SEO Q&A Week

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. I'm Michael and I'm joined by Arthur for another episode. How are you going? I'm doing very well. How are you? I feel that you should just, we could cut and paste your little response there and just insert it each week and save a couple of seconds because it's always exactly the same.

ARTHUR: Well, I'm telling you the truth. What do you want me to say?

MICHAEL: Ah, you know what? The one time that you didn't do that, you said you were very depressed. It was when the lockdown first happened. So yeah.

ARTHUR: No, look, I'm doing good. Still in lockdown, obviously, but you know, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Um, things are going well, so I can't really complain.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Is the light at the end of the tunnel, the fact that we're talking about SEO questions and answers this week, or is it about the fact that the world's opening up? Because I'm not sure what's better. A bit of both really. Yeah. I think we definitely know what's better. It's the SEO questions and answers, right? Because that's what we're doing this week. You know, we've, we've had a few questions come in. Um, you know, if you head to our website at the SEO show.co.co. You can fill out the contact form there if you happen to have a question. And depending on how well this episode turns out, we might do this every so often. But what we've done is pull together a few of the ones that we like the look of from people getting in touch with us through that contact form. We're going to run through them today and give our thoughts. So with that being said, let's just jump into it and see how this turns out. So Alex asked us, how much does SEO cost? And that's it. That's a, that's a great question. It's a great question. Not a lot of context there, so it's going to be relatively tough to answer, but what would, what would you say to someone that just asks how much does SEO cost?

ARTHUR: Look, it's a very, very common question. It's, you know, anyone that's looking to do SEO is going to ask that question. And I guess, you know, the answer is how long is a piece of string? Like it depends very much on, you know, different variables. So where, What niche the website's in, starting first and foremost, how competitive it is. So seeing, making sure and looking into the competition and seeing where they're at, you know, there's a bunch of questions you need to ask them basically before you can answer that.

MICHAEL: I think a big one would be like, are you just servicing Camden, for example, or are you servicing all of Sydney or all of New South Wales or Australia or the world? Yeah, so it's sort of, I guess there's different schools of SEO services out there, like some of them will just charge fixed packages and just shoehorn you into one of them. Yeah. Then others will look at all of the above, plus your goals and what are you selling? Is it expensive and competitive and are the leads valuable? Because if so, there's going to be more competitors, which means you probably need to spend more to get results. If you're doing something super niche, then obviously you probably won't need to invest as much. Yeah, exactly. It really is. There's a lot that goes into it. It does need to be, in my opinion, it needs to be bespoke and customized to you and your unique circumstances.

ARTHUR: Yeah, most definitely. It depends if you have a large e-commerce site. So, if you've got 500 pages of products that you want to rank or do you have a small website with five pages? It's going to depend a lot

MICHAEL: And how much, like, do you need? Is it purely a content play? Is there a lot of link building that needs to be done? You know, what is the actual SEO strategy that's going to be used? So I know that's probably an annoying answer because it's not an answer. So let's just say, you know, on average, what would, you know, when we're working with clients every week and month, on average, what are they spending?

ARTHUR: So actually around the numbers and how to look. So on average, SEO client retainer is about two and a half thousand dollars. Um, so that, that is a good estimate. I think, you know, if you're wanting to do SEO, you should expect to spend or be prepared to spend around $2,000 as a, as a bare minimum. But I guess on the flip side, we have e-commerce clients that spend well upwards of $10,000 a month or even more. So I guess the bare minimum would be around a $2,000 mark to get a good SEO service. That's going to get your results.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Because that's the thing, like once you start going cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and thinking of it like a commodity, you are going to get what you pay for, which will be a service that's doing nothing on your site or bad dodgy links or the SEO person you're dealing with has 150 clients and you know, you're just one in many, you know, they're just trying to tread water and deal with whatever fires happen to pop up that day. So that is sort of what happens when you go cheaper. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it does out of all the channels, it's probably the one that you would invest the most in, you know, I guess in terms of what you spend with the agency, like let's say with Google ads, you might spend 20 grand a month on the Google clicks, but only a grand on the agency service. Whereas with SEO, you could be paying 5, 6, 7, 12 grand a month on it. So. That is a very long way of saying it depends as an answer.

ARTHUR: I think, you know, like most things in life, you should do your research, speak to a couple of different agencies and you should get a ballpark figure. You know, they should all be giving you a similar quote. Anyone that's, you know, low balling and saying that they'll do it for 400, $500 probably avoid. Um, and again, on the flip side, if you're getting really ridiculous quotes as well, you know, probably avoid that as well.

