What is Your Least Favourite Part of SEO

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 for another week. I'm Michael. And as always, I'm joined by Arthur. How are you going?

ARTHUR: Hello. I'm doing very, very well. First time recording in the new studio together. It is.

MICHAEL: Well, I haven't recorded in here. I had to go in a little booth the other day with Jeff Kennedy. Oh yeah. Well, he wasn't in the booth with me. He was over in the UK, but yeah, it's my first time in here too. How does it feel?

ARTHUR: I like it. We need to do a little bit of decorating, but it's a lot more convenient being able to pop in whenever we want and record a podcast.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You can see your desk from where you're sitting now. It's a bit different to the old space.

ARTHUR: You know what? It's a good vibe. I reckon once we get everything set up, we'll get some cameras set up, maybe have one facing the office.

MICHAEL: You can see, I guess the wheels and cogs in motion, a high performance SEO team at work in the background. But, um, we're not here to talk about that, are we? No, we're not. We're actually here. We have, I'm going to call it a new segment. Have you prepared the intro music for the segment?

ARTHUR: Um, I didn't know I was meant to, but I'm sure we can find something and overlay it.

MICHAEL: No, we'll make something custom. You know what? No, we won't. Why am I just, why am I going off script and talking about intro music? I don't know. Because we have a segment I'm very excited about. Okay. The general premise of the segment is we go on Twitter and see what people are talking about related to SEO and then talk about it on here. Because Twitter, there's a lot of good SEO chats going down on there. You know, if you follow the, I don't know if you follow the hashtag or the interest SEO, you're going to get some stuff popping up in your feed, people chatting about SEO, interesting stuff pops up. And one of the things we saw that we thought was interesting was, what is your least favorite part of SEO? Which is a tweet by John Mu, who is basically the mouthpiece for SEO from Google. Mm-hmm because he has quite a big reach Lots of people started chiming in with their comments about their least favorite part of SEO. So it's gonna be a little bit of a down and depressing type today considering this whole shows about SEO we're gonna talk about the least favorite parts and of SEO. We're going to pull out some of the replies that we thought were interesting and have a little chat about them.

ARTHUR: Do you know what we can do after this? What's that? An episode about our favorite parts of SEO. Yeah. Just to counterbalance it a little bit. Yeah.

MICHAEL: We'll do one of them and then we've got to let Twitter decide though what the topics are for the new segment here that we're going to have the intro music for and everything, right? You don't sound that enthused or committed to it.

ARTHUR: No, I'm committed to it. I think it's a really good idea. I think it's a really interesting segment and it's definitely interesting to see what other people are talking about or I guess what other people dislike about SEO and see if it's, you know, similar things that I find annoying.

MICHAEL: Well, let's get into it. What was the first tweet or response to this tweet that you liked the look of?

ARTHUR: Um, the one that caught my eye is something that we're dealing with at the moment. So GA4 being forced upon us. Yep. So as of, um, I think it's July, 2023, Google's basically cutting the cord on universal analytics and forcing everyone to use Google analytics for, which is the newest version of analytics. And that's becoming, I guess for us a bit problematic because it's a big job, you know, migrating all your clients across to a brand new GA. Yeah. I guess that's a good starting point. Yeah.

MICHAEL: The other starting point, not starting point, the other big problem with it is that GA4 sucks. I'm just going to say it. I hate it. Most people seem to hate it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I want to look, I'll, I haven't used it as much as I probably should have, but so far I haven't enjoyed it. That's not to say over time, you know, it's like everything you, it takes some time to adjust, but at the moment it's, it is a pain in the ass because a lot of the stuff that's in universal analytics, all the reports that we're so used to looking at every day, they're not there. You know, the data is different. The whole UI is different. So, you know, trying to find something that takes me maybe, you know, 10, 15 seconds, I can't even find in GA4, so. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Like we were saying before, they've basically taken everything we know about GA, everything we know and love and removed it or changed it, just made it more difficult for some reason. Yeah. Which Google seemed to do a lot with their products. They make big changes to them, change the UI, and it often is worse than what it was before.

