SEO Q&A Week #2

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. How are you going? Yeah, very good. How are you going?

ARTHUR: I'm very good too. I'm very excited about this episode.

MICHAEL: You know, when are we not excited? Because we're talking SEO. It is the SEO show. We got a good one. That's true. It is true. I'm not lying. It is the SEO show. And we had so much fun last time that we did a SEO questions and answers episode that we thought we'd do another one again because we've had a few good ones come through. A couple of ones there that are probably a little bit on the beginner side and then a couple that are on the technical side or more than beginner side, let's say. Would that be right in the same? Yeah. Sure. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Just checking. Just checking. You're still with us. No, I'm here. I'm here. All right. It's been a big week for you, hasn't it? You've been under the pump a little bit to say the least, but it's good.

ARTHUR: I like being under the pump. It makes the days go faster. You feel accomplished. I like feeling accomplished.

MICHAEL: Well, on that note, I should say for all of our listeners, Arthur is now SEO director at LocalDigital, aren't you? Moving up in the world of SEO. That's it. That is a very, very official sounding SEO title there. Well and truly worthy of an SEO podcast co-host. So anyway, with that little deviation aside, let's get into some questions because it's going to be short and sweet. We've only got six. If people want to send us through some more, by all means, head over to theseoshow.co, go to the contact page, send us through your questions. But yeah, for today, we'll be going through what we have here and we're going to start with Aaron's question. Aaron's asked, what are some good free link options? There's a lot out there. I hear you taking in a deep breath at the sound of that question. Yeah. Because there's so many different ways. There's no such thing as free. There's still going to be time involved in all these things that we're coming up with here. But as it comes to actually handing over money to someone for these links, you don't have to do that. So that's a little caveat we want to put on this. But what are your favorite free links, Arthur, if you're out there building links?

ARTHUR: My favorite? I would say probably directories and citations, web 2.0 profiles, quick and easy to kind of set up. I say quick. They're easy to set up. Like you said, it takes time to manually go through all the sites and fill out all the information, verify your email address and all that. But they're a very good starting point. We build these for our clients as foundation links because they build a good foundation to do, I guess, regular outreach and more authority link building later on down the track.

MICHAEL: Yep. So these are the lowest investment in terms of, I guess, time and money. They're just listing on directories. So Yellow Pages, True Local, Hot Frog, that sort of stuff. They don't do much for your SEO. They probably do nothing for your SEO, really. Maybe for your Google My Business performance, your local SEO, they're very important for that. If you're in some competitive nation, you'd think building directories and like web 2.0, these free links is going to sort of push you up into the top spots. Unfortunately, it's not, but it's just the type of links that every legitimate website probably should have because, you know, real business should be on real business directories. Exactly. If you want to build actual links that move the needle from an SEO point of view for free, definitely doable, but it involves a lot of effort on your side. So a service that is good for this sort of stuff is Hiro, help a reporter out. So that's a service where reporters, you know, if they're putting together a article on a certain topic, they would put the call out for experts or people to feature in the article, you know, like giving their opinion or expertise to the article. And quite often you can get links if you have the expertise to, you know, give them what they're looking for. So, you know, just signing up for that sort of a service. In Australia, we have another one called Source Bottle, which is like a more localized version of that. But, you know, sign up for those services and each day it will send you an email with, you know, what journalists are looking for help with, you know, and what topic they're looking for help with. But, you know, you basically then have to write a comprehensive reply to whatever their brief is and then hope that they use you. You know, they won't always use you, so a lot of time and effort, but you can get some very juicy links free of charge doing that. You know, we're talking DR 80, 90 plus. Yeah.

ARTHUR: What about our infographics? What are your thoughts on infographics?

MICHAEL: I love infographics. We used to do heaps of it way back in the day. We do none now, but.

ARTHUR: It does take a lot of time and effort to, you know, create a good infographic. Yes. And there's a lot of shit infographics out there, so.

MICHAEL: That's the thing, like, you know, they're just churned out for linking purposes. You're not going to get links with that really, but. Let's say you have some cool data or unique angle or something.

