Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - Damon Burton’s 3-Part SEO Strategy Funnel Builders Are Missing | #Marketing - Ep. 32

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

What happens when you combine the speed of funnels with the long-term power of SEO? That’s what I wanted to explore with my guest, Damon Burton… The founder of SEO National and the guy who’s been running SEO for me, Tony Robbins, the Utah Jazz, and dozens of others. He’s also been in my Inner Circle for over 4 years, and when it comes to search traffic, nobody breaks it down more clearly. Most people in the funnel world have written off SEO as “dead”… but Damon showed me how it’s not only alive, it’s evolving in some insanely profitable ways! Especially if you're using ClickFunnels 2.0!! We covered: Why SEO is still growing (even in the age of AI and ChatGPT) The 3 pillars of modern SEO that never go out of style What schema is… And how it gives you an edge in Google rankings How to structure your site (and your content) for compounding traffic The one SEO tool Damon uses that every funnel builder should know Why backlinks aren’t as important as you’ve been told How Damon turned his SEO agency into a 6-figure course business using Inner Circle strategies We even geeked out on some of my own funnels… Including SecretsOfSuccess.com, and what his team is doing behind the scenes to drive more evergreen traffic every month. If you’ve been relying on ads alone to fuel your business, this episode is a must-listen. SEO isn’t a replacement for funnels… It’s the multiplier most people are missing. Want to work with Damon or learn more about his SEO training? Visit damonburton.com. ⁠⁠⁠https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠ Special thanks to our sponsors: NordVPN: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ⁠⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/secrets⁠⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Northwest Registered Agent: Go to ⁠⁠⁠northwestregisteredagent.com/russell⁠⁠⁠ to start your business with Northwest Registered Agent. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at ⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn.com/CLICKS⁠⁠⁠ Rocket Money: Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at ⁠⁠⁠RocketMoney.com/RUSSELL⁠⁠⁠ Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at ⁠⁠⁠Indeed.com/clicks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now, obviously if you want to sell stuff online, you're gonna need a good funnel. But if you want a great funnel, then you're gonna need to use ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is the number one funnel builder in the world, helping more first time entrepreneurs to leave their nine to five and to launch their dream than any other company on earth.

ClickFunnels was built for the dreamer and the doer, and you can get a free four to day trial by going to ClickFunnels.com slash podcast right now. That's ClickFunnels.com slash podcast. ClickFunnels, because you're one funnel away from changing the world. This is the Russell Brunson Show. What's up everybody, welcome to the show.

I am here right now with one of my friends, Damon Burton, who has been an Inner Circle member now for four and a half years. We're here in Boise doing Inner Circle. I've grabbed a couple of cool people in and I wanted him to come in because there are two things that don't, a lot of people don't think they go together,

and that is funnels and SEO. And Damon's been doing SEO for all of my funnels and my brands now for quite a long time. And so I thought we'd geek out and have some fun talking about SEO and funnels. But my first question, isn't SEO dead? That's what I heard, is that true? Yeah, it dies.

You know, before AI, it was about every two weeks, but now with AI, it's about every two minutes. Yeah. It is different though, right? Or how does AI affect what you guys are doing at all? Or is it better? Well, it's increased the demand, right? So the way that I've thought about it is AI has kind of increased the viability of SEO into infinity because AI is largely just another search engine. So, you know, we'll probably get into the technical stuff and kind of deliverables of SEO, but to do AI optimization is really just traditional SEO.

So for your answers to get pulled into AI, it's just SEO. That's cool. What do you think about this is something just more so like I've noticed that my wife specifically like she used to Google everything and now she chats GBTs everything. Is that, I think chat GBTs is going to open up a platform, is that going to open up something where we can get traffic or pay dads or anything in the future you think? Yeah, you know, there's two things come to mind on that. One is usually what I hear is kind of what you said before that is SEO debt or is AI

going to kill SEO? And so there was this really cool study that came out just three or four weeks ago by SEMRush. I think it was SEMRush. And Rand Fishkin, if you know anything about SEO, he was talking about that study. And what it said is Google actually grew by, I think it was 21.64% last year. So it's not going down, it's going up. And obviously, Chad GPT has done amazing and had a huge adoption rate. But I might be off a little bit on the statistics. But Google is 800% bigger than chat GPT.