ARTHUR: Yep. You'd think that someone the size of Google would invest in someone to look at the UX and UI, which I'm sure they do. Yeah.

MICHAEL: But yeah, sometimes they come up with solutions that are looking for a problem. Now with GA4, I feel like J4 is designed for their advertising world and playing nice with all their ad tools and they don't care about SEOs and whether SEOs are getting the information they need out of the report. So, you know, we'll have to see. Like a lot of things as well, this will improve over time, they'll add more features and when they change to the most current version of the Google Ads interface, remember how annoyed we all were? Yeah. We were clinging on to the old interface for ages, trying to avoid it as much as possible. And now I can't even really like off the top of my head, remember exactly how that looked. I'm so used to the new one.

ARTHUR: Because it was a gradual change. I feel like they didn't kind of, you know, with GA4 it's completely different. The new Google ads or AdWords interface, You know, it took a little bit. I think they did a bit by bit, didn't they? It wasn't like a instant rollout.

MICHAEL: No. Well, that's the thing with this GA4, they're saying by July, 2023, Universal Analytics is gone. So they're just forcing it upon us. Admittedly, GA4, they've been teasing it for a long time. You've been able to use it for a long time. People haven't been because it's just not that good. It's garbage. Painful, less intuitive, worse user interface, less features, migrating over is a pain. So why would you use it? Maybe this is Google just trying to force people to use it because no one's been really taking them up on it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think the last point for me is historic data. So once it's switched off, it's going to be hard to do comparisons, you know, year on year, going back further, it's just going to be a pain. No more conversions. Everything's an event. That's another thing you can't set up goals. You know, if you have destination URL goals, they no longer exist. You have to create events. There's just a whole bunch of things that are frustrating about it, but let's not dwell on it for too long. It's got a whole, whole list of things to talk about.

MICHAEL: It's kind of like Game of Thrones. Winter is coming. It is. And winter is in the form of GFL. You know I haven't watched Game of Thrones. You should have by now. What about you should watch it this winter? Winter is coming. Why don't you watch Game of Thrones over winter?

ARTHUR: It's just not interested in, to be honest.

MICHAEL: Okay, fair enough. Moving on. Let's have a look at, maybe we should name drop the people that are actually replying as well. Okay. Since we're stealing their content.

ARTHUR: So that one was from Kyle Wingham.

MICHAEL: Okay. And so I'm going to go with his Twitter handle at SEO underscore Marcus says his answer to the question, what is your least favorite part of SEO? His answer is my answer is not provided in brackets. Sorry. You will never know. Good little SEO joke. Like that one, that one tickled me. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Did it tickle you? I found it. So obviously I liked it. It's fitting with the, um, I guess the previous tweet.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah, nice flow there. For those of you that don't know what the hell we're talking about, Google Analytics, in their infinite wisdom, removed the ability to see keyword data for organic traffic and just bucketed all keywords in together in the not provided category. But if you pay them for Google Ads, they'll show you every keyword and what it's doing. So, yeah, that was a little SEO joke there. Let's move on. Let's see what at gfiorelli1 had to say. I'll let you read this one.

ARTHUR: Working hard and seeing that nothing you recommend has been implemented months after you delivered your recommendations and mostly because of bureaucratic bottlenecks.

ARTHUR: Hmm.

MICHAEL: Something we've spoken about quite a bit in the past.

MICHAEL: Well, we sort of did one. We did one back in the early days on like, is it you hurting your SEO?

ARTHUR: Yep.

MICHAEL: And I think even recently we answered what that one user sent in a question.

ARTHUR: We've done so many now it all blurs into one big podcast for me, but I guess it's something we can relate to sometimes. So clients being the bottleneck, delaying things, delaying, you know, implementations of, you know, documents, metadata, content, things like that. Sometimes they think they know better. It happens from time to time. You know, you'll provide recommendations and they'll, I guess, challenge everything that you're saying. It can become frustrating and it can have a negative impact on results and ultimately leave both yourself and the client unhappy.

