a year's time they'll only be 10 left and we want

34:23 to be number one you know so that's the a okay so besides

34:28 do you use AI tools for anything else besides content generation and which tools are your favorites to do that yeah

34:35 so for images I love mid Journey right like I've I've been paying for Mid Journey for like two years or something now for video editing we use descript

34:43 which is absolutely fantastic Loom is awesome as well just for the quick videos and that is like the AI

34:48 transcriptions and the AI uh summaries and the chapters and things like in terms of other stuff there's like

34:54 various Chrome extensions like aom AI which does Automation and click Automation and stuff like that so you

34:59 can like ask it to sign up for a Facebook account or something like that for you and it will do it for you right um there there's various tools like that

35:06 but again daytoday the majority would just I just use po so poe.com and then I

35:12 that allows me to have access to all the models so if I want to use Gemini Claude chat GPT or llama I can just go to PO I

35:20 have a subscription with them and I can just select which model I want to use and start using that model which allows me again because some models are better

35:26 at certain things so like Gemini and Claude tend to be a bit better at um creative writing but GPT tends to be

35:34 better at like specifically optimize research content and Claude is really good at coding llama's pretty good at

35:40 coding um GPT is not that great at coding stuff like that so you want to use certain models for certain things

35:46 and I just use po for for all that okay now a lot of Affiliates side got hit in

35:52 the March Google update of course so uh we all know a lot of the market tends to

35:57 been a very negative sentiment how do you see affiliate size business now in the wake of these Google

36:04 updates yeah so affiliate sites number one if you hit by helpful content that's

36:10 game over right you're not coming back it seems to be a a punitive action where it's it will just hit your site and you

36:17 can't rank new pages it won't let you rank old Pages Etc when when in regards to new

36:22 sites you can still build new affiliate sites it's just Google keeps changing

36:27 the intent of Surs more and more away from affiliate blogs and things like that right so if you used to go and look

36:34 up a lot of keywords like best XYZ it used to just be best review guides with

36:39 like top 10 this top 20 that something like that and the top 10 pages would all

36:44 be the same kind of uh review guides nowadays you have Reddit and core ranking you've got YouTube videos you've

36:51 got e-commerce Pages youve got all this other intent stuff that Google has filled the up with and it just won't

36:58 rank your pages for yes there are certain keywords where that intent hasn't changed and you can still rank

37:03 your pages for and if you're a high enough Authority you're a dr90 you can still around the pages but if you're a

37:09 Dr 30 or 40 something like that it's you need to only you can only compete where you can compete so the level that you

37:16 can get to and the level of earnings that you had that ceiling has now come down

37:21 drastically okay and uh so let's talk now a little bit about personal branding

Charles Floate Training & SEO Career Paths

37:26 of course you you have launched charge flow training and then you have started with the SEO carriers as well so what

37:34 inspired you to create this platform and what the students or a subscriber can

37:39 expect to learn yeah so Char training basically I was um in covid I started a gumroad

37:47 account and and mainly started on Twitter and I ended up becoming like a top 10 gumroad seller um in within two

37:54 years or so and I was earning quite good amounts of money off of gumroad but um

38:00 gumro had a system where if you'd earned over a million dollars in revenue on the platform you got the lowest possible

38:06 commission rate so you were paying 2.9% plus 30 cents per order um and then

38:13 I I hit that million dollars in revenue and then two months later they changed the whole system and took it away from

38:19 me and then made everybody pay 10% flat fee so I like earned This Ti fought for

38:25 this thing and I was like well you know screw this I'm not paying 10% anyway so I just moved to my own platform and I

38:30 built Shopify store because I saw so many other people on Shopify like Alex orosy was just killing it and things like that and you could do your own

38:35 customization clavio was on there all this stuff was just easy so I built it on Shopify and started releasing loads

38:40 of free ebooks free downloads checklist things like that and then started doing more premium courses Consulting audits

38:47 um things like that but I realized I didn't really like it um so and I didn't really like the customer service and speaking to people and it started

38:53 growing a lot more than gumroad and becoming more of its own entity so I just got one of my team and put him as the CEO of the business and now he runs

39:00 everything there and I just can make content for it which is perfect right so

39:05 so you now be not releasing any content on gumroad no so no we don't we don't put

39:10 anything through gumro it's only through Char training now okay okay and all

Building Your Personal Brand

39:16 right so you you done a remarkable job building a personal brand brand within the SEO Community what advice would you

39:22 give you give to others who are looking to establish themselves as an authority in this space of course you talk about

39:29 being active on Twitter and Linkedin but is there any other advice would you also like to give yeah like don't be afraid

