Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Deepak Shukla: Ranking No.1 In Life & On Google | Marketing | E16

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

Do you even SEO? Still playing by rules you heard 5 years ago? Well, ya better step it up because all the #youngandprofiters are doing it! In this episode, we chat with Deepak Shukla, career coach and founder of the award-winning SEO agency, Pearl Lemon. Deepak has lived a lot of life in his short 33-years. He was an up-and-coming rapper, started several businesses, he was trained as a British soldier, backpacked through over 50 countries and the list of his extraordinary experiences go and on! Tune in to find out why randomness is your best strength and hear Deepak's best personal lessons and SEO tips to rank number one in life and on Google, Youtube and more! Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

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Visit compasshq.com to learn more. You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. I'm your host, Halitaha, and today we're speaking with Deepak Shugla, founder of the award-winning SEO agency, Pearl Lemon, and a career coach who helps his clients achieve their goals to design a life they love.

Deepak has lived a lot of life in his short 33 years. He was an up-and-coming rapper, started several businesses. He's a trained British soldier, a marathon runner, went backpacking through over 50 countries, and the list of his extraordinary experiences go on and on. Tune in to this episode to find out why randomness is your best strength, and hear Deepak's best personal lessons and SEO tips to rank number one in life and on Google. Hey, Deepak, thanks for joining Young and Profiting Podcast. Halla, I'm really excited to be here.

You're based in the UK, right? Correct. I'm in London in a little place called Fulham, which is Zone 2 London for anyone who is in the UK listening. Very cool. Well, I have a ton of listeners out in the UK, so you better represent. Absolutely. Wired. All right. Well, I actually think it's going to be an awesome conversation because you have one of the most unique stories I've ever heard of, which is why I brought you on the show. It seems like you've squeezed every bit of excitement out of life, and I can't wait to get into all of that, your store, your background. But first, let's start from this point in time. Tell us about who you are today.

Brilliant. Great question. And amazing introduction, I'm worried. My name is Deepak. I feel like I'm going on a blind date now. I run a company called Pearl Lemon. We are, well, we're fast becoming a media group. So we started as an SEO agency, and we're now expanding. aggressively so. So that's what I do in work. In life, I have a cat called Jenny and my wonderful partner, Daniela. We live here in Fulham, and that's what I do today. Awesome. One of the ways that we found you was through a TED talk, where you propose that randomness is a person's best strength. So I thought this would be a great introduction about you and your philosophy about life. So tell us about

this concept. How did you come to this realization? Diversity is, I think, at the core of every human being to the same extent that one can love, one can hate, one can hate and love in the same moment. And we sometimes, because of perhaps the world that we're coming from, perhaps the industrial age, we seek to kind of pigeonhole people and to use a frame to define someone. And that doesn't serve all of the amazing things that a lot of people do that they never speak of. And it also does not serve all of the amazing things that you could do that you don't. because of this need to be a particular type of person. And I think that embracing the spontaneity, the opportunity of whatever kind of comes into

your life or whatever you reach out and grab actually can help you become that much more of really a dominant force in whatever you choose or wherever you choose to ultimately live out your power. So, you know, if you are going to decide to go on a journey of being a host of an amazing podcast, then all of the things that you've done up to that moment, whether it's been travels to Indonesia, whether it's been doing field work in Somalia, whether it's been helping your mum in a software update for Skype on her phone so you can talk to her. All of these things are part of the amazing randomness that I think we should embrace. and actually helps us become that much more powerful when we go and do the thing that we love. Yeah, that's really powerful. That's really interesting stuff. So before we deep dive into your entrepreneurship adventures and get all the insight about, you know, best practices for SEO because I definitely want to get into that.

