SEO Q&A Week #5

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 another week of the SEO show. I am Michael Costin and I am joined by Arthur Fabik.

ARTHUR: Hello. A bit of a different intro this time. Normally you start off with hello. Hello. Hello. One hello this time. And I was, yeah, just thrown off a little bit. Yeah. Sorry. That's okay. Maybe next week I can go back to hello.

MICHAEL: Hello. Hello. I like to keep you on your toes.

ARTHUR: You know why I wanted to keep it short because we have a good, Old fashioned Q&A week podcast.

MICHAEL: Q&A week five. We have got some juicy questions. Some of them sent in by listeners. Others we have pillaged from sites like Reddit because we didn't have enough listener questions this time.

ARTHUR: No, we encourage you to send in any question you have about SEO to Where?

MICHAEL: The SEO show.co is our website. You can get, we actually have a thing on there where you can submit a audio question so you can record yourself and we'll play it on the show. No one has ever done it, but it's there. So if you are feeling brave, if you want to hear your voice on the SEO show and feel that you've really reached the pinnacle of your, I guess, uh, human existence, really, wouldn't it be having your voice on the SEO show? Then go on there and submit. You're waffling a little bit. I'm embellishing a bit. But anyway, go to the FCOshow.co and submit your questions for the next episode.

ARTHUR: On a side note, I was meant to create a Twitter and Instagram page. Yeah. I'll probably do it this week. See how we get for time. I don't know.

MICHAEL: I'll do it. I don't have high hopes for the people following and engaging with that page.

ARTHUR: We'll just buy followers like most other podcast pages.

MICHAEL: You know, it's always, if you ever see a business that has like 2000, 3000, 4000 followers, just hover over one of the images they share and it will have like one light and you know it's all bullshit.

ARTHUR: 20, 20,000 is like the, The number that gets me suspicious, because if someone has 21,200 and something followers, I assume the 20,000 is fake. You hover over it on, can you do it on mobile app or do you have to do it on desktop?

MICHAEL: Desktop, or if you click it, yeah, if you click into a mobile, it doesn't tell you the exact.

ARTHUR: But if you hover over on the desktop app, you can see that they'll have 21,000 followers and then two comments and seven likes, which is, yeah, that's just not. the right ratio of likes to followers at all.

MICHAEL: Like even in our world, the digital marketing world, digital marketing agencies, there's lots out there that have 2000 or 3000 or 5000 followers. We've got like 500, like 580, 600, something like that. After seven years, we run ads on Instagram, we get little dribs and drabs. Admittedly, our content's not that amazing on there, our presence, but you go on our posts, we get a lot of engagement with it. You go on these people that have 5,000, they have very little, so.

ARTHUR: Unless you're a client of ours, why would you follow a marketing agency?

MICHAEL: Well, the reason you would, you've got talking to your mic, you're a bit quiet there. Am I? Sorry. This is because you don't wear headphones.

ARTHUR: It's because I was talking quietly.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Why would anyone follow a marketing agency?

MICHAEL: I reckon they would if like the stories were cool and it was showing off like different tactics and all that stuff, which all stuff that we want to do, but don't. But otherwise, no, you wouldn't.

ARTHUR: So maybe rather than wasting my energy on creating an SEO show, why don't we just work on the local digital one and get everyone, get our listeners to follow that instead. Do a stories takeover. What is it?

MICHAEL: At local digital cove. There you go. Yep. So follow that. Let's move into the questions because this is a Q&A episode and we've been going a few minutes now without saying any questions. We're going to start off today with one from Peter. So Peter asked us, if you find your site has somehow been targeted by lots of spammy backlinks, but not hacked, how do you get rid or disavow these links? How does the site get targeted by spammy links in the first place? What do you have to say about that one, Arthur?

