SEO Q&A Week #3

It’s the third SEO questions & answers episode this week. New questions from the world of SEO answered by Michael & Arthur.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Local Digital 0:04
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 host, Michael and Arthur.

Arthur 0:23
Welcome, everybody to another episode of the SEO show. I’m here with Michael. And today we’re gonna be talking about what are we talking about today?

Michael 0:33
Alright, five seconds into the interview. Any crumbles? The interview? Oh, man, the intro. Let’s do it again. No, those.

Arthur 0:41
Let’s keep going. Why not?

Michael 0:42
Okay. All right. Let’s keep going. Sorry about that.

Arthur 0:46
It’s q&a week. There we go.

Michael 0:49
q&a week three. We’re talking about today. Jesus, not a good intro. I heard the questions are good.

Arthur 0:56
They’re good. We have a couple couple today that we want to go through.

Michael 0:59
And we enjoy doing these because, you know, the questions come in. And it gives us cause to sort of think about things that we might not think about all the time doing SEO, you know, every day, you don’t always think about things from this perspective. So um, yeah, we’re gonna give it a go answering these questions. And hopefully, they’re good answers.

Arthur 1:18
Hopefully that better than the intro.

Michael 1:20
Alright, let’s go. First question from Jared. Yep, you can read. Okay, cool.

Arthur 1:26
So this one’s from Jared, I have been applying for some ser roles and even interviewed at a couple but so far, I haven’t managed to get an offer. What can I do to improve my chances? It’s a good question, Jared. It is. There’s a bunch of things that you can do. I guess, you know, I haven’t interviewed in a while, but I remember that can be very daunting, especially if you’re, you know, fresh, you know, you’re just trying to get your foot into the door, starting off at a you know, starting your career. I think one of the main things is to show you have passion. So you know, if you’re interested in doing SEO, give, give the interviewer examples of things you have done, you know, websites that you have built or examples of any SEO, you have done yourself in the past to show them that you actually care that you are passionate about

Michael 2:13
it. Because if you’re if you’re coming in from entry level by weight, we interview a fair bit at our agency. And well, that’s the first thing we always look for his like passion, like true sort of interest in the space. Yeah. Not just sort of wanting the job because you want a job, or you sort of heard is, it’s a cool industry to get into, but you’re not really that interested in it, you know, you sort of need to show that passion. So with SEO, if you are an SEO or if you sort of even are interested in it, you should be tinkering with websites. Yeah. Playing around building a site trying to rank it. Maybe just doing affiliate sites, something like that. Yeah,

Arthur 2:52
I mean, before I started doing SEO, I was always like, back in the day back in the juicy these days, I was building websites like every week just random stuff, never ranking them or anything that I had that interest in building forums and doing all these kind of, I guess you’d call it nerdy stuff that other people wouldn’t be doing or wasting wasting their time on like in the day.

Michael 3:10
Yeah, cuz SEO is a nerdy by nature. Like what I did there, I was good at by nature. Do you even know who naughty by nature?

Arthur 3:20
Yeah. Is that way before your time? It’s not before my time, but I know them. Hip Hop. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Michael 3:25
Anyway, SEO is a nerdy by nature. And by that it means that typically, not everyone, not not in every case, obviously, but typically, though, like the techy things in life, but like, computer games, that sort of stuff, though, like building websites. Yep. So can you point to that as an interviewing? Cool, yeah, cool. The other thing is, when you’re coming into an interview, and you’re talking about SEO and you’re saying you really interested in it another like you need to know the big players in the space or the big publications, Search Engine Journal Search Engine Land search engine roundtable, you know, the sites that sort of blog about going on in the industry and you should be able to say that you read them and why Yeah, know what you read on there. What you take from it, like you, you shouldn’t have no idea what that stuff is. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Cuz you will get asked about it in an interview. Yeah,

Arthur 4:14
that doesn’t hurt to name drop a few, you know, influential people in the SEO world as well to show that you kind of pay attention