ARTHUR: Well, let's use the example you used.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so we did one on politics, which doesn't sound that exciting really, but it was around the time of the election here in Australia, the federal election. And we researched what people are searching around some of the topics of the day at the time, you know, all the sort of political things that they were sort of campaigning on. And we looked at Google search data and Google trend data and Google autocomplete data and just put together an interesting infographic of what Aussies are searching for. designed it up looking really nice, you know, really well illustrated and totally custom and then promoted that. So the big thing with infographics is the promotion. You know, you don't just create it, put it on your site and suddenly have all these links pointing to it out of nowhere. You've got to really get out there and let people know this infographic exists. But with that one, we got a ton of really good authoritative links from, you know, well-established publishing type sites. Yeah, I remember. A lot of effort goes into it. It's again, yes, the links are free in that you're not paying the website owner for the link, but you are spending a lot of time researching, scripting up the infographic, dealing with your designer to create it and then doing outreach and find, you know, well, finding all the sites and doing outreach to them.

ARTHUR: There's a lot of time. A lot of time, yeah. Very time-consuming. What about April Fool's Day?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, tell us your favorite April Fool's Day link building story. My favorite story? Well, I'm thinking of one in particular where there's a little bit of angst on your side.

ARTHUR: I won't go into full detail, but basically what we used to do for a lot of our, I'd say larger clients or well-known clients was link building around, not link building, sorry, but promotions or April Fool's Day jokes, I guess you'd call it that. Um, so we'd, for example, for INET, what we did was we had a brainstorming session and we came up with a, like a mock-up product called Petfire. So basically what it was, was a, like a pet collar with a wifi dongle built into it. Basically what it did was it expanded your wifi reception. It was just a joke. We put it up on the site, um, April 1st and I got a lot of coverage. So it was picked up by a lot of new sites because often they do like a wrap up every April, April fool's day where they'll go and find cause all the, um, all the brands that have released one of these kind of April fool's jokes and publish it on their site. So yeah, we were fortunate that year to get published on, I can't even remember. It was like, 20 odd high DR sites, proper news sites, news.com, BuzzFeed, all those.

MICHAEL: Daily Mail, TypeSize7. Yep. And, um, the thing with that, with a good April Fool's prank, you can get featured like legitimately, like where people believe it and share it and sort of do articles on it. And then the roundups, as you said.

ARTHUR: So I think when we did it, this was going back, what, maybe six, seven years ago, people did believe it because it was kind of still fresh and new. Now, now, now people just expect, you know, Yeah. Companies to drop something on Twitter or Instagram. Yes. But back then, not so much. So, it was a cool tactic that we successfully used for some of our clients. And someone stole my idea, which is annoying, but… That's the part.

MICHAEL: In the brainstorming session, after that a minute was his idea, his genius. You were there, you know it was my idea. And he felt he didn't get enough props for his genius. But anyway. Anyway, look at you now, water under the bridge. Another good one, competitions. Again, I'll touch on an example that we did for a client. We had a florist, Valentine's Day is the be-all and end-all date on the calendar for florists. It's a big selling period for them.

ARTHUR: No, Mother's Day is bigger. Sorry to chime in, Mother's Day is bigger. Anyway. All right. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. That's just a little fun fact.

MICHAEL: Mother's day and Valentine's day. Yes. We did a competition for Valentine's day playing up on that whole love angle. Um, love is in the air or that sort of stuff. And we basically went and found this really cool, uh, I guess you could say Instagrammable venue.

ARTHUR: The love cave.

MICHAEL: It's a cave out in the Blue Mountains where you can stay, you sleep in this cave, it's got a fireplace and it's got views over a valley and it's got like a hot tub in it and stuff and you know, it looks awesome. And we basically teed up that spot, we went out there and took photos of it with like petals, like rose petals all through it and the competition was you'd win a night there for you and your partner, you get a bottle of champagne, chocolates, that sort of stuff and it will be covered in flowers. And that place costs like a grand a night or something like that. So it has a healthy dollar value attached to it. We created a landing page for it. We created like a YouTube video, Instagram and Facebook video ad that went with it. And then we just pumped the advertising for that. We also did a lot of outreach. We're reaching out to all sorts of different blogs, you know, sort of mummy blogs and things to do in Sydney type blogs and the like and promoting it there. And it got a ton of attention, a ton of links because it was really visual and awesome. So that worked really well. Again, a lot of time and effort goes into that. It's not free per se, but you weren't paying for every link that we got. No.

ARTHUR: And I guess in that situation as well, there was the cost of the prize. So I can't remember if the client covered the cost or we did, but you have to factor that in as well because that would have added up a fair bit, I imagine. Yeah. But well worth it in the end.