Let's talk about your specific randomness, what makes Deepak special and maybe some of the life lessons that you learn from each one of them. So one thing that caught my attention because, you know, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, stalk our guests and do an enormous amount of research, is that you're a rapper. And you went under stage names like MC Bionic and Deep Impact. And you had a very long and serious rap career. So tell us about that experience. And we actually have a lot in common with this. Oh, wow. Thank you, first of all, for having spotted that. And the bionic, wow, you brought back memories. Hala, I love music. I always have. I remember grabbing one of my mom's cassettes that had her

like Bollywood Budgins they're called or like Indian songs, recording right over that stuff and just having DJ like an MCN on repeat, that graduated to me discovering that I think it's Michael Jackson's beat it that has an instrumental section literally about for the first 60 seconds. And I recall just literally running to the cassette player, playing those 45 seconds, trying to write something down, it running out and Michael Jackson coming in, which was beautiful. But then me and being like, no, damn you, Michael.

And then stopping the tape and rewinding it. And that was the genesis. Well, that's awesome. So tell us about what you went on to do as a rapper. Like, how serious did you get about it? And what did you learn from the experience? So I ended up joining a group. So Darkside soldiers or the Darkside family,

we were a group of emcees based out of some estates in Acton in West London. We ended up getting involved in rap battles, running out backdoors because people were coming to the front door to try and beat us up and stuff. We hosted our own parties, performed at several lovers, and I was part of our own little crew and gang, if you will. That developed into beginning to perform on stages at university, releasing my first kind of CD, unseen and unknown, getting nominated as a West Midlands artist of the month. being on BBC TV, us trying to push onto television and then radio, me leaving that behind a little bit because academia kind of took precedent, but then also returning to it post-university. I went and got a corporate job, hated that corporate job, left that corporate job to start a recording studio, deep impact recordings, to then renew my rap career once again.

And yeah, Hala, it's been an amazing journey, actually, just music within itself from really, 14 up till about 24. It was a significant part of my life. Wow. And we have a lot in common. So I used to want to be a singer and I actually worked at 107. I was Angie Martinez's assistant for at least three years. And yeah, I had this whole singing passion and I recorded a whole album. One thing that I learned from being a singer is being a good public speaker. Did it help you get over your stage fright and make you just always willing to kind of be the center of attention? Absolutely. I think that music really teaches you the art of improv, especially rapping. So stage presence and the ability to being able to think on my feet when people ask me challenging questions. Like what you don't know

is that before I was talking to you, I've launched a second agency with a guy who was on a training program that I built called Pearl Lemon Leeds. He was in a board meeting with a business I've got no idea about. He was struggling a little bit and I said, put me on speaker, just call me now. And they started asking all kinds of questions that I had no preparation for. But actually, it's been the whole rap thing that's given me my preparation. It's been getting into these rap battles, going onto stages or recording 150 songs by myself because I wanted to record. And that whole creative process, as you know so well, Hala, it's amazing. And it really does set you up for conversation, presentation, improvisation.

So it's really been such an amazing asset as I'd move forward, which I didn't really know at the time that I was doing it. Yeah. Another wild thing you did was live homelessly for one week. Oh, yeah. That must have been really life-changing. Tell us about that. You know what?

I was at a difficult stage of my life. That was the stage at which I was leaving music a little bit. I'd got into a relationship, a damaging one with a musician. within the industry and she was violent towards me. I got into marathon running, which is something you'll probably come and ask me about in a while. And I remember the day that I left to go and live homelessly was the day after I came back from the Oslo Marathon in Norway. And I went away for six nights, seven days to experience what it was like to be homeless. It's touched my family. My uncle has been selling something called The Big Issue and has been homeless on and off and in various types of institutional housing for a long time.

And my family having come from rural India and being born in villages and stuff, it's something that because of that as well as perhaps me trying to seek some meaning led me onto this journey of being homeless. And wow. What'd you learn? I learned how easy it is. to become ignorant of all of the pain and suffering that stands in front of you. I have also learned why in some instances it's just the only way to survive because you've got your own world, you've got your own problems. And equally, I think on the streets, you know, I just saw this other world,

Hala, and it really upset me. I saw people shooting up in the streets. I met people who had had massive addictions of abuse or gambling or drugs, as well as being people that had established careers. And I think that, you know, the biggest single learning that I took away from that is it taught me to appreciate what I had because there's always, there's always a new bottom. When you think you're at the bottom of the barrel, there's people out there that will make what you have looked like the most amazing thing in the world.