Michael 4:22
podcast as well. Definitely just drop that you listen to the SEO show. That is a very big instant. Hi there. Yeah, absolutely. But not just SEO podcasts, broader digital marketing, you know, there’s a tonne of digital marketing podcasts out there. So if you listen to any number of them or my I won’t name drop any now but like, maybe I should. Authority hackers. Yeah, things like authority hacker, for example. They teach you about SEO and building affiliate websites. You should be listening to that stuff. If you truly do have a passion and interest in the industry. To further your skills or your knowledge of the space and be up to date. Basically be current with it. Your knowledge. So often in interviews, you’ll probably get asked about that. If they’re just saying that you listen to, you know, case file, or, you know, True Crime podcast or stuff like that. Probably not going to carry a lot of weight in SEO interview. So

Arthur 5:14
unless, of course, the interviewer really likes crime podcasts. Um, so I I’ve

Michael 5:18
gotten excited when people mentioned that in the past, but yeah, what I’m really looking for if I ask about podcasts is Yeah, marketing, SEO, that sort of stuff. Of course. What else Analytics as well, Google Analytics?

Arthur 5:30
Yeah. No one expects you to be analytical mostre. But doing the Analytics course, getting to know the basics and, you know, maybe creating an analytics profile, adding it to a website and starting to figure out how it all works, how you can look at the data and, you know, manipulate it and read it. Definitely no harm in doing that. We use analytics daily. So it’s definitely a big part of being an SEO

Michael 5:54
and having that qualifications be a big bonus. Yeah, there definitely. And then things like courses. There’s a website Udemy Udemy. Udemy never know the right way. It’s like the SEM rush fest, sem rush. Udemy Udemy.

Arthur 6:09
I call it Udemy. Yeah, I

Michael 6:10
call it Udemy. But then sometimes to me, but it would be you reads as you to me you de my bit off topic, though. But yeah, but like that site, right, you can go in there and buy courses that people have put together for sometimes it’s like eight bucks, 10 bucks, like really cheap. Doing that sort of stuff will show you’re a self starter, again, that you’re truly interested in the space. Because if you’re going for an entry level role, like you can’t talk about your experience working in an agency or you know, in the industry, because you don’t have any butter, that sort of stuff shows that you’re not just turning up and wanting a job. So you go on Udemy and look up SEO courses, there’ll be a tonne, yep, complete a couple of them. Talk about your experience during them what you learned from them, that’s gonna reflect well, in an interview. Definitely. They’re the main ones from an SEO point of view, you know, trying to get an SEO job. But the other thing that sort of is important in interviews, is, have you done your homework? Like, do you in an ideal world, you should know about the business that you’re interviewing at? Yeah, exactly. So check out the about page on their site, check out their LinkedIn, chattogram, Instagram, like, get a feel for the place, and particularly the people you’re meeting with. So you should know who you’re interviewing with beforehand. Yeah, do a little bit of stalking, you know, try and learn about them in the business. And there might be an opportunity to work that into the conversation, that’s gonna reflect well, most of the time.

Arthur 7:33
Yeah, just be prepared. Have a look at the interview questions. So SEO is and there’s stuff online, that you can be prepared. Prepare yourself how to answer these questions. Do your homework. And, yeah, first and foremost, if you have a passion for SEO, sure. So

Michael 7:47
yep. Because we’re just talking interviewing at the moment. But what, what we do at our agency, and what a lot of other agencies do is a little test, like a skills and knowledge test. Sometimes it could be technical, like getting you to actually look at a slot, audit it and give recommendations or feedback. Other times, it might just be as simple as like a multiple choice thing. You know, like, yeah, what’s the most important H tag on a page h1, h2, when they were

Arthur 8:12
just basic stuff, like, give us a recommended page title for this page? You know, stuff. Really easy stuff. Someone that is Junior should be able to, you know, take a stab at it and get it mostly right, sir.