But back to your second question, what was even more interesting is out of the adoption of chat GPT, only 30% of the queries are commercial. Right? Because if you think about how most people use chat GPT, it's like, write a thing for me or make a thing for me. It's not how do I find a thing to buy? So I think that's skewed for Q&A-based sites. Those have probably been more impacted.

But my commerce and retail clients has had no impact at all other than positive, because now we can get them into another source of audience. Interesting. Yeah, it's definitely a weird game. I started playing SCO way back in the day when it was like, you know, you had just the top 10, you had a couple of ads, pay- pay- pay- click ads, that was it. It was like just spamming the search engines and that's how we had a lot of fun with it. But when it started getting more complex after I can't

remember which- which update it was, Hummingbird or Panda or some- some update that slapped where I gave up and I like walked away from SCO and I was like, all right, I'm not going to keep playing this game. But you've gotten obviously keep on playing. When did you start? 2007. 2007. How many updates have you? I don't know. Pay attention. You know, all these updates. So out of all these updates, I've never had a client get a penalty in 18 years. Yeah. So my clients are either neutral or up,

and this goes back to one of the things that you kind of open the conversation up with is has SEO changed a lot? So the problem with a lot of other people that get into SEO or agencies that crash and burn or their clients crash and burn is because the agencies get caught in looking for ways to cut corners.

But if you just look at the fundamentals, which are really just three things, one is how good or bad is your website built? So structure, two is content, how good or bad is your website built, so structure. Two is content, how good or bad is your content. And three is credibility, how good or bad is your, that's why reviews are important and backlinks and things like that.

And every algorithm to date might change in the future, but everyone to date falls under one or multiples of those three. So if you just focus on the fundamentals and play the long game, then you don't have to worry about all these little corner cutting things that might work for a short term but just crush you long term Yeah, we talked about for those who were not searching in spammer We would just like mass create articles spin them post them and get 8 billion links coming from everywhere

It was amazing You drink for every other drink for like make money online and get risk quick and like we're in for everything and one day They all disappeared. So Damon does it the white hat long term way, which is way better, which is why he does all of our projects now because I trust him and I'm not nervous about the effort and the work you put in that's going to last. It's not something that's going to disappear or penalize you in the future. So, all right. So I want to talk about the crossover between funnels and SEO because obviously, you know, I talk about funnels all day and for a long time, you know, I assumed that people invest in funnels, you know, and then you start coming in a circle and started doing presentations

for everyone like, hey, there's a couple of things we can do to actually do SEO and to optimize your funnels. And so anyway, I'd love to go down that path of just tying those, the two worlds, my world and your world together. How does it work? What do you look for? Yeah, the big adoption or opportunity came with the new release of ClickFunnels, because within it you have extra things, right?

Largely, it's the ability to scale content through the blog feature. There's a couple other things like the site maps and stuff that you guys have added as well. But when we just kind of briefly mentioned those three core pillars of SEO, the second one is content. And so you can only show up on Google for what Google can read.

And so now that you guys have all these extra features and click funnels, how you can build out content interconnect things, that's really what leveled it out. And there's some, there's some ways that you could kind of get around that in the original version of ClickFunnels. But now it's just like so much easier to scale your content. And so that was what closed that gap. And so now anytime anybody says that it's really just they're not familiar with how to do it properly.

Yeah. So what's this model look like? Someone's building a funnel like they go through my training to build a funnel. How what should they be like? What does that look like? They got to build out a content structure as a plan. There's stuff like like let's say you are I'm a brand new client you're taking me through like what what how's it through, what do we do?

Yeah, well the first thing is you got to go find the money, right? So it's like what is your audience already searching? And so a lot of people know that content is important but they write for the sake of writing instead of actually writing to attract a pre-qualified buyer. And so first you want to spend all your time looking into the audience and go, you know there's tools out there that show what people are already asking, what they're already searching online. And so what you want to do is look for those buyer intent-based keywords.