And that has taught me really to just appreciate the opportunities that I'm given with this life that we have. You know, not many people would go ahead and put themselves in that situation. And it just shows how much like you're just willing to make yourself uncomfortable to experience things. It's so cool. Thank you. So you've done so many other random things that we actually don't even have time to cover. You've backpacked through 50 different countries. You've lived in, I think, nine different countries.

You're a British Army reservist. You've started so many different companies. You're still so young, but you've done so much. So often I hear people saying that they just don't have enough time. Like, I don't have time. What's your advice to those who feel like they don't have enough time? Because you're not even 35, I think. And you've done so much already in your life.

So what's your advice to those kind of people? I think that the only way that you can put yourself into a place of expansion is you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. it's literally the only way you need to live by that as kind of a rule and as a means of moving forward. A lot of these things that have happened have come from places of, you know, I feel overwhelmed, I feel anxious, I feel scared, I feel kind of worried. And I think that for anybody who wants to try and find time, it's really, it's about creating anchors. It's about creating anchors.

I think, Hala, that the real way to get something done is to get out your credit card. Find a reason that will move you to actually living outside of your comfort zone. For me, a pivotal moment was going to a self-development conference and coming out of that. And in my moment of madness, you know, those moments where we feel excited, we feel inspired, we maybe heard someone say something on a YouTube clip or something, on a podcast or a conversation, use that moment. That's the moment where you attach an anchor to whatever it is that you've dreamed of. And it doesn't even matter if you don't fulfill it, right? This is the thing that people that I find crazy. Okay. I've run marathons,

but I've also failed many more. I've done iron men, but I've also screwed up a lot. I'm a British Army reserve this, but ultimately I didn't succeed in my application to the British Special Forces. And it's not about being successful. It's really just about the act of going out there and doing something that you're afraid of. And I think that when you put your credit card down, when you use something like money as an incentive, then I think everything else can follow. I actually talked to this with Ben Hardy on episode number seven, all about investing, investing in your dreams and that kind of commitment just makes you take that extra step forward. It's all about just taking action, like you said, getting over your fears.

That's very important to keep in mind and just progressing in life. Yeah, agreed. You mentioned earlier that you quit your first proper job right after university. I think it was at Deloitte. Yeah. Just months into the job, why did you decide that corporate life was not for you? And how did you know that your destiny was entrepreneurship? I knew that corporate life wasn't for me because I remember meeting an associate partner at a networking event.

He was who I could become seven years into the future. he had quite kind of sunken eyes he was a man of few words and Harla I looked at him and I thought fuck this is not where I want to be this is not what I want for my life in seven years from now and and you know what here's the interesting part it's not that I even wanted to be an entrepreneur in my 20s I don't think I've been an entrepreneur in my 20s I think that what I really wanted was just adventure, exploration and discovery. I think that a lot of people get told of two paths ultimately right now. They get told of a corporate gig. They get told of don't do a corporate gig.

You can either kind of do some form of being an entrepreneur, whether it's vis-a-vis digital nomadding or whether it's start a tech company. These really are the three routes. And you know what? I just knew that I didn't want to be a consultant. I knew that I loved music. And that's a big part of why my 20s were filled with randomness, because I was really just exploring and seeing what was out there. Yeah, I think it's so important for people to realize that, like, in your 20s, it's so important to just get experience, just take the experiences, follow your dreams.

It sounds so cliche, but just take the time, like, you're still young in your 20s, you know? Some people feel old when they're 20 already, and it's just like, I just can't believe it. I completely 100% agree with you that people get old too fast, and it's like, wow, you know, this life is beautiful, travel and transport has never been cheaper, learning how to do anything that you want exists for you on YouTube. It's just about prompting action in your life and learning one practical skill. There's one skill that's not that hard that everyone needs to figure out, right? There's one skill, I believe, that will set you free. The one skill is learning, learning how you can make three to four thousand dollars a month working 15 to 20 hours a month.