ARTHUR: Well, I think every site eventually will get targeted by spammy backlinks. It's inevitable. The longer you've had your site, the older the domain, the more crap you're going to find in your backlink profile. So there's just scrapers out there that will build rubbish spammy links and to be honest they're not going to harm your backlink profile, they're not going to harm your SEO. So I guess it depends on what those links are, you need to be able to identify like a harmless spammy link and also need to identify what a dangerous intentional link that a competitor might've built to try negative SEO site. So if you're talking about those general spammy links, then you probably don't need to do anything at all. In fact, Google has come out and said, unless you are a hundred percent certain this link is going to harm you, they recommend not disavowing anything. It could also draw attention to your backlink profile, potentially that, I don't know, maybe if they've got someone disavowing links, they might manually review it. Maybe.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We don't know what they're looking at inside the walls of Google. So he's used the word targeted here. Your site probably hasn't been targeted to begin with. No. Like every site gets so spammy ones. Yeah. You just ignore them. Um, but I guess if you're, if you're trying to figure out if you have been targeted, so to speak, it would be looking at things like the anchor text, like, uh, Are you getting thousands of links for your keyword, your main keyword? Well, that could say or indicate that someone is trying to take you down because that is a sign of negative SEO. But if you're just getting random links from like a random scraper site where they've put a photo that is from your site with a link back to you, that stuff just happens to every site. Yeah.

ARTHUR: You also said as well, if they're using your keyword, if they're using a keyword that is completely irrelevant to your business or something like, I guess the most typical one would be, you know, Viagra, Cialis, those types of medications, then chances are you have been hacked. Potentially someone's injected stuff onto your site without you knowing.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but that would be links away from your site to those, like let's say a Black Hat affiliate or something.

ARTHUR: I've seen it on other sites.

MICHAEL: Linking back? I agree, yeah.

ARTHUR: I have seen them linking back because they're trying to capitalize off that, those injected pages they've put on the site.

MICHAEL: Yeah, maybe. And also, I think if you have a lot of those types of links, like a blast of them, it can be just a bad quality signal to Google for your site like that. Well, yeah, true. That's the other thing.

ARTHUR: Why are you targeting, you know, insurance and then Viagra?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Anyway, that's that. So the general answer is you probably, most people might think people tend to think they're being targeted or like competitors are taking them down or there's negative SEO. A lot of the time it's not that it's just scraper sites. They can be safely ignored because Google pretty much ignores them. Don't frantically rush to disavowing unless you really, really need to save the disavow tool for the big ticket backlink removal. Let's move on to Celeste.

ARTHUR: What has she said? She said, can you have too many headings? Yes. And no. Yes. And no.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Which I guess you can have, like, let's say you have 10 H1 headings on your page. That's bad. Yes. You should only have one H1 heading for every page. Correct. Then of course, like in your body content throughout the page, you might have H2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, so on and so forth down the page. Generally we recommend just do it as necessary to cover the topic properly. So your H2s and 3s and 4s will, I guess, add sense and structure to the page. Go with what makes sense when you're writing your articles. And really best practice is to go and look at the top ranked pages in your space and keep your content in a similar vein. So if the top two or three pages for a keyword have 20 headings and you've gone with the 60, then that might be a problem. It probably won't be, but it might be if you've, if you've really gone under and you don't have enough content in your page, you only have a couple of headings and you probably need to expand on it and give Google what it's already saying it likes to see by those top ranked pages.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I was going to say that. So I guess that works when you're looking at a page, which is like a blog post, for example, what if you're looking at like a homepage or, Any other page in the site where they've gone and used and styled different elements using H tags. So let's just say a homepage where you have your regular H1, H2, whatever in the content. And then you also have it styled in like, you know, different categories, different things. So you end up having 70 or so different headings.

MICHAEL: I would say that's less than ideal from a pure SEO sense. Yes. Because like a lot of those headings will just be navigational in the text.

ARTHUR: With just random words, which have no relevance to anything really.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So again, look at, look at the top rank sites, use tools like use on page tools like Surfer or SEO Minion. Page Optimizer for SEO Minion, I feel like. Is that a plugin?

ARTHUR: That's a plugin, sorry. Just to see, you can pull the code and see all the headings on a page, rank them. You can sort them by, I guess, order or the type of heading, like importance. Use it to compare different sites at a glance.

MICHAEL: Everything's good at a glance. It is until you dig into it with Surfer and it says you need to get rid of like half of them. We're not saying what Surfer or Page Optimizer Pro say should be gospel, but they help. Analyze what the sites already ranking well are doing. So if you get it in that ballpark and you're addressing the content well Then generally that's going to be right. So can you have too many headings? The answer is yes, and it depends. That's the old SEO What would you say meme I guess in terms of answers, but I guess it's true in this case So we're going to move on here to one that we have unashamedly stolen from Reddit and it is, Arthur's going to answer this one really well because he did it before Ruffair. I'm really looking forward to this.