So a lot of people are familiar with maybe also asked or actually answer the public. Also asked is my favorite tool. I like to use it. Also asked? Also asked, yeah. And these tools are great for paid ads too, because a lot of times when you run paid ads, right, you're trying to get in front of the intent of what the audience is. So you can use this for all sorts of marketing, whether it's paid ads or SEO or email. You can figure out what's kind of already in the mind of your buyer.

And so what you first want to do is your SEO strategy is going to be as good or as bad as that trajectory that you first identify, right? And so you want to figure out where all that money is because you're going to build the foundation of your campaign around that. So first you want to go identify where the buyers are. Now after that, you can only show up for what Google can read. And so it's mapping out this content calendar. So we like to map out a big 52 week content calendar because you know, let's be honest, writing sucks. And so it's like, if you're going to write, then at least know what the game plan is. And when you want to put on your writer's cap for that day, be super productive and crank out a ton of content.

So now a good example of people who want to see an example would be secretsofsuccess.com. And so where funnels and paid ads and SEO kind of overlap is if you look at secrets of success, there's the top level of the website, which looks very traditional, right? And so it's like, here's the value propositions, here's the navigation, traditional looking kind of website, but all the calls to action go to the funnel.

And so on the SEO side, you need that top level domain for Google to look at. But then on paid ads, you can direct them wherever you want. So you can still run your paid ads to the funnel, and then you just build up the SEO on the top level domain and then that's how they overlap. So by the way, he just said go to secretsofsuccess.com. So this is one of the sites that Damon's working on with me and like he said, I created a couple good funnels and then we used the ClickFunnels website feature and then Damon seems to be

going through like building out the, what do you call it, not the width, the bulk, building out the site, making it, I don't know, what's the word in your world? More pages, more stuff. Yeah, your secret success is gangster. That one's got so much, how do you balance sharing all the technical stuff without going super nerdy? That one has a lot of stuff. So secret success has the value of what the program delivers and That one has a lot of stuff. So, you know, Secret Success has the value

of what the program delivers, and so there's a lot of talk about that. But then we're trying to identify people that are already familiar with or have an interest in the authors that are featured. Yeah, Napoleon Hill or whoever. Yeah, and so then you can go, I'll just try and throw out a couple random examples.

Some people might really like Napoleon Hill quotes and so they want to go search for other Napoleon Hill quotes. That could be a potential target is Napoleon Hill's best quotes. Then you can build out a content piece about that, bring them in and then you answer the question or deliver the value and then you have a call to action in there. Your goal is to establish yourself as the authority or the website that has the answers, not sell them as, not directly sell them, right? We're not just vomiting sells on every page.

It's actually establishing value trust. Then after you've delivered that, then you can have a call to action to the funnel. All right. Funnel hackers, let's have some fun for a second. One of the hardest parts about B2B marketing isn't getting attention. It's getting the right attention. I'm sure you know what I mean. Isn't it a pain when you see the weirdest ads showing up in your feed, ads for things

you know you would never use in a million years and you start thinking that person's wasting so much money targeting me for a product or service I will never use? And here's the thing. Those companies probably thought that they were marketing perfectly, but they were wasting money because they didn't get their targeting right. And that's why LinkedIn ads is such a game changer. LinkedIn isn't your everyday social platform. This is where over 1 billion professionals, people who are already thinking about business are hanging out and their targeting options are unreal.

You can target by job title, industry, company size, role, skills, revenue level, seniority, literally laser focus to the decision makers who can actually buy what you're selling. It's like having a magic filter for your perfect customer. And if you're serious about growing your business and you don't want to keep paying to show people ads who will never buy, then you have to get on LinkedIn. Here's the best part. LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash clicks.

