Kyle Roof Interview

We chat with Kyle Roof this week. Kyle needs no introduction in the SEO world after he famously (or is it infamously) proved Google doesn’t really “understand” content – it’s just a math formula that looks at certain inputs.  To do this, he ranked a page written purely in lorem ipsum dummy content #1 in Google just by changing keywords in certain parts of the page that he thought Google’s algorithm looks at…. hey presto – #1 rankings.

Kyle is also the founder of Page Optimizer Pro, a software tool for auditing and improving your onsite optimisation.  We’ve banged on about it in the past on the show, we use it in our day-to-day workflow and have seen it generate good results for us. A many of many hats, he’s also the founder of SEO agency High Voltage SEO and the SEO testing and training community Internet Marketing Gold.

We enjoyed this chat with Kyle as we touched on all sorts of SEO gold across onsite optimisation, backlinks and a few rapid fire questions about SEO myths, SEO software and underrated tactics. Enjoy!

If you enjoyed the chat why not check out Page Optimizer Pro and have a little fun with Google’s algorithm yourself. If you like it and decide to purchase it then enter the code LOCALDIGITAL and you’ll get 15% off the monthly plan.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Unknown Speaker 0:02
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.

Unknown Speaker 0:24
Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of the SEO Show. Today we have our first actual guest. Excited.

Michael 0:33
Well, you know what I am, but you failed to acknowledge our brand new intro. What about a new intro? A new voiceover?

Unknown Speaker 0:40
I didn’t know we had a

Michael 0:42
voiceover. Well, we do. This is the week it goes live. We’ve got rid of the old man that used to call you up there. And we have a guy that just says Alpha. Sounds like a C black and Z black. Yep. So um, but that’s a bit more on brand.

Unknown Speaker 0:55
So I’m happy with that.

Michael 0:56
Yeah, I’ll do the intro. There’s a little bit of a different outro too, for those that stayed to the end. So a little nugget to stick around for. But yeah, I don’t think I’ve heard that. No, you haven’t even heard that. I’m just chucking it in there. So I have to listen to the show better listened to the end because it trashes you in the outro. Now,

Unknown Speaker 1:15
I really, no, of

Michael 1:17
course not. This asking for my favorite thing, which is for people to subscribe and leave us a review. I figured instead of asking, we can just have the outro ask every week.

Unknown Speaker 1:28
Anyway, we’re getting a bit off topic.

Michael 1:30
So what is the topic who was our special guest? We had a chat with him yesterday.

Arthur 1:35
So we had Kyle roof cycle roof, the co founder of high voltage ser, and also the co founder of page optimizer Pro, which is a tool that we have previously mentioned on the podcast. Very powerful on site optimization tool that I use personally all the time. So I don’t know how we managed to get a guest of his caliber on the show, but not complaining, not complaining at all

Michael 2:00
lucky self doubt. We are highly esteemed at the SEO show. So yeah, it’s a good chat with him. Obviously. We we did it yesterday. So we covered things like on page optimization a little. What would you say he ran a little experiment that got him in the bad books of Google. So we had a chat about that. And just his software. And it’s taken SEO. So it was a pretty cool chat. So maybe without further ado, let’s cut to it. And you guys can all listen to the sounds of man car having

Unknown Speaker 2:32
chatting up and not really just being a passenger in this one. Yeah, he

Michael 2:35
might have contributed a little bit. But look, the guest with Kyle. So that’s what this episode is all about. So, yeah, let’s hear what he had to say. Hi, Kyle, welcome to the show.

Unknown Speaker 2:46
Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here.

Michael 2:47
Yeah, no problem. Look, we’re stoked to have you on the show. But you know, for our listeners who might not have heard of you before, if you could just give us a real quick overview of who you are and what you do. That’d be awesome. Sure.

Unknown Speaker 2:57
I have an agency. We’re a multinational agency. We have offices in Phoenix, Berlin and Melbourne. We do local to national international, to everything in between. I’m the inventor and CO creator of page optimizer Pro, which is an on page SEO tool. And I am the co founder of Internet Marketing Gold is a place where we do tests on Google’s algorithm. And then we also have a series of courses. I have several courses in there myself.

