Technical SEO with Geoff Kennedy

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, hello, we are back in action on the FCO Show. Now I say we, but it's just me. Arthur was on a, what was he doing? He was on annual leave. He was down in Jervis Bay last week, living it up. So it was up to me to do the first show back since we've moved to our new studio. And funnily enough, didn't even do it from the studio. We had a special guest join us this week and the studio wasn't quite ready in time. So I record it from one of the silent booths in our new office, but it all worked out pretty well. And I ended up having a really good chat with this week's guest. His name is Geoff Kennedy. So Geoff, we first came across when he worked as the marketing manager or the head of marketing for SiteBulb. SiteBulb is a technical SEO tool that we use a lot here in our agency to audit websites. So it's a really good tool in that it will give you all sorts of technical recommendations and then prioritize them and give you little hints about what the recommendations are. It's a tool we use quite a lot. We used to use Screaming Frog a lot, but these days we use Sightbulb a lot more. So Geoff, obviously having worked there, knows a lot about technical SEO and, you know, he doesn't actually work there anymore. He's moved back into being a freelance SEO consultant, which he has done for the best part of 20 years, you know, like excluding Sightbulb. He's been really working in the digital marketing trenches for a long time now. So he's quite knowledgeable about technical SEO and we had a really good chat about all things Nerdy nerdiness code servers all that sort of stuff. So without any further ado Let's jump into this conversation with Geoff Kennedy. Hi Geoff, welcome to the show, it's great to have you here.

GEOFF: Hello. Good morning. Thank you for having me.

MICHAEL: Yeah, look, no problem. Very happy to have you on. Excited to get stuck into the chat today about technical SEO. But before we get into that, it's good for our listeners who may not have heard of you just to maybe hear from yourself a little bit about who you are and what you do.

GEOFF: Yeah, so my name is Geoff Kennedy. I'm based in the UK and I'm a digital marketing and SEO consultant. A few people might know me from my time at Sight Bulb where I was Head of Marketing there for a while until the start of this year where I've gone back myself again.

MICHAEL: Okay, awesome. So the reason we reached out to you originally is because of that connection to SiteBulb. You know, it's a tool we use ourselves here at the agency when it comes to technical SEO. So we thought it'd be good to chat to you about the topic of technical SEO. We have done episodes on it in the past, but I thought we'd get the obvious thing out of the way at the start. What is technical SEO exactly?

GEOFF: Yeah, so I'd like to think that was a straightforward question. It's not so much. I mean, I used to be what I would consider an SEO years ago by rule. Back then, it was pretty much everything that wasn't content or links. So all of on-site stuff got bundled into technical SEO. These days, It's a bit harder to define. I'd be a bit reluctant to call myself a technical SEO because of the amount of very technical stuff you've got. The technical end of the scale has got a lot more technical when we're talking about sort of rendering and the intricate JavaScript websites and site performance, that sort of thing. So the technical end of the scale is quite a developer's world. But I think it's still used in quite a lot of different ways. I think it is still used in the sense of as soon as you're moving away from content, you're getting into more of a technical realm. But everyone uses it slightly differently.

MICHAEL: I think I'd agree with you on that. We normally say it's all the nerdy stuff related to the code, the server, which I find is a good way of bucketing together. But you're right, there's so many different aspects to it, whether you're working with a WordPress lead gen site or a million page e-commerce site. I guess, you know, a lot of our listeners would be at that first end of the spectrum, you know, their WordPress site, they may be doing a bit of Ledge. And so I guess keeping that, I guess, hat on, what would you say the key factors, if it comes to technical SEO, where are the key things that people are sort of looking at or working on or trying to improve from a technical point of view?

GEOFF: It's a tricky one because it varies so much, but I mean just indexability, I mean making sure that you can get your URLs, your pages, your content indexed by Google. It's kind of ironic that the the better our technology is getting in terms of the websites, the more difficult it is for Google to read that a lot of the time, especially when we're talking about JavaScript websites and progressive web apps and things like that. So just purely making sure it's visible to Google and all of your content so it can actually read what's on the page. And that's, I mean, it's not It's probably not the most common thing that I've come across, but if you can't get that, then you can't be seen at all. So that's a massive barrier to people. So it's probably the biggest issue I've come across though.

MICHAEL: And where would you start to try and fix something like this? We touched on Sightbulb. I have a feeling you might talk about that. But what would be your process? Let's say you're starting from scratch. You don't know if you've got technical problems. How do you uncover them?