That's LinkedIn.com slash CLICKS. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. Funnel hackers, let me tell you a story that still makes me cringe a little. We were gearing up for a huge launch. Funnels were done. Landing pages were tight. Copy was dialed in. Everything was ready to rock, except for one thing. We were looking for more support people to be able to handle the launch. And we figured no big deal, we're going to find somebody quickly. But that didn't happen. We spent weeks trying to hire the right person. We put listings on all the typical sites, but they got buried under a flood of random applicants who weren't even remotely qualified. It delayed our campaign, slowed our momentum, and ended up costing us tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales. That's why now I tell everyone

to use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all that you need. It's built to help you find quality talent fast, especially with sponsored jobs, which put your listings right at the top of the page so it's the first thing the right candidate sees. And here's what's wild. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. Why? Because they're seen by the right people at the right time. You can get your job post live in minutes and reach people who are actually qualified. No more scrolling through irrelevant resumes,

no more wasting time, and there's no monthly fee or contract. You just pay for results. Want to know how fast it works? In the time we've been telling you about this story, 23 hires were made on Indeed around the world. That's how efficient it is. There's no need to wait any longer.

Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash clicks. That's Indeed.com slash CLICKS. So what are you waiting for? Just go to Indeed.com slash clicks right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash clicks. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. So in our example, obviously we did, we did authors and inside the authors, then there's their books, like is that kind of you structuring like that?

I'm trying for other people thinking through this on their own side, how they would. Yours goes categories. So it's like book types, right? So motivational entrepreneur books as a general example. So there's a hierarchy where it gets more granular. So it'd be book types, and then it'd be authors within that book category, book categories, authors within that category, then books from that author. And then within all those, then we, there's a bunch of stuff on the back end that you add.

I don't know if we'll get into it because it starts to get more technical, but if anybody's familiar with Schema, we've gone super heavy on Schema on website. And so the short answer of what Schema is, is like when Google goes to a website, it makes educated guesses. And it goes, I think this is about Napoleon Hill. And then Schema will say, Google, you don't have to guess anymore. I'm going to tell you definitively, this is about Napoleon Hill, who by the way is an author. And then these are his books.

And this is the book ISBN number. This is the date that the book was published. Then now all of a sudden, Google has clarity on all these little things about the products or the books. And then because it has clarity, it trusts it more. Because it trusts it more, it's willing to position that website higher. Mm-hmm

interesting, so I'm thinking let's say somebody who's listening this they're in our world their coach They're a weight loss coach or fitness coach or I don't know some yoga coach Whatever it is how because they can most aren't gonna be like me where you have authors and books and stuff like that like how would you structure something like that if it's's somebody who's a guru in their space, how would you build out the categories and things like that for somebody in that world? So you'd want to dig into those, the research first. So I'd go somewhere like also asked.

If we want to address this for the listening audience and kind of keep it actionable, I would focus on two things. So the first thing is make your website load quickly and the design really simplistic. Everybody overcomplicates designs and I consistently see the most simplistic designs outperform the most visually stunning. Because the most visually stunning are either distracting or they load slow because they have all these fancy videos and all these moving animations. So really simplify the design and make sure it loads quickly. There's a really free there's a free tool called GT metrics.

And so it's the go-to tool that we use where it'll just tell you very specifically, how do you make your website load faster? So just start there with that structure after after you fix the structure, then go all in on content. Use those two sites, answer the public, also asked. And then in there type in, so if it's like yoga instructor, you can type in yoga instructor. And what it'll do is it'll create this visual tree branch, and then you can start to identify topics. And what you're looking for is buyer intent. And so what a great opportunity to look for buyer intent is are people asking for time commitments or financial commitments? And so when you're

clicking through the also asked and you got these queries or example targets for yoga instructor, look for the ones that might say something like how much does it cost to hire a yoga instructor? How long does it take to get certified in yoga? How long does it take to lose 10 pounds in yoga? Whatever it might be. So look for those intent-based topics. And that is what you're going to build your content calendar around. So just make it a really simple, efficient website

and then double down on content. Very cool. What's it look like now with AI and content? For a while, I was like, you can't use it because they know and they'll slap you. And then I've heard of the people who like, the new AI is so good it doesn't matter. Like, yeah, what are your thoughts on using AI for content or do you just need to get

back to actually writing? A little bit of both. Yeah. Who I wear that tin hat sometimes. I'm like if Google is going to, you know, I'm not so much worried about Bing since they're the bigger investor on chat GPT. And so it's less likely that Bing sharing sharing that data with Google but who knows. So I'm okay selectively using AI.