Michael 8:24
Yeah. So prepare for that. Those articles you mentioned, like searching for SEO interview questions. I’m sure there’s millions of articles out there and that, learn the basics, so that when someone throws a curveball at, you know, like, what, what do you think about bread crumbs? Yeah, you’re not you’re not thinking about bread, loaves of bread?

Arthur 8:42
Yeah, massive fan of bread crumbs.

Michael 8:44
All right. Well, I heard I think, Well, you got any more.

Arthur 8:47
I’m just be confident, be confident in yourself. And you know, I guess, if it is a junior role, no one expects you to know the world about SEO. But just be confident in yourself, the way you speak the way you carry yourself. And then you should define.

Michael 9:00
I would add to that as well ask questions about them. Yeah, of course. Ask questions about the business. You know, where you’re headed. What are your goals?

Arthur 9:07
What’s the role day to day? What are you doing? He’s a manager who you’re reporting to?

Michael 9:11
Yep, stuff like that. Yep. So hope that helps. Jared. Also, you’ve only interviewed a couple. You might not even be doing anything wrong, necessarily.

Arthur 9:20
Jared episode today, isn’t it? Yeah,

Michael 9:22
well, like he just um, if you’ve only got two haven’t managed to get an offer interview at a couple more and you might find that you get an offer. Maybe whoever jokes? Yeah, well, man, maybe if you’re in Sydney, head to the careers page and local digital calm today. We’ll see what what we can make happen. But um, look that hopefully helps. And, yeah, let’s move on to the next question. We’ve got Matt here. He has asked, is it worth focusing on other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo?

Arthur 9:56
No. Yeah, I was waiting for you to say that no one uses Bing or DuckDuckGo, very little people use Bing, even a smaller amount of people use Docker. I guess technically, if you’re optimising for Google, you’re optimising for all the other search engines. So I wouldn’t worry too much about, you know, all the alternatives out there. Especially Docker

Michael 10:17
here, like Google owns in Australia 92% of the assessed page in the US a bit less. So what would go be like point something percent? Yeah, like it is increasing a lot. But yeah, it’s coming up a small base. And it’s the numbers just pale in comparison to Google,

Arthur 10:35
I guess. DuckDuckGo is used by people, people who are typically trying to be more private or don’t want to be tracked by Google. So yeah, not really trying to cater to those people.

Michael 10:45
Yeah, different demographic on DuckDuckGo. Typically, at the moment, like it will grow over time. But yeah, being I would say typically is used by maybe older people, or less tech savvy people, I guess. It just is the default computer they’re using? And, um, I don’t know how to change it. Yeah. Or even know they need to, you know, so probably think it’s probably the number one such thing I’m being is Google. Yeah. So they’re probably going to Bing search and Google and Google. But anyway, ultimately, no, yeah. Ultimately, the answer is no focus your efforts where the results are going to come from. That’s critical. If you do well on Google, chances are you’ll show up in those other ones, to some extent, anyway. Yeah. Alrighty. Hope you like that one map. Cool.

Arthur 11:33
We have another one here from Sam. White Hat, grey hat or black hat. What’s the difference? And what do you recommend? Hmm, good question.

Michael 11:43
It is good. And the difference because people categorise white hat black hat, or different wave? Yeah, so we’ll give owls? Yeah. So I’m gonna start with black hat. The evil one. To me black hat. You know, I gotta set the scene. Yeah. Got a bit of suspense. Like, I can’t see evil one the bad one. Because it’s, in my opinion, it’s hacking other websites or doing like really dodgy stuff to get rankings in the search engines? Yeah, being nefarious, like being dodgy with your behaviour. So an example might be WordPress, there’s some sort of vulnerability where you’re able to inject links into websites using that vulnerability, you as an SEO, make use of that vulnerability and inject links to your affiliate website into 1000s of compromised WordPress websites.

Arthur 12:41
Have you tried doing that? No.