GEOFF: I mean, yes, definitely. You mentioned different tools there. And there's a bit of a debate going on at the minute about how much you should be relying on tools or not. But for technicality, you need tools. And I mean, I say you need tools. I use Google Search Console a lot. I rely on that these days. And that's usually one of my first places that I go to because, I mean, that's Google telling you what their problems are. That's how they're interpreting your site. So Google Search Console, the coverage report in there is really good for telling you what's indexed, what isn't indexed, any errors that are coming across, and then you've got crawlers. So, I mean, Cyborg's the one I use most of the time because I know it well. It works well. A lot of people are familiar with Screaming Frog, which is similar in that it's a desktop-based crawler. It doesn't give you quite as many pointers as Cyborg does. Cyborg goes that bit further in doing a bit of analysis for you and trying to point out where the issues are. Of course, then you've got the cloud-based tools, so SEMRush and Ahrefs, which are all good in their own right as well, but the audit inside tends to be a little bit more basic. So the issues that they're flagging up, it's a bit more cut and dry. It doesn't let you do as much of your own investigation on there as the likes of SIPOL and Scream and Frog that give you all the data to look at. So my go-to would be a desktop trawler like Sightbulb, just to figure out the big issues there. And from that point, it's a lot of manual investigation and double-checking what they're saying.

MICHAEL: And so when you run those sorts of tools and some of them will prioritize things, is your general process to sense check those recommendations or do you sort of just hand it to a developer and say go fix this? How do you sort of get your most bang for your buck out of what these tools are recommending? Yeah, so I mean that's

GEOFF: When doing audit, that's probably the biggest part of the job, going through and sense checking, double checking what these are, because there's two sides to that. There's one, you get sort of false positives in there, or false negatives rather, when there's issues flagged up. tools don't know your website, they don't know your business, so what might look like an important set of pages or a big issue on there, it might be something that's intentional, it might be a set of pages that really aren't a big deal to you, so they're not a high priority. And sometimes you just get it wrong. I mean, I've come across more and more recently where the websites are behaving differently when you crawl it in different ways. So as soon as you put it under load using the crawler, it starts behaving strangely, which it might be a problem in itself, but it might just be, it might just cause the crawler to start fragging issues. So, I mean, that was something we spent a lot of time looking at at SiteBulb of how much we should be telling people, this is an issue, this is a high priority versus We think this is an issue. Here's your starting point for investigation. Here's the data. Here's where you can go and start looking at that. So that prioritization side is a massive part of it. And just understanding the issues as well. So I mentioned there was two parts to it. The other is finding what's causing it. It's all very well knowing that you've got an issue. You've got, I don't know, URLs that aren't linked to from anywhere on the site or something like that. It's only when you start digging into what type of pages are they, are they actually meant to be on the site or not, and investigating the root cause behind the symptoms, that you start being able to give a recommendation. Because there's no point saying, we've got these orphan pages, you should send loads of links to them, if you'd never intended having them pages in the first place. It's something that your CMS generate automatically. So you've got to understand why the issues are happening as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so it's not just coming at it from that technical SEO point of view and having your blinkers on, it's more thinking about the business objectives and goals and the reasons behind things.

GEOFF: Yeah, it's very easy for businesses to spend a lot of time fixing things that aren't very important, trying to get pages ranking that don't matter, or just going down rabbit holes fixing stuff that isn't very important to them in any way.

MICHAEL: And that would be, I guess, a pretty common thing when it comes to technical SEO and technical audits. It's very easy to have the fear of God put into you, so to speak, when you see this big list of things that are being recommended and technical mumbo-jumbo. And as a business owner, you might not know if it's important or not. You might think, I don't have breadcrumbs. My site needs breadcrumbs when it makes no sense in the structure of your site to even have them. And a business owner probably doesn't know what they are, but the report's saying you need that. But I would imagine, you know, having done so many audits, having worked at SiteBulb, you probably see common SEO mistakes or technical mistakes popping up from site to site or areas that have really big impacts, if you can improve it from a technical point of view. So is there any of them that come to mind that would be useful for our audience to sort of think of as, I guess, an important area to focus on?