Michael 3:21
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. So you’re man of many hats. And, you know, this method of agency, there’s community there. And we’ll probably touch on a few different parts of that as we chat. But I wanted to first start by just saying where I first heard of you that in my travels in the SEO world and the internet, I came across this guy, he managed to rank a page of lorem ipsum. So the dummy action, I thought it’d be cool if you could talk about that to our listeners, just because now people sort of think Google’s this mythical being that you really need to be, you know, ticking all these different ranking factors to get get a page ranking, but you’ve done it with lorem ipsum. So that’s really cool. If you could tell them a bit about that and be awesome.

Unknown Speaker 3:57
Yeah, you bet. That is a what I’m most famous for. That’s what most people heard of me. It was 2018. It was a SEO competition put together by SEO signals lab and their Facebook group. And the competition was to rank the term rhinoplasty Plano rhinoplasty is a nose job and Plano is just outside of Dallas, Texas. My team and I we decided to enter from the agency and I think 27 other professionals entered, it was a 30 day competition. And the stipulations were the ad is a brand new domain. So you couldn’t have done anything to the domain for a new domain. And then after that, you can pretty much do whatever you want. And at the end of that 30 days, we took fifth actually. And then about two weeks later, our site went to page one. And about two weeks after that, we went to number one and then I went to number one of the maps. And then at one point we completely wiped out the maps and we were the knowledge panel. We were rhinoplasty Plano, and at that point, people really started to lose their And the reason they did was because we wrote the entire site in lorem ipsum, which is the dummy Latin text. But what we did is we did the math, we did the math on how many times we needed rhinoplasty, Plano. Only times we needed its variations how many times we needed its contextual terms. And then we copied and pasted those words into the lorem ipsum. In the places that Google is checking, checking your page, and a lot of people think that we are, we did it to make fun of Google. And that’s not true at all, we actually did to make fun of SEOs that tell you that you need to write good content. Because you know, well, you do need to write good content, because you need to get people to convert, you know, to do what you want them to do, and they do the page. Ranking is a whole other thing. Ranking is methods because it’s an algorithm. And if you can give the algorithm the math that it wants, then you can do very, very well. And that’s the point that we were trying to prove tonight, I think we were able to prove it

Michael 5:52
absolutely proved it to the point where it didn’t didn’t Google come after you or something like that they wanted to get rid of the FUD or D index and

Unknown Speaker 5:58
that is also true. So what’s funny is I have a course on white hat SEO that I put out last year, and in doing the course obviously need to read the the guidelines again, just to reacquaint myself. And as I’m making notes. And I noticed under automated generated content, there’s there’s a rule that says, you can’t have a page that doesn’t make any sense to the reader, but contains keywords. And I was like, well, when did that rule go into effect? And so I put the URL into the Wayback Machine. And before the competition, that rule isn’t there a week after the competition ended so that people could see the sights and see what we did. It’s there. And then, so I didn’t notice at the time, but then three months later, there was an article written about this, like, Google ranks site in Lorem, Ipsum, and Search Engine Journal. And about six hours after that came out, my sight was deindexed, which is that’s fair play, I guess. But then that night from about 1:15am, to about like 1:25am, Google deindex 20, my test sites. And those test sites had absolutely nothing to do with the the competitions like they were on different servers, different everything different hosting, and they didn’t link to it was just that’s those are sites that I just used to test the algorithm. And Google when took all those down. Which wasn’t really fun in the moment. But it actually worked out pretty well. Because basically, what they did is they validated everything that I was doing. Yeah, like, if I was getting lucky, or just, you know, they would have rolled their eyes moved on. But what I showed is how you can learn about the algorithm, how you can test the algorithm, how you can see if something is or is not a ranking factor. And, and then they made a rule trying to stop you from doing it, I have not stopped and

Michael 7:41
I like getting a penalty, you know, manual penalty or something like that as a bit of a badge of pride, you know, if you’re going to be pushing the limits in FBO, and seeing what works. And if they’re rewriting their guidelines, I think that’s taking that to the next level. So I think

Unknown Speaker 7:55
it’s pretty good. And then also, using this that same method that I use there, I also now have a US patent on if determining something is or is not a ranking factor in Google. Awesome. So I may be one of the few people that has both a patent in SEO and a Google rule.

