Brian Dean did something that less than 0.01% of us will ever achieve. He built his site to a staggering DR 90 on Ahrefs, almost entirely on his own. This week, Gael sits down with the internationally recognized SEO expert to uncover his exact methods to success. 

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More About Brian
Main Site
https://explodingtopics.com/
Socials
https://www.youtube.com/@BrianDean/
https://twitter.com/BrianEDean?s=20

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Time Stamps:
00:00 Intro
02:14 Semrush & The Sale of Backlinko 
06:30 The Three “Phases” of Backlinko
10:11 Comment Section on Sites
11:50 The Structure of Exploding Topics
13:54 Content Planning & SEO
20:28 Tips from Brian Dean
24:47 Topical Authority
30:50 Stats Pages
35:24 Internal Linking
42:08 Content Structuring
47:17 AI and Google SGE
56:41 EEAT
01:02:00 Final Words of Wisdom
01:04:37 Closing

Well, that's not at this ridiculously high standard.

Brandon did something that probably less than 0.01% of you will ever achieve.

He built his site to a staggering DR 90 on Ahrefs.

And look, I'm not saying this to insult you, but just to give you an idea, here are some of the brands that Backlinko.com has more authority than.

Lenovo.com, The Spruce.com, NBA.com, and the Sun.co.uk, a national newspaper.

And the crazy part is he did this mostly alone, while the brands I just mentioned usually have decades of existence, hundreds, sometimes thousands of employees, and niches much wider that make it much easier to acquire links than the marketing niche.

And last year, he sold Backlinko.com for an undisclosed 7-figure amount.

But his new project is skyrocketing in the subs even faster than Backlinko did.

Exploding topics went from 1, 200 organic visitors estimated by Ahrefs at the beginning of 2021 to over

So that leaves us with the question I was asking myself all the time while preparing this interview.

And that's what I set myself to discover during this 1 hour interview I had with him today.

And as you will see, I had to challenge him a little bit sometimes to get the answer I wanted.

Among other things, I wanted to figure out the exact process that he uses to create content because his hit rate is very, very high.

I also wanted to know how he builds links in 2023, and I wanted to poke him a little bit and ask him some cheeky questions like, what kind of tactics did he recommend at the time of Backlinko that he would not recommend you follow today?

I also got him to talk about topics that we really never heard him talk about like the future of Google with SGE or EEAT.

Overall there are a lot of subtle things that he shares in this interview that made me want to change the way we create content.

So let's jump into the interview but before we do don't forget to like, subscribe and click the bell.

We're putting a lot of effort into YouTube these days and the 1 thing that keeps me going is your comments and subscriptions so go crazy.

And while you're in the comment section let me know who you'd like to see next in the podcast.

Hey everyone welcome to the Arturia Hacker Podcast.

Today we have the only 1, the legend, Brian Dean.

We've actually only met once in real life, so I think it's going to be an interesting talk.

And I know everyone is interested to hear your takes on SEO and all of that.

So I think it's going to be an interesting thing.

But for people who don't know you, how would you introduce yourself in 2 sentences?

Founder of Backlinko, co-founder of Exploding Topics.

I think everyone's seen Backlinko anyway.

And talking about Backlinko, that's where I wanted to start the interview, actually.

So it's been 1 and a half year to SEMrush.

And according to Ahrefs, following the sale, the traffic started declining a little bit until last April when it just went back basically.

And I know you're still working with SEMrush.

So I wanted to know, like a lot of pages have been updated, et cetera.

Did you actually, did you do the SEO and did you recover the site basically?

I can't take responsibility for the turnaround.

I wish I could and say, it was me, but it really had nothing to do with me whatsoever.

It was just a matter of, you know, when they bought the site, figuring out the next best steps, what to do with the site and how to get the most out of it from their perspective.

And I think, you know, once they made a decision, then they put that into place.

Pages getting updated, new content being published, and sort of maintenance things that help obviously make a big difference when it comes to organic traffic.

I wanted to know because obviously, when you make this kind of exit, you tend to work with the companies for a certain time and quite often...

I do work with that, but not really much on Backlinko.

Because given the probably pretty high price they've paid for it, I just don't see the return in its current form.

So I'm just curious to see if you can tell anything about this.

I just know for the most part, it's a traffic play to get people to come to the site and rank and control a property that ranks for a lot of keywords that Semrush wants to rank for already does rank for.

So then you can have multiple spots on the first page, How you go from that to getting people to sign up for SEMrush, I think that's something...