GEOFF: Yeah, I mean, I mentioned earlier on just about indexability and that side of things. So that's obviously one of the most important areas. And I've seen a lot recently of incorrect canonical tags and sort of duplicate URLs and that sort of thing. And Google deciding the canonical themselves. So where there's a canonical tag not present, it decides, well, this is the true version of the page. And luckily, they're quite clear about that in the coverage report. But very often, it's not the page that people are intending to be ranking. So being careful of that sort of thing is really important. And a lot of the time that's caused by internal linking as well. So if you've got a duplicate version of a URL and your CMS automatically links to the duplicate rather than the real one, Google suddenly decides, well, this is the page we decided the true one, whereas you're focusing on the other version to it. And those sort of things are often a tangled mess of URLs and links and horrible things. But the more you can understand your own website, the easier it is to unpick them sort of things and then able to go to a developer and say, this is what's happening, this is what I need you to do with it. So yeah, that's one of the things I've seen on a lot of sites I've ordered recently.

MICHAEL: We actually have just run into that issue ourselves with a client, they're an online retailer and they had a page up for like a seasonal sale and then the page comes down and then it came around to that time of year again, they put the page up and there was a canonical tag that was pointing to the wrong page and Google started favoring that page and we updated the canonical and we're getting it re-crawled but we couldn't get Google to accept that we're telling it, you know, this canonical page is the one and it can cause problems because time ticking by, the sales coming up, and if you're not on top of that sort of stuff, week to week, month to month, it can hurt your sales when it comes down to it.

GEOFF: Yeah, and you get all sorts of weird stuff going on as well. I had one not too long ago where they had staging pages that they'd set up and they canonicalized them to the live versions, but then they'd also put a new index on the staging versions and it carried over the new index directive to the the live pages. And no one could work out why these live ones weren't ranking. And I mean, it's not something I'd even seen before. So no, it was a bit of a weird one. But yeah, you'd think things would get simpler, the more advanced we get with stuff, but there's just more ways for it to go wrong.

MICHAEL: You've just touched on something there that I see a lot as well, like staging website being indexed. It might be on staging.domainname.com or whatever. That's very common with business websites or they might have old pages and stuff. Probably something our listeners can be doing is just a site colon and then their domain name search in Google and seeing what's in the index. as you said, using Search Console to try and identify when that's happening. Like in your case, that's very extreme where the canonical is passing over and no index, but just having extra pages in the index and maybe there is no canonicals and you've got the staging and the live site in there and they're competing with each other. I guess, yeah, it comes to mind that that's probably a quick area to focus on if you're looking to make improvements.

GEOFF: Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's one of my questions whenever I'm starting to work with a client is, have you had any websites in the past? Have you had a different version of the site or try and get an idea of that? Because there's usually remnants kicking about of staging sites or old sites and things like that, where the migration hasn't been done quite right. Or redirects aren't doing what they should and things like that. can be a bit of a minefield in that way. Yeah. And I mean, on the plus side, though, there's usually something to be gained there by fixing them things. So it's often it's more of an opportunity rather than something that's actively holding them back.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And another thing that's come to mind then in the world of technical SEOs was two parts, the site speed and then core web vitals. How's your travels in that space at the moment? Are you seeing much by way of like impacts, results, negative or positive?

GEOFF: It's a really tricky one. And I mean, this is another one we spent a lot of time on when I was at Sable, how much how much emphasis we should be putting on this as SUs, and where does that line stop between SUs and developers? And we never came up with a definitive answer. I mean, myself as an SU doing audits, I tend to push quite a lot of that towards developers, because I find it's not for me. I can give a lot of pointers. I can say your site is slow or these pages are slow. These are things that are causing problems. But in terms of solutions, I'm not a developer by a long way. And I have had quite a few sites that have had big issues. I mean, sometimes it's been across the whole site. So it's sort of, you just need to make this faster. It's not like tweak these things. There's do the whole lot. Here's where you can find your testing tools. You just need to sort this. Versus sometimes it's a bit simpler. It's like, I don't know, your images need improvement. You're serving massive images. Reduce them down. Here's a few ways you can do that. In terms of issues it's causing and results it's got, it's been a bit underwhelming. It blew up into, like, it was pushed as a really big issue and everyone needed to solve it, but it was always going to be relative. So if everyone else in your service is slow, then you're going to be measured against them. If you're slow but a bit faster than them, then that's probably going to be enough. But if you're in an industry where all the other websites are lightning quick, then that's not going to cut it. So it's one of the things where everyone just assumed you need to be a fast website, really fast. And to a degree, that's true. But in practice, it's not quite as big a thing that it was made out to be. But then on the flip side of it, There's a lot of slow websites that are just bad for usability. They're not usable sites, and that's never going to go down well with Google.