MICHAEL: Cool. Cool. And go into it with your eyes open, like compare apples with apples and try and understand what are you actually getting for that spend with each option. Exactly. All right. Well, Craig asked us, I thought this was a good one. How can e-commerce sites avoid thin content penalties? Which is a bit of a bane of the e-commerce existence. You know, by very nature of what they do, e-commerce sites, there can be thousands of different pages on a site. And if they're looking too similar in the eyes of Google, it can lead to, you know, at best, no traffic into those pages and at worst a penalty, you know, your whole site suffering because of thin content. So I guess to explain what thin content is. Google doesn't want to see sites with hundreds or thousands of pages that effectively look exactly the same in terms of the text, the content on them. E-commerce sites often have this. So how can you avoid that happening? So Arthur, how can people avoid that happening?

ARTHUR: There's multiple ways you can avoid it happening. I was going to reference eBay. So back in the day, eBay got hit for a thin content penalty. 2015 or 2016, back when we were working, I think a bit before that. Yeah. So they had a lot of duplicate pages. So they were just generating pages with very similar content and products and Google caught onto it and basically de-indexed all those pages. So they saw a massive drop in traffic.

MICHAEL: Um, and they would have like, so basically they did it based on the searches on, on the site. Like if someone searched like black shoes, size 13, it would create a page for that. Exactly. Yeah. And if someone else searched black shoes, size 12, you'd create a page for that. And the page would look exactly the same, like lots of the same products and the H1 tag change and not much else.

ARTHUR: No content, millions and millions of pages, which were very, very similar.

MICHAEL: Which actually worked amazingly well for a long time for them until it didn't.

ARTHUR: Exactly. But to answer your question, how can you avoid it? Canonical tags are a good way to avoid it. So if you have, I guess, product pages, which are split across different categories, which are exactly the same, using a canonical tag to reference the original page. So when Google sees all these duplicate pages, it ignores them and just puts all the SEO value to that one page. Another way to get around it would be to remove any filtered result pages from the search results. So we find that this actually happens a fair bit. people will search for something and the page that it generates will be indexed. And you might find, you know, dozens and dozens of pages, search index pages, hundreds of pages sometimes clogging up the search results.

MICHAEL: So when you, when you say filter, that's like on an Ecom site, like the, the, the filtered navigation on the left-hand side where you could filter shoe sizes and colors and, and brands and all the different combinations of them can very quickly create a ton of pages on your site.

ARTHUR: Exactly. Yeah. So removing those and making sure they don't get indexed before basically being proactive and making sure they don't get indexed because once they do, it can be a pain in the ass to get them all removed.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. So you want that, you don't want to remove the feature because it's good for the users. It's just setting your site up so that Google, you know, you would have a no index tag on those pages so that Google sees them, but it doesn't index them. Exactly. Or using canonical tags on, on the bat.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And you can also use Google's parameter tool. So you can find the parameters that it uses to create those pages. And basically Google will ignore them and won't index them.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Cool. Look, another one would be if you have like, you wouldn't be able to do this for all of these pages that you have on an e-commerce site, but creating custom content for things like your category pages and subcategory pages. just to make them unique would be useful. And you really want to, in an ideal world, do it for as many of them as possible. So it does depend on how big your site is, of course, but like with anything in SEO, the more unique content you can get into a page generally, the better it's going to be.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So the way I remember we used to do it for a bigger client, David Jones, was they had a priority list of products that generated the most revenue and they were the priority pages. So they were preference of every other page and had, you know, more attention spent on content to make sure that they rank. And then as it filtered down there, because you can imagine a site like David Jones having thousands and thousands of products. It's, you know, it's not feasible to write unique content every time a new product comes out.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And that's a pretty good point to make about SEO campaigns in general. You know, you, you want to focus on low hanging fruit and the wind, you know, where the winds are going to come from. Pages that are generating revenue start there. Don't go writing for every page on your site that may not even get traffic. You know, look in analytics, see how much traffic's going to the pages, see how many leads or how many conversions, you know, e-commerce sales are being generated by the pages and prioritize that way. Like a lot of people with SEO campaigns don't necessarily always do that. And that's just a good thing to keep in the back of your mind with SEO campaigns. Another one I like, and Amazon's a really good example of this, is having user-generated content like reviews or questions and answers built right into the product pages. Obviously it's going to probably need a site to have a decent level of traffic to get that, but anything that you can do to encourage people publishing stuff to the pages is good because that's going to be unique content It's going to be naturally filled with all sorts of keywords and related keywords for those products and categories that it wouldn't have had otherwise. So encouraging reviews, encouraging questions and answers straight into your pages can be a good answer or solution for some types of e-commerce sites. And the last little point we had on this is, like with everything in SEO, boosting the strength of your domain with links. is always a good thing to do for all sorts of different reasons. In this case, the stronger a domain is, the less likely it's going to have a thin content penalty. That's why sites like, you know, the Amazons of the world or eBay previously were able to spin up all these pages and get a ton of traffic and rankings on the back of it because their domain is so strong. So you always want to have that undercurrent of link building going on, boosting the strength of your domain because it helps with rankings, it helps with Things like thin content penalties. That was about all we had for that one. Moving on. We've got your favorite question here, Arthur. Yeah, from Khan. You liked this one before we started, didn't you? I loved it.