Michael 12:42
I’ve never tried it. You know how to be interesting. Be interesting, but it’s also illegal. So it’s probably not worth doing. Illegal. Yeah, by law. Yeah. What to hack people might compromise people’s websites and inject stuff into it. Well, guarantee if you

Arthur 12:56
get caught? Yeah, of course. Yeah. How often did you get caught?

Michael 12:59
I don’t know. But um,

Arthur 13:00
I didn’t think it was illegal. I

Michael 13:01
thought it was frowned upon. But I would say most by any sort of law, I would say putting content under someone else’s like website would be covered by some sort of law to fact check this. Yeah, we’re just speaking off the cuff here. But anyway, that’s Blackhat. To me, some people think Blackhat is like building links, you know, going against what Google says?

Arthur 13:21
Yeah, there’ll be a lot of people that would think that places I used to work out would strictly no link building just because it’s against Google’s guidelines. And you can potentially get penalised, but paid link building paid link building.

Michael 13:34
Yeah. But um, to me, it’s the exact you know, hacking other websites and trying to get your links in there to make money with an affiliate website. Or the Nike Air Max and Viagra and spam links that you see on websites. Yep. That’s usually the result of blackhat seo.

Arthur 13:51
So what’s on the flip side, white hat?

Michael 13:53
Want to go there? Okay.

Arthur 13:54
So what’s white hat SEO, white hats,

Michael 13:57
boring SEO.

Arthur 13:58
It’s basically just sticking by the book and not steering away from Google’s guidelines whatsoever. Yeah, Google’s

Michael 14:05
book in this case is Yeah. So white hat SEO is will preach. Just do great content. Content is king traffic will come? Yeah, just you know, write more in depth articles. Make your site way better than everyone else’s, Google will reward you,

Arthur 14:21
which is somewhat true, depending on the site. But to an extent, yeah, the point you made earlier is to me off off, microphone. But if you’re if you’re a plumber, just starting out, you know, you’re not going to get links the way a big website such as David Jones will, or any sort of big brand because they get links naturally for various reasons. So they don’t need to go and manually do link building. But if you’re a plumber, just starting out a plumber based in Panama, for example. How are you going to get people to link to your website? Yep. It’s you know, you might have some partners that you work with or if you sponsor a team or something, get a link there, but that’s not going to move the needle at all. So you have to kind of engage in some sort of link building paid link building, which is, I guess where we kind of step into the grey hat. Yeah. area.

Michael 15:10
Yeah. The grey hat really is. In my opinion, it’s doing what works. Yeah. It’s being a real SEO. It’s like looking at what ranks in Google. Yeah, how its ranking. And then making sure that you’re doing similar. Yeah. Which can often go against Google because

Arthur 15:27
Google doesn’t want you to manipulate their search engine algorithm, algorithm, GS, which had that arm. So obviously, they’re going to not tell you what works, they’re going to tell you, you know, you can’t do link building. It’s, it’s Blackhat. It’s not right. But in reality, it’s what works.

Michael 15:43
Yeah. And it’s not Blackhat. Now, as we’ve discovered, you’re not you’re not hacking, you’re not damaging other people’s sites, you are doing stuff to your own site that pleases Google’s crawlers, its algorithms and gets results. So things like paying for links falls into grey hat. Yep. Things like even private blog networks can fall into grey hat. Even you know, Google don’t want you creating, if you’re a local service business, and you create pages for the locations, your service, they don’t even technically want you doing that. But that stuff works, you know, trying to get local traffic. Yeah, that’s all grey hat. And typically, that’s where most, that’s where the right mix of risk and reward live, is in that grey hat zone. Yeah, if you’re, if you’re like, let’s say you run an affiliate website, you want to rank for like credit card comparison, you are not going to rank being purely white hat, because you’re not going to get enough links, you need to go out there and probably pay for links to compete with all the other affiliates that are paying for links. Yep. So you need to be grey hat. And that’s typically where results will come from, for most businesses, super big enterprise brands that get links because they have, you know, big marketing budgets or TV brand awareness er, or that they don’t need to worry about links, they can afford to just focus on content and technical. Most other businesses need to live in that grey hat world. Agree. Agreed? Yep. All right. Well, well said. Hopefully, that answered your question there. Sam. What do we recommend? Well, go ahead. Yeah, look, unless you’re a big enterprise brand. That’s why we don’t recommend Blackhat. Not just may or may not be illegal, but it’s definitely immoral.