If you can figure out how to do that, you can buy your freedom for your entire 20s. That's one consulting gig where you check in two hours a week, for example, and they pay you $3,000 a month. You could live on that. You could go abroad. You could live in Malta. You could go to the Seychelles. You could scuba dive. You could bungee jump. You could learn a language. one gig, it's all that you need. And everybody's in this rush to start a company. And it's like, well, dude, I went to Iron Men, right? Considered to be the hardest one day. I see 70-year-olds doing Iron Men. Blue my mind. It blew my mind. And that changed everything for me when I realized, wow, Deepak, everybody's in a rush, but life is long. You can start a company in your 50s and become a

billionaire by the time you're 68. Why the rush? Why the rush? Why the rush? hurry. Yeah, I'm on the same page. Everybody needs to just slow down and take their experiences because just getting those skills are going to make you better later on. I started a blog site when I was like 24. I'm in corporate now. But literally, everything that I learned and why I was so successful entering corporate later in life is because I could web design. I could social media. I can write. I can lead. I can, you know what I mean? All these things that I just learned because I was forced to. And you've got to just put yourself in the position where you're forced to learn things that other people your age or whatever it is wouldn't necessarily learn. I completely, completely agree that that randomness

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book's money tools. Learn more at quickbooks.com slash money. Again, that's quickbooks.com slash money. Terms apply. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Incorporated, licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Okay, so let's talk about your work life. So you did all these cool things, but you also sustained yourself in the process. So give us a snapshot of all the different adventures that you did, your startups, your failures, and how you got up to what you do now. Pearl Lemon. Definitely. So I left Deloitte and I, before Deloitte, was a literature major, like an arts major at university. So I spent my time learning, reading Shakespeare, Doystoyevsky, Schober, Flobert, Chopin, all of this stuff. Then I went to Deloitte and I was a tax consultant. What I knew leaving when I handed in my resignation was like, Deepak, he don't have one clue about how to make money. And then what I did know was two things. One, what I do have is a British

Indian, right? My parents grew up in India and came here to give us a better life. So what that gave me was work ethic. That was the first thing that I knew that I had. The second thing that I knew that I had was that I can read because I was a literature major. I was like, I can read and I can outread maybe the best of them. So I took to Amazon. I went to Google, I went to the bestsellers and I bought the first 10 books on the list at that time, the four hour work week, rich dad, poor dad, chicken suit for the soul, the $100 startup, whatever it might have been. And that was really the beginnings of my education. That taught me a lot of things. I then began to implement. So my first business was deep impact recordings. That was my recording studio. It was in a spare room

at my mom's house. Musicians would come in via our back door into the kitchen where my mom was making chapatis and lentils and Indian food. They'd come through the kitchen into the studio where they'd record music. The studio was built from wood from my local carpenter's shop and the soundproofing was from my local maintenance store where I bought like carbon fiberglass, which is used in loft insulation. That transitioned into a couple of studios. I had the green, so the red room and the blue room. I learned about hiring. I learned about how to hire really badly. I learned about a cash-based business and how that's just horrendous for accounting. I did kind of all of these things. that business shut down and really what followed Harla was a series of ventures right all founded upon

well okay I need to make some money so the studio shut down and I remember a friend of mine said Deepa you're an English graduate why don't you teach English as a tutor so I said okay I'll do that so I signed up to an agency I discovered that they were paying me 18 pounds per hour and the client the parents were paying 36 and I thought hang on I can do that this, this isn't that hard. So I figured out how to use Wix, the website builder. I built my own site. I found out where you could order flyers from. I did some really basic design. I then looked up parkopedia.com, which tells you where all of the car parks in London are. And then I started hitting up car parks with all of my flyers. I was then getting thrown out of car parks, removed by security from

shopping centres. But I was only targeting the cars with baby seats in them or the five-door estates that I thought would have parents. That ultimately got me up to like five to maybe 10,000 pounds per month. I then discovered online listings because I thought, well, I don't want to just always go out and fly it. I want to do something online. So I put my first classified ad up. That was on gum tree.