39:36 to get out there and network just send DMS to people ask people to go for coffee if they're in your city go to

39:41 events especially if they're free make sure that you're releasing case studies consistently the more information you

39:47 show and talk about and even if you see things in the Surs right when you're doing your research and you see a cool

39:52 thing that you think is interesting talk about it show share about it right um you'll eventually get some stuff that

39:58 might go a bit viral within the industry and you get a couple of them and people start really knowing your name and you

40:03 can get bear in mind that some of the bigger conferences like SMX and stuff they'll pay you to quite a bit of money

40:08 to be on stage you can ear five figures to get just for one Speaking gig right so there's stuff like that that can

40:15 really level up a lot of people's careers especially if they're more in agency jobs and stuff as well okay and uh so of course in 2J

Significance of Personal Branding

40:23 digital landscape how important do you think personal branding is for professional is it becoming more of a

40:29 necessity rather than nice to have yeah if if you're running an agency you have

40:34 to do personal branding if you're doing freelance or Consulting you have to do personal branding if you're doing

40:39 affiliate and stuff like that you don't have to do it right and and in fact I'd recommend you don't publicly reveal

40:45 stuff because Google has come after you know people quite recently and in the last few years come after influences for

40:51 for doing the exact same thing so I only think that personal branding is important in certain parts of the

40:56 industry and then you know for 60% 70% you probably don't need to do it um and

41:02 it's it's better off if you stay in the shadows you still need to build a network though right you can't just be

41:07 in the shadows not talking to anybody not doing anything because you will be behind you won't be as up toate as you

41:13 can be and you won't be able to back and forth with ideas that you have with people that are just as good as you

41:19 which is what you need sometimes your ideas aren't that great right and you need somebody to tell you that because

41:26 you go and Implement them on own accord and you end up ruing your site or your campaign I think right so just having

41:31 that network is more important I would say everybody needs a network not everybody needs personal proper right

41:37 right now uh a lot of people talk about uh um nishing down in the Su agency what

Importance of Niching Down

41:44 is your take on that yeah so I think it is it's it's a valid technique and it's a valid

41:50 business model because you get to learn so much about an industry you only need to go to certain industry events you can

41:57 one client who knows other people in another city and things can refer business to you very easily stuff like

42:03 that and you can start again you can start speaking at conferences in that Niche and in that event so it makes it

42:09 easier the only thing is if anything happens to that industry you're very susceptible right there's quite a there

42:16 was quite a few travel specific digital marketing and SEO agencies that got

42:21 absolutely destroyed in Co right when Co rolled around and there would travel specific indust there were travel

42:27 specific agencies they lost 90% of their revenue overnight maybe 100% right so they had to fire everybody restart from

42:34 scraps they had no business the next day kind of thing right um so you have to be

42:40 careful to things that those Industries are susceptible to and bear in mind that SEO can also be susceptible to change as

42:47 well so if both are susceptible to change you might be in some serious hot water right so I would just try and go

42:53 with industries that are more stable so there are the big ones like Law Firm and

42:58 surgeons and dentists and things like that even like construction and stuff is really good and kind of underserved but

43:05 you need to just make sure that anything that you're doing isn't susceptable to change that you know even if you're doing it in a local country or

43:12 jurisdiction that might there might be government influence influences around construction and things like that if you're doing that needs around law all

43:18 sorts of stuff so you need to make sure that whatever you're doing is protected right right of course uh uh staying

Staying Ahead in SEO

43:25 ahead of the curve in such a rapidly changing industry must be challenging so how do you keep yourself updated and

43:32 ensure you are always at the Forefront of these trps yeah so I'm I'm I'm on Twitter and

43:40 Linkedin a fair amount right so like I probably spend maybe like 15 minutes a day on socials just um scrolling through

43:46 having checked if there's any like trending news stuff like that I'm also in quite a few different groups so if

43:52 anything you know serious happens like when the Google Monopoly announcement happened I was saw it in a group chat

43:57 basically straight away and kind of manage to comment and engage with that so anytime there's ALG updates anytime

44:03 there's major changes and stuff like that my network is the best place for that because I get told about it from other people normally straight away or I

44:09 find out about it on social media straight away um in terms of keeping up to date with AI and SEO changes and

44:16 stuff a lot of it is just testing your own work and then making sure that you're following the right people who

44:21 are the most up to date themselves in that specific area that maybe you can't keep up to much as possible there really

44:27 good YouTuber called AI explained he's a British guy who's about my age I think as well and he does news videos twice a

44:35 week about just AI business and AI model updates and changes and stuff and he's really really good okay okay now uh as