I think they'll be able to figure it out with like subtle messages, retargeting, because they can put a pixel on there, building the email list.

I mean, they already optimized the email.

They already used the email list to get people to their SEMrush Academy.

They use that very effectively since they bought the list.

Getting people from the list to sign up for free courses, they get exposed to SEMrush and they sign up.

So I'm not super involved with Beclinko, so I'm probably not the best person to ask what's going on and what they're trying to do with it.

I'm sure you keep an eye on it a little bit.

You know when we sell sites, it's like, oh, it's like how the project in Ahrefs or something, how it's going, et cetera, and how the new owners are going.

And then you just look at it and they're a bit different, but still the same.

But like, do you feel like it was a smart play by ACM Rush?

Like how do you feel now, a year and a half later, like about you and about ICM Rush basically?

I think it was a smart move on their part from, because you have to understand for us, this is like a lot of money, but they're a publicly traded company.

For them it's like a round, I wouldn't say it's a rounding error, but it's not much.

So for them to be able to get an ROI on that, I think they can do it.

Because look at it from their perspective, they could rent, try to rank for backlinks on page SEO, keyword research, link building, how much will that cost and how in the meantime, you're not getting that traffic.

If it does even work versus like that, you get all those rankings.

not as valuable like you're, you mentioned, which is a good point.

It's not directly to SEMrush, that traffic aren't going directly there.

So you have this sort of intermediary you've got to get there, but that can actually be an advantage because you can use it almost like a review site that you own and control.

And for like best SEO tools, SEMrush is number 1, best keyword research tools, SEMrush is number 1.

And it's easier to rank a third party independent site than their own.

So if they haven't already got their money's worth, I think they will in the future.

I think the link equity is quite powerful because 1 thing that you achieve with Backlinko, which I think 99% of people building websites will never achieve, is reaching a very high level of authority.

We use the Ahrefs metrics, DR90, a little message to SEOmerge by the way on the way, they should probably include the authority metrics in their keyword magic tool because that would help me actually use their numbers a bit more often.

I mean, I think I followed you since the days you were on Wickedfire, which was a forum for people who joined in a little bit later.

It was kind of grayish at SEO, but there was a bit of everything.

And a lot of people who did well actually were there.

Like Kevin Espiritu from Epic Gardening was also a very big member on Wickedfire.

And now he's just tweeted he's gonna make 30 million in sales this year on his website.

But like, yeah, you started all this way.

And I feel like there were 3 phases in Backlinko.

Like I've kind of like divided it like in Backlinkology, I've put 3 time periods in how you run it.

I put the first period, which was like the blogger, which was when you started alone, and you were releasing kind of like these big guys, and they were kind of like a mini event, and you tried to make a mini launch every time you launched a blog post, and your focus was very much on growing your email list with content upgrades, I would say.

V2 was like, I think when you established an editorial team and you had some help, so you started having some graphic designers, editors, et cetera, and building a process still around you.

I think at that time when you did an interview, you were like, I still write everything on Backlinko.

And very much still focusing on the same format, so large guys, et cetera.

And I feel like the third phase, which is the last phase before you sold, you kind of like abandoned blogging and you became a utility site.

And you were just releasing these content hubs, like SEO hub, content hub, that there was the YouTube hub as well, you have a few of them, et cetera.

And you kind of like became almost like a bit of a wiki and your top pages started being these pages.

Is that how it went or did I forget some steps in the process?

Well, you just made it sound a lot easier than it was.

of hard work through those 3 phases, I can tell you that.

I want to talk about how it happened and how you transitioned between each phase, basically, because I think that's the interesting part on how the industry evolved and how you adapted to it actually.

Gail, a big part of these changes was reacting to industry changes and just user behavior changes over time.

Like when I first launched back in 2013, blogging was still a big thing.

Like you followed blogs, there were blog roles, you would have pingbacks.

It was a really different time where you would follow these individual bloggers and when they publish a post, you get it on your RSS feed reader and go to their site.

Those communities, those conversations moved to Reddit, to Twitter, to YouTube, to other platforms.

And it wasn't so much this blog was this mini universe.

And that's 1 of the reasons that I switched to this hub model, because I realized that the goal is really just to get organic traffic to your site.

And there are a certain number of people who will follow every post that you publish and be like, Oh, there's a new post coming out.

I need to read it and comment right away.