That helped the business take a significant revenue bump because I discovered this world of students who studied psychology that did not realize that psychology had a statistical module in the course. And that like scuppered a lot of these students. And a lot of these students happen to be international students who had money and stuff. So as soon as I got a call from something, hey, you know, I'm at my dad's office in Regent Street and I'm struggling, bloody bloody bar. And I was like, oh yeah, it's like £60 an hour. And they're like, fantastic, when can you come? I did the first couple of lessons, discovered that there was this

whole world of students pivoted and ended up transforming my tutoring agency. And then it kind of transitioned to me trying to start up. I raised some money. I took the money abroad and spent it partying, gone in a lot of trouble. The investors were not happy, but I was partying, so I was happy slash unhappy. And yeah, there's been this kind of whirlwind of events, Hala. And you know what happened that brings me to today to answer your question? At 30, and as you said, this was all in and amongst, like living in Lisbon, fighting Thai kickboxing in Rio or whatever I was doing and wherever I was doing it, I kind of at 30 decided

that I wanted to come home and that I began to, as really Jack Marr talks about with his growth about Ali Barba. He says that in your 20s, it's all about experience. And in your 30s, it's really about beginning to grow something and do something that you could maybe look to achieve legacy from. And I didn't really know it at the time, but I did know at 30 when I launched Pearl Lemon, October 2016, I realized that, okay, I want to grow so. roots now. I want to do something that, or I want to build a business that I can be proud of and still is around in a couple of years because I had a track record of starting something, getting bored, things happening and kind of not sticking around and kicking out.

And that's where I am today. And we've got an SEO agency. We're okay. We did maybe 300,000 pounds in the last year. That's, I don't know, it's maybe $400,000 or whatever it might be. That's been a wild journey because we bootstrapped. I was again back at my mom's house. I had no cash. I'd run out of money. I'd come back from the army. And I was like, all right, I need to make some money. What do I know? I'm good at marketing. Okay, let's go with that. And now, yeah, we've got a couple of companies that we set up. The meeting that was on just before was for the new business. And it's again another whirlwind. But I enjoy the madness. I enjoy the chaos. And that's where I am at today. Yeah. So at what point did you learn SEO? That's what I don't

understand. Like you had all these experience. At what point were you learning SEO? Or is this something you just took gone and learned everything about and then started this company. So I knew a lot of different strands of digital marketing simply because I'd had to, when you raise money, you have to wear many different hats. And the experiences I had at Deep Impact Recordings when I learned just about the process of tagging people on Facebook back in 2008 and what that meant about then someone appearing in someone else's newsfeed, then that moved on to, for example, Gumtree, the classified ad site I told you about, I discovered that if I keyword stuffed a title, I would literally make an extra £1,500 at month, because I would

appear in many more searches. That then transitioned into trying to tech startup, meet my tutor, and trying to list our site and all of these different directories, startup ranking. And then when I started my agency, I looked at what I perceived to be a space that was technical enough for a business to want to outsource that was interesting to me, and that would lead to retainer income, meaning that what is it that people pay for, that if they find a good provider, they'll stick with for years. And I thought, well, SEO. So then what followed was kind of aggressive learning, if you will, that happened in the same process as I just described before. I bought a couple of books. I also went onto YouTube. I also went on to UDEMI. I also

paid for, you know, Brian Dean's Backlinko, his paid programs. So I spent about $5,000 in paid programs and then I spent about 100 hours maybe learning over the course of a couple of weeks and I then realized that that already put me into a certain finite percentile of people that knew enough about SEO to do a pretty good job and then off and away and it was just from there really Paula. You hit exactly the right point which I wanted you to is that you know you weren't an SEO expert but you had learned it and you had used it and it's not just for like marketing and tech geeks. Anybody can use SEO and it's just part of life now. Like the internet is life and the doorway to the internet is search. And so you better know how to make yourself visible and searchable and

noticeable. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. You chose to have a global and remote team. Yeah. How do you manage that type of a team and why did you choose that model? I chose the model because it's what I know. I am used to being by myself a lot of the time day to day. And that meant that I didn't want to have to have a team next to me every day. So I just naturally began hiring remotely. So that was why as to how it works. A lot of it is about letting go of control and accepting that, you know, you need to empower people

and, you know, trust in them to do great work and accept also that a lot of the time they won't. But what hiring globally does give you is a global economy to draw upon. Yeah. I personally think that this is the way of the future, This is the most cost-effective way. You don't have to pay for a headquarters.

