Bo Bennett On Building SEO Without Big Budgets

HOST: Welcome back to Archieboy Holdings News, Bo. It's great to have you for episode 26. You know, all the way back in our first conversation, you said something that's basically been the thesis of everything we've built since: that "It's not very difficult to publish a book; it's difficult to publish a profitable book." And I keep thinking about how that applies to websites too: it's not very difficult to have a website; it's difficult to have a website that people actually find. And that's exactly what Groops.com is about. So, Bo, tell us about Groops.com. How is this helping people find websites? GUEST: Well, one of the biggest problems with having a website, as you allude to, is the fact that most people can't find it. And the reason is because there are literally, I don't know if there's up to a billion so far, but we're probably close to a billion pages. And that's a lot of pages on the internet. A lot of people looking for things, and the fact is most websites just get buried. So, the idea of groups.com is to increase anyone's odds of getting their pages found by creating very specific SEO landing pages. And that's search engine optimization pages that have the keywords associated with the site. So, when people type in the thing that your website is providing, those words, those phrases, it might not go to your website, but it will go to these landing pages that Groups creates. And then from the landing pages, there are links to jump to your main ways website. So, it's just a way to get people that are searching traffic back to your site. HOST: So it's kind of like casting a wider net across the search landscape, capturing people who are searching for slightly different variations of what you offer, maybe by problem rather than product name? How is that different, though, from just creating lots of similar pages on your own site? Why the separate Groops.com platform? GUEST: Creating a lot of pages on your own website is fine, but it just takes such a long time. And most people don't have that kind of time, energy, and budget. Whereas groups.com, it's all done for you automatically. You just put in a couple of things, fill out a couple of pieces of information, press the button, and about an hour or so later, all of those pages will be created for you. And that's the thing. It It's one of those situations where people can do it on their own, but they never do because it just takes so much time. It's so difficult and such a headache. Whereas this does the whole thing for you and it's it's so simple that that people actually will use it. HOST: So it's the sheer speed and automation that sets it apart creating up to 25 pages per project based on a single description. Now, Google has been pretty aggressive about cracking down on AI content that it classifies as unhelpful or thin. How do you ensure that these pages actually provide value to someone searching, rather than just being flagged as spam? GUEST: And you nailed it with the two criteria. Google penalizes content that's unhelpful or thin. So we make sure the content isn't unhelpful or thin, that it really does provide some useful information and it's it's uh plentiful enough that it doesn't fall under that thin category. HOST: So you're focusing on the quality and depth of the content, ensuring it's not just keyword stuffing, but actually useful to someone landing there. Now, the sites live on groops.com URLs, not on the user's own domain. Does that change how Google treats them in terms of authority, or is the authority of the Groops.com main site part of the benefit? GUEST: It is exactly. It's It's a different domain, a different IP address. When you have all of the content on your same website that has very low authority, then there's no real benefit. But now if you have another website, like groups.com, which for most people will be in a completely different network than their website, then you have that extra authority that's going to give your pages a boost. HOST: So you're leveraging the existing domain authority of Groops.com to give those pages a head start, rather than having a new site starting from zero. Who is this really designed for? The site mentions book authors, local service providers, YouTubers... up until now, your focus has been pretty exclusively on authors. Is Groops the first truly non-author tool in the portfolio? GUEST: Oh no, we have a lot of non-author tools in the portfolio already. But I guess technically Groups might have been one of the first ones because we started this actually a while ago, but it was a rebuild recently in order to be more compliant with Google's terms and just to get better SEO. So those changes were fairly recent. And in fairness to your assumption, for a point in time, groups.com was exclusively for authors. But then there was really no reason for that. So we just opened it up and made it made it more generic for any businesses because anybody, any website could could really benefit from this. HOST: Ah, so it was an evolution, originally built for authors and then opened up to everyone. When you think about somebody using the whole stack you've built through Archieboy Holdings—writing, editing, covers, promotion, and now Groops—where does Groops fit on that timeline? Is it a Day Zero tool, something you start with immediately, or does it compound over time like some of the other promotion tools? GUEST: Well, you could start it immediately, but it does take time for it to actually ramp up and become useful. The the whole process of Googling uh and Google going through and searching and cataloging all these different websites takes time. And we've been finding that anywhere between a two and 90 and 120 day window is when the users really start to see traffic coming in and the benefit. From these pages. HOST: So there's a realistic lead time to see results, that 90 to 120-day window for indices to catch on. Before we go—for listeners who want to follow up on what we covered, where can they find you and the work you're doing? GUEST: Artuboy.com is our main website with all of our domains and all of our websites that we create. And specifically for this website, we're talking about groups.com and that's spelled g r o o p s.com. HOST: Bo, this has been a great look at what SEO looks like when you're not writing million-dollar ad checks. It was fascinating to hear about how you evolved Groops from an author-only tool to one that anyone can use. Let's get you back on soon—there's plenty more we can cover once Groops has been running long enough to show real ranking data. And thank you for spending part of your day with us. Until next time—that's a wrap.