ARTHUR: Concerning if I didn't know what it was.

MICHAEL: It would be, but I'm going to ask you anyway, what is a canonical tag and is it needed to be set for every page? Is it needed to be, does that make sense? Anyway, what is a canonical tag? Do you need it on every page?

ARTHUR: So basically a canonical tag is just a bit of HTML code that's placed on pages, and it refers to what is supposed to be the original page. So for example, if you've got an e-commerce website that has duplicate pages, duplicate categories, you'd be using a canonical tag. I guess referencing the URL that is the original page. And what that does is it tells Google to basically ignore all these duplicates and focus on that original page. I guess all the SEO value is passed on to that original page. It prevents those duplicate pages from getting indexed and just essentially it's best practice for SEO. Does every page need a canonical tag? I mean, essentially it doesn't matter really, does it?

MICHAEL: You can have self-canonicals on most pages. Sometimes, it sort of depends often how the CMS is set up. Yeah. Some might just, you know, if you only have one page. Yeah, you don't need it. So let's say Ecom, it might have a product page and then all the different color variants are its own URL.

ARTHUR: Yes. So in that case, you would want to have it on all those pages.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All of them refer back to the main product page, not any color variant. But if you just have a, you know, commercial lawyer Sydney page and no other similar pages, you don't need canonicals because there is no duplicates of it.

ARTHUR: Exactly. So really you just need it on any page that is going to be duplicated.

MICHAEL: Yeah, pretty much. But some CMSs will set them automatically and they just do a self referencing one on a page where there is no duplicates. So that's like it's saying to Google, Hey, here's this page. And it is a canonical of itself, which isn't a big deal. It's not going to be redundant, but yeah. So this one's a cool one. I feel. We've also stolen this one from Reddit. We're crying out for people to submit real questions here. But anyway, with AI now writing content, do you think SEO will be replaced by AI? That's a big one. That's a very sobering, somber question for people that are SEOs. But really my answer is no. SEO that like the profession will not be replaced, but definitely aspects of it will be, but they're generally going to be the aspects that take a lot of human time for not that much value being added. Yeah. So an example would be, let's say a blog post for purely for link building purposes that takes a human writer however long to write, that could potentially be done by an AI copywriting tool in half the time or a quarter of the time. Yeah, definitely. So that's one thing that will definitely be replaced. Things like copy for FAQs, you know, embedded in a page to add a bit more context. That will probably be done. But the overarching strategy and execution of an SEO campaign across all of the pillars. So thinking about, you know, what are the goals of a business and how do you get there and strategizing all of that and executing on it. AI is not coming in and doing that because the AI tools aren't that amazing at the moment, right?

ARTHUR: They are pretty amazing, but they're never going to replace, I guess, the attention to detail that a real person can provide. I think it's good for scaling content. I think it's good for copywriters if they want to speed up the process if they want to, I mean, if they have a writer's block, I found when I was using some, is it Jasper now? I can't remember what it's called. Java's Jasper. I think it's Jasper now, but I've been using it for meta descriptions just to, I guess, get ideas. You know, most of the time I'll need to make tweaks, but it's useful for that.

MICHAEL: content that shouldn't necessarily be read by humans. Like let's say, like, as we said before, FAQs buried on a page just to get more.

ARTHUR: Read more content. Yeah. That sort of stuff. Help your page rank. Yeah. But again, using that point, you're still going to need to optimize that content if you want to rank for it. So yeah, unless the AI is smart enough to know what Google wants on that page, what like, I guess, keyword densities and different variations and, Everything that you would normally do to optimize copy, you're going to need someone to do that.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and it's not good enough. Like we play around with Jasper quite a bit. There's the other tool, Surfer. So Surfer will try and look at top-ranked sites and get an idea for what needs to be done on a page. And then you can plug those tools together and like, in theory have Jasper create content that addresses what needs to be done on a page based on what Surf is saying, but it's, needs a lot of human oversight and editing and human touch for it to make sense. And for it to hit all of the sort of optimization factors that Surf is saying. You can't just hit a button and it just goes, spins up content. And so I feel it's a long way off being able to do that.