The value of money across different countries is so drastic that you can really get somebody talented in like India or the Philippines or something for unheard of rates. And it's great for them. And it's just the way of the future. Like even for Yap, you know, small podcasts, I've eight people on my team. One of them's from Canada. One of them's from Estonia, you know. So. Brilliant.

That's awesome. That's just the way of life now. So let's get into SEO. let's pick your brain about all the different things that you know about that area. So how do you define it? Yeah, sure. SEO is ultimately the game of visibility. It's you appearing first or close to first when someone runs a search.

And that search doesn't need to be limited to Google. There's LinkedIn search. There's, you know, Instagram search. There's search on Twitter. So it is the game. of optimizing any profile that you've got to make sure that you rank favorably when someone looks up a particular term on that platform. And so like SEO 10 years ago, from what I know, was pretty much like a manipulative

and repetitive marketing tactic. But nowadays, algorithms have really turned it into an art form and it includes things like branding and content creation and so on. Can you talk about some of the once revered SEO tactics that really don't work anymore? Yeah, sure. It's a great question. So keyword stuffing is one thing that we made reference to before and it doesn't work today. Keyword stuffing is really just designed to manipulate search engines, but search engines have become smart enough to understand that it doesn't mimic the way that people actually read content. So that's one thing that doesn't work anymore. The second thing that doesn't work anymore is it's almost like it's stuffing keywords on. your actual homepage at the bottom what often you sometimes see is and you still see it on maybe you know linked in sometimes you'll see lots of different keywords stuffed into either the html so there's also the way of these keywords are presented so it doesn't just relate to content like in terms of

blog articles it also relates to keywords actually at the bottom of for example a home page and that's seen as being quite spammy a third thing that doesn't work anymore people still use it, so arguably then it still works. Well, we'll talk about it anyway. So building private blog networks. So private blog networks are ultimately designed to, of course, manipulate Google's rankings. It's ultimately a link exchange taken to an art form. So in a private blog network, we might have you, we might have me and we might have our friend Frank. You, me and Frank would all exchange links between our sites to particular pages with the intent that we all as a consequence increase our domain authority, increase our actual trust flow. And what we will do is do our best to

not reveal to Google exactly how these links have been built. And therefore, the network that you build, once you put in any link into that network, the link becomes a lot more powerful as a consequence of the strength of the network. So then when Google becomes savvy to what's going on. The PBNs, the whole network basically collapses, including any site that's attached to it. And we do deal with sites in this space that suffer from problems like that today. We're dealing with a couple of businesses at the moment. Typical industries where people will build that would be gambling, would be the adult space, would be CBD is a good one right now that's quite popular. The reasons that people build links like that is because a lot of websites won't accept

links from gambling sites. They weren't accept links from, I don't know, like a lingerie site. They won't accept links from these kinds of sites. So that's like a third strategy that's kind of can work, but it can also end horribly. And so let's talk about what does work in the ethical way to go about it so you don't actually get like shut down. I know that there's with SEO, there's kind of like a right way and a wrong way to do things. And let's start with Google rankings because 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. And I read that the first page of Google receives 95% of web traffic. What are some SEO tactics for Google rank that will give us some bang for a buck? So PR and SEO work together and they kind of merge. So if you're listening, guys, and you know,

you could look at being even on podcasts, for example, because what happens is that you get a chance to share your brand story. You get access to an audience. You could reach out to you, of course, or socially share your story, which sends social signals to Google, because then Google learns that, well, people are actually socially sharing, you know, this podcast, which means it's a podcast of importance. You also, for example, get maybe a link back because it's normal when you're on a podcast or when you present a podcast, you'll link back to the website. That's one thing that you can do. Audio is still in its very early stages. If video is here, podcast is still early stage when you compare basically, you know, long-form technical blog content, kind of had its heyday. It's still there,