Like the biggest thing, we don't have to explain why AI is attractive to integrate into your systems but what people don't think about is, let's go back to you mentioned you used to be an SEO back in the day and you got hit by one of these algorithms. So one of the old algorithms was called Panda and Panda focused on mass produced low quality content. And so back then we had these things called content spinners where you could just type in you know, scrape some content from Wikipedia or your competitor and then it'll shuffle around the paragraphs and synonyms.

Well AI is largely just a way bigger content spinner. It's more glorified. It's more efficient but it's still sourcing content from somewhere else. So one, how accurate is the content? Two, are there any liabilities in the content? But I think what's most important is AI misses the opportunity to be as relatable or personal, right? So most people might follow your content for your expertise, but they convert when they relate to you as relatable or personal, right? So most people might follow your conduct for your expertise, but they convert when they relate to you as a human. And so the example I always give in AI is,

you know, AI doesn't know what it's like to smell grandma's cookies in the holidays. You know, only you can write that compelling piece of content, or AI doesn't know what it's like to get your heart broken, right? So only you can convey that. So it's not that you don't necessarily have to use, it's not that you don't use AI, but how can you weave in those relatable personal stories that only you can tell that make people

relate to your unique hero's journey, right? Yeah. Interesting. And I keep thinking back in the article spinner days. It's funny because that's how Todd, when I met Todd, he built an article spinner software that literally was spinning articles and then ranked him, he was like number one ranked for the word article spinner. And so then people start signing up for it and that's, and he took four years off and

just like lived off of that for a long time, which is kind of funny that now that's what AI basically is. I never thought of it as a complex version of an article spinner, but that's interesting. Okay, because I was thinking now, again, this SEO spammer Russell, from back in the day, he's going back, I'm like, we can use AI, we could pump out like 500,000 sites a day, like it would be insane. I wish we had these tools back then, but obviously, didn't work that way anymore.

Okay, so those are the on-site things. Back in the day, the second thing you talked about was like reputation and trust and things like that. You used to be back in the day, Lynx is what created that, what caused that. Is that still part of the algorithm? Is it not so much anymore? It is, but in my opinion, I mean, SEOs will throw rocks at each other over this all day every day and have a different opinion.

I'm of the opinion that they become less important. I think Google is always looking for ways to identify credibility in websites that are less likely to be manipulated by SEOs or webmasters. And so backlinks have been manipulated as soon as SEOs kind of figured it out, right? And I think they're still part of the algorithm, but it's been diluted in value. And some of our clients, we've actually phased out backlinks entirely,

and they're still competitive with all the others. And then going back to what we talked about, when algorithms come out, do people get hit? So every time there's these new algorithm updates, we haven't had anybody hit because we're not in there playing this mass- mass produced backlink game.

And so for the listeners that might not be familiar with backlinks, it's when another website hyperlinks to yours. And so each one of those links counts as a vote in the search engine popularity contest. So we largely are not aggressive on backlinks anymore. And so we try to attract them passively through value-added content. And the only time we do backlinks is if a client understands a risk reward and wants to be more aggressive with it. Interesting.

So the most part then, you're focusing 100% on content, schema, site, load design, and then from that, waiting for Google to find it and hopefully rank it. Yeah, we got super heavy in structure for the first one to three months, depending on how big the site is. And then after that, it's a giant content machine. So how do you get from, because back in Dagen, if we were on page two or page three,

it was just a game where we're trying to get more and more links to move us up the rankings. So eventually, we hit page one, and then spot three, then two, then one. Are there things you can do actively to increase the ranking? Or do you create the best version, put it out there, then you move to the next one and just kind of hope that it lands? Or how does that part work? You can introduce a couple extra things. how to create the best version, put it out there, then you move to the next one and just kind of hope that it lands.

How does that part work? You can introduce a couple extra things. So there's different content types that you might be more aggressive with or content volume. So there's no such thing as too much good content. But when you're an agency and you bring SEO to a client, it's like how do you economically balance what's the best fit for the budget? And so on the agency side, there's a little bit of dancing with what's the best, the maximum ROI for the budget. And so on the agency side, there's a little bit of dancing with what's the best, the maximum ROI for the budget.

