SEO Q&A Week #6

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.

ARTHUR: Maybe I should do the intros moving forward.

MICHAEL: No, that's fine. That's exciting. Is it? Yep. It's Tuesday afternoon. We're excited to talk about SEO. I'm Michael Closton. I'm joined by Arthur Fabic. Very upset looking Arthur Fabic.

ARTHUR: As always. Oh, you need to work on your intro game. No, I think that's good. I think I'm going to start doing them moving forward. I've decided.

MICHAEL: Okay. I'm sorry. Let's go from the top. You can do it. Go.

ARTHUR: Welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I can't do it on the spot. I need to think about what I'm going to say. Today we've got an exciting episode, another Q&A week.

MICHAEL: There we go. Yes, we do. And guess what? We have an actual recorded question because you may or may not know this, but on the SEO show.co our website, if you go on there, there's a little widget that you can record yourself asking a question and to date, no one's used it, but I'm very excited to say that Dave has submitted a question today, but I don't go to it just yet. Don't go to it just yet. Are you going to do a joke thing? I was just going to go. Well, that was out of context. Do you think it's a joke that Dave submitted a question? No, not at all. So, um, we have him, we have Dave's question queued up on the tool that we do all our sounds, all these sounds, which we haven't been using, but we're going to start using it moving forward. Yep. Starting with Dave's question. Um, But I just want to remind anyone listening, if you do have an SEO question, head to the SEO show.co, send it in that way rather than sending it in by email, which is how we get most of them, because it's just cool to hear yourself on the show. So let's jump into it. Let's listen. Yeah. Do you want to do the honors of pushing the button? Which button is it? The first one? You know what? That's a bloody good. No, no, that's the, that's a stolen from social. Can I press that one? No. For fun. Okay. Go on. Stolen. Stolen from social.

ARTHUR: Stolen. Okay. Now we'll press the actual one. The real one is this one.

MICHAEL: So this is Dave's question. The first one off the rank this week in the SEO show Q and A episode. You're putting your headphones on. I need to hear the question, don't I? All right. Are you ready? Let's go.

CALLER: Hello, gents. Love the show. Long time listener, first time caller. My question for you is around how much you guys tailor your SEO strategy depending on your client's industry. So I'm wondering if there's a significant difference in your approach to, you know, content or link building for a university client versus someone who's a news publisher or an e-commerce business or something like that. Is there some nuance in terms of where you focus your time or is the approach completely different based on the industry and maybe their competitor set or things of that nature? Curious to hear if it's sort of a one size fits all or how much tailoring happens behind the scenes based on those variables. So thanks and looking forward to hearing back.

MICHAEL: All right. That is very cool, isn't it?

ARTHUR: Very, very cool. I couldn't hear the first half of the question because my volume was right down, but I think I got the general gist of it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. He's basically asking, do we change our approach depending on what the business does? So I'm going to say yes, we do. Well, there's, I guess there's two parts to this. Like some parts of SEO are the same, no matter what you're working on. And then other parts that very much is nuanced, like he's asking. So you start off with like, what sort of a business is it? Service, E-com, publisher, he touched on there. Obviously a service business has different goals and different needs than a e-com business. You know, service business is generating leads. Maybe in a local service area, e-com is trying to generate sales. Yes. Copywriting for an e-com business, you might be using less copy on a page. Service business, you might be spinning up like huge amounts of copy for, you know, different location pages.

ARTHUR: Different types of copy as well.

MICHAEL: Yes. Blog post copy, um, you know, your money page copy, service page copy, that sort of stuff. So there's a lot of, um, variants depending on what industry you're in.

ARTHUR: Very much so. E-com sites tend to be, most e-com sites tend to be bigger and more technical. So you might be focusing more on, you know, keyword research and technical, I guess, aspects of the site. Mm.

MICHAEL: So I guess the general approach, you know, content links and technical is the same, what you're working on. It's just the different aspects of it that change. Yeah. Big one though, like outside of what the business does for me, a big thing is looking at the competition. How competitive is the space? How far behind, I guess the, um, the main sites are you, that feeds into the bulk of the decision-making when I'm doing SEO. So link building, for example. If you're way behind the competition, you're going to need to do a lot of links regardless of what sort of industry, whether you're in a service or an e-com business. Yeah. The vertical itself as well will feed into that. Some are way less competitive than others. So. You might not need to do as many links as much content, that sort of stuff.

ARTHUR: I mean, you could do slate roofing or you can be a massive insurance company. It's going to be very, very different, but I guess you're right. You know, the general gist of it is the same.

MICHAEL: You know, if you're trying to rank for best credit card