MICHAEL: Yeah, all the users that are actually accessing the site, right?

GEOFF: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I'm not naive to think it is the same thing, but it is kind of the same thing in that Google's trying to figure out what users like. So they want fast websites, give them the fast websites. But on the scale of things, most of the audits I do, even when they have got sort of slow pages or slow parts of the site, it's usually one of the least of their problems. Because if that's been neglected, there's usually a lot of other stuff's been neglected that's more important.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. And so when you're auditing sites, what's the general mix? Is it largely e-commerce sites? Is it local lead gen type sites? WordPress? Shopify? Magento? Sort of working across the board or you finding yourself working on the same types of sites?

GEOFF: A bit of all sorts. I used to focus a bit more on e-commerce, used to do quite a bit in travel because I used to work with the Scottish Tourist Board with Scotland. And just there's a lot of e-commerce about as well. These days, I'm doing quite a bit on SAS websites. So my time at SiteBulb, which kind of led me into looking a bit more on that side of things. But it varies quite a lot. And in terms of platforms, it varies a lot as well. And that's, it's almost one of the reasons why I've been brought in to do audits. I mean, most of the recent ones I've done, they've had multiple platforms that they've been on for various reasons. And that's where a lot of the problems lie from. They're sort of one part of the websites on one platform and another's on another, and where they're joining up, it's a bit mismatched because they're not working the same way. I've also worked on a couple of recently progressive web apps. I don't know how much you've dealt with them, but I kind of wish they'd go away. They've been horrendous so far. I can kind of get the logic behind them from a development perspective and just extending an app to work as a website as well, but they take a lot of work to get right. The developers I've spoke to that worked on them, they've underestimated a lot of the time how much it takes to take an app and make it into a website. And there are a lot of problems. What works as one doesn't necessarily work as the other. It would be nice to get to work on consistent CMSs a while. WordPress is usually quite nice to work on these days, because at least it's a familiar platform. It's something you can diagnose quite easily, whereas all the other CMSs have their different quirks and things that are consistently wrong. And there's no point in me making recommendations on something that can't actually be fixed within the CMS Excel. So yeah, I think I strayed away from the original question a little bit there.

MICHAEL: No, no, totally covered it. I've heard you touch on a couple of times, you know, working with developers, dealing with developers, getting developers to do things. And there's, I guess there's a bit of a, there can be conflict between SEOs and developers in our world. And it's one thing to find out what's wrong with the website and do the audit and get this list. getting it implemented is a whole other thing. So what's your process around, I guess, prioritizing and communicating with developers and getting buy-in and that sort of stuff to make changes?

GEOFF: It's… I mean, it varies for me on a client-to-client basis. I mean, I have some clients where… Sorry, see if I threw that. I have some clients where there's an internal stakeholder that is dealing with it, I develop it, I deliver the audit to them, I give them the list of recommendations and explanations, and they go off and deal with it. And that's quite nice at times when you've got that between, but a lot of the time I'm working directly with the developers as well. And that's what I've been used to more in the past. And I found the biggest thing is just working as closely with them as you can and explaining why you're trying to do things, why this is an issue. Because the whole thing of this is an SEO issue doesn't go down well, because SEO doesn't really mean anything to most developers. They're not being measured on it. It's not a big thing. They're not bothered about Google. What they are bothered about are the users, usually. I mean, if you explain to them that, like the whole site speed thing, of, well, this isn't something we're doing for Google directly, or kind of is, but we're doing this because users are getting really slow experience. This is the thing that's slowing it down. And if we make it better for users, then Google recognizes that and we could potentially run better. So going through that thought process and that explanation is usually a lot better than just saying, we need you to do this. And also not, I mentioned before about specifically about the site speed stuff and performance is not always trying to give them the end solution. So talking to them about like, this is the problem. I know this is maybe a potential way of sorting it, but they are the developers. I mean, I'm not a developer, I've not worked on the website. I've come across ways things can be solved, but they know the website better than me, they might have other ways of solving it. Yeah. But it's also very careful to keep an eye on how they are going to do things and having that discussion because I've had in the past where sometimes you can give the issue and say we need this fixed and the fix can be worse than the original problem. So understanding what they're going to do about that. can be a big thing. And sometimes they'll go over the top and do a fix that goes well beyond what you intend and it spends additional time and resource and like, yeah, that's nice, but you didn't need to do all that. It was just a flick this switch and it's sorted sort of thing. So communication is a big part. And sometimes just understanding the work involved. There's some things that I would recommend, say to a client, you need to fix this. This is something I'd consider relatively important. If they come back and say, yeah, that's six months of development resource, that is going to change my priorities. I say, right, well, if I have six months of resource, you should spend it elsewhere because it's going to get better results fixing all these other things versus this one that isn't seeming quite as important anymore.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. And that happens so often, you know, you find there's a report, let's say someone runs their site through the PageSpeed Insights tool and it spits out all this stuff you should be doing, like, you know, compressing this and minifying that and an SEO agency might hand that over and say, there you go, off you go and do that. And this client is working with a developer and retainer that charges 150 bucks an hour just to reply to a message. And it just, you know, you've got to be It's a case of prioritization, isn't it? Like, what is going to have the biggest bang for your buck from an SEO point of view and from an outcome point of view for the business? Yeah. Sorry to interrupt.