but everything is moving towards video now. Facebook are trying to compete with YouTube. Audio is still kind of at the early enough stage. If you get in, you could do some really interesting stuff with it. So that's one space that people don't truly appreciate the power of podcasting and all it can offer in terms of SEO as well as PR and how they work together. the second thing that we could look at are really making sure that you've crossed your T's and dotted your eyes when it comes to your website's infrastructure. Take your URL. If you're Frank's coffee shop, then plug your Frank's coffee shop into any free SEO analysis or free SEO audit tool and present those list of problems to a developer. It doesn't matter where the

developers from. Find them from India. Find them from the UK. Find them from just present that list of problems and run a before and off the test. Pay to have those problems fixed, run another test, see if you're on page SEO is improved. The process can sometimes be, you know, that simple, really, Harla. You know, businesses are different kinds will come to us. For that process is exactly what happens. You'd find a service provider you'd comfortable with once you run a report and you're like, well, you know, I could try and fix these issues, but I don't know what I don't know. So the point I'm trying to underline there is don't be afraid to hire someone. Hello, young improfitors.

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Yeah, definitely. And also, don't be afraid to, if you're tech savvy enough, I know a lot of my listeners are millennials, like, just learn, read, go on YouTube, search things. It's okay to know not a lot and start from somewhere and just build your expertise. It will make you a better, more skilled, well-run. person because even if you don't have a business, just being able to optimize your personal brand online is so important. If it's not your area and you're not interested, hire someone, but don't be afraid to learn. How about YouTube? I had Josh Fetcher on. I don't know if you've ever heard of him.

He's a very well-known growth hacker. At the end of the show, he predicted that YouTube would be really hot for 2019 and that B2B businesses would flock to YouTube because it's really unsaturated and it's really easy to still rank for competitive keywords. So can you tell us about any tips or hacks you have in relation to YouTube SEO? Yeah, absolutely. Number one, use the primary keyword at the start of the title. So if you're trying to rank for someone who's looking for entrepreneurship advice, you would want to use the keyword entrepreneurship advice or you'd want to think about the semantic search. Semantic search refers to how is it that actually people type in search terms.

The second thing that you should consider is that 93% of all Google searches are long tail, same as YouTube. What that means is that people type in things that are longer than three words. Search is becoming very much more contextual. So you want to consider that with the kind of content that you build. So when you're producing content, think about content islands. So if you're producing content around entrepreneurship, go to Quora, think of the innumerable variations that relate to a singular subject and then really build for one

keyword with lots of variations in mind, keeping the primary keyword at the front of the actual video. That's other consideration. That's awesome. Can you give like a real example with that? Yeah, sure. And this relates to also the next tip. So let's take the example of entrepreneurship. What ranks in Google?

Tutorial videos do really well? Review videos do really well. anything that relates to a visual component of search and how does that apply to business. So you could really, in trying to rank for entrepreneurial keywords on YouTube, you could produce content around how to start a business, how to start your first business, how to start an online business, how to start an offline business, what is business? And look at all of those variations, and I've just thought of a few in my head, as you've just heard, Google it. Find 15 more that are sensible that focus on a very particular component of how to business and create a bunch of videos

that focus around that particular keyword so that you can gain ownership over it. And then there's the other thing. Make sure that your tags, make sure that your descriptions are in place, make sure that you build some level of interlinking structure between videos so that one video can refer to another. That's also really important. Consider building playlists that relate to content curation, that's going to be a big thing probably in 2020, that people are going to start moving more towards just finding playlists based around particular types of content. Have a look at playlists that already exist in your space. See if you can reach out to those playlist owners to see if you can have one of your videos inserted or try and compete with that playlist by building

a better playlist. So there's all of these things that can happen as a consequence of a kind of internal YouTube search. Great advice. I think these are all gems for our listeners. So how about UX experience. So this is user experience for people who are not familiar, all about landing page optimization and getting people to take an action. So, for example, click on your main button on your page. Can you talk about some tips you have for user experience? Yes, yes.