ARTHUR: So, Khan has asked, how important is Schema for localized optimization? How important is it?

MICHAEL: You tell me. I think it's important. You know, Schema is just… extra code that you can add to your site and it helps search engines better understand it. So with Schema, you can add in, you know, business types. So you could go in and put local business schema and you can specifically tell like if you're a lawyer, even you can go down to the lawyer level and say, you know, I'm a local business, I'm a lawyer, here's where I'm located, here's the hours we're open, here are our social media profile links, All that sort of stuff you can put in, you know, here's our review rating from Google, my business, you know, five stars from 50 reviews. You can put all of that stuff into code, put it on your site. Then Google comes along and reads it all and goes, oh, well, thanks for telling me all of that. You've done it in a way that I understand. I'm going to use that to understand your business and show it in the search results, you know, so. If people are searching for a lawyer, I know that you're a lawyer and I know that you're nearby because I know your address and I will show your social profiles in the in straight in the search results as a result. So I think it's important, you know, it's pretty easy to do as well. So it's just a tool in the arsenal that's there. So why not do it?

ARTHUR: Exactly right. And it's also super, super important to have a optimized Google My Business profile as well and make, making sure that all the information across your website, your schema, um, your profile all matches up. Yep.

MICHAEL: So, um, it's there. It's easy to do. It doesn't take long. So definitely do it. So we were being a little bit facetious, you know, in that, that question that it was Arthur's favorite because you know, skim is quick and easy, but you know what, this was your real favorite. This next one, wasn't it? Simon's question.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's a, it's a good one, isn't it? So Simon has asked which parts of SEO are expensive and why are people spending thousands of dollars per month?

INTRO: Yeah.

ARTHUR: So probably one of my favorite questions, really. So there's, I guess, two ways to answer it. So I want to say the most expensive part of SEO would be link building. So the largest cost that we incur as an agency would be link building. Would you agree?

MICHAEL: Yep. You know, we've got the team to run, we've got publishing fees in some cases, we've got content creation costs, infographic costs, software tools, all sorts of stuff that goes into acquiring links.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It all adds up. Yeah. And I think, I think that's something a lot of people don't realize that there is a lot of time and effort and cost involved in getting one backlink.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You sort of, I see it a lot with the client perspective is, you know, let's say a thousand dollars for example. They're spending a thousand bucks and they think that thousand dollars is going straight in the pocket of the SEO person. Exactly. If that SEO person cares about results and is doing the right thing, and that's a big if, you know, it depends on who you're working with, but some of that spend is going to be going straight into getting those results for you. So it's not like it's just going in their pocket. There are costs involved in delivering an SEO service properly.

INTRO: Exactly.

MICHAEL: Content creation as well as another one, you know, content writers. depending on the volume of words being churned out, there's quite a lot of expense that goes into that.

ARTHUR: Exactly. So that was the first part of the answer. But the second part is my favorite part of the answer. Okay. So I guess like with most industries, you're paying for the SEOs time first and foremost and experience. Yeah. Absolutely.

INTRO: Yeah.

ARTHUR: So you can outsource your SEO. You can find someone, a junior that maybe has one or two years experience. You can find someone overseas and you'll probably pay a lot less than working with a local agency with experienced SEOs. But it just comes down to like most things in life, you get what you pay for. Um, and I like to use the analogy of mechanics, which I've used in previous episodes, because I think, I think.

MICHAEL: You do like this one. You love this one.