GEOFF: No, I was just going to say, I think something like the relationship with the client or yourself with the developer is really important for that as well. Just being able to have the discussion, because I've come across some cases where you give them a list of recommendations, And the developer's like, yeah, great. I've just got a year's worth of work there. I'm going to work through all of these and they're not going to question it. Whereas developer questioning stuff isn't necessarily a bad thing because they're trying, if they've got a limited amount of resource, then they're going to want to get the most out of it as well.

MICHAEL: So I guess in an ideal world from an SEO point of view, we're trying to avoid these technical problems, right? Popping up or creating fixes, creating even more problems. For a typical business owner or maybe let's say on the lead gen side of things and then the e-com side of things, out of the box, what one sort of ticks the SEO boxes best do you think?

GEOFF: Yeah. I wasn't looking forward to this question because it's a really tricky one. Yeah. I mean, a typical business owner, it really depends on the scale of things and especially how they're planning on building that website, whether they are going to settle themselves or they have developers. Out of the box is For most people, there isn't an out-of-the-box, in a sense, in that you're always going to do something with it. My go-to would usually be WordPress, even with e-commerce and having the bolt-ons to that. But it depends on the scale. If you've got a lot of products, that often becomes unwieldy. One of the platforms that I've not dealt with a lot myself, but does seem to be coming out quite a bit is Wix. So it's a one I would have avoided like the plague in the past. But I know they've been working with SEOs a lot recently. I was speaking to the team a while ago, and they've been integrating a lot of stuff in there that, to me, it works quite well for small business owners in that WordPress, the danger is you go in there, I mean, by default, out of the box, it's great, it's fast, it's really simple, it's slick. But very rarely do people use it out of the box, because you decide, right, we need this, we need that. And you start adding plugins and making changes. And very quickly, you can take it from it being a really good platform that works very well to a bit clunky, and a bit messy. Whereas Wix was, and I've seen them, a lot of other platforms with the opposite end of the scale, where you can't control anything. It's locked down. You've got fields that you fill in for your content, and it spits out a website, and you can't change any of the elements you want to as an SEO. So they've started making a lot of them things I've talked about, so your meta elements and your site map and your robots or text and things like that and canonical redirects, they've started making them accessible. But rather than just opening them up and saying you can do what you want with these and letting people make a lot of problems, they've tried to get a middle ground in making them controllable but having fail safes in there so they know that if they just open up and let people add redirects, that's potential for an absolute nightmare. For someone that doesn't know about redirects, you can take your website down quite easily.

MICHAEL: You let them loose on HT Access and it's game over, isn't it?

GEOFF: Exactly, yeah. I mean, and that is the problem when you've got open source platforms and things. I mean, WordPress is the example. So if you don't want to deal with HT Access, you add a plugin for your redirects, that slows things down. Yes. specifically about that sort of thing with when I was speaking to Wix the other day, they were letting people do whatever they want with redirects. So you can do rule-based or one-to-one and some quite advanced stuff. But there was also things going on in the background to check. So if you did something stupid, then it would flag that up or it would stop loops and things like that. So There was a bit of thought going in there, which I haven't seen so much on other platforms. So as I want to try, I say that with the caveat of not having done it myself, but I know there's some good people working on it. Wix would be a decent place if you don't need to go down the e-commerce route.