MICHAEL: And I guess in that tweet he said, and mostly because of bureaucratic bottlenecks, um, that might be an example of that might be you're working on a large site and there's like 10 different people having their say and input. And someone might not want to, you know, someone high up might not want to change the content on the site because it's not in the right brand tone of voice or something. And it's content that's never going to be written. that Google will read and get a feeling for the page and, you know, needless blockages like that can be really annoying, particularly if you've already done a lot of work on the keyword research and the mapping and the content recommendations and all that, just have it sit there and gather dust. One other area outside of clients contributing to it would be maybe developers as well. The battle between SEOs and developers can sometimes be one that leads to stuff not being implemented. So if a developer doesn't agree or they push back or it's not a priority for them because they've got so much other stuff to work with, just trying to, I guess, deal with that side of things and having it impact on the work you've done can be frustrating as well.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, occasionally sometimes you'll have developers charging ridiculous prices for implementation of something that takes, you know, 10 minutes. So we've had bottlenecks with clients previously, even, even recently trying to get a plugin installed, you know, simple plugin, $420 or whatever they're charged just to install the plugin. That's a bottleneck, you know, ridiculous to charge someone that much to install something that simple, but it happens a lot.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right. Well, let's move on. We've got another little, uh, negative, I guess it is things that annoy you about SEO. They're all going to be negative. Well, not, not, not annoy you. Your least favorite part. So see, least favorite is a good way of phrasing it. Cause it's all favorite because it's SEO, but it's just the least favorite part. But, um, at Jacob Stoops said the negative reputation and misconceptions that we often battle when trying to get our work done. Which sort of ties into that last point. It can be, you know, misconception or something on the developer side or the client side that means that the work doesn't get implemented. That ties into that last point. But then also I think a lot here is to do with people being burnt in the past. You know, negative reputation. You're like a used car salesman. You're like a dodgy real estate agent. You're a dodgy SEO snake oil salesman. That sort of stuff. Um, a lot of people want to do SEO. They know that it's important channel for their business, but they're very gun shy if they've been burnt in the past. Right.

ARTHUR: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we did a episode on this as well. Yeah. Or at least a section of an episode. Yeah, for sure.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But how do you deal with that?

ARTHUR: In terms of, you know, client reputation, expectations. Yeah.

MICHAEL: If you've had it, like, let's say you've had a bad experience, you've got a negative perspective of SEO.

ARTHUR: How do you deal with it or how does the SEO deal with it with the client? Both really. I'm fishing for an answer here. Educate. Yeah. Basically educate yourself or that's what I do whenever I have a client that's, I guess, hesitant or has, you know, cold feet is you educate them. You explain what you're doing, why you're doing it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that is what it is really.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So like on the client side, listening to a podcast like this, you're educating yourself. You're not going to have a bad experience if you sort of take everything on board that we've spoken about in the past and around selecting agencies and shouldn't, shouldn't be done that sort of stuff.

ARTHUR: Yeah, and if it's a good agency, they'll have frequent communications with the agency, with the client, you know, they'll be up to date, they'll be getting reports, they'll have an account manager that's, you know, keeping them updated on what's happening day to day, you know, to give them peace of mind that there is someone working on their campaign trying to get good results.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, um, we've got, we've got one coming up here. I'm going to let Arthur read this one. Cause it's got, it's got a lot of words in it, but it's by, um, at yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

ARTHUR: So yeah, sorry, just got a bit distracted there. So yes, yeah. Seeing competition do everything Google states they should not do. Horrible, error-ridden, non-mobile friendly site using regurgitated content from the agency that is used on many other websites across the country. Failing core web vitals, et cetera, yet they're still ranking at the top of Google.

MICHAEL: That is a least favorite part of SEO for sure.