Arthur 17:22
I wouldn’t even know how to start to do Blackhat. SEO when it comes to hacking sites. So yeah,

Michael 17:27
no, it’s not a skill you want to learn. So let’s move on. This question is a dumb one. Not even a question let you read this one out an email. I am professional blogger. Actually, I have links and top PR websites with high alexa rank for sale at great prices. Karen Jones, we’ve probably all seen these emails. Our inbox is flooded with them of people selling links. Do you see these emails every day

Arthur 17:53
after I see them? Yeah, well, I don’t know how they got my email address. But they have. Yeah, and it’s annoying. So that obviously scraped it from somewhere and found out that I do ser so I probably get I’d say maybe four or five maybe six a day random people hitting me up asking me if I want to buy some super high dr. sites with high alexa rank. Yeah, to boost my SEO and rank number one. Yep. Ignore ignore it, if I’ll even go one step further is have a look at the sites that they’re offering to you and then blacklist them and never approached him. Because if they’re hitting you up, they’re probably hitting up 1000s of other people as well. And you can bet your bottom dollar that those sites are eventually going to get de indexed and removed.

Michael 18:37
Yeah. So we’ve put that in bit tongue in cheek, because obviously, it’s not a question, but it’s just junk emails that we get all the time. And you as business owners listening to this probably do as well. Don’t fall for it. Don’t be tempted to engage with anything like that. Yeah, it’s just going to be good. Yeah, marketers, Junkin, marketing. I Mako. I’m constantly mocking them to spam.

Arthur 19:00
You should see my list of Blocked Senders. Oh, yeah. It’s just like you’re getting into like the, you know, 1000s. Yeah.

Michael 19:07
But the reason we’ve included that one is because it sort of ties into this next one, which is from Kevin. He says, What are your thoughts on outsourcing SEO overseas for cheaper? Now, the reason we’ve typed that in those those one selling links are normally from overseas people trying to make a buck. Now, this question is just asking about engaging with overseas SEO for cheaper? The answer to that is, could be awesome. Or it could be a nightmare. Yeah, depends on who you’re working with and how you’re working with them.

Arthur 19:38
Definitely. I guess the best way to answer it would be to kind of go through the pros and cons. Obviously, the main pro would be it probably going to be a lot cheaper than working with someone local. There could be good SEO is out there. It’s you know, like everything it’s hit and miss. You know, there’s definitely going to be a lot of scammers out there that have no idea what they’re doing. But amongst those people, you might find someone that’s actually pretty decent. It could be that they live in a country where the cost of living is significantly lower than here in Australia. So they can afford to charge. I don’t know, let’s just say I’ll throw a number out there $10 An hour or $15 an hour to do SEO and good quality SEO, compared to someone here, which is, you know, no one would do it for that way. Not enough so they could get away with getting results for a lot cheaper. That would be the pros.

Michael 20:30
Yeah. What else? That would probably be the

Arthur 20:32
the two main pros. Yeah, if you can find someone that’s good, then great. But I guess on the flip side, that there are the cons.

Michael 20:42
Just on that point of finding someone good. It is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. Because yeah, the ones that email you cold? Probably not good. Yeah. So know them, then you got a job place like, Well,

Arthur 20:53
you go on Upwork. And a lot of the good ones this time to cost a lot of money as Oh, I can, arguably more than some of the people in Australia. Yeah. So I’ll charge up people know that worth, you know, if someone’s a very good SEO, and I’m not going to do it for $5 an hour. Yeah. Because they know they can do it for a lot more. So