MICHAEL: Very interesting because, you know, with Wix, there was a time there in our business where if people came to us and they were on Wix, we would sort of say, look, it's probably not the right fit for us to work together at the moment. And so we just didn't want the headaches. But you're right in that I know they have been focusing on that a bit more. So it's definitely a case of watch this space from an SEO point of view and maybe something we need to do a bit more ourselves.

GEOFF: I think on the whole, most platforms, it's what you do with them. It's good and bad. I've seen good websites on most platforms and horrendous ones on all of them as well. It just depends how they've been set up and designed because it's tricky. The more flexibility they give you, which is better in a sense, but they set you up to have problems as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it's sort of like if you think about social networks like Myspace, you used to be able to do whatever you want with it and some of them would be just horrific messes of GIFs and colors and music and then Facebook locked it down and gave you, I guess, elements that you could work on and yeah, in a way, that might be the Wix approach. They're letting you do what you need to do but keeping those sort of safeguards or training wheels on.

GEOFF: It's a good approach. I quite like it. It's just finding out where that sweet spot is as well, just how much control do you give people.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, look, we're getting to the end of our time here, but one thing I wanted to get your opinion on or your feedback on, because it's a big topic in SEO as always. We always like to chat to our guests about it. It's not a technical one. It's good old link building, the world of link building. When it comes to links, are you for paying for them? Are you against paying for them? Do you do link building? What is your take on that side of things?

GEOFF: I sit on the fence very much. I'm not for or against buying links. I wouldn't buy links usually, not because I'm against it or that they don't work. More so because if I'm given the opportunity to buy a link, that usually means other people are given the opportunity to buy links. So I don't want it from that place. Usually if I can buy the link, I don't want to because I can. If someone was to come up with an opportunity on a great website that they can say, right, I'm not going to sell a link to anyone else. No one's going to know about it. I'm going to do it in a very clean way. And it's going to be nice and cheap then and good value for money, then great. Sounds like the dream right there. Exactly. But I mean, nine times out of 10, when someone's buying a link, it's it's part of a network, or it's a blog that is selling links to everyone else. So as soon as that's happening, there's patterns created. And I don't want to be part of that pattern. Yeah. I mean, there are, like, I mean, I, I work, I split my time between clients, and I do a bit of side projects, sort of affiliate things and stuff like that. I wouldn't be adverse to buying links for that sort of thing. Because it's, if something goes wrong, on a site I've not put a lot of resource into, it's not the end of the world. Whereas if I started recommending the client buys links and it takes their site, they get a penalty for their branded domain that they've had for the last 10, 20 years and they have issues with that. That's a whole different thing. That's not something I'd even want to consider really. So it It's a mixed thing. And the variety you get with paid links as well differs so much. And there's the whole debate of how do you define a paid link? At one end of the scale, it's someone saying, here's a list of pages you can buy a link on. Here you go. Versus the other end of, well, where does it stop being paid? Does it have to be money? Is it sponsorship? things like that, is that still paying for anything? There's a lot of grey areas, so yeah. Again, I don't know if I answered that definitely. I think I sort of sat right in the middle there.

MICHAEL: Yeah, no, you did. There definitely is a lot of grey. I think Google try to go down the path of like any exchange of any form of anything for a link is paying for it. You know, they try to really bring down the hammer on it. But whether they can actually tell when that's going on is another thing. But patterns and stuff, as you say, definitely can be picked up.

GEOFF: But even if you start applying sort of the, I was going to say no follow, but sponsored tags and that now, there seems to be getting more evidence that they, them links still have value. Maybe not in the same way as a followed link does, but then still it might be worth doing that sponsorship and being upfront about it because it's still building your brand in a sense that you're big enough to do this sponsorship thing. You're being associated with this whatever this thing is you're sponsoring. It's a tricky one. I have bought a lot of links in the past. They have worked. I'll just be a lot more cautious about it these days.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like we always say on this show, it's a risk versus reward type thing. What's your risk appetite? What are your time horizons for this sort of stuff? How competitive is the industry? So there's a lot of stuff to consider there. You've just given me a good idea there, I think. With the RHEL-sponsored attribute, we haven't really done much testing with it, but it would be an interesting little project to build a small site, maybe an affiliate site or something like that, and only build those types of links to it and see how well it ranks and just get a feel for, is it past its use? Are you able to rank with it?