ARTHUR: And it applies to most trades, you know, plumbing, electricians, most, most trades, you know, you I'll use the mechanic example. So if you were to get your timing chain changed in your car. You'll probably spend about $1,500, right? And to get it, you'll take it to the mechanic. They'll quote you $1,500. You have a look at the part list and you'll find that the actual chain probably cost you $350, $400 max. And you've got to ask yourself, well, where's the extra money? Well, the extra money goes to the mechanic, the guy that spent, you know, six, seven hours tearing your engine apart. You know, the expertise, the years of experience he has and knowing what he's doing and the peace of mind you get knowing that he's done a good job. So I guess that kind of, I guess what I'm trying to say is it's very similar to SEO, you know, links are just one part of SEO, but you're really paying for the expertise of the SEO, the experience they have, you know, they've worked.

MICHAEL: Even their location, like, you know, you mentioned overseas before, that could be good for some companies, but other companies want to have someone locally to talk to. And then a local team for the agency costs more than an overseas team would cost. So yeah, I guess it sort of comes back to what you want out of the relationship and The things that are important to you, your goals with your campaign and the like. Like for example, you know, you mentioned before, we're looking at recruiting a developer at the moment to work on SEO campaigns. Hiring a developer is expensive. Those costs sort of go into what the clients invest each month. Exactly. You know, us controlling a developer under our own roof is probably going to be a better experience for clients than working with developer themselves overseas directly where you might not even know the terminology or how to engage with them or working with an agency that just outsources it to some random overseas and the reliability and all that that goes with that. So that's essentially why SEO can be expensive. It's the cost of the goods or the things that go into the service and then the team's expertise and their quality. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Like I mentioned earlier, you know, you get what you pay for. So I'd be, I'd be reluctant to work with someone that's going to promise you the world for $500 a month, because they're either doing something really dodgy that will harm your website long-term or a flat out, just lying to you and taking your money. So.

MICHAEL: I've actually, I read a story the other day. So this is, I'm going to see your mechanic example and raise you with a new example here. It's a little bit gruesome though, so I don't know how much we'll use it. But I read a story about a man who's in court at the moment because he was running from his tattoo studio, like a tattoo and body piercing studio. He was also doing like liposuction for people. He's not a doctor. He has no training. Like black market lipo? Black market lipo. He charged this woman $800 to do lipo on her. And then she went home like really sort of unwell. He gave her some Nurofen and said on her way. And she, you know, was very, very, very ill from it. And I guess the, I guess the comparison there is, you know, paying 800 bucks to get lipo suction done, you're getting what you pay for a dodgy backyard operator with no medical qualifications whatsoever. Yeah. There's reasons why LiPo costs many thousands of dollars. And it's much the same with any service, really. That's a good analogy. Yeah. Definitely. The story I read was much more gruesome. I've gone with the PG version of it, but yeah.

ARTHUR: I think the point is that you can apply that logic to any anywhere in life really, any, any kind of trade, any skill, anything. So why not apply to SEO?

MICHAEL: Yep. And at the end of the day, um, I always like to say like it, it's not an expense, it's an investment. So really whatever you're investing in it, it should be returning many times in the future and you need to be confident in the plan that's getting you there. If you are, then you want to be spending as much as possible because that returns so great. So yeah, That is a pretty good answer to that question, I reckon. So let's move on to what, Tosha or Tosha? Sorry. I think it's Tosha. Tosha. So Tosha's asked, should I be using transcripts for my podcast? And you know what? We'll let you know in six months because we've only started this podcast ourselves. And, um, we're putting, we're putting transcripts. Um, it makes sense that transcripts work from an SEO point of view for your podcast.

ARTHUR: In theory, they should work. It's long, long format content. I was doing some research. So a 30 minute episode can be upwards of 6,000 words. So it's a lot of copy for Google to crawl and index. And yeah, there's a lot of natural language in there. For example, we're, we're asking and sorry, answering a lot of questions. So, you know, this sort of content will be great.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So what we do with our show is, um, we use a AI. We don't sit there and write out every word after listening to it. Can you imagine how painful that would be?

ARTHUR: I thought you did.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I have to burn the midnight oil getting the transcript done after each episode. Is it good? Is it reliable? It is okay. Like the spiel on the tool is like, you know, our artificial intelligence learns how you talk and it starts to understand things. But pretty much every week, like when we say the word SEO, it will be putting like TGA and SCD and like, it always gets it wrong and I always have to change it. It doesn't seem to learn. So, I don't know whether that's our Aussie accents because it seems to struggle sometimes when we talk quickly or, you know, mumble a bit. But it gets about, I would say, 60% of the job done. So, then I go in and change a bit and then I sort of sometimes get bored and I just go, you know what, close enough is good enough.

ARTHUR: 60% is high. I thought it would have been longer than that.