ARTHUR: What it does well is it rewrites content well. So if you give it the actual, I guess, context and the actual content, it can rewrite it. So it's not having to actually create it itself. So I think it's a lot easier for the AI to be able to change words around and learn that way and provide better copy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So what a lot of people will do is just take copy from like a Wikipedia or elsewhere on the web, chuck it into one of these tools, spin up a new version, and then sort of build on that. And sort of, you can generally pretty quickly put together an article. It's not going to be the most engaging, like. No. They like, let's say a human is writing an article and they're trying to be a bit witty, a bit funny, use puns and dad jokes or whatever, like include memes. You can do that in Jasper. Allegedly.

ARTHUR: The tone, the tone you can have set to like witty Joe Rogan.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like there's. It's not the same as a human.

ARTHUR: It won't be the same, but I think it's a fun little feature.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So the content ultimately is going to be, line in length, I would call it.

ARTHUR: But no, I don't think AI is going to replace SEO.

MICHAEL: The other thing I want to say on this one is like, if you think about deep fakes, I was listening to a podcast on AI a while ago and- Not even deep fakes, but that Dali R2. I don't know about that, but with deep fakes, right? The AI, there's teams of people working on the AI to make deep fakes better and better and better and better.

ARTHUR: But deepfakes of people.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And then there's people working on deepfake detection AI to detect when there's been a deepfake. And it's a bit of an arms race. So like one will have a sort of a, I guess a technological breakthrough or advancement, but then the other side that catches up. So it's game of cat and mouse. And I think Google will probably want to go after total AI content if they can try and detect it. All of these AI tools use GPT-3 like the open AI. I guess they plug into that. They're just like a shiny marketing front end on that. Google will probably try and come up with ways of using its AI to detect when content is being created by those GPT-3 space tools. And you know, it might be a game of cat and mouse. That's not saying that's happening at the moment, but I could see that happening.

ARTHUR: But it's like that Dali, that Dali two, Dali one, you know, that image AI. So basically you chuck in whatever you can think of, like Joe Biden riding a tricycle with a penguin suit on. And basically it'll just create that image. So the first Dali, there's like versions of an open source that people can now go on and just create the images. They're not that good. Still fun to play around with, but the one, the Dali two, which is the more recent one is insane. And I've watched videos where you can literally put whatever you can think of and it will create that image like to varying degrees of like accuracy, but super accurate. So it's awesome and scary at the same time.

MICHAEL: So it'd be interesting to make like a purely AI created website, like you featured image and all the images in the post created by Dali, all of the content created by Jasper or similar. I'm sure someone's already done this out there, but you know, and then if you had a human doing the SEO strategy at the top of it, so sort of deciding what content's being created and. making sure all the internal linking's done and the rest, and then just see how easy it is to rank. And then if it just randomly gets taken down one day. Have you watched the daily two staff? A little bit, a little bit. I've sort of seen like, you know, I haven't gone and watched videos about like specific creation of an image, but I've seen the results of what it does. I find some of them a bit like weird, like a mishmash of styles and stuff. Yeah.

ARTHUR: But I mean, if, A good example would be let's just say you had a photo of yourself wearing a blue shirt and then you could just say this photo of a red shirt and then the AI will change the color of your shirt. So using it for those purposes rather than just like generating random images from scratch. Sure, like remove the background. Yeah, pretty much exactly that. Or like I've got, I don't know if you can see it on here. I know we're going slightly off topic, but you know, enhancing images or changing, you know.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Make a variation of this image. Yeah. So this image in like Andy Warhol style.

ARTHUR: Correct. Yeah. Or like an astronaut in the desert, like just stuff that is.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. It's very cool. Yeah. You won't be able to know what's real and what's not in like a couple of years. That's the scary part. Yeah. Well, yeah, it is. Cause I, in this podcast, I was listening to the potential for like deep fakes to lead to like cataclysmic political.

ARTHUR: Well, there was like maybe going very off topic, but during the election, people were suggesting that there were deep fakes of Trump and Biden at the same time, because of the videos that they were being released on like Twitter. And then like calling out things like, I guess, you know, where the shirt meets his neck would glitch over and things like that, or just unnatural movements of the body compared to the face.

MICHAEL: I wonder how much of that is a deepfakes or be just like dodgy, like bandwidth or something on the video codecs and whatever. Anyway, but like, it's interesting because it's not far off. Like them having a video of like Putin doing something horrific or they could do that now. Yeah. So people believing it and it could start all sorts of, you know, problems. So that's why they need the deepfake detector AI. Anyway, we've gone way off topic. What was the topic there? Will AI replace SEO? Well, we've got it ending the world, so it could potentially replace SEO, but I don't think so. The profession won't be replaced.