Because if you double the budget, it doesn't mean you're going to compress time by cut it in half. And so there's a little balance of that. And there are some ways, like the thing with backlinks is there's no real good scalable affordable way to back to backlinks. So they're either scalable and easy and garbage, or they're way expensive and unscalable but good but expensive. So depending on the campaign like you can come in and do some high priced backlinks

which are good but you would do it in the case that you gave where it's like okay what can we just use to get over the edge and you wouldn't necessarily integrate it into like the recurring part of the campaign. Yeah. As you're adding more and more pages and more content every single week, will that naturally help others? Is it like a rising tide rises all ships? Like will they all start rising as well or is it kind of each piece stands in and of

the self-extended? No, that's a great comment because a lot of people get caught up in, you know, I need to optimize this page and this page, this is the money page, this is the money page, which might be true, but SEO is now about the credibility of the entire domain. And so is there a little bit of value spread throughout? And so yeah, you want to, the more value you bring and aggregate good content, it lifts the entirety of the site. Hey everyone, if you're anything like me, you've probably spent more time than you want

to admit just trying to stay on top of your email. Am I right? I used to wake up, fire up the inbox and boom, I was hit with a wave of random stuff. Newsletter noise, low priority requests, affiliate spam, and somewhere in the chaos, a few messages that I actually needed to respond to. It drove me nuts. And I ended up spending hours every day sorting, replying, getting distracted and pulling off the work to actually move my business forward. But that all changed when I tried Notion Mail. And let me tell you, it's like somebody took my funnel brain and built an email platform out of it.

This is the inbox that thinks like you. Notion Mail uses AI to organize everything based on what's important to you. It learns what matters, automatically labels and sorts messages, drafts, responses, and even schedules meetings. It's personalized, automated, and completely flexible. And do you want to know what's become my absolute favorite feature? Custom inbox views. I've created views for my podcast outreach, my internal team, my JV partners, and even launch commissions.

I can jump into a view and laser focus. No distractions, no noise. And when I need to move fast? Snippets. I've got one-click templates ready to go for follow-ups, affiliate approval, speaker confirmations. It's like having a pre-built funnel, but for email replies. If you're like me and your brain runs a hundred miles an hour, Notion Mail gives you a calm, focused command center and it just works.

Get Notion Mail for free right now at Notion.com slash Russell and try the inbox that thinks like you. That's all lowercase letters, Notion.com slash R-U-S-S-S-E-L-L to get Notion Mail for free right now. When you use our link, you're supporting our show, Notion.com slash R-U-S-S-E-L-L to get Notion Mail for free right now. When you use our link, you're supporting our show. Notion.com slash Russell. I'm curious because on YouTube we have an issue where if we're buying ads on the same channel we're trying to get organic views.

It messes up the algorithm, right? Because it's like you're paying for ads, someone comes, they see the ad, they leave and then YouTube doesn't separate this ad traffic versus someone viewing it and it's like oh this these videos aren't good and then Like your whole channel suffers at least for us like a year before we're able to fix it Do you have a similar thing with SEO where it's like we're also driving paid ads to seekersuccess.com slash whatever People come in there bouncing faster than what if they were organically finding does it affect the site as a whole or is it? It can yeah, the one thing you said the bounce rate. Yeah. So we've had some clients where we'll be crushing it on organic and then all of a sudden we'll have thousands of visitors that come in and they stay for five seconds and we'll hit up

the client and they'll be like, oh yeah, that was our ad guy. Well, like what's your ad guy doing? And they're not paying attention. So yeah, you can, um, largely SEO and paid ads and social media don't directly influence each other. SEO can influence it, which maybe I'll come back to in a minute, but paid ads and social don't largely influence SEO, other than bounce rate. Yeah, so you can send a ton of visitors and if people are just bouncing, then Google is going to go, maybe this isn't the best site because people aren't sticking around. So would it be smart to put your funnels on a subdomain or different domain altogether? Do you think? You could, yeah.

I mean, because that's the beauty of paid ads is you can direct that wherever you want. So unless you have it dialed in or if you want to A-B test something pretty significantly that could impact your SEO if you already have a good SEO foundation established, that's something to consider. Interesting. If you were to put the pages on a subdomain, would it be separate? Does it look at the subdomain the same as the rest of the domain? A little bit of both.