MICHAEL: No, no, it gets a lot. But there's just some really weird, totally incorrect things in there, like all the way through it. So be that as it may, you know, we will put the transcript up in our podcast, like on the podcast host. Then we also put it up on the website in the show notes for each episode. It stands to reason that Google will come along, read all of that. And over time, it's just a ever increasing library of content on the site. That's unique to us. So yes, you should be posting transcripts of your podcast. Short answer. Yes. Yeah. Even though we haven't like seen, we got there in the end. Yeah. We say yes.

ARTHUR: And look, if it's easy to do, if it's all AI, that's doing the transcripts, then why not? You have no, nothing to lose.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We might revisit that one in the future though, once we've got a bit more. evidence behind our show. I'd like to let you all know as well, we're doing a little bit of link building for our podcast website at the moment, and we are probably going to do some tests on the SEO for the actual podcast. So that might be something we look at in a future episode, provided it all actually works. So let's move on to Tyson who said, now this is a pretty broad question. My rankings and traffic have gone backwards. Why? I love, I love broad questions. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's say someone came to you and said that, what do you do? How do you figure it out?

ARTHUR: So someone's come to me and said their rankings have gone backwards. Yeah. Why? So the first, first thing I'll do is I would have a look. So I've got access to their GA. I've got access to all the tools. I'd go in there and try to figure out when, when did the traffic start to go backwards and where, so I guess touching on when I'd find out what date everything started going pear shaped. And then I'll have a look at a list of all the algorithm updates and see, see if it lines up with any specific update that's been rolled out recently and see if there's any correlation there because that would be a good indicator that had been hit by an algorithm update. Uh, the next thing I would do would be have a look at where the traffic was lost or which rankings have fallen, whether it was site wide, was it a specific page or a cluster of keywords and then work backwards from there. Um, what else would I do? I'd have a look at the backlink profile. So I'd have a look and see, you know, has there been any negative SEO? Have they been acquiring really dodgy spammy links? Has someone been doing poor link building? Have they been doing any link building?

MICHAEL: Um, if you look at things like, um, you know, no indexing or accidentally blocking the site and robots, you know, you can go and search console and see like, what, what's your sort of index status for all the pages. Like, is it the same as it always has been, or has it dropped? Yeah. That would be a good one. Yeah. Maybe ask, you know, what changes have you made to the site recently? Did you happen to, did you happen to wipe all of that content that was put on there for some reason?

ARTHUR: Hey, look, it happens. Yeah. It definitely happens.

MICHAEL: Maybe look at competitors too. Like have they upped their game in any way, shape or form?

ARTHUR: I think, look, there's a lot to it. You'd probably just do a, you'd do an audit. So you do a technical audit of the site and a competitor audit, um, and get to the bottom of it. But I guess a good starting point would be trying to figure out when and where, and then work backwards from there.

MICHAEL: If you, if you like what we've just covered off there, you're probably going to find, there's going to be clues basically, um, in most cases. So they would be the starting points. But like with many things in the SEO world, another answer to that one is it depends. So the answer, why? My rankings and traffic has gone backwards. Why? The answer, it depends. We're going to need to look into things a bit more. But let's move on. Let's move on from rankings and traffic's going backwards and let's look at success. Because Jennifer asked, what metrics do you use to evaluate SEO success? And look, there's things that SEO nerds look at. And there's things that business owners look at. Now, the things that business owners look at are the stuff that probably matter the most. You know, revenue, conversions, leads, phone calls, people signing up to your mailing list, all that stuff. You know, that's the stuff that business owners really care about. And that's probably the most important SEO metrics to look at, right? Most definitely, yeah. And we like to, you know, revenue is an easy one, conversions, The more insight you can get on that, the better. So you don't just want to say that a lead came from SEO. Like, admittedly, that's good. It's better than nothing. But can you track that lead in your CRM all the way through to it converting into a customer? And then do you know, you know, let's say you've invested X amount in SEO that month and it's generated X amount in business because you've tracked it all the way through from your website into your CRM, into your proposal software, into becoming a customer. Yeah, exactly. That's what you really, that's the name of the game right there.