MICHAEL: Oh yeah, in that particular case for sure. So again, like all these ideas we're talking about here, like infographics, competitions, April Fool's Day, it really is the idea and the execution has to be really strong to make it link worthy. Otherwise, you put it out there and no one will link to it. Exactly. But maybe some ones where you can just get links without having to put as much time and effort and sort of coming up with awesome ideas like Arthur's so capable of with his April Fool's idea would be partner link building and broken link building, right? Because that's just your time.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So if you have any partners that you work with, or sponsors that you work with, just reaching out to them. And then if they have a website, getting them to link back to your site, all it takes is, you know, a simple short email. We've had great success with it for our clients and for ourselves. So yeah, like you said, it only takes your time. Same as broken link building a bit more technical. Um, but basically. I guess the dumbed down version is just finding broken links on websites in your niche that link back to similar sites and then reaching out to them and letting them know, Hey, you've got a broken link. We've have, you know, similar content. Why don't you link to us instead? So again, that is a bit more technical and, but like you said, it just, yeah, it takes up time. No cost involved.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So look, they're the main ones for free link building. There's plenty there to get started with. So I hope you enjoyed that one, Aaron, if you're listening. Let's move on to Hannah's question. I think it could be a joke question. What does SEO stand for, Arthur? Search engine optimization. Okay, good. Moving on. Question three. This one's a real one. It's from Paige. I'm not saying the last one was not a real one, by the way, but Hannah, you could have just Googled that.

ARTHUR: It's not a real one.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, anyway, Paige, our company is opening an international office. How do we deal with this from an SEO perspective? So there's a bit going on with that question. It all comes back to, I guess, first and foremost, what your domain name is. If you're on, let's say you're on a .com.au, so bobscompany.com.au and you're opening an office in the US, The approach there would be different than if you were operating on bobscompany.com and you were looking to open an office somewhere else. Because with the .com.au, you can't really go into the US and use that domain name because they're not going to want to see .com.au domain names. It's going to be weird, foreign to them. It's probably not going to rank well in Google over there either. Um, so if you were expanding from Australia to another country, what you'd probably want to do is in an ideal world, you want to have like a, a.com domain name, like a, you know, just a very standard top level domain name that is well known the world over.com. Right. Then you want to have a sub folder on that for each of the countries you operate in. So slash AU for Australia slash us for the us slash NZ for New Zealand, for example. and have versions of your site on those subfolders that are tailored to that country. Then you can use things like hreflang tags in your code to say to Google, this is our Australian one and it's in English, this is our US one, it's also in English, this is our New Zealand one, it's in English, but in the New Zealand English, Australian English, US English. And then have Search Console and Google My Business set up for each of those countries or locations pointing to those sites. That way, you'll be able to have those subfolders show in each of those countries. You with me, Arthur? Does that all make sense?

ARTHUR: Oh, it makes perfect sense.

MICHAEL: So that's my preferred option. Why is it my preferred option? Because you have one domain then and all of your link building efforts for that domain benefit all of the different locations or the different countries that you're working on. Because the other ways of doing this is you can set up a sub domain. So that might be au.whateveryourdomainis.com or us or dot or nz.whateveryourdomainis. So, you know, the, the nz au us bit shows before the domain name. That's one option or just having a whole top level domain for each location. So .com.au.com.co.nz.

ARTHUR: Can you think of any reason or benefit of using a sub domain over a sub folder?

MICHAEL: Well, benefits might be it's easier to create a website, like whole websites on each subdomain, like a WordPress installation on subdomain, for example.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

ARTHUR: But you could also do that with subfolders though.

MICHAEL: No.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Historically, it used to be more about subdomains, but now everyone's kind of moved over to subfolders. I rarely see subdomains.

MICHAEL: No, no, no, no. It's always, it's always been better to go with subfolders because of the link building perspective. You said historically it's been subdomains. Fact check it after the recording.

ARTHUR: Okay. I will do. I'm pretty sure I said it the other way around. If I didn't, then I meant what you said. Okay, so you're agreeing with me, don't do subdomains. Yeah, yeah, I'm agreeing with you. I'm just saying, I just remember historically when I started doing SEO, it was more about subdomains than it was subfolders.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. Other thing, maybe things like hosting as well, like if you have a server in each location. Yeah, very true. So, you might just have your subdomain point to each server, but there's ways of dealing with that with subfolders anyway, but… Look, really, the other thing would be top-level domains as well. Companies will just register domains in each location. That can be good from a user's point of view when they see .com.au for Australia. In New Zealand, they're seeing NZ. It's very familiar. It makes you seem local and the like, but you're just splitting your efforts across three sites then. You're link building efforts and all the rest of it. the preferred way, have a subfolder on a master domain for each location and then use the hreflang tags and search console and gmb for each location. If you don't know what they are, look up hreflang tags and it's pretty straightforward to implement that. Anything you want to add to that, Arthur?