Michael 8:10
Yes. And so I just did that. Is that what led to all that sort of work you’re doing there the testing, and then sort of pushing the limits and math, I really like you coming at it from that angle. Like we always talk about the fact that you know, an algorithm just has its inputs, and then there’s the outputs. And you’re really looking at what those inputs are? Is that what you’re doing with your page optimizer pro, you know, the side of things a SaaS business? Can you tell us a bit? That’s

Unknown Speaker 8:35
exactly right. I’ve done I think more than 400 On Page tests on Google’s algorithm, and then I’ve repeated them. And the knowledge that gained from that is what is coded into the algorithm of page optimizer Pro. One of the things I learned early on about when I was testing, what occurred to me was the Google can’t read, you know, Google can’t read like a human being would be reading, you know, kind of going left to right and top to bottom, Google is just doing math. And so if you can then satisfy the algorithm, if you can give the algorithm math that it’s one that it wants, then you can be very successful in your SEO.

Michael 9:07
So when you’re saying math, for our for our listeners, let’s say they’re wanting to go do a little bit of math in their content on a weekend have a lazy weekend doing that. What are the main areas that you can sort of hit to really, to be pleasing to Google, I guess, so to speak.

Unknown Speaker 9:25
You actually don’t even have to go as nutty with it as I do. But really, the top four places to put a keyword are in your URL, your title tag, your h1 and in body text and paragraph tags. Those are the top four places. If you take one thing from this and just put your keyword in those four places, you’ve probably done 60% of SEO right there. Yeah, the rest is minutiae. A lot of people intuitively do that and actually have a lot of success. Because those are the most important places. Those are the factors that are the strongest, because when Google breaks down a page, it doesn’t look as it’s not reading. It’s also not looking at page as a whole is looking at specific places on the page. And some places are more important than others. And so those are the top four places. Yeah, if somebody is brand new to SEO, though, one morning, is if you have a page that’s ranking and it’s been around a while and you realize you don’t have the keyword the URL, don’t change the URL, because you’ll be giving Google a brand new page. But if you have a page that’s just starting out or page you’re building now definitely put that keyword in the URL.

Michael 10:22
Yeah. Okay. And so looking at that stuff, in general, how sort of deep does it go? What sort of other things does it look, I know, it looks at competitors a bit as well, doesn’t it?

Unknown Speaker 10:32
Sure, the concept isn’t the secret is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you the sites that it likes, yeah. And like some for their on page, they’re off page or a combination. And so you can learn what Google likes for your keywords by looking at the sites that it’s currently rewarding. And then what pop does is it looks at that. And then with our algorithm that we’ve written, we look for competitive edges. Because there are times to get an edge on your competitors, you want to do more than what they’ve done, maybe exactly what they’ve done, or a little bit less. And so pop looks at those different factor areas that are on your page, and then gives you a recommendation for like how many times you should use your terms, you know, your exact keyword, its variations and the contextual terms. Well, people don’t realize that those, those variations of your keyword actually do a lot of heavy lifting. You don’t want to put your keyword on the page 1000 times. One that doesn’t really help that much a bit. It can but it’s it’s also gross like to do. But those variations actually do a lot of heavy lifting. And if you count those terms, and then put them in all those places, like your title tag, like your h1 and paragraph tags, you can be very successful.

Michael 11:37
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. So we, um, we use the tool quite a lot ourselves in our business, and we sort of see good results, you know, not always, but like quite a lot of the time, you know, looking at the competitive length of the content, use of the keywords and all those supplementary keywords, not just banging on the top keyword all the time. So definitely works. You touched on links there a little bit. One thing I want to get back to this, rhinoplasty was that site ranked what was the link side of things that was a much going on with Link Building was a purely content.

Unknown Speaker 12:10
So I did two rounds of citations for local SEO purposes, because we did get a verified GMB. And then and then the we did citations. Yeah, we did around citations, and then I did around a web 2.0. I think it’s a good practice to own your brand name across the web. And so you want to have, you know, your brand.wordpress.com, your brand.tumblr.com, etc. So we did around those. And I did those for the signal of the were a real entity that were real thing. And I also did it for indexing purposes as well, because I wanted these pages get indexed. And then I did fire just a few links at the page just again, to get them indexed. And we also had a silo built out. That was also on lorem ipsum. And, and it was pointing up to the target base. So we built a few links to the to the silo pages just to to get them indexed as well. But under 100 150, it was just Yeah, a few links to go and just to kind of get the ball rolling.