ARTHUR: Yeah, exactly. And look, the obvious answer as well as rankings and traffic, but I feel that a lot of people get hung up on specifics like that. So they don't, I guess, attribute the ranking, sorry, the traffic from a specific keyword. So they, they just want to see traffic increase or they want to see like a vanity keyword rank first. Not, not quite understanding that there's a bit more to that and not quite understanding that all like not all traffic is the same. So although you might be getting traffic to the site, is it converting? If it's not converting, then it's basically useless traffic.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like we spoke about on another episode, that example of the e-commerce store ranking for like popular sports in Australia. And they got a ton of traffic, but it didn't do anything. So then, you know, when that website, their blog post stopped ranking one day, they're concerned about the traffic drop. But meanwhile, revenue is going up because there's more relevant traffic coming to the site. You know, the SEO being focused on non-brand conversion intent focused keywords has actually done better. So yeah, rankings and traffic, they're a good way of seeing how well a campaign is going at the end of the day.

ARTHUR: Of course. Yeah. And there's a bunch of different SEO metrics as well. So the tools that we use looking at domain rating, trust flow, citation flow. So they basically measure how strong your domain is. So you want to obviously see those improve throughout the campaign and also looking at overall organic visibility across different keyword positions.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So we use, for that, Ahrefs and Majestic will give you the DR, TF and CF scores. Visibility, you know, all sorts of different tools, rank tracking tools, Ahrefs lets you see it as well.

ARTHUR: So I think first and foremost, revenue and conversions, because that's what is going to, you know, that's why they're paying us basically. Yeah, exactly.

MICHAEL: So Josh has asked, why would someone invest in SEO as opposed to going with something else like Google or Facebook ads? I think, yeah, I come at it from the angle that all these channels are important. You don't want to just favor one over the other. In an ideal world, you want to have a little bit of a presence across multiple channels. Get that traffic to your site and then your site should be set up to convert it so that the overall story is a good one. Your revenue is growing, your return on investment is positive. So trying to be too siloed is not always the best approach. But let's say someone had to choose between them. Then why would you invest in SEO?

ARTHUR: Why would you invest in SEO, Arthur? So why would I invest in SEO? Well, first and foremost, because most people still turn to Google when they're searching for a product or a service. And there's been studies done. A lot of people will scroll past the ads and the shopping and, you know, go straight to the organic listings because they find that they trust the organic listings more than paid ads.

MICHAEL: Hmm. And this is despite Google doing everything they can to get people clicking on the ads. Exactly. It's still like 70, you know, 60 to 70% of the clicks are going to Google. Oh, sorry. Organic still.

ARTHUR: Exactly right. Um, and SEO is the channel you weren't. So if you stop spending, the traffic is still coming through.

MICHAEL: And it's, um, like with Google ads, for example, you have your budget, let's say three grand a month. And, uh, after a hundred clicks, maybe that budget's gone. And so your traffic stops, whereas with SEO, you only, there's unlimited traffic potential in a way, because. Well, I wouldn't say unlimited, you're only limited by the amount of like volume that's out there in your market for the keywords you rank for. So let's say, I'll try to do some maths on the fly, let's say you have $3,000 a month budget, you got a hundred clicks, so that's $30 a click, but really there's over a thousand clicks in the month. So really you would have needed to spend $30,000 a month on that on Google ads. but if you were ranking for it in the organic keyword, then you would be able to get all those clicks. Some quick maths there. Yeah, I'm not even sure if the maths was right, but you know, you get the point.

ARTHUR: I get the point. You're not capping yourself, so there's a lot more potential.

MICHAEL: Yeah, the upside is much higher. You're not stressing, you know, like with paid search, when you pay 30 bucks a click and it doesn't convert, we sometimes have clients like calling freaking out because one day they have a few less phone calls than they did the day before and they want everything to be perfectly the same and consistent every day. It just doesn't work like that, unfortunately. But, you know, with SEO, at least the more traffic you have, the more chance you have for leads to be generated. And then the more choice you have as a business owner as to which leads you decide to go after, for example. So look, SEO, that's why you would invest in SEO versus other channels. The flip side of that is SEO takes time, as we always say. So if you need results now, it's not the right channel for you. You know, the Google ads or another channel, Facebook ads would be a better choice in that case. So just playing both sides of the coin there. So moving on, next one. So this question is not actually a question that someone has sent in to us. It's more something that we came across in the wild. Ah, let's say, I guess business owners, any business owner listening to this probably gets an absolute ton of sales emails from SEO companies trying to sell them the world, you know, over email. So the world of SEO sales is very amusing at times. And we actually had a competing SEO salesperson speaking to one of our clients and telling them that pipes, using pipes in a title tag versus dashes. A fundamental error. I believe we were using dashes instead of pipes in this example. Yeah. Fundamental error. It was fundamental. Fundamental. Yeah. And we should have known better. They said we should really have known better, which is nonsense really. So the question that we've taken from that is, should I use pipes or dashes in my page titles? The answer is it depends.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it depends. So look, I've traditionally used dashes since, since the very beginning. Um, But look, I've done a lot of reading on the topic and you get answers from both sides. You know, people agreeing from both sides. A lot of people like to use dashes. A lot of people like to use pipes. Now, I think the only real benefit of pipes is, A, it can look a bit more appealing when you have that kind of vertical line. And B, it uses less pixels on the screen. So you can fit in more into your page title. Marginally more. You're not going to get that much more, but yeah, you know, every pixel counts. But look, honestly, I don't think there is a difference. I've started using dashes, sorry, pipes as a test. And look, to be honest, I saw an improvement in some pages, but other pages haven't moved. Yeah. But then was that due to the dashes or sorry, pipes or? Was it coincidental building?

