Summary:
Welcome to another great episode of Startup Junkies!
On this episode, hosts Jeff Amerine and Caleb Talley sit down with Farzad Rashidi, the lead innovator at Respona, an all-in-one link-building outreach platform built for B2B, SaaS, and agencies to increase organic traffic from Google. As the former director of marketing at Visme, Farzad helped the company gain over fourteen million users, and since then, he’s been helping other companies achieve similar successes via Respona. Throughout the episode, Caleb, Jeff, and Farzad discuss how Respona is utilized as a promotion tactic and the concept of backlinking.
Show Notes:
(1:01) Introduction to Farzad
(1:21) About Respona
(6:59) The Resilience of Backlinking
(11:10) The Concept of Hyperlinking
(14:07) Link Building
(18:55) Respona’s Customer Journey
(21:57) Respona’s Focus on SEO
(23:30) Making the Choice Not to Raise Venture
(28:31) What’s Next for Respona
(30:43) Respona’s Company Culture
(34:15) Advice to Younger Self
(35:47) Closing Thoughts
Links:
Quotes:
“Instead of us trying to invest cash to pour into advertising to become a household name, let’s start showing up in places where people who are looking for a product or a solution like ours would naturally come and find us.” – Farzad Rashidi, (4:21)
“So now, not only do you have to create a good website with a good foundation that loads fast, you have to have content that people stay on to read and is relevant contextually. You also have to convince other websites to link back to it and talk about it.” – Farzad Rashidi, (9:05)
“We are not in the sales industry…the reason being is the way we structure our companies is entirely inbound. So, what we do is produce lots of educational pieces that are targeted for our industry. So, it touches all bases when it comes to the customer journey.” – Farzad Rashidi, (18:56)
Changing the Search Engine Game with Respona
On this episode, hosts Jeff Amerine and Caleb Talley sit down with Farzad Rashidi, the lead innovator at Respona, an all-in-one link-building outreach platform built for B2B, SaaS, and agencies to increase organic traffic from Google. As the former director of marketing at Visme, Farzad helped the company gain over fourteen million users, and since then, he’s been helping other companies achieve similar successes via Respona. Throughout the episode, Caleb, Jeff, and Farzad discuss how Respona is utilized as a promotion tactic and the concept of backlinking.
The Buildup to Backlinking
Before Google became the king of search engines, there was Yahoo, Bing, AOL, ect. However, the problem with these search engines was their algorithms and how they were prioritizing search laws. The goal of these search engines was to understand what content was the best quality and show that at the top of the search. Therefore, when a keyword was searched, the results were prioritized based on the content of the web pages it was found on.
As a result, these algorithms relied on keyword density and understanding the context of the page’s content. The problem with this approach is that marketers would start stuffing keywords into everything to try and appear more relevant to circumvent the algorithm.
Therefore, Google developed an algorithm called page rank, where searches became reliant on backlinks to determine authority. This makes it much more difficult for spam websites to gain traction, as they must convince authoritative websites in their industry to link back to their content.
“So now, not only do you have to create a good website with a good foundation that loads fast, you have to have content that people stay on to read and is relevant contextually. You also have to convince other websites to link back to it and talk about it.” – Farzad Rashidi, (9:05)
What Is Link Building?
Link building is a broad concept, but to simplify, it’s building relationships with relevant publications in your space and collaborating with them. This can be achieved using a variety of strategies. One of those strategies is being put into practice right now with this podcast episode. Farzad agreed to be a guest on the Startup Junkies podcast in an effort to foster a relationship with Jeff and Caleb, who are seen to be relevant, authoritative sources in their respective field.
This accomplishes two things. It helps Startup Junkie provide an episode and content for its audience. Then Farzad indirectly benefits by having the opportunity to introduce Respona to the audience, as well as having a backlink included in this blog that sends people back to Respona’s website. For this reason, backlinking can act as a form of social proof when your website is backlinked by a reputable source.
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