ARTHUR: He's mentioned a lot there. So there's a lot to digest.

MICHAEL: I'll tell you the first problem. He says there, seeing competition do everything Google states they should not do. Bingo. Don't, don't ignore as a general rule, ignore Google's SEO advice. Exactly. Or at least take a grain of salt when, um, take a grain of salt when looking at it, that doesn't even make sense, but you know what I'm trying to say? Because, um, often what they say and what they reward two very different things.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And I think on the, I guess same topic, if, if they are ranking first. you'd be reverse engineering what they're doing to try to replicate it. So, you know, basically what you said, if whatever, whatever they're doing is working, then you should be trying to do that on your website as well. Be it link building, you know, be it whatever.

MICHAEL: Don't just take advice, particularly Google's advice blindly.

ARTHUR: About SEO, especially about SEO.

MICHAEL: Yes. Because they don't have, I guess they don't want you doing well with SEO really. So you should always be testing really with SEO. Like if you have a website and you see that someone is doing really well with their site, you should be implementing what you think is working for them and testing. Don't just settle for doing what the best practices in air quotes are or what Google recommends.

ARTHUR: Rules are made to be broken.

MICHAEL: They are, you're a rebel, SEO rebel. And anyway, who says Google sets the rules? You know, well, I guess that is the search engine we're trying to rank in, but Google does. Yeah. But their rules are like designed to get them more AdWords or Google ads income. Yeah, absolutely. It's not grounded in, I guess, SEO. I'm going to say best practices. It's not grounded in what actually works in the SEO world. Yeah. There you go. That was the word I was looking for. What do we have here? We've got a little um what do you want to call it a thread party of three Tom Selleck.

ARTHUR: I'll let you read this one. I read the last one.

MICHAEL: It says Tom Selleck, but I think he's handle it at Schmidberg. So he says, his least favorite part of SEO is that Google just moves sites to the top of the list because they have high DA and their content isn't even relevant to the search. Google rewards sites that buy backlinks, which is supposed to be frowned upon. Supposed to be. Supposed to be. And then, um, at search triggers says. when someone with worse content and more authority ranks higher than you. So bad content, but more links. And then Yeezy, which is a M Punk Bruder at M Punk Bruder buying backlinks. Don't tell me I shouldn't. Even with better product, better design, average page time from 10 minutes, very high engagement, good concertion rate. I have no chance against shitty floats with dozens and hundreds of strung BL. That frustrates.

ARTHUR: I've got a feeling this guy had a few drinks before he typed out that tweet.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it certainly reads that way. But there's a general common thread to those responses there, which is link building and how important it is in SEO.

ARTHUR: Absolutely.

MICHAEL: If you've listened to more than one episode of this show, we've banged on about links a lot in the past. And it's because it works. And that's what these people are all saying, you know, sites will move to the top of the list just because they have really good links, even though content isn't relevant. Or someone, you know, you've got terrible content, but they've got tons of links and they rank high. And then old mate Yeezy is just saying, doesn't matter. He's got better product, better design, blah, blah, blah. But there's a dodgy site with dozens of links. A good concertion rate. And a good concertion rate. So we have spoken about it. You all know it. If you work in SEO, if you're trying to rank a website, links are super important. And again, this comes back to that last point. Ignore what Google says, because Google says, don't go out and build links. Yet their search results reward sites that do. Simple. Simple. Let's have a little look at what Brody SEO. You can read this one.

ARTHUR: I was planning to. Oh, you're taking a big long pause for a dramatic impact. So Brody has written working with incomplete data. So sampled queries in Google search console, lack of conversion data for queries, search volume inaccuracies, et cetera. And that was followed by this, by Jan Carels, I believe. Carels? Oh, who cares? Sorry, Jan. Yeah. So basically, yeah, we don't really get the same level of data that Google ads does. So even search console, which is good is incomplete and has inaccuracies. So sometimes it does feel like we are flying blind, but. Yep. It is what it is. Google doesn't like SEOs.