MICHAEL: Yeah. That's the thing. You've got to isolate that as a factor to be confident that that is the way. And there have been studies done on this that don't really show that much proof that, you know.

ARTHUR: Actually also wanted to say that the pages that we did test, they did improve, but then they went backwards back to where they were.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And we also made on site content changes at the same time.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Which, yeah. So in conclusive, SEO is all about testing. So test, test, test. But in my opinion, they don't make a difference other than saving you a couple of pixels in your page title and potentially making, you know, if it comes down to aesthetic,

MICHAEL: Personal preference. That's why sometimes putting emojis and stuff in there, like, you know, little emoji icons can attract more attention. You put it in your meta description or something like that and improve your click through rate.

ARTHUR: So yeah, I've always, I've always thought dashes look better than pipes. So do I, in my opinion. Yep. But after reading a lot of like posts and forum comments and Reddit, um, you know, I think it's the opposite. A lot of people prefer to look at pipes.

MICHAEL: I reckon personally, That's a bunch of SEO nerds talking about it. And in the real world, no one even thinks about it that much.

INTRO: No.

MICHAEL: If I was to ask my family or my wife or something like, do you prefer pipes or dashes in your title tags? They'd look at me with cross eyes going, what are you talking about?

ARTHUR: I think a pipe looks more optimized. I think if I see a pipe, I know that someone's tried to optimize that page title. Yeah.

MICHAEL: But you know that. Does someone that's inquiring about like marble polishing know that?

ARTHUR: No one's going to think twice about whether we use the dash or a pipe.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So that one is just personal preference and testing. If you put a pipe and it works, your results are good, just leave it. If results aren't there, maybe try dash and see if that makes a difference. Unlikely. Look at sites like Amazon, they're using commas and inverted, sorry, like colon, semi-colons and stuff. You know, it's a wild world out there with your meta description, meta title tags. Geez, I'm having trouble. And it really comes down to what works, doesn't it?

ARTHUR: Exactly. You got to keep testing. That's what SEO is all about.

MICHAEL: But I seem to remember in a previous episode, you got metadata perfect the first time, every time. And now you're saying test.

ARTHUR: Well, the metadata. What do you have to say for yourself? Well, the actual metadata, the keywords and that were great. It was just. Look, I do have an answer because I did test it and it didn't make a difference. So therefore the original metadata was perfect. It was. Okay. That's, that's my answer.

MICHAEL: All right. We'll move on then to a noob. What does a noob have to say? He says, what's your go-to SEO tool? Ahrefs. Ahrefs.

ARTHUR: All right, moving on. Now, look, we've covered this off in the previous episode. It does everything you need. It's a great all-in-one tool and it, you know, it'll get you by. So if you were to pick, if you were to pick one SEO tool, I'd definitely choose Ahrefs.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Because we do, again, that question is pretty broad because what are you trying to do with the tool? Yeah. There's so much, you know, is it a technical issue you're dealing with? Is it on-site? Is it links? Is it whatever? Ahrefs does all that, so.

INTRO: Yeah.

MICHAEL: But it's not the best for all of that. But anyway, Ahrefs is a tool. So. Yes. Cool. To keep it simple. Moving on to today, Junior.

ARTHUR: Moving on to Mick, how long will it take to see results?

MICHAEL: Another broad one. Mick's actually written, how long will it takes to see results? We're going to have to edit that one. How long will it take to see results? So again, it depends.

ARTHUR: I feel like you can answer a lot of these questions with it depends.

MICHAEL: That's the old meme in the SEO world. The answer to everything is it depends, but it does depend, you know, it does.

ARTHUR: It does. It depends on whether you're starting from scratch. So is it a fresh domain? Have you done SEO before? Look, an honest answer. If you're a brand new website, fresh domain, you're probably looking at 12 months or more before you start seeing bottom line results.

