314: SEO and Organic Traffic with Farzad Rashidi of Respona

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: Jeff Amerine Caleb Talley Davis McEntire Farzad Rashidi Respona   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)