Entrepreneurial Advice for SEO Professionals

44:44 someone who has sold multiple agencies and website what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs in the SE

44:51 industry yeah so I would definitely say number one you want to lean up right

44:56 don't have a really heavy outgoing business right A lot of people the number one things in agencies and stuff

45:02 is HR cost right that's the number one killer for most people is that they end up over hiring and they're they lose a

45:09 couple clients and then they're not profitable right and it's and they struggle to fire people because it's it's hard job firing people you don't

45:16 want to do it especially if you've just onboarded them like in two months ago or something like that um and you promis in the world kind of thing and now youve

45:22 got to destroy their dreams that's not fun so a lot of people tend to have

45:27 issues around costs versus profit so I would just say make sure you're always

45:32 profitable or as profitable as possible and focus on that first focus on growth

45:39 in the highest growth areas too many people focus on growth in what they think is going to be the the biggest

45:46 growth areas and they don't track and analyze their businesses they don't track and analyze spending clicks and profitability and clients and things

45:51 like that there's normally the 8020 Rule and most people don't even know about it right they don't even know that 80% of

45:57 their cost is here and 20% of their profit is here and 80% of profits here ET Etc and just trying to focus more on

46:03 those areas and just trying to always be that Better Business you know going into work every day and not having it be a

46:09 SLO just have it be a better business when you leave it not set not causing more fires and stuff right um and then

46:16 the second thing is don't get kind of drawn in by like crazy shiny objects in syndrome stuff new crazy courses or

46:23 ideas or tools or things like that generally don't happen that much chat GPT was like the biggest Game Changer in

46:29 SEO in recent memory kind of thing um and even then that was free so you don't necessarily need to be spending crazy

46:37 money to to get this success you can just spend precisely and cleverly and

46:42 you'll be able to get to a higher level and try and stick to the basics don't over complicate stuff right over

46:47 complicating link building will get you burned over complicating your on page SEO will get your pages over optimized

46:53 stuff like that so just make sure that everything's simple and profit okay okay that's a fair advice uh so

Recommended SEO Resources by Charles

47:02 what are the top resources you recommend you will recommend for someone looking to deepen their SEO Knowledge and

47:09 Skills yeah so it depends on what you're trying to do if you're doing like local or Ecom or affiliate and stuff there's

47:16 different people to follow but I would generally try and follow the specific

47:22 people that are currently doing it right there's a lot of influences in SEO that

47:27 right now they haven't done an SEO campaign in the last 12 months not they haven't even looked at one kind of thing

47:33 right so they don't really know what is currently going on with Google what is happening in the serps what is working

47:38 the best all those kind of things try and follow the people that are actively doing it in AI for example the best

47:44 person as an example would be Julian Goldie because he is posting and streaming every single day sometimes

47:50 twice per day of him actively doing stuff in his on his screen those kind of people are the best people to follow but

47:57 if you start hearing really conflicting advice that's when you want to kind of seek out some networking some support

48:03 and stuff like that bear in mind that s your information can get outdated very quickly so if you're watching a video from four or five years ago that advice

48:09 might not be that relevant right now right right so before we wrap up is

Charles' Latest Project

48:15 there anything you are currently working on that you are excited to share with our audience yeah I'm working on a Paris at

48:21 SEO tool yeah yeah so that will uh should release in about two weeks less than two weeks from today of recording

48:28 this and it is going to be a literally a parisol where you input your keyword or

48:34 your topic and it will build parasite opportunities for you that aren't currently ranking but are topically and

48:40 authoritatively relevant to your keyword and it's available in 22 languages um we

48:45 have database of like 6,000 free parasites and over a thousand paid ones across all the 22 languages as well and

48:52 it will it has an AI planner built into it so you don't even really need to know that much parasite you can just start

48:58 ranking using the the parasite AI planner which will do everything for you

49:04 where do I sign par.com it will be uh it'll be available very soon yeah okay

49:10 all right all right and uh and finally where can our listeners follow your work

Follow Charles Online

49:15 and stay updated on your latest projects yeah so mostly on uh Twitter and and Linkedin just Charles on Twitter and

49:23 then LinkedIn is Charles float you can connect with me that I I have posted both the links in the comments

49:28 below and uh that is it Charles it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast of course your insights are

49:35 invaluable and I'm sure our listeners have gained a lot uh from this conversation thank you so much for

49:41 joining us today thank you for having me I appreciate you having me and and hope everyone enjoyed the show yeah and thank

49:48 you to all our listeners for tuning in if you enjoyed today's episode be sure to subscribe leave us a review and share

49:53 it with anyone who might find it valuable until next time keep optimizing