ARTHUR: Jeez, we're only up to question five.

MICHAEL: We only got seven. Do we have seven? Yeah, seven. So five. Another one from Reddit. Another thieved question. This is an interesting one. These people are saying, we want to build an in-house SEO team. How should we structure it? This is an interesting one, like do you outsource, do you go in-house, do you use agencies, do you try and do it, you know, all with your own team? And this is very much based on variables. There's a lot of variables that go in there. So at the start, what does your business do?

ARTHUR: How big is your business?

MICHAEL: How big is it? What is the lifetime value of a customer? Like does it justify building a team in-house? Yeah. What's your budget basically? And what's the traffic opportunity in your niche to go all in and build a team in-house? Because building a team in-house you… You have to employ them. You have to pay super. You have to have all the tools and all that. And then once they are employees, you can't just get rid of them if your SEO campaign stops working. So it's a big, you know, totally different value proposition to hiring an agency.

ARTHUR: Cost to benefit, like is it cheaper or more economical for you to hire an agency or have you reached that stage where it makes sense for you to hire someone in-house or hire a team in-house? So yeah.

MICHAEL: And yeah, budget comes into it. What I would say, if you want to build an in-house SEO team, you're talking many, many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries per year, plus costs related to publishing like link acquisition, content creation, that sort of stuff, all the tools. So pretty big budget. Yeah. So let's assume you've got the big budget, you want to build it in-house. Really, like if you break SEO down into its pillars, you know, technical content links, UX, are you going to find a guru that can sit there and handle all three all day? Maybe, but they'll be super expensive. And then there's not enough time in the day for them. Like if you're really trying to do link building properly and scale content creation, they can't be doing that. And then also handling the strategy and all the rest of it. So you do need to build a team as you've touched on in this question. I would say you need to go find like a senior strategist, someone that has experience running SEO on real websites, whether that's at an agency, whether it's for themselves or in, you know, client side. But if they have experience across all of the pillars, they can sort of sit at the top and come up with the strategy, the approach that you're going to take and the way you're going to execute. But then you might make use of outsource partners for your link building and your content creation. where super time-consuming, it needs to be done, it needs to be done at scale and you probably couldn't get one person doing all of that. But then if you did want to do it all in-house, you'll need that senior strategist that manages the whole process, you'd need at least one content writer, one full-time link builder prospector and then one technical developer type person. Across those four people you would then have an SEO team to work on your site all day long. Take a breath. Well said. That's going to be expensive. Yes. Well said. Comes back to you, your business, your goals. Most of the time, it doesn't make sense to build a whole SEO team in-house. That's why agencies exist and people use them. All right, let's move on to a question from Anthony. I'll let you take this one because I need to get my breath back here.

ARTHUR: Yeah, you kind of, no, you answered it very well. Well, thank you. This one's a bit of a shorter question from Anthony. What's the best way to track keyword rankings? So there's a number of ways you can do it starting from manual checks. So going into Google and incognito and then just searching for your keyword and then having to go through all the pages to find where your page ranks for that keyword. So not ideal. There's other ways you can do it such as Chrome extensions. So the one that I use is called fat rank. by Fat Joe SEO, been using it for years since I started. So basically it's just an extension where you can set your location, search for a particular keyword on, sorry, I have to start again. So you have to be on your domain, on your site. When you're on your site, you open up the extension, search for the particular keyword that you're looking for and your location. And what it'll do is it'll show you where or what position you rank for if you do rank and then what page ranks for that. So again, good if you want to spot check keywords, maybe if you have like, you know, half a dozen to a dozen, but if you really want to track, you know, dozens to hundreds of keywords, I'm starting to ramble like you. No, you're answering it comprehensively. Yeah, so if you're wanting to track, you know, a large number of keywords, then you're probably going to have to look to a dedicated rank tracker or Ahrefs, which also have a dedicated rank tracker built in. So the one that we use internally is Nightwatch, which I think having used a different number of different variations or different Rank Trackers, starting to stumble here. I find it's the most accurate, the best UI, the easiest to use. You can link it with GA, Search Console. They've got servers all around the world so that you can track from different locations if you need to. So if you've got a client in, if you're in Sydney and you're in Perth, you can track from Perth. If you're in Perth and your client's in Singapore, you can track from Singapore, so really handy. You can track competitors as well. So you get nice little graphs of the key, like the SERP might result over time. So you can average position of all the track keywords.