MICHAEL: Yep. Even GA like sampling, like if you have too much data in there sampling, um, it makes making totally accurate decisions, or I guess being very confident in your decisions, tough in some cases. But yeah, as Arthur said, it is what it is. That's a good way to sum that one up. You can't really do much.

ARTHUR: I mean, you can try reverse engineer it like we do sometimes. Um, I remember when not provided first came in, people were, you know, selling tools that, you know, you can, we'll link up all your data. We will link up search console and you know, we'll give you the keywords, but it's not the same. It never will be the same.

MICHAEL: Yep. Alright, well let's move on and have a look at Shortensleed. No, I like this guy's Twitter handle, it's really good. I've only just noticed it. He is at Wolf of Baldstreet and it's a little photo of a bald guy. I enjoyed that. Anyway, he says his least favorite part of SEO is honestly reliance on Google. I wish there was one or two other choices with significant search market share. So do I sometimes. Yeah. We hear you, Wolf of Ball Street, but I guess like the last question, it is what it is. Google own everything.

ARTHUR: Maybe one day, but don't hold your breath.

MICHAEL: Yeah. No. All right. Let's move on. This could be the last one. We got one more.

ARTHUR: We've got a couple more.

MICHAEL: Okay. All right. Okay. Okay. Well, at Proximo webs said crawled, not indexed sticking out tongue face. What do you want? What do you want to talk about on this one?

ARTHUR: Something I'm seeing more and more frequently in search console. So basically Google has crawled the page, seen the page, but it's decided not to index the page for whatever reason. And then that whatever reason is usually down to one of two things, content. So either having duplicate or thin content on the page or poor website architecture. So, you know, poor internal linking. I found, even with some of my clients, we've had pages set up, you know, just SEO pages, Unique copy, all fine, ranked well, that have now been removed from the SERPs. Google still crawls it here and there, but because the internal links to the page are missing, there's only one link, Google doesn't view, doesn't crawl that page as frequently and has decided not to index it. It's not important enough. Likewise, you know, if you've got pages with the same copy, just changed up, I guess, you know, just changed up the keywords, the keyword, I can't talk at the moment, keyword or two, you might run into the same problem. So we had a, again, I guess it comes down to internal linking, but we had a site that we worked with before previously that had thousands of pages, all location pages, thin content, all, you know, 10,000 pages were removed.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I would say kind of rambled on there a little bit, but no, no, that all makes sense.

ARTHUR: It came out better than it sounded to my head.

MICHAEL: That sounded okay in the years. I think. Okay, cool. I did tune out a bit. You were waffling. I was just kidding. The last one to that point, I would say that as well as the authority of the domain is important. Like if you have a really weak domain, tons of pages, they're probably not all going to be indexed.

ARTHUR: No. Yeah. But I think website architecture more and more important internal links. A hundred percent.

MICHAEL: So we're seeing like if you go in and add internal links into body copy on pages where they weren't any, it has all sorts of positive impacts on SEO. So it's an area a lot of people overlook. You get caught up on external backlinks and crafting the ultimate meta title tag and copy and that sort of stuff, but maybe not so much on your internal linking. But anyway, let's move on here. What at John Wright 79 had to say his least favorite part of SEO was. The waiting. What do you reckon? It is annoying.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It is what it is again.

MICHAEL: SEO is a long-term game as we always say.

ARTHUR: Yep. You're not going to see results overnight. I guess there's certain things that take longer than others, you know, but it is definitely a long-term play and you have to have patience.

MICHAEL: Yes. And when you're investing thousands per month, it's not always easy to have that patience. So you need to be confident in the strategy and the people working on it. But as Arthur said, and as we've said many times already, this podcast, it is what it is. That's a new, I'd known the SEO world, the saying, it depends is a bit of a meme. You know, it's the answer to everything. Like how long is it going to take? It depends. How much more traffic could I get? It depends. That sort of stuff. It's true. Now it is what it is, is also, we're going to, we're going to have to advocate that as the new meme in the SEO world. Get it trending. Might reply on this Twitter thread and see what people think.