Michael 13:07
And just foundational, like we call them foundation links at the web 2.0 citations, the bread and butter stuff every business website should have really, but you didn’t really know

Unknown Speaker 13:17
what don’t do for some reason. Yeah. And they’re the easiest to do. And they’re the safest to do and they have a lot of benefit. And they kind of build a nice little fortress around your site for you and a lot of people don’t do it. Yeah,

Michael 13:27
I am. I heard you touch on silo them. So did you did you have sort of the main page for the rhinoplasties location and then silo pages for other keywords that were also just lorem ipsum. But with a keyword related to that main topic, if that’s sort of what you were doing with the silo?

Unknown Speaker 13:43
That’s exactly right. So I think I had seven with seven silo posts. And they were from like, people also asked type questions, which are really good use for silo posts, or related keywords related to rhinoplasty, Plano. And then what we did is we interlink them all. So A to B, B to A and C, C to B, and D, etc, we link them that way. And then they all link up to the target page. And then we had one link from the target page coming back into the silo. So it kind of completes the silo. So the Google can track through all the pages, and then back up to the to the target page.

Michael 14:16
Cool. Cool. And so let’s say a local business, you know, they’re wanting to rank a page, do you find there’s more value in that silo approach, where they you have the sort of main theme, and then all those supporting pages, or going super deep, you know, like a really long in depth page and just trying to go for everything on one page, what

Unknown Speaker 14:35
Google shows you the pages that it likes. And so what a really good approach is to say, okay, Google is rewarding this type of page and it has 2000 words, that’s the type of page you should do. I don’t think you should try to teach Google something new. That’s very difficult to do and not the path toward success. So I would see what Google is rewarding. And in this case, I think, at the time, it was like about 1500 words for for To target so we had 1500, Lorem, Ipsum words on on the target page. After that what you’ll find those there often I would use people also asked on those target pages or on your target pages, because those are obviously the questions that people are asking about your particular thing. And related keywords are also a good idea. But sometimes you’ll find some that are just a little too far afield for maybe the target page, those are the ones that are excellent for your supporting pages. Not only, I mean, you get that initial link, but if once they start to rank for their own keywords, because you won’t make that a longtail kind of a keyword a longer phrase, it’ll start to rank for its own keywords, it’s going to build the strength of your site sites to rank for more keywords do better. So this gives you an opportunity to to start ranking for a lot of keywords, especially as it might take some time for your target page to be successful. But you’re within the ballpark, you know, when you’re within the realm of what you’re going after. So you should be getting good impressions, good clicks, the kind of people that you want, and at the same time, you’re raising the value of your site.

Michael 15:59
Absolutely. Okay, awesome. And do you think this would work today? lorem ipsum? Is a hole that Google’s plug

Unknown Speaker 16:06
does work today? I do it all the time? Still? I think um, so I got a lot of hate mail after doing it. And a lot of people said like, No, you can’t do that anymore. And they would list a series of reasons as to as to why it wouldn’t work. And so the following year on my speaking circuit, I spoke in LA, Bali, Vietnam, Chiang Mai and in, in Milan, and I ranked a page on page one in lorem ipsum for each of those cities. Beautiful. And then I think of those, I think three of those pages are actually still up on page one.

Michael 16:46
And did you Did you also just moving on in terms of topics here? When it comes to writing these pages, like let’s say you’re writing a page, you’re not going to check lorem ipsum? In there, you want to rank a page legitimately for a client? How do you sort of approach it? Do you just sort of pick a keyword and say write as off you go? Was there a bit more structure to the way you brief them in like a you, you’re trying to break them in with this sort of pop mentality behind it before you’re going in? And if you’re going the page afterwards, as like some people like to call it? What’s your sort of approach? In the real world