And I realized why am I putting all my effort into these mega guides that are getting low and lower demissioning returns when I could put it into 20 pages in a hub and get 10 times the amount of traffic over the long term.

I think 1 thing that we could notice this on was the comment section.

I think we started like 2 or 3 years after you, something like this, we were a little bit behind you.

But when you published a blog post, you'd get hundreds of comments using 48 hours or something.

And you made a point to reply to everyone.

So congratulations to you because it was a lot of work.

But like eventually that kind of like tarnished, I felt, like it's like for us to the point where I even completely removed the comment section on our sites because it felt like there was, you know, like most people would comment because they tried to get a link back, even if it's an awful link, of the WordPress comment system.

And the value of the debate was, I felt low of what was left over, basically.

And 1 thing is like, we all saw that, yeah, oh my God, the comments matter so much for SEO, it helps you, et cetera.

No change when we remove the comments personally.

So it's like, is that something that you've also given up?

Like kind of like you just see on your site?

Cause I feel like social media is a better place for it.

And with exploring topics, when we started that blog, my first rule of thumb was to have no comments.

There's so much spam and then yeah, like WordPress has some built in spam.

Things, but it's just so much for every 1 good comment there's 10 spam comments and then there's like 10 kind of like you said those people that want their nofollow link this it's not Technically spam, but it kind of might as well be so yeah for me Like if I was just I started another blog from scratch and I have no comments and I think I would I would do that Again, if I was starting a different blog, I would also do no comments.

1 thing that surprised me though is the way you structured Exploding Topic.

You kind of moved over with Backlinko and you came back with Exploding Topic to a blog system.

Well, I mean, there isn't really a hub of like, you know, a topic we've really gone into that's like, oh, this would be perfect for a hub because For a hub to work, it needs to be a pretty meaty topic.

Like you mentioned, Akiel, we have the SEO hub, the YouTube hub, the content marketing.

These seem to be gigantic topics in order to justify having 30, 40, or 50 entries into the hub.

Well, Explore My topics haven't really discovered that big high level topic that would require a hub.

So in the meantime, we're just doing the blog.

It's just for that, like if you're in fitness, you need like a bodybuilding hub, a protein hub, you know, cardio hub.

They had to be huge topics and just haven't really come off cross 1 of those.

But like the thing is like, most of your content on Exploding Topic is like trends and statistics, et cetera, and like couldn't you categorize them, for example, so your blog hub, like your blog page almost would be like, oh, like here's the tech, the tech trends, here's the fitness trends, here's the whatever, et cetera.

And then you could essentially build hubs around what these pages are about, basically.

But the challenge there is that they're kind of about different things.

So you have like fitness trends and business trends.

They're both about trends, but they're totally different.

And now it's like, you need to categorize it.

It's just something that I haven't been able to like, I haven't found a topic that's perfect for a hub.

We even have a templates library, which turned that to a hub and that brings in a ton of traffic.

That's been a goldmine for traffic for Backlinko.

But I was just interested to see how you moved over from blogs on Backlinko and you kind of came back to it when you were exploring topics.

I think that was an interesting thing to look at.

1 thing I wanted to talk about as well is how you put your content together.

I think a lot of people are interested in your SEO tactics, But I think your SEO would never do that well if the content was not so well put together.

And I think it's a bit more difficult to talk into specifics about that.

But I think 1 thing that characterizes content written by you, and quite often I can open a page and tell that you worked on it, even though I don't see the author name or who owns the website, is there's a ratio of words and sentence lengths to number of images, for example, that you have.

Like the number of images you have on content is very high compared to most people.

Your paragraphs are very short and they kind of like jump from 1 to another and they read like a bit like a Buzzfeed story.

And also I think your content width is also very narrow usually with a large font size.

Is there anything else on like how you put your pages together that makes them more engaging, that would help people, you know, essentially drive more engagement without changing anything to their content?

So 1 is that like, yeah, you use a lot of images, but the images should tell a story and help someone move down the page So with the way I looked at images was for tutorial stuff how to do something Which is most of the content I backlink Oh could this exist without the text?

If you could just see the images and follow along, maybe not perfectly, because that's what the text is for, but you have an idea of what to do or what I'm talking about, then the image does its job.

Like it's not just an image, like it should be a tight screenshot of that section with the important part highlighted with arrows and examples.

That's really the main thing with images.

Now with non-how-to stuff like explaining something that's where visuals come into play.

But it's sort of the same idea that people are visual creatures and the text is obviously the main part of your content.

But images should play like as important a role as a text to sell.