MICHAEL: Um, So when you say bottom line, that's like revenue, leads, revenue, leads, exactly. Yeah. You will start to see improvements before that, but yeah, absolutely. I think improvements in SEO metrics before that, at least.

ARTHUR: Absolutely. Yeah. You'll start seeing keywords appearing in the search results. So your organic visibility will continue to improve. Well, it should continue to improve as the campaign progresses. Uh, usually we see results like that around the three month mark, three to six months.

MICHAEL: Yep.

ARTHUR: But again, like we said, it really very much depends. Has the site done SEO before? Has it got history? Has it got backlinks? How competitive is the industry? It's all going to play a part in success.

MICHAEL: Sure. Yep. All right. Well, this is lucky last number 13, and this is from Inika and Inika. I'm not sure if Inika is a guy or a girl. So they ask. I'm pretty sure it's a girl. A girl. Okay. Sorry. Why should I continue SEO once I've gotten good rankings? So why should you, why? Or should you even continue SEO, you know, to add to that question?

ARTHUR: Yes, I think so. Yeah. Look, yes and no. Yes. Let, let me, let me elaborate. So wild ride there. Yeah. Look, it depends again, very much on the competition and where you're at. You know, if you get to a point where you're ranking for your keywords and you stop doing SEO, but your competition continues to do SEO, then chances are they're going to start to outrank you. Yeah. Um, and like I said, it depends on the niche. You might find that you're in a niche where you can do SEO for six months, 12 months and stop for a bit. Yep. And then come back to it. Um,

MICHAEL: I guess. Yeah. I guess. Have you, have you like written every piece of content that you should have? Like, have you done absolutely everything SEO wise or is there other areas of growth to unlock as well?

ARTHUR: Absolutely. Yeah. So that's the other point, you know, you can unlock a lot more traffic. So you might be ranking for the keywords you want to rank, but there could be a plethora of different keywords you could be ranking for that could be driving more traffic to the site. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So I've actually got a good example on this one. There's a case study on our website where we ranked, like we took a website from not existing and ranked it number one for a keyword. Now the reason we knew about this industry was tuck pointing. So it's a very expensive, I guess, brick restoration type service. Yeah. So ranking well for that sort of a service is good for these companies because they can sell you to jobs that cost many tens of thousands of dollars. So it's good to have rankings. We had a client in that space. We did all this work for them. We got them ranking number one. They turned off their SEO investment because they're ranking number one. They had a lot of leads. Their business had grown and they were happy to do that. So that was a while ago that they stopped working with us. Since then we've created our case study site, which is on our website, on our blog. Our site's now ranking at the top of the search results and theirs has dropped now, like if I search for Tuck Pointing Sydney, one, two, three, four.

INTRO: Oh really?

MICHAEL: Yeah, now I'm fifth. And that's because they haven't been doing SEO for… You know, a year, 18 months, however long it's been. Well over a year. Yeah, maybe even two years, whatever. But it's been some time. In that time, you know, a new competitor, our site, has come along and pushed to the top and other tuck-pointing businesses have also gone past them. So those businesses, probably I haven't looked into it, but I would say some of them have worked on their SEO, whereas our client sort of remained stagnant. Our ex-client has remained stagnant. That's sort of what can happen, you know, ebb and flow if you don't invest in it. And now when they do want to invest in it, they're starting from behind. They have to sort of recover that lost ground and all that time. So it's normally something you want to keep going because there's always something you can be doing. Can you be creating more content? You can be building more links, strengthening your domain, building more of a moat around your website that the competition just can't really get over because you've continued to invest in it. So generally, we recommend, you know, obviously we're a little bit biased in that we're an SEO agency, so we're always going to be on the side of SEO, but there's always something that can be done. There's always ways that you can be improving things, you know, in the majority of cases. Yeah, 100% agree. All right, well, it's been a pretty long one today, but it's been pretty fun chatting about all these different questions.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I really like this format. I think we should definitely chuck it in the rotation moving forward.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so we will. If you guys listening have any questions, just head to theseoshow.co. fill out the form. We've actually put a little widget on there where you can record a question, you know, your voice, and we'll put that into the podcast too. So if you're feeling brave, wanting to record yourself, we'd love that. Otherwise, just submit the form and we'll review all the questions every so often and jump back on and do another one of these episodes. But that's all the time we have for today. So we'll be back next week with another episode. And in the meantime, happy SEOing. See you later. See you later.

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