ARTHUR: No, I think you covered everything very, very comprehensively.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I hope so, because I felt like I was talking in circles a little bit. We'll see. So, let's go to Greg's question. Because you've done a bit of training of team members, so I think you're pretty well placed to answer this one. How long does it take to become a good SEO? Greg wants to know.

ARTHUR: That's a difficult question to answer, isn't it?

MICHAEL: To find good.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, I'm still learning every day. I've been doing SEO for God knows how long. So I think, you know, what makes a good SEO is someone that's committed and is actually passionate about it. So obviously you're going to, the longer you do SEO, the more experience you'll have, the more knowledge you'll have, I guess the easier it will be. But I think to be a good SEO, first and foremost, you have to be passionate about it. You have to enjoy SEO, I guess, for lack of better words. You have to be a geek, you know, you have to want to learn it like most things in life, I guess. But there's a lot of people that I guess started out doing SEO that just weren't cut out to it just because they didn't have that passion, they didn't have that drive, they didn't enjoy doing SEO. Help me out here, come on.

MICHAEL: No, no, no, I agree. And you have to enjoy, you have to be a self-starter, a self-learner. Because with SEO, a lot of it is coming up with ideas and testing them or constantly reading and staying in the loop with what's going on in the industry. members of slack groups or different forums or reading different publications and staying on top of what's going on and then trying that stuff out. So you have to enjoy doing that sort of stuff. Yeah. As it comes to timings, you know, I would say to become a competent, let's because good is, you know, what is good? Like that's a bit tough, but a competent SEO, I would say like if you work at an agency and you're doing it, After a year, you should be competent enough to be able to managing multiple clients and provided you've got that team around you that you can lean on when you don't know certain things. Absolutely. You definitely would be competent enough to be managing client campaigns. You should have done enough training and had enough experience on the SEO side of things.

ARTHUR: Look, and everyone's different as well. It takes, you know, Some people a little longer to pick up things, others learn a lot more quickly.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And some people are better at different aspects of SEO. Like, you know, there's technical content links. So like some people might be drawn to different aspects of it as well. So they'd be really good at one thing, but maybe a bit, you know, not as good on the technical front, for example. Which is fine. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let's say right about that. Yeah, Mark, you would hope to be pretty competent. Agree. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, let's go to this one here because it's another little technical one. Wade asked, our staging website is indexed and showing in Google when people search for our brand. What's the best way to deal with this? Okay. So, um, that's like if we, yeah, if we were to go search local digital instead of just our website results showing, our staging server, it might be sitting on a sub domain of Kinsta or it might be, you know, you know, testing site.com slash local digital, you know, some where your staging site lives so that you can look at it and use it and test it before it goes onto your live site has for some reason found its way into Google's index happens all the time.

ARTHUR: Oh, it's happened to one of our bigger clients recently. I don't know if you remember. No, who, who am I allowed to say? Let's just say one of our bigger clients said one of our more recent clients that have migrated to a new site. Give you enough clues. Okay. Okay. Yes. So what happened was they wanted to keep the, I guess the legacy side or the old side visible for the time being, just as they were migrating across and they moved that to a old dot sub domain, but forgot to know index that. So what happened was the new side and the old side were both showing up in the search results. Yeah, which is far from ideal when you're migrating.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So the reasons it's far from ideal, A, it just like, you don't want people accessing both versions of the site. B, like that's two whole sites in Google's index with all the same content and stuff.

ARTHUR: Exactly the same, more or less.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yup. C, for me, from a OCD point of view, I don't like seeing staging results mixed in with real results. I don't think anyone does. Yeah. Just from purely OCD purposes. But yeah. Anyway, it's relatively easy and quick to deal with. Yep. So step one with your staging site, make sure the pages are no index. So, you know, you do this via meta robots tag in the code, or if you're on WordPress, there is actually a setting in the settings just to block search engines. I think every CMS has that setting.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: So make sure that's in place, first and foremost. You can also, in your robots.txt file, block all crawlers from indexing the site. So the one-two punch there, the knockout blow for your site being indexed. So get that in place. Then your staging site, you're going to need to claim that in Search Console so that you basically confirm you own the site and that you can tell Google what to do with it. Claim it all get it all set up in search console Then you can use the URL removal tool to request to block the entire site. So Like there's a section there to block URLs with that start with a certain prefix if you just leave that blank It's going to block every URL that starts with your domain name. So So the whole site effectively. So what will happen is Google will remove those pages from the index They won't be found anymore. And then eventually they're going to come back and want to recrawl it that the removal is only temporary But because you did all of that no indexing stuff at the start it won't index it again. So your problem solved So there you go Wade, hopefully that makes a difference in your world So lucky last Rachel says, why are SEO fees so expensive? Why are they? That's a tough one because we don't know what you're being quoted, but you know, first of all, are they expensive?