ARTHUR: Just reply on every single one of these. Hashtag it is what it is. See if you can get it trending.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, we have, um, at Mui Alucard. Mui Alucard?

ARTHUR: I don't know.

MICHAEL: Mui Alucard? Anyway. Mui. Muis. Whatever. Yeah. Muis is his name on there. I wonder if that's actually him. Could be. Anyway. So he's saying his least favorite part of SEO. And there's actually, again, this is a little thread because there's a couple of tweets here in this vein because Siobhan underscore Fagan also says something similar. So let's go with Moira Leclad first. He goes, my machine generated rubbish content ranking above well done content. I don't know why he thinks that's his least favorite part. If his dodgy content is doing well, I'd be happy with that. Maybe he's just more ethical. Maybe. But um, Siobhan says the enormous quantities of bad content written in an attempt to game the system and the increasingly poor serves that result. And Christo Fooch says you have AI to thank for that. Yeah. What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: Um, I don't know.

MICHAEL: I am again, I'm just, I come from the school of if it works.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it is annoying that if a hundred percent, you spend a lot of time writing good quality content for the end user and only to be outranked by some gibberish that's frustrating as hell. So I can, you know, I can relate.

MICHAEL: Well, he's frustrated by his content, which is gibberish. Anyway. Use it to your advantage if you can get away with it. Yeah. Because like, we're not saying create a whole page of gibberish. You need to think about your user. It needs to convert first and foremost. It needs to, you know, get your customers or whatever your goal is. But if adding some AI spun content deep on the page improves your rankings. Do it. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yes. Um, but the search results, yeah, they like in some niches, they're just an absolute mess of just junk pages and good quality pages that are doing things seemingly right. You know, either not getting the rankings to begin with or losing them for some reason. But, um, again, it is what it is, you know? Yeah. It's a, you've got to go look at what works and just replicate it. You know, that is SEO at its core.

ARTHUR: There's two more here that I accidentally removed, the funny ones. So Rico, is it Rico? No, my eyes are bad. Nicola Gal wrote the O, so the optimization, the search optimization. You probably shouldn't be doing SEO. That's his least favorite thing of SEO.

MICHAEL: That's the most time consuming part because the other part is just a search engine.

ARTHUR: And then the last one here by Victor Missa. My least favorite part of SEO is Google, no doubt. Also can relate. Yes.

MICHAEL: It's a bit of a weird one because there would pretty much be no SEO without Google. No. Considering they have 90% plus of the market, but they're also very, can be annoying. Some of the stuff they come out with like forcing GA forum people when it's not a nice product to use. No. But it is what it is. You have to work with Google because that's where the traffic comes from. So they were the ones that stood out to us on that Twitter thread.

ARTHUR: That was pretty fun. There were a lot more. So maybe we can, like you said, make it a recurring segment. Yeah. Cause I like it. It's fun.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And look, there's going to be bringing in all different perspectives of people that aren't necessarily guests on the show, but we think are interesting and looking at what's going on in the world of Twitter, I think could be pretty, pretty good way of coming up with new topics for the show. But. Another way that we like to do things is with our Q&A's. We're going to be doing another episode soon, we've had some questions come in, but if you have any questions about the world of SEO, if you have any questions where you want us to tell you that the answer is it depends or it is what it is, then let us know. Head to theseoshow.co, send your questions in. Do we have a Twitter? No. Maybe we should make one. You know what? We've spoken around Instagram. We've spoken about intro musics, Twitter, probably Twitter would be the most relevant. I think so. We can chime in on these combos and yeah, let's do it. All right. Well, by the next episode, you'll have that set up, right?

ARTHUR: I'll do my best. You know what? Yeah, I will. Awesome. Remind me next episode. Okay. I will do.

MICHAEL: But until then, happy SEOing. See ya.

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