Everybody's lazy, guys. Everyone's like lazy. Doesn't really want to read, doesn't want to listen to anything that's hard. Have big buttons. Have obvious calls to action. what is the problem that you're solving right think about some of those key tenants what is the problem that you're solving is the download now join now click now get this button huge is it so obvious where it is is the contrasts right are you using clear distinction between colors so that the button is so

blindingly obvious that the text is so blindingly obvious build beautiful things there's a lot of templates that are beautiful now. So there's not really a reason to have a site that at least meets a minimum standard. Templates exist in abundance. Done for you, templates do exist in abundance. So I think that there's a lot of core components with making buttons obvious that are important, making sure that the UX experience is, as you scroll through a site on a mobile, is seamless, making sure that everything loads quickly. It's probably the biggest thing that I'd say, actually to be on who see the Hala. Like, your site needs to load quickly.

It doesn't matter how good your UX is if it takes too long to load. You know, 40% of users bounce or rather exit a site after three seconds if it hasn't loaded. That's four in ten people that will just leave. Wow. Or two in five will just leave if it takes more than three seconds to load the page. That sounds like an art. And speaking of art, content creation is more important than ever. So what are your tips for going viral and writing stories that pop?

personal stories are probably of the utmost importance. I have had a lot more success by speaking about things that don't relate to SEO than I ever have by talking about SEO. So I think that being a singular sector specialist, that concept is beginning to blur. People plug into Gary Vaynerchuk because he's an entertainment figure as much as he is a motivational speaker. And to be honest with you, those two things don't even relate to what his business does Vaynerchuk Media. Or rather, he's an example of it. So have that in mind when you start producing your stories. People just want to read.

It's something that at least I'm beginning to call like edutainment, that you need to be educational, but you need to be entertaining. And if you can find some segue with that, then I think that you'll do really well. We're moving into a world where everything is going video or audio. and the large proportion of marketers are untrained, right? They know how to produce content, but they're untrained storytellers. So learn the art of storytelling.

Read the book, get the audio, watch the video, pay for some storytelling training. And I think that that will be a huge differentiator if you just get that little bit of training because everybody else out there's for the large part untrained when it comes to telling stories through their education. It's so true. just don't know how to copyright. They just don't know how to connect with people. And that is such an important skill going forward as everything becomes online and you've got to connect with people virtually. You need to do that through your writing for the most part or your videos or your audio.

But it's all the same thing. It's all telling stories. So give me your pitch as to why SEO is important for the average person, a person who's not necessarily in marketing or in tech. Why is SEO important to think about regardless. Let me ask you, when you want to buy something, where do you run a search? There's probably two places I can tell you that I run a search. When I want to buy something or when I want to find something, find my local cafe. Buy a T-shirt. I will look on Amazon search a lot of the time, but even more so, I'll Google it.

right? Where don't I look when I'm thinking about buying something? I don't search anything on Facebook. I don't search anything on social media. Social media is social and it's huge of course for e-commerce. But actually, I go on to Google search when I'm looking for anything. And I just really want you to think about really is in the name. And that hopefully should demonstrate what's possible with SEO if you start using it as it's meant to be used for your business. Well, this was so interesting. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you? Head to Deepakshukla.com. You will probably find the link that Harlow will attach. But Deepakshutler.com, Pearl Lemon.com, if you're interested in the business aspect,

any of those two places, or wherever you want to find me, among most places. Awesome. Yeah, he's really searchable. We have a Yap Society on Slack, which is basically a community of listeners for our podcast who are, you know, really into the show, really into bettering themselves. Do you have any resources? I know you've written so many e-books. Any resources that we could share with our group? Yeah, definitely. I've got a free 14-day training program that talks about how I built my business up to $20,000 a month. So I can share that link with you guys and go through the three training. It will give you insights into how I got the business to the stages into there.

Thanks, Deepak. This was amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. Oh, hey, I had an amazing time. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on our new Slack channel. Check out our show notes or Young &Proffeting.com for the registration link. And if you're already active on YAP Society, share the wealth and invite your friends.

You can find me on Instagram at Yop with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search my name, Hala. And a huge thank you to the Yap team. Tim, Danny, Christian, Steeb, Stephanie, Nicholas, Ryan, Kayla, Shiv, and Julian. Catch you next time. This is Halla, signing off.