MICHAEL: Very accurate, pretty accurate as far as these tools go.

ARTHUR: Yeah, so it takes into consideration the local pack, I guess, site links and stuff, organic site links and things, which can pop up in different, I guess, search results, position zero, doing a sales pitch for these guys.

MICHAEL: Let's say some competitors of them are stat, get stat and then Accuranker like picky poison, I guess.

ARTHUR: They're all gonna do the same thing. I don't know which one, well, in my opinion, unbiased opinion, Nightwatch is the best, but essentially they'll do the same thing.

MICHAEL: We're not really like, we're not really testing other tools because we just use this one at works. I would say is a bit slow to update like it.

ARTHUR: If you pay for the actual rank tracking, I think it's better 24 hours, which is what rank tracker is nightwatch. Sorry. They used to be called rank tracker. Yeah. Night watches every 24 hours and midday. Our time is when it refreshes. So yeah, best way to track keywords is using rank tracking software. If you're serious about it.

MICHAEL: If you're serious about it, yeah.

ARTHUR: If you've got a little bit of budget, they're not super expensive. Usually pay per keyword or pay per blocks of keywords. So I don't know how much Nightwatch would be. Not much if you want it to track 100 keywords or so.

MICHAEL: We pay heaps, but we're tracking thousands and thousands. Well, yeah, that's right. Like if you're just tracking it for one site, like you're talking probably less than 50 bucks a month. Yeah, tens of dollars. Yeah. Tens of dollars. Double digits. All right. Let's move on from that one. Is this the last one? Yeah, this is the last one. I didn't even know. I think this is stolen from you. You haven't credited this on. I was so fired up by this question because we have quite a lot. This was for a minute. Yeah.

ARTHUR: It's the one I found which set you off. Do you want me to read it out and you can answer it? Yes. Okay, cool. So let's just say hypothetically a competitor is copying your site design and content.

MICHAEL: What can you do? Now, the reason this sets me off is we have had this happen a ton over the years. Some examples are, you know, we had a website We had like a sort of sub-brand of our agency running PPC services. We had copy, like I slaved away on the copy for that site, put it on the site and then- Slaved away.

ARTHUR: Slaved away.

MICHAEL: Very, very emotive language. Yeah, that is emotive. By the way, I sat there and wrote some copy for a while, but it was my work and it was on the site and this other business inquired with us about us running Google ads for them, like sort of outsourcing to us. We didn't work together, but then not long later on their website, almost word for word, I saw our copy from the page at the top. That's one example. I've seen other websites where they've pretty much copy and pasted the entire local digital websites copy and put it on their site.

ARTHUR: That was like the original website, wasn't it? I think when, yeah, the 2016 website where you found someone that basically copied the sections.

MICHAEL: It's happened with all of our sites. Yeah. It's just common. And I'm sure it's not just in the digital marketing space. It would be in other spaces. Of course. So the first, we've even had people write like our name.

ARTHUR: Can I chime in quickly? I'll be very short. We had a client that was a furniture retailer, pretty big. their SEO agency literally stole a copy from a furniture retailer in the United States and didn't even bother changing the brand name. So I think the company was called Space Furniture. So you'd go into the client's site, it would be like, Space Furniture stock, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I blatantly just copied and pasted the copy from that, sent it to the client. I don't know how they managed to approve it, but I think the client might've just not cared and just said, do whatever. But they went to that extent. They just went to a different region, copied and pasted it without even changing the brand.

MICHAEL: So it's rampant on the internet. Because a lot of people don't want to do the work, basically.

ARTHUR: Yeah, which is why this AI content rewrite stuff is really handy because you can probably do that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Next time you're copying our content, just AI rewrite it so it's different. So anyway, I'm going to give you a few options from easiest to hardest. Number one, be flattered and do nothing because ultimately If they're copying content wholesale of your site, it already means I guess they're behind you. You know, they're not coming up with this stuff themselves or bettering themselves or improving themselves. They're just copying what you're doing. So just be flattered and do nothing about it because they're probably not a true competitor to you.

ARTHUR: What's that saying? Flattery is the… No.