Michael 21:09
the other thing I want to make that point. That’s the SEO but there’s also link costs. Yeah, if you’re doing grey hat and actually paying people for links, you can avoid those costs. You can’t, if you want to get the right types of links that are not going to hurt you or have the least chance of hurting you. Yeah, you can’t really avoid paying for them. So there is what you pay the individual doing the work on it. But there is like building a house analogy, you can’t change the cost of the materials that go into building the house. Like at a certain level. It it just gets to a floor basically. Yeah, that’s the same as Link buildings, does depend what you’re using this overseas SEO person to

Arthur 21:45
do. Yeah, it’s like keyword research and, you know, technical audits on site stuff. And if they’re good, and they’re cheap and reliable, then why not bother when it comes to the link building? Probably not ideal.

Michael 21:58
Let’s chat about the cons, as we see it.

Arthur 22:00
Yeah. So I think the main con would be depending on where they are the timezone. So, you know, if you’ve, for example, if you’re based in Australia, or someone in Southeast Asia, the time difference isn’t too big. So you can kind of overlap you can, you can have them start earlier, finish earlier to kind of match up with Australian times that works. We have a few people that we work with overseas, which is fine. If you’re looking to go to Eastern Europe, and then unfortunately, it’s pretty much flipped day as night, not as day. So you might find that there’s only an hour or two a day where you kind of have that opportunity to engage with them and chat with them and you know, meet with them. So you’re basically trusting them to kind of go away and do their own thing. And yeah, so that would be, I guess, the main con for me.

Michael 22:52
I would say on that note, you have to project management. So you need to understand SEO enough to deal with that person and keep on top of them and make sure that

Arthur 22:59
yeah, you shouldn’t Yeah, because otherwise it could just go away, take your money, and you have no idea what’s happening. It could flick you automated report every month, and you might not see results and you weren’t there. Why? So you kind of have to have some level of SEO knowledge.

Michael 23:14
I would say as well with them being in those different markets. They don’t necessarily understand local places and things and vernacular, like the way we talk and that sort of stuff here. So yeah, it can it can show in the copyright, or the definitely tactics they use or even like the tactics they propose or location pages in the like.

Arthur 23:33
Yeah, so it’s if you’re working with a Sydney client, they didn’t know any of the suburbs in Sydney, or, you know, they might not know the capital cities of Australia. So basic stuff that a local person would know straightaway. Yeah.

Michael 23:44
Yeah. The other big ones, from my perspective is there’s no real legal protection for you, as a client, there’s no repercussions to them. Really, if they do the wrong thing,

Arthur 23:55
they can just disappear, you know, decide not to come online ever again. And that’s it, you’re never going to hear from him, we’ll find them.

Michael 24:00
And that happens often, you know, they just get missing leave you in the lurch. They also don’t care about their reviews or reputation in the local market here in Australia. So again, just disappear, do poor work, and you’re left holding the bag, so to speak. Yeah,

Arthur 24:15
I guess the only kind of flipside to that is if they are using Upwork, then they do kind of rely on reviews. So again, it can be very hit and miss

Michael 24:24
hmm, yeah. So I guess, look, we although we work at an agency, that services, businesses here in Australia, we’re not going to sit here and try and tell you that there’s no use for using overseas people. You know, in certain circumstances, it can be worth doing. But if you’re an established business here in Australia, you’re at a large enough size, you have a big enough marketing budget. You probably want to work with a local agency because you can pick up the phone and talk to them whenever you need to. You can go in the office and see them or have them come to you whenever you need them to. They care about their reputation in the local market. So they’re going to want to keep you happy. There are legal repercussions available to you if things go wrong. You know, there’s a whole lot of stuff timezones the exact same as you most of the time. It’s a whole bunch of stuff there that just makes the headaches of working with an anonymous person overseas, more or less. Not worth it. So, anything you want to add to that one?

Arthur 25:20
No. That’s everything. Good to know.

Michael 25:23
All right. Well, that’s about all the questions we had for this episode. So hope you enjoyed that one. We will be back next week with another episode of the SEO show. But until then, happy SEO ng see up soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai