SEO Q&A Week #4

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. Trying to do something new with my intro there and I can't even make it through the word without failing. Well, look, the loyal listeners have written in and just said, look, maybe with the intros you could be a bit better because we're pretty garbage, generally speaking, so. Sorry guys, we'll have to try next week with that. But look, this week, this episode is all about our loyal listeners because it is another episode of… Q&A week. Q&A week, number four. Pretty cool.

ARTHUR: Number four already. Yeah. Our time flies.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, I don't even know how long we've been doing this for, but…

ARTHUR: It feels like forever. No, it's been a year. I think we might be coming up to the year mark.

MICHAEL: We should probably check. Yeah, we'll do some sort of. Arthur said he was going to sing happy birthday and jump out of a cake for the video portion of the show. I'll do that.

ARTHUR: I think you were saying. If you get a cake big enough to fit me.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it would have to be a pretty big cake, wouldn't it? Don't shame me on the podcast. All right, moving on. Let's talk SEO. Let's talk Q and A's. Got some good questions this week.

ARTHUR: We do. I forgot to copy the names across. Oh, geez. We can make names up for each of them. It doesn't matter. We don't need a name.

MICHAEL: If this time round, if you submitted this question, we don't have your name, but we do have your name. We just don't have it on the list on our list here, but you'll know when you hear the question that it was your question. So thank you. Anonymous.

ARTHUR: If they listen to the podcast, that is, but yeah, you'd hope they are.

MICHAEL: Yeah. If they're submitting questions, they should be waiting eagerly for these answers.

ARTHUR: Cool. So the first question is, is internal linking, sorry, is internal link spamming a thing?

MICHAEL: And that was submitted by someone, Barack Obama, I think. Okay.

ARTHUR: So all the way from the white house or anyway, ignore me. Um, is internal link spamming a thing? I don't think so. No.

MICHAEL: No, I don't think so. It depends on what we are classing internal link spamming.

ARTHUR: We talked about this off air a little bit. So for example, if you were to add a large number of internal links to your footer, probably not a great idea. Likewise, if you're just internal linking from random pages on your website to another random page without any sort of strategy, a bad idea.

MICHAEL: Even that's not that much of a bad idea.

ARTHUR: Not a bad idea, but it's probably not going to get you, like, if you don't know what you're doing, you're not going to see results.

MICHAEL: What about like over-optimized anchor text internally? It's fine. Yeah. We think it's fine. Like I know there's articles around that say, or you shouldn't do it. You can get penalized, but we haven't actually seen that happen from our adventures with internal linking.

ARTHUR: No.

MICHAEL: So is internal link spamming a thing? Not really, not the way most people would internal link on their website.

ARTHUR: I think if you're going to be internally linking, if you're doing like an internal linking audit, make sure you have all your high value pages in your header, any sort of pages, I guess, top level pages in your footer. don't even have to, but ideally, why not? And then if you're going to be doing internal linking within your content, use Ahrefs, have a look at which pages have the most referring domains pointing to them, and then map that out and start internally linking from those pages to deeper pages, wherever it makes sense. And then do the same for, you know, level two pages, level three pages, so on and so forth.

MICHAEL: And just don't put let's say a hundred links in your footer for best locksmith and then every suburb in the area you want to go after. Like that's sort of internal link spamming. That is a thing. It's just don't do it. Like there's no point in doing that. You know, you can, you can have a page with those links in it and it serves the same purpose. Moving on the next question. So I'm not happy with my SEO person and I believe I might've been fleeced. So is anyone willing to take a look at my site and tell me if I'm wrong out of the team? That was submitted by John Howard. So thanks for your question. Wasn't that Joe Biden? No, Joe's the next one. What's fleeced? I haven't heard that term. It means like to have a little money taken out of your pockets. Yeah, pretty much. Okay, cool. Fleece. It's like you've been, you've been brought it. You've been robbed. They've been, they've robbed me blind.

ARTHUR: There's no context behind that, but I know that's an internal joke we have.

MICHAEL: So it probably means nothing to you guys, but anyway, it's the same thing. This person feels that they've been robbed or fleeced by an FCO person. You hear it a lot. There is a way like we can't really take a look at the site and tell you if you're wrong.

ARTHUR: We don't know what the site is.

MICHAEL: We probably could if you sent us the site. So John, if you wanted to send that in again with the site, we can take a look, but you as a website owner can definitely go and look at a few things to try and figure this out. So how do you keep an SEO person honest? Well, first and foremost, What's the reporting what they've been doing every month they should report they should tell you what they've been doing they should be updating you on how the sites going and they should be giving you a chance to talk to them and. understand what's going on with your campaign. So if they're not doing that to begin with, then they probably are slicing you. If they are doing that, then ask, you know, what have you done this month? Exactly.

ARTHUR: Have a look at your website and see if they've made any changes to it, I guess, on face value. Yes. You need to know what to look at, obviously. But I guess the first thing is that across my mind would be metadata, page titles, have they added content to the pages? Are they doing link building? So even if you use a free version of Ahrefs or any other tool, Search Console, have a look if there's any new internal links, not internal links, sorry, referring domains pointing to your website, and you'll be able to have an idea of whether or not they are actually building links.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you, in Ahrefs, when you look at the referring domains, you can see how many you got in like the last seven days, 30 days, 90 days, something like that. So just run, run that search and put those filters on and just see if there are the good links coming in. You listen to our previous episodes on this topic and you'll be able to learn what a good link is. Are these coming in or are you getting nothing or just random scraper junk links that every website gets? And there's, there's no SEO. Yeah. It's coming in. Um, look at the pages on, yeah, the site, like is it a homepage, internal pages, category pages or like nothing. Um, I would also have a look at like a page has been created, new pages, you know, new copy. Are they sending you a copy to review in the month before it goes up on the site? If they're not, then what are they doing?

ARTHUR: Just ask, have a conversation with them. probably the best starting point.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, if they're fleecing you there, they'll be like, yeah, all good.

ARTHUR: Like, yeah, but just get them to give you a list of, like I said, a list of things that they've worked on in the past month and then just check and see if they've actually done those things.

MICHAEL: I would say a couple of other things that are a bit outside of just looking at tactics and all that is what are they charging? Like if you're paying 500 bucks a month or 600 bucks a month, you're being fleeced. Because SEO is expensive and takes time. That's true. Yeah. You just can't avoid that. So if you're paying five, 600 bucks a month, you're getting nothing for it. Likewise, if you are in certain types of businesses and doing SEO, sorry, let me go back. If you're in a certain type of business, you shouldn't be doing SEO. Like let's say you are a little local neighborhood travel agent and you want to rank for like flights to Bali or something like that. And some SEO person has sold you SEO. you are never going to rank for that. No, you shouldn't be doing SEO. So if someone is taking your money in that circumstance, you're being fleeced. So, um, I would say they're the main things that you can look at from your side to try and suss out. If you're being fleeced, you could ask, Hey, am I being fleeced? And see if they'll be honest. But, um, yeah, the other thing I guess you could do is maybe, um, reach out to other agencies or consultants and get them to have a look. Now I would put a caveat on that, that they're going to probably come in and say, Oh, there's all sorts of stuff wrong because they want to try and win your business. Absolutely. You know, you might, if you get a few different opinions, pick up on a common theme of, of things that are wrong. So then that will help, you know, then you can take that to the person you're working with and see what they have to say.

ARTHUR: Just be prepared that they're going to hit you up after that.

MICHAEL: So yeah, you will be sold to yes. All right, well, I hope that helped you, Johnny Howard. Let's move on to Joe Biden's questions. He's been spending some time in Ahrefs.

ARTHUR: Has he?

MICHAEL: Apparently.

ARTHUR: So Joe Biden has asked, Ahrefs traffic improvements not showing up on Google analytics. Well, the reason for that is Ahrefs traffic is estimated traffic. So what it does is it looks at where you're ranking. So all your keywords, the position, and then based on the click-through rate for that position, they estimate traffic depending on where you are. So it's never going to match up with Google analytics. That's why.

MICHAEL: So we always say Ahrefs traffic is like a barometer. Like it should show trends generally. Like if things are going up, it picks up. If things are going down, it picks that up.

ARTHUR: And yeah, it's a good tool to use when you're comparing domains, if you're comparing sites. So you can get a good idea which site's getting more traffic, but it's never going to be accurate traffic data.

MICHAEL: And it's also in a bit of a lag as well.

ARTHUR: Definitely. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Keyword rankings can sometimes take months.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. Longer sometimes. So yeah.

MICHAEL: So you need analytics for your site. Uh, I guess it's, uh, it is annoying if I address is saying you've got tons of traffic and your analytics says you don't, that shouldn't really be the case.

ARTHUR: Have a look at where you're looking, which location you're looking at, because if it's, is it looking at worldwide traffic? Is it looking at a specific region? Yeah. So if you're in Australia, make sure you always set Australia and that should be more accurate than yes. The default setting.

MICHAEL: Yep.

ARTHUR: Cause you could have keywords ranking in New Zealand or anywhere really.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But if they're ranking, you should be expect that traffic's coming from there. Not that you should care.

ARTHUR: True.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Depends what you do as a business as well. Like maybe you want international traffic as well, but yeah, the general gist is Ahrefs is a guide to what's going on. Analytics is going to give you the more obviously accurate data. All right. The next question has come in from Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is asking, we've got a lot of US politicians tuning into the SEO show. We do. Who would have thought?

ARTHUR: I know, it's crazy. Life after politics, SEO.

MICHAEL: Yes, I moved into it. Is lazy loading good for SEO? Yeah, definitely. Yep. Yeah, pretty much. So for those that don't know what lazy loading is, it is where images on your page will load as you sort of get to them.

ARTHUR: So it's loading all the important stuff elements first before it gets to the images or whatever you don't need straight away. Yeah. And that improves page load speeds and better for user experience.

MICHAEL: Yep. So your, your site will sort of appear to be fully loaded much quicker. And then as you scroll down, it's like, Oh, better load all these images that are down here now. But, um, the page is already loaded quicker and you sent that signal back to Google that your site's fast. That is a good thing for SEO. So as long as it's implemented correctly. So, uh, Hillary, hopefully you are having good luck with lazy loading on your websites. Good luck in 2024.

ARTHUR: Okay.

MICHAEL: If you choose to run, yes. Moving on, we've got another question here. My website was hacked. How do I clean it up and how do I prevent it? That was from Bill. No, I'm reading Barnaby here. Barnaby didn't have HTTPS on his site. He didn't update his WordPress, his plugins and someone's gone in and hacked it. He wants to know how I can stop it.

ARTHUR: So let's start with how can you prevent this? So if you're, depending what CMS you're using, make sure that all your plugins and WordPress is up to date. That's probably one of the main reasons sites get hacked. Plugins do go out of date, people exploit vulnerabilities, hard word to say, and that's how they inject malware and all the nasty stuff that you can find on a website. So the first step would be making sure that All your plugins are up to date. It's always good to have some sort of like malware software or security software installed. If there's any issues of any, if there are any known plugins that have vulnerabilities, they'll let you know.

MICHAEL: So examples of that security word fence, they're the two we mainly use. Harden your like admin username and password. Like don't use the username admin and the password my business 2022 exclamation.

ARTHUR: That used to be very common.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you should make your admin username like KV at asterix.

ARTHUR: Yeah, use a bunch of uppercase, lowercase, characters, numbers. Gibberish. Just, yeah, make it unhackable basically.

MICHAEL: Because the other way people hack, there's vulnerabilities, but yeah, they'll use scripts that just try combinations and they'll always start with. the stuff that's commonly used and then like variations on that, like.

ARTHUR: Password one, two, three.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All of that sort of stuff. Like if you're doing that, you deserve to be hacked basically. So Barnaby, I don't know what your password was, but yeah, make sure your admin username and password are tough to impossible for someone to guess really.

ARTHUR: How should you go about cleaning it up?

MICHAEL: Just thinking if there's anything else we can say on the preventing side of it. Well, I would say as well. Secure servers. Backups of your site. You should be on a host that backs up daily. So if you're hacked today, you can roll back and not be totally stuffed basically.

ARTHUR: Happened recently and it's using, again, I know we're not sponsored by Kinsta, but having the ability to restore with one click is a God save sometimes. So definitely make sure you're doing regular backups.

MICHAEL: So when it comes to cleaning it up, now this depends on so many things.

ARTHUR: I think getting a developer would probably be the smart idea.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Someone else. Don't you try and figure it out.

ARTHUR: They'll know where to look. They'll know how to clean it up. Yeah.

MICHAEL: One I'm like, if you're on WordPress, there's services like fixed.net, F I X E D.net, where you can just go on there and say, Oh, my site's been hacked. I don't know what's going on. Can you please fix it? Pay them a one-time fee, give them access and they go clean it up and then tell you what happened. Yeah. Sometimes Kinsta, if you're with Kinsta, they can help to a certain extent as well. Their support.

ARTHUR: Yeah. They've got some sort of guarantees around hacking. I think they do. They're guaranteed to clean it up for you. Yeah. Yeah. But I think, I think it's much better to have those backups ready. Cause it's a lot easier to restore a site than it is to have to clean it up because yeah.

MICHAEL: You can be waiting a couple of days while your site's down.

ARTHUR: Yes.

MICHAEL: So, and if you've got ads running, let's say you've got Facebook ads running and Google ads running, you have to pause them, which then interrupts all their like machine learning on those platforms. And it's not good to have your sites go down. So Barnaby, I hope that helps you out. Get all of those things lined up and sort of done properly and your website won't be hacked again.

ARTHUR: Wannabejoyce.com. Got it, yeah.

MICHAEL: I don't know if that, yeah.

ARTHUR: Cool. We have a question here from, this is the last question actually. Have you got a name ready to go? Yeah, I'm trying to think of, I can't think of any other politicians. Pauline Hanson.

MICHAEL: Pauline's back. She's bloody mad. She doesn't like it.

ARTHUR: No.

MICHAEL: Cause the competitors got more traffic.

ARTHUR: Can you tell why a competitor is getting more traffic than me? So there's a bit more to this one. Hi, can you tell me from a report why a competitor is getting way more traffic than me? They have much lower backlink and lower authority score, could be paid PPC traffic, sorry, paid PPC or something. Mine is 1.5K while his is 35K. So there's a lot to digest in that question. It's hard to read, but.

MICHAEL: So it could be paid. So wait up, let's get back to this.

ARTHUR: So it depends where first and foremost, how do you know they're getting that much traffic? That would be a traffic estimate.

MICHAEL: So they're looking at Ahrefs let's say.

ARTHUR: Assuming, yeah. And let's assume they are looking at Ahrefs.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So it won't be PPC or paid traffic. We can get rid of that part of her question. And so it's saying that she has one and a half thousand visitors.

ARTHUR: They've got 35,000 visitors.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But they've got like way less links and lower score for those 35,000 visits.

ARTHUR: Allegedly, yeah. What's going on? So without knowing the sites, you'd have to have a look and have a look first and foremost, how big are the sites? So, you know, if you're comparing your 20 page website with a 2000 page website, you're always going to have less traffic because you've got a lot less pages ranking.

MICHAEL: less nets in the sea to catch fish.

ARTHUR: The analogy we always use. So first thing I'll do is have a look and see what pages are ranking, how many pages are ranking and what keywords they're ranking for.

MICHAEL: You could go to Google and type in site colon and then the name of the website, the URL, hit enter. And it will say how many pages are in Google's index for site A and then do it for site B. Then go to Ahrefs and have a look at the top pages report and see how many pages on their site are getting traffic. You know, they might have way more articles, blog articles, or they could be getting like, is the traffic even good that they're getting? Like, or are they just getting junk traffic to a blog that doesn't mean anything? Like remember that example of that one client in the past that ranked for sport, best sports, Australian sports.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Top 10 Australian sports by participation or something. Yeah. So it was a sporting apparel company that did a blog post about the top sports in Australia. Got tens of thousands of organic sessions per month, zero conversions.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And that page ranked and then after a Google algorithm update, it didn't rank anymore. Traffic dropped. Yeah, traffic projections drop.

ARTHUR: Revenue stayed the same.

MICHAEL: So what do you care about? Yeah. The other thing is like you say that the competitor has less links than you. They might not, because not every link is even picked up by Ahrefs. Like some websites will actively block Ahrefs from being able to see they exist. So maybe this competitor is out there doing heaps of private blog network link building to boost their domain and their authority and links are much better than yours.

ARTHUR: How long has that domain been around? If you're starting from scratch, if you've been around for six months and they've been around for six years, that will play a part.

MICHAEL: User experience on the site, like is yours just trash? Is it really bad and mobile, you know, like, and they're really good. That's going to play a part. There's a lot to it. So I think they're pretty good points to start with. Like we're basically talking, you need to do an SEO audit.

ARTHUR: But I think a good starting point was have a look and see how many pages they have, how many pages you have. If there's a big gap between you and them, that's the likely cause.

MICHAEL: We really missed a trick when we read this question out, right? We said it was from Pauline and we should have said the question. And then at the end said, please explain. Just thought of that. So look, I thought I'd dropped that. We recorded. Top shelf humor right at the end there to leave everyone on a high at the end of this episode. But that's all we had for this week. So to the real people that wrote those questions, we're sorry, but, um, we hope you enjoyed the answers. If you were listening, we're sorry, we didn't have your real names. Um, but. We won't dwell on this any longer because we got no more questions. We hope you enjoyed that. Keep sending them in. Keep sending them in. We'll be back with another episode for our weekly episode of the SEO show as stated in our contracts. We're obligated to do it weekly and we're going to stick to it.

ARTHUR: We'll see you next week.

MICHAEL: We'll see you next week. Bye.

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