Do you like still write all the content yourself?

Or like how do you teach people to write like that?

Because it's personally, I'll tell you, you know, editorial team is very difficult to get people to do that.

Like freelance writers, they like to write a lot of content.

How do you get someone from Upwork, which you mentioned you hire a lot of writers for, to write like that?

For exploring topics, it's the different style.

Like it's more B2B and there's no how to stuff.

There's still a little bit of like that concise message.

There's definitely, oh, that stuff's universal.

Like even if you go to the McKinsey blog, for example, McKinsey has some of the best B2B blog content online.

And if you look at their stuff, they use the same things, big margins.

So the, the text is smushed within the small area, short sentences, big font, easy to read, serif font that, and a lot of images like they fall the same rules as backlinko, a totally different style.

Like the the approach that works, I try to do that for everything that I contribute to but the writing style like the hey, here's the deal, you know, for example, like you shouldn't be doing that unless that's really like, no.

No, it's more like the conciseness, et cetera.

It's like, how do you get your writers to basically say the same thing in half the words?

And do you have some kind of editorial process that you go through?

Like, how do you go and probably transform what you get that's not perfect to what ends up on the site, basically.

A lot of comments on Google Docs, honestly.

So I will go through personally when we take on a new writer and the main thing I'm looking for, Gael, you point out exactly, is same message, fewer words.

Sometimes I will just change sentences and just put same message, fewer words.

And I'd say that's when I edit, my editing is mainly focused on reducing the words with while retaining the same message.

Everything else, like there's some things about clarity, word usage when you edit, but for the most part for me, it's trying to condense that message into as few words as possible and as few sentences as possible.

And you're right, It's actually the opposite of how most freelance writers approach it.

So you have this internal conflict that's like, and sometimes it just doesn't work out.

So that's why when I hire writer, I usually have a test project and I send them our guidelines, which are very simple.

And it's basically like really concise writing, blah, blah, blah.

And if they're on the right track, then I'll work with them.

If it's totally off and they're just using like wacky examples, like, you know, when you're doing marketing, it's kind of like being a heart surgeon.

You have to be care like when you do it, that's what I thought.

But for the most part, if you've done your screening questions and seeing their writing style, but you're right, there's always this eternal conflict between me trying to get down to the media stuff and them trying to fluff up a bit.

I say that's, that's, what's interesting because like, that's how your content like kind of like distinguishes itself from like the average piece of SEO content that would come out.

And what's interesting when you think about that is, and the question that comes from that is, do you use any kind of on-page tool like Surface SEO or something like this?

I was going to say, because essentially this also conflicts with the writing style you have.

You probably use it and ask you to put all these words and then you're like, no, I want it more concise and I want to do all of that.

I mean, when I hire, like for writers now, I don't even mention SEO to them.

Don't mention keyword placement, surfer SEO, H2.

It's just create the best piece of content on that topic and publish it.

The only on-page SEO is put the keyword in the title, in the URL, and a couple of times in the content, which 99% of the time happens automatically.

So I don't even do on-page SEO basically anymore.

And how about checking your competitors for like essentially like what's on the page, like making sure there's no information gap, et cetera.

Or you just go like, you know what, I'll do the page

Okay, so it goes against everything most people say, but I think that's interesting because obviously, people can go check exploring topics you're doing really well.

So it's like, obviously that's proved that this approach works.

And I think that's nice because it's like, it feels fresh when you read the content as opposed to like a lot of like rehashed stuff that you might find on the serves.

Which it's kind of like something that's rarely talked about how the way you put content together, but I think that's probably 1 of the most important traits of why you're doing well.

It's just a bit more difficult to talk about it.

Talking about backlink, I have a bit of a trick question.

What kind of tips that you gave to people across the years you ran it, would you say they probably shouldn't follow anymore?

Yeah, I think a lot of on-page SEO stuff that was really important back then is less important now that I would basically say, I mean, this stuff probably on-page SEO is 1 of those things where unless you're doing like shady stuff or crazy stuff, it can't hurt you probably.

Like I rather just have my writer focus on creating the best stuff as opposed to worrying about on-page SEO and being like, I need to put this in there, cover this and content gaps and all that stuff.

So yeah, I would say a lot of on-page SEO stuff probably is a bit outdated that I had at the time because it was important then maybe not as

We're talking about 10 years, which in SEO terms is like a century.

So when I first started, if you didn't do all this stuff, you had, you would struggle to rank.

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