Unknown Speaker 17:19
kind of tricky, I find it’s tricky. If you tell a writer, I need 2000 words, and I need 400 of them to be from this list. I think it’s very difficult for writers to do, especially those that aren’t necessarily SEOs. I think the right approach is to think about, okay, we’ve got this page, and we need 150 or 1500 words on it, let’s say that’s five sections, what I’ll do is I’ll actually find the terms I want for the section. So those would be like the people also asked, or related keywords, I’ll give them the title. I’ll give them the the section headings. And those will become your H tos on the page. And then after that, tell them just fill all this in, you know, answer this question or provide the information needed for this section. And what happens is, is that you kind of get very close to your necessary counts, I would then run that through pop, and then you’re just doing tweaking on the editing, adding in a term here taking out a term they’re not trying to do that the SEO process from the start, when it’s kind of tricky to do it that

Michael 18:10
way. Yeah. And you end up with a I guess a more naturally reading piece of content that way, rather than you know, we are the best dentist Melbourne that Melbourne has to offer

Unknown Speaker 18:21
enter exactly, you get something that’s more readable for humans, but you’re also getting something that’s going to the Google would like to because you’re getting the term frequency. Now the amount of times you need, the terms should be pretty close, or you’ve got terrible writers, like completely missed, whether you were supposed what they were supposed to write about them. That’s it’s impossible for that to happen when you give them those sections. I think an important point for people, though, is that I see it as a game of probability. Now, as you mentioned, it doesn’t work every time right? It but the idea is to make enough good decisions so that you are right More times than not. Normally, normal SEO is, in my experience is only right about 30 to 40% of time, that’s one out of three pages. Good SEO is right maybe 50% of time. And if you think about that’s a coin flip, you could make all the other decisions the other way. And you do just as well, yeah. And that’s why people often get frustrated with SEO, is because they see it as like this is just a coin flip. So the idea is to have a repeatable system to have a repeatable process things are going to do over and over. And so you get to that 70% range to maybe 80%. And at that point, you are winning, you know your coin is rigged in your favor. And that won’t work every time it’s going to work most of the time. And I think if you take that to the page level, you might not rank for that target keyword. But if you have those sections with the people also ask them with the related terms, you can win those and you can still have a very successful page ranking for hundreds or 1000s of keywords. But maybe not that top level turn but it’s still going to do very well for you. So with the idea of this is a game of probability want to give your page the best chance to rank for as much as possible. And then then you can be very easily test one SEO.

Michael 20:01
Awesome. Awesome. Okay. And so when you’re testing, you know, we might run into scenarios where we find a page is ranking well, and then rankings maybe start to plateau or fall off. And you might think, well, let’s throw some more links at it or something like that. But do you find there’s much value in reaping a page or, you know, refreshing content just to give it a little nudge? Do you sort of find that stuff in the testing that you’ve been doing?

Unknown Speaker 20:27
Yeah, absolutely. The goalposts shift. You know, when you move on to page one, the reality is you’ve knocked somebody else off a page one, and they might not be very happy about that. And I think we often forget that we aren’t the only SEO in the world, we’re not the only people that are interested in particular terms. And so when you knock somebody off, you know, they want to do something about that. And it’s possible for them to push back up. So things will shift as people do more SEO. And then, at the same time, there are also algorithmic updates, the big ones and the small ones. And those can also affect your page. And so you to update proof your page or to protect yourself, you should have benchmarks for what you did, how many times these important terms were needed in these places, when an update happens, or when somebody new moves on to page one, you can rerun something like pop and look at the new benchmarks. And see, that’s how you can tell if you if you need to tweak something to stay relevant to keep your page up or to move your page back up onto page one. Awesome.

Arthur 21:24
Well, one thing I like to do is we created a tool that actually monitors whenever a competitor changes the copy on the page. Once they do that, we rerun the page and pop and see what they’ve done. Perfect. That’s exactly what yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah, I find that really helpful. Yeah, for sure.

Michael 21:40
On the topic of algorithm updates, maybe not even algorithm updates. But we sort of anecdotally, we haven’t done any sort of in depth testing. But we used to see back in the day over optimized anchor text, really aggressive, exact match keywords in the anchor text pointing to internal pages, did a bit of harm, but we’re seeing increasingly competitive industries, a lot more of that going on. Have you been doing any testing and in the world of link building lately? And is there anything interesting on that side of things?

Unknown Speaker 22:10
In the same way that they’re on page benchmarks like what do I need for this particular because it’s it’s different keyword keyword, niche to niche. So in the same way that there are benchmarks for your on page stuff, there are benchmarks for your backlinks, including anchor text and stuff like that. So for sure, those kind of things you do need to measure and, and you do want to check from time to time as well, like as you would rerun Poppy rerun, to see what your competitors are doing in terms of the the things that are going on, especially after an update, then you really want to see, like if anchor text ratios have changed significantly, or if like now the pages have a lot more links, which is often the case. So yeah, that’s something you would want benchmark as well. And for sure, it’s extremely important.

Michael 22:47
Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Cool. And on the the content side of things, and again, this is in that realm of what we find people are often scared of from a penalisation point of view is the old, good old duplicate content. And, you know, that can mean so many different things to different people, or a lot of people don’t even necessarily understand what it means. But, you know, with things like you know, let’s say, let’s say I’m thinking of a local service business, and they might have pages for the different suburbs they offer, they service, maybe 1020, suburbs or something like that doorway pages, so to speak. What’s your testing or what’s, you know, the world of pop law, you know, ranking lorem ipsum, I would imagine you could create pages like that and change a little bit. And you’re probably going to be in the good graces of that, that math formula. But what are you seeing on that side of things,

Unknown Speaker 23:35
a test I did years ago, which was a lot of fun was, so duplicate content is really on your own site, right. And you can see if your pages have been filtered, because there’s a there’s a duplicate content filter. And so you can grab a paragraph off one of your pages search for it. And if you have that paragraph on multiple pages, you’ll see if you if you’re actually getting hit with the duplicate kind of filter, because it’s that little blue line that says we’ve removed these results, we removed 100 results from the service because that we think they’re duplicate, and you can click on that, and then they appear. So you can actually see if your pages are being filtered. Because of duplicate content. And more times than not, you’re not getting filtered, the bar is very, very low. But a test that I ran was that we’ve got completely identical pages. And then the idea was to see what’s the least amount that we can change to then get past the filter. And it was a so we started out changing every 11th word. And that worked. And then we tried every 13th word and that word, I think we took it up to 20 something but basically just going out and changing every 20th or so word would get you past the duplicate content builder. So the bar is very, very low. Then I looked at like just chunks on the page. And if you have a page that is about 60% unique and chunks that will also get past the filter. So the bar is very low. And I think a lot of people think they have duplicate content issues when they probably don’t and you can check for it. You can actually see if it is a problem and if it is a problem. It’s not that difficult to fix, because you can just start changing words here and there and sections on your page, you’ll probably get past it.

Michael 25:05
Very, very cool. And so in that example, where you’re just changing every 11th word, was the all the big ticket items like H ones or the metadata. Was that the same on every page? Oh,

Unknown Speaker 25:16
yeah. This was all just within the paragraph text. Yeah. Wow. So for like the pages you’re talking about in local, because you’re putting like a geo tag or geo specific term in your title. And in your h1? Often, that is enough? Because that’s such a strong signal that just putting something unique in there, like the location, that’s usually enough to get past the duplicate content filter?

Michael 25:37
Yeah. Awesome, that totally agree with what you’re saying there. Like we’ve seen the same sort of thing in our testing, if you just sort of walk into we’re not walking, you run into hesitancy out there, I guess, because some people will be like, doorway pages or duplicate content, you can’t do that. And you’ve got to put 1000 words of like, expertly crafted copy on that get around this stuff. But it’s sort of not the way it really works in practice.

Unknown Speaker 25:59
No, you’re right. And also, though, the definition for doorway is an interesting one, when you look at the guidelines, because what it infers or what I think it says is that it’s not necessarily that you’ve got pages, they’re pretty close for, like all those different locations, it’s that they funnel the user somewhere else. The idea is to grab the the search and then move them to somewhere else on the site where you want them to convert. So if they can convert on that page, if it’s, if that’s the intention of the page that they come in, and they can convert and do the action you want to do on the page, it’s probably not a doorway page. Yeah. And even if it’s really close, in concept, like the location pages that you’re talking about.

Michael 26:37
So we used to work at an agency before we work together at our agency now, and we had eBay as a client. And back in the day, they got a massive penalty applied on them, because of doorway pages, they would have listings of products, every search that’s ever searched on eBay, and they just spin them all up programmatically. And you’d have to land on it and then go into the product to convert and they were crushing it. And then Google brought down the hammer on them. And we had to fit there at that the business of God, they came up with a system basically where they would feed pages into it. And we had to mark whether it should exist or not exist manually, like 1000s of pages and the whole

Unknown Speaker 27:16
small site. Yet. It was, it was over

Michael 27:19
time for the team. So people were loving it staying back to four to 8pm Getting food bought and all that. But it was pretty painstaking work. So it was a nightmare.

Unknown Speaker 27:28
Yeah, I can’t even imagine I remember when he got hit for that. Yeah. That was one of those ones, like, note to self do not do

Michael 27:37
this. Yeah, yeah, they always have they’re sort of big ticket takedowns every so often distract the fear of Google into everyone.

Unknown Speaker 27:45
You know, that fear then actually then sparks and kicks off like a whole bunch of misinformation, where people see that, and then they misinterpret what happened. And then they tell you, like you can’t do X, Y, or Z. And that’s simply not the case. And that’s actually where I think something like testing does come in, like you can run your own tests, you know, if somebody tells you something, you know, we’ve got this situation, you can test it, you can actually see for yourself, and that’s almost always a better way to approach your own learning of SEO.

Michael 28:11
And so I guess, let’s say for from the perspective of like a business owner, someone toying with this stuff, and they’ve got other stuff on their plate? What would be a way that they could maybe test things? You know, would it be as simple as just tweaking copy and seeing what happens? Or do you need to be a bit more strategic with the way you go about it?

Unknown Speaker 28:28
No, I mean, that’s a perfectly valid test, you know, then you, you will learn something, the only caution that I would give is, don’t test on a site that you care about, right? Yeah. If something goes horribly wrong, you know, you, you might not be able to change your you know, your brand name. But run a hobby site, you know, whatever your passion project is, you probably won’t mind writing about in reading about and researching about it, have a little hobby site, set up for something that you like, and then anytime you hear the latest and greatest new technique, do it on that site first, and see what happens. You know, try those techniques, try the products, try the shiny objects on that site, and then the ones that work for you, then that that can then go over to the site that you care about. Yep.

Michael 29:09
Cool. Good advice. So on the topic, let’s let’s keep our head on for talking to, you know, a business owner. If you you know, let’s just say you’ve got limited funds, but you got a bit of time. You know, we talked about link building, we talked about content. We talked about technical, we talked about doorway pages, where should you? Or where would you if you were going to work on a business website, be spending most of your time each week to try to get the most bang for your buck

Unknown Speaker 29:34
content, for sure. All day. It can’t get you in trouble. It’s evergreen, and sites that rank for more keywords do better. So if you have a site that ranks for 20,000 keywords, and I have a site that ranks for 2000 keywords and everything else is equal, all of these equal, we launched the exact same page, you will outrank me, your site is stronger. So the best thing you can do is to continue to pump out content and rank for those terms, don’t be afraid of like zero, click terms, zero search volume terms. Those are our cash money because you’ll they’re usually lower competition. So they’ll rank quite quickly, as long as you’re staying within your field and you’re going to get good clicks, good traffic, good impressions. But those pages as they rank for more and more keywords will raise the strength of your site. And so I go content all day, every day.

Michael 30:22
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Okay, you mentioned they won’t get you in trouble content won’t get you in trouble, something that will get you in trouble. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this is link building. What’s your take on link building? Are you further you’re against it? Do you like paying? Do you try to get links for free? How to your price,

Unknown Speaker 30:40
you have to do it. It’s it is a massive part of the algorithm. I listened to your episode on link building. And the one thing that people misunderstand a bit is that Google doesn’t want you directly paying for a link, but you are allowed to advertise. And in advertisement, you can do native advertisement, native advertisement as an ad that looks like it’s legitimate, like it was, you know, something that happened organically, but it’s an ad placement. A guest post is native advertising. So as long as you are clear that this is an ad, you can pay for that. And it’s an unacceptable link. So as long as you’re clear as to what you’re doing, you really avoid a lot of problems with with link building, and especially in the concept of paid link building, this also goes back to people so you can never buy a link Well, true. You can’t buy a link for the sake of the link. But you are allowed to advertise your product, your service, your websites, and all that. So as long as you can stay within that realm, there’s a lot that you can do with links, that’s very powerful. That still keeps you within Google’s guidelines.