Subdomains are technically separate domains, but search engines are obviously smart enough to know that they're related. I have seen some weird nuances where you and I and most users would just consider it the same thing, but you'd be surprised at how the anomalies that can show up in the data. Yeah, interesting. OK, the last thing we talked about is I know you've got a program now where you're

helping agencies to start doing SEO for funnels and things like that. We talked about that as an opportunity. It's a unique opportunity a lot of people aren't doing or heard about or thought about, and something you've been capitalizing a lot over the last little bit. Yeah, it's been fun.

You were kind enough to give me a deadline last year. And it's true. Like, I think I told you at the FHL International that I got more done in that, like, 60 days than I probably would have done in a year. Yeah, it's been fun. So why don't I share a little bit of that journey? Because when I got into Inner Circle,

there's so many cool things going on, but there was nothing wrong. I didn't want to get distracted. I didn't want to accidentally mess up the agency. I think they had their shiny objects here. They had more shiny objects. For the first year, there was a little part of me where this, this place is so cool, but like everybody's just like launching every day. And I was, I was used to just reoccurring revenue and the agency side. And so there was a little bit of time where there was some insecurity

about it where I was like, am I missing this opportunity here? And then when I got talking to other people, they're like, no, you probably made the right decision because I did chase both. And then I kind of lost both. And so focus on whatever your most immediate opportunity is. But I couldn't not think about doing training because I've been doing this for so long and I get asked for so long. But more importantly, that was where the personal reward was in me is like I wanted to help this type of people.

But that's the total opposite of my agency. The agency is established business and people that want to learn SEO, it's a difference of who values time over money or money over time. And so there are different audiences. And so I mapped out the course years ago. I didn't launch it though because I knew I didn't have the time to support it. And so I didn't want to take people's money. And so for years it was in the back of my mind and then you see all these people in

inner circle doing all these people in Inner Circle doing all these things, and I'm like, ah. And so I finally got a COO a while ago, got him over the learning curve, and then now I feel comfortable whose hands the agency are in. And so I could come back to launching that. Now, back to, I think it was a decade and a day last summer. You know, when I came up for the hot seat, you're like, dude, when are you going to launch this?

And in my mind, I'm thinking end of the year. But I didn't say that because I knew that was like six months. I'm like, Russell's not going to let me say six months. And I can't remember what I said after that, but you're like, you know, three months or something. So we agreed on Halloween. And that deadline was OK because I had a couple weeks that I had to wrap up some stuff but then that would give me like four to six weeks to figure this out.

And so then I did a live event, so I did a two-day live event to validate the curriculum. Now a couple things happened from that, you know, you and Inner Circle are always talking about bring your product to the market first and then get that feedback. And so you hear that and you like think know that, but until you actually do that, you don't realize how much value that actually brings. So in my mind, it was like, okay, I'm going to do SEO training. And there's three types of people that might buy this. One was existing agencies that want to do it better or add it.

Two was an entrepreneur that wants to, a solopreneur or a freelancer. Or three was a nine to fiver that might want more job security and they do marketing and so they want to establish that. I thought the agencies would have been on the bottom. And when I started posting about it, it was almost all agencies. The other two were nonexistent. And so then that, you know, the market started to give that feedback. Yeah. And so then I said, hey, who would be interested? I'm going to do it for a thousand bucks. And I was just wanting five, 10 people, right? Just to validate it. And I sold 8,000 bucks, eight seats, like that day. And so I went and found an event space. I was going

to just do, you know, a small nice room. And then I booked a space for like 10 people. I'm like, yeah, I got like two extra seats just in case. And then I made a follow up post and then I had 15 seats. So I was like, crap. Okay, so what's still close that is nice. And then I found this other place that held like 20 people and then I made another post and eventually I ended up getting to, it was like just shy of 50 people, right? And so that validated the demand but then it also highlighted that agencies were the main audience. So then as I started to bring it, as it started to get closer to the event and I'm kind of dripping some of the curriculum of what we're going to talk about, then I

got more feedback and what I realized was in addition to people wanting to the event and I'm kind of dripping some of the curriculum of what we're going to talk about, then I got more feedback. And what I realized was in addition to people wanting to learn SEO, a lot of them didn't know how to run a business. And so it wasn't just about SEO. It was like, how do I actually run a business? You know, SOPs and how do you communicate with your client? And so then I shifted like 50% of the curriculum to here's how you run a business. Here's how you communicate to clients.

Here's how you onboard them. here's how you set expectations. So sold that, validated the curriculum, then got tied up for a little bit and then got back to focusing on transferring all that, transitioning all that into a course and then by bringing it to the market it was the same thing, more feedback, more feedback, more feedback. So I finally did my first launch just about a month ago. Just did organic the first time, posted about it for two weeks,

and had 60 something people register, 40 showed up, held all 40 for an hour. Last five minutes when I pitched, five dropped off, 35 heard the offer and 13 closed. Done a few more small launches since then, and as of now I'm just shy of a hundred grand off of like two and a half, three hours. Yeah. So cool. I hope everyone's listening like just the process of creating a product

too. I think a lot of people think it's the other way around like okay I'm going to create it all and then launch it versus when you talked about the iterative process and including the people then you find out what people actually want which is the magic behind it you know I mean. In fact it's one of the main reasons why I do Inner Circle is because I had a chance to like see everybody hear people who are doing this game and then it's like oh like the ideas come from there the iterations the changes the two egg all this stuff comes from like sitting in a room of your dream customers talking about what they're doing and what they're not doing and what their what their pain points are you know a lot of times we try to create things in secret and launch them and then you just

miss the mark. That's me. I overthink it big time. I know because when we had first conversations, you never, that wasn't the direction at all. And it's crazy that's what it's become and where it all landed at, which is really cool. Yeah, it's been fun. That's awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you coming and being part of Inner Circle this long and hanging out

and all the SEO work you're doing for us. And hopefully, it gets any of you guys who are listening understand there's a whole other world of traffic. Because in my world, we don't talk about SEO hardly at all. We talk about paid ads and we focus on social and those kind of things. But it's funny, you rewind back 15 years ago, there were only paid ads and SEO. That was the two things. That's all we drove traffic with initially.

And now people don't talk about those very much. And there's this huge untapped opportunity for people who will dive into it, which is why you're doing it for most of my core businesses right now. And we keep adding. Every two months, we add you to another one of our businesses. It's like, take the next one, and the next one,

and the next one, because it's the long tail. I always think about this with ads. Like people ask me, what should I do? Should I do ads or SEO? I'm like, you should do both. Because ads will get you traffic immediately. But if you're doing the SEO in the backside, eventually you can taper down or turn off ads.

But the SEO will continue to grow over time. And that's the thing I think people miss is they want to just flip on SEO like they flip on ads. No, you got to start planting the seeds now. It's a lot of the harvest. You plant seeds, plant seeds, and eventually it can surpass the traffic you're getting from paid if you do it right. Yeah.

Yeah, most of our clients, if they give it long enough runway, SEO ends up becoming 50% to 80% of their revenue. Yeah. Even today, the SEO is dead. They're still getting that. So that's good to know. So anyway, man, I appreciate you coming out and sharing. If people want to follow you and hire you and all kind of stuff,

where do they go? DamonBurton.com. Everything's there. DamonBurton.com. And who are some of your clients, just so people know that you're legit? Russell, Tony Robbins. We worked with Utah Jazz, Rayals Salt Lake.

Lots of cool businesses. But I think my favorite are Mom and Pops. We've got a lot of Mom and Pops that we've taken from little kitchen tables into multi-million dollar warehouses. I still have my first client, first two or three clients from 18 years ago. Still with me 18 years. Yeah. They haven't dropped any of the updates because you weren't spamming the search engines.

I could have helped you out back then. Glad I didn't. I would have ruined everything. Hey man, I'm grateful for you. Thanks so much. Yeah, everyone, SEO and funnels, they do go together. Start working on it, add it to your traffic and it'll change your life, change your business. So thanks man. Appreciate it. Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your

funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next Selling Online event by going to SellingOnline.com slash podcast. That's SellingOnline.com slash podcast.