GEOFF: Yeah, that would be a really interesting one. Because I mean, it's one of these things that you hear more and more chat there about, well, they're still passing value, but the proper experiments are usually few and far between. So I'd be interested to see that.

MICHAEL: Yeah, maybe do a control one where you just build normal links, and then one where it's just sponsored at the same time, same nation. Yeah. Watch this space. We'll see if we've got the time to do that. I look forward to that. But look, I'll wrap things up now, but what I like to do at the end of each episode is just do three questions about SEO. Ask everyone the same thing. It's always interesting to hear their responses. So the first one is, what do you think is the most underrated tactic in SEO? It could be any tactic across any sort of SEO.

GEOFF: I wouldn't be the first to say this, I'm sure, but internal linking, most people are underusing in their internal linking just to pass value through their site. I've seen a couple of sites recently where they said themselves they're not doing SEO, but they're performing so well just because they had really good internal linking. They've got decent content and it was really well linked between all. And that can have a massive boost. It's one of them areas where you can do it and see an uplift relatively quickly.

MICHAEL: Yeah, cool. Totally agree with that. Let's go the other way. What would you say is the biggest myth in SEO?

GEOFF: That's a tricky one. I think just that there's there's a right answer to things, like there's a right and wrong. Like, I've made the mistake of going into Twitter a bit recently. And everyone's arguing their point and different things. And yes, people have different opinions. But there's very rarely a right and a wrong way of doing things. Like we've just talked about links there and different scenarios and things like what's right for one person isn't going to be right for another. With technical stuff, you're getting a bit more into the realms of right and wrong, but it's still very rarely cut and dry. Everyone wants to be seen as black and white, this is the way to do things, but people forget it's based on your business, your scenario, your website. So yeah, I'm not sure that's a myth or not.

MICHAEL: I think so. I think that's a really good answer because we hear it a lot from clients as well. They say, I want you to tell me exactly what I need to do here in this scenario. And we'll have the best, I guess, idea on what should be done based on stuff that's worked in the past on other sites. But at the end of the day, we're not Google. We don't know exactly what's going on. So there is this element of testing and, I guess, implementing what you think is going to work having to wait and see. So that is a good answer. There's just not, as you say, black and white answers to everything.

GEOFF: My favorite myth that I heard not too long ago from someone at a small business event was saying that you should add and remove blocks of content on your homepage every other week because Google likes fresh content. and that would help. So that was the one I really liked.

MICHAEL: Okay. Yeah. I haven't heard about adding it and then removing it over and over. Yeah. The old updating the published date on your blog post just to try and trick Google. Okay. Well, the last question on the rapid fire questions here, this is probably going to be an interesting one for you considering your background in the space, but let's say you were limited Someone came along and said, you can only use three tools in your SEO arsenal for some reason. What would you pick to get the job done?

GEOFF: At the minute, I would say Siteboard. I'd upset them if I didn't. I've got to admit, if you'd have asked me that two or three years ago, I would have said Screaming Frog every day. Both is just a way of getting data out. Search Console, if we're considering that a tool, that's one of my go-tos as well. And Ahrefs is my other one for more on the links and the off-site side of things, the wider stuff. So they're my main one. Yeah, for pure SEO stuff, that's what I would go do.

MICHAEL: That's a good, I think I'd pick them too, if I had to pick. I've never asked myself this question, but that covers pretty much most things you need to do, really, from an SEO point of view right there.

GEOFF: Yeah. I have actually tried last couple of years to cut my tools down because it's so easy to just end up jumping between so many and paying out quite a lot as well. And a lot of them

MICHAEL: overlaps. You might do a trial as well and forget about it and it's just sitting there paying every month. That happens all the time here. Yeah. We love our tools in the SEO world.

GEOFF: Oh yes. Always something new to play out.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, thanks for coming on the show today. Geoff, it's been really great chatting with you. For the people that have been listening that want to check you out a bit further and maybe get in touch, where can they go to do that?

GEOFF: Best place, I would say often on Twitter, Geoff Kennedy on there, Geoff with a G. LinkedIn, if you want the tall work stuff, they're best places usually.

MICHAEL: Okay, awesome. Well, thanks again. Great, thanks a lot.

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