ARTHUR: What is expensive? Exactly. Subjective as again.

MICHAEL: It comes back as well to, we've, we've spoken about this in the past, is SEO a cost or is it an investment? We see it as an investment. If you're getting a return and your business is growing, and you know, you're putting a dollar into it and getting five dollars back, that investment, it's not expensive. It's awesome. You should be spending as much as possible.

ARTHUR: I might have to dust off my mechanic analogy again.

MICHAEL: I've got one. I've got a new one ready. I'm ready. So let's say, because, okay, so first of all, it probably isn't expensive. Depends on what you're selling, it depends on your margins, all that sort of stuff. But let's say for most, if you're a business, a service business that has customers coming back to you all the time, pretty decent pricing and margins, then you should be able to invest a decent amount in SEO. As long as you're returning on that, good thing. But let's look at the costs involved with doing an SEO campaign. You know, link building and content creation costs money, as we always talk about. So it's next to impossible to do good, strong link building without investing it. Like even that question at the start, talking about free link building, there's a ton of time that goes into that. And if you're working with an agency, you're paying for their time to do that. So look, you can't get good links without investing in it. It just doesn't come for cheap. So here's the analogy. You've got your mechanic one. My one is, you know, building a house is dictated by the cost of suppliers or at least, you know, a third of your cost building a house is probably in the cost of suppliers. So the same with SEO. If someone comes along and says they can do it for a quarter of the price, something's fishy. You know, your builders are probably using dodgy materials if they can do it super cheap. What do you reckon about that one?

ARTHUR: That's good. I think, I think mine's better, but yeah, no, it works. It definitely works.

MICHAEL: Let's do a little recap on yours again. Cause I always say I'm going to use that one. Then I forget it.

ARTHUR: Can't even remember how it goes. So I guess being an SEO is similar to being like a mechanic. So let's just say your timing chain breaks, right? You go to a mechanic and you get quoted two grand to get the timing chain repaired. An actual timing chain costs about $300, $400, depending on the maker model of your car. But the rest of the price that he's quoted you goes to his experience, his time. And yeah, basically that's the outcome. So you're paying for the experience, you're paying for our experience, our knowledge, you know, someone that's been doing SEO for 10 years is going to have a lot more experience and a lot more knowledge than someone that's only been doing it for six months. So you get what you pay for, like everything in life. So if you can imagine, yeah, you know, your links are your timing chain. You know, we might spend X amount of money on links a month. The rest of it is our time, our expertise, our strategy, all that kind of combined into one. Yeah. And look, as an agency, we need to make a profit as well. You know, we're not a charity, so.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, that I was going to say on that note, like think about how much employees cost, you know, like anyone that overheads. Yeah, overheads, electricity, insurance. But anyway, if you work with an agency, you're working with a team of people often, like SEO specialists. And if you want an employee that's not totally overloaded with clients to the point they can't even really work on you properly and you want them to be available to you, the cost will be a bit higher because they have less clients to cover them. So it's still going to be cheaper most of the time than hiring people in-house. Some companies will want to try and hire this unicorn digital marketing guru that does SEO, paid media, PR, link building, copywriting. Just for the average wage, they handle everything, but that person doesn't exist. Employees do cost money, but an agency is going to be cheaper than doing that all yourself at the end of the day. But if you do think SEO is expensive, we recommend just learning to do it yourself to begin with. So podcasts like this, blog posts, tutorial courses online, YouTube, learn what you can, get results yourself. And then once you're busy enough to take that off your plate, then do so. But yeah, don't go down the path of cheap SEO. We've spoken about it in the past. It just does more harm than good normally. All right. Well, that's all the questions we had for this week. I hope you enjoyed it. I think next week we'll be back in our studio. Let's do it. Let's get out of this home setup. Let's get in the studio. We'll give the listeners that awesome audio quality that they've been desiring. And yeah, we're looking forward to that. But for now, I'm just going to end this because I don't know what I'm talking about. And we hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll see you for another episode next week. See ya. See ya.