Michael 31:42
And on the topic of that, I guess the native or the advertisement side, you know, they’ve got their rel sponsored type attributes that they want people to apply. What’s your take on that? Have you done any testing or sort of thing? If it? Does adding that discount? The I guess, the SEO benefits or

Unknown Speaker 31:57
No, it’ll it’ll still give you juice? Yeah, um, it still works. Keep that keep in mind that is for the protection of the site. Owner. You’re getting the link from not necessarily you. Yeah. So that’s on them to put that in there. And what you just need to be clear to them is this needs to be obviously marked as an ad. This is an ad. And as long as you made that clear to them, and they are marking it as such, that is an advertisement. I think you’re okay.

Michael 32:25
Cool. Cool. Awesome. All right. Well, um, look, thank you for your time. Today, we just wanted to wrap up with a couple of quickfire questions here about FBA airway, let’s do this what’s the most underrated tactic in SEO?

Unknown Speaker 32:42
most underrated I think would be the putting the keyword in most places that I mentioned, people people really overthink it right? Yeah. Your your your title that you give Google and your title that you get humans should be identical. But for some reason people want to get like super creatively want to out clever Google, don’t do it, do the do the foundational stuff, put your keyword in those workplaces, and you’ll do really well and then TINKER AWAY from there.

Michael 33:06
Awesome. We refer to that as at 20. Fei here, you know, you can, the sort of couple of places that you focus on the basics are going to lead to the bulk of your results. You don’t need to get cute with it. So awesome. Totally agree with you on that. But uh, what would you say is the biggest myth in SEO

Unknown Speaker 33:25
that just write good content. And that is an absolute myth that will not get you any kind of ranking, you know, and every business owner has had this experience. Like they’ve had these mints where they’ve written a page, and they’ve said, I know this is a better page is better written, it’s better researched. And they’ll say something like, this guy on page one doesn’t even do it. Like, that’s not even relevant. They’ve all had that experience. So, and I think the idea is, I think Google’s making some sort of value judgment. And Google isn’t there. There’s no, Google’s not saying like, you know, I am now a better algorithm for having read your content. You know, I want to thank you from the bottom my heart, like that doesn’t happen. You know, so it isn’t just writing good content isn’t just writing good content, Google find you. It’s doing the math. So that’s what I would go with that. You have to be conscious of, of the algorithm and you have to do things to to optimize your pages.

Michael 34:14
Yeah. There’s no such thing as right. And they will come you need to be

Unknown Speaker 34:18
does not happen. I promise it won’t work. Yeah, absolutely.

Michael 34:21
I can, let’s say, shock horror, you’re limited to three seo software tools, because we love our tools in this world. What are you picking in your arsenal if you have to go with three

Unknown Speaker 34:33
so obviously, I have to choose my own tool, don’t I? So you need something for your own page. You don’t have to use my tool but you need something to benchmark your on page. So you go to like page optimizer Pro. You do need to benchmark your backlinks and see what your competitors doing. So pick your poison on Moz Ahrefs SEMrush, that kind of tool. And then I do really like correlational software. Something like Cora for example, with a you know correlation isn’t causation. But causal factors correlated. And a lot of people miss that point. And so if you can see that this appears to move the needle, those are good things to keep your eye on, especially if you’re in a tougher nature, you need some edges. Those edges can often come from things you can identify as, like, you know what the top sites are all doing this. And, you know, if it’s a low hanging fruit takes you five minutes to do do it. And you’ll find that you can be very successful with that.

Michael 35:23
Okay, awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show today, man, it’s been really great chatting to you. And we’re gonna pop a link to pop in the show notes. So if you guys were interested in checking that tool out, we can totally recommend it. We use it ourselves. So if you’re wanting to spend a bit of time working on your on site optimization, why not get started with that? So thanks. Thanks for joining us.

Unknown Speaker 35:45
Awesome. Thanks for having really appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker 35:47
Thanks for listening to the SEO show. If you liked what you heard, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We’ll see you in the next episode.