MICHAEL: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. That's the one. That's the one. The next one would be to… Reach out to the website owner, so track down who owns it and then politely ask them not to do that. Politely. Yeah, politely, start politely. So I'll give you an example. Our business is called Local Digital. Someone in our industry has come and created a business called Local Digital and then another word. And, um, when I saw that happen, it only happened like a few months ago. I reached out to the guy on LinkedIn, politely asked him like, why would you create a business that has the exact same name as us when we've been around seven years and we're very established? And he said that he searched the brand name and didn't see us. But if you search his brand name, we were ranking first. We were ranking organically, we were in the ad, so he just, I don't know, didn't care, whatever. And at the end of the day, could potentially try and get lawyers involved and all that stuff, but is it really worth the headache? Probably not. Like it's a small business that's only just starting out. I just can't be bothered. Sometimes if you reach out politely and ask them not to, they might not realize that they've made that mistake. Or, you know, maybe they know full well they did, but once they've been caught out, they're going to change it because they don't want any problems. So just start with a polite ask. Try and scare them with legal action. Everyone always threatens, I'll have my lawyers or whatever.

ARTHUR: Well, I mean, if you're a small business just starting out, it's probably not something you want to read first thing in the morning and have an angry email. So that would be enough for me personally to potentially just change it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, that was, um, that was where I was going to go next. You can start going down the legal paths. So the first one is filing a DMCA takedown. Now I don't know how well this will always work. Let's say you're in Australia, it may not work, but DMCA takedown, DMCA is a website where you can go on there and if you are the original, I guess, a copyright holder of content or the original creator of content, you can go on there and submit an infringing URL and what your URL is and give them a whole bunch of information about how you created it. And then DMCA can do takedowns. So I don't know how successful they are and I think it's more a US thing, but that might be something that you could do to again, try and spook them into doing what you want, which is not copying your content. That going to the next level is sending a cease and desist letter to them, where you basically starting to go legal there. You're starting to say, my lawyers will be in touch, you know, or you might even do it through your lawyers to try and take it down. So the cease and desist is a more legal way of asking them politely to not do it anymore. After that, the only option left is to actually engage lawyers and sue them. So I guess it depends on how egregious their offending is and how much you want to spend. Because once you engage lawyers, you're committing to spending many, many hundreds or thousands, not even hundreds, thousands of dollars. Let's be serious. Yeah. Thousands of dollars trying to take this down. So is it commercial? Does it commercially make sense to do this? Probably not.

ARTHUR: I think if it's impacting your business and potentially, but if it's some small backyard operations somewhere else far away that have, you know, probably, probably not unless they actually do become a actual threat.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We'll see.

ARTHUR: In which case you'd hope that probably try to build their own brand identity and stop piggybacking of other agencies.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So using a name of a business is definitely a case where that can happen. Yeah. It might happen in our case. Cause I've seen that now they're starting to rank. close to our brains.

ARTHUR: There was another one that was, don't want to say their name out loud. Can I? Nah, probably won't. But it was something local digital as well. Yeah, there's a couple of them. And then there was that time, there was the guy building websites where everyone thought that he was us. And I don't, I can't remember what name he used, but close enough for them to start reaching out to us.

MICHAEL: Yeah, he used local digital co. That's it. And then did websites really cheap, did a really bad job of it. And then we would have angry clients calling us, threatening us. We got a bad review left on our Google profile for a business that had nothing to do with us. So with that one, I went pretty nuclear to try to take it down and got the end result I was looking for. If someone has just copied content off your site, like the first example I gave where people copied our wording, pretty much word for word, I just can't be bothered. Like let them do it. And then you just focus on you and your business and improving things and getting better and better in your business. And they're not normally going to be a concern to you. So yeah, it depends on the level of offending, let's say.

ARTHUR: Yeah. If people are starting to call your business confusing you with them, especially if they're doing dodgy work, then, then that's probably when you can start worrying about it a little bit.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Cool. Well, that, that, that, I was going to say that. Yeah. What do we got here? About 35 minutes or so. That's pretty good. Pretty good. We've gone past our contractually obligated 30 minutes per week.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I'm going to need a free lunch for this.

MICHAEL: I think. Yeah. It's almost lunchtime. So on that note, our tummies are rumbling. So we're going to go eat in the meantime, not even the meantime until next time. Happy SEOing. Hope those questions help go to our website and ask a question. If you have any, we'd love to answer it for you and we'll see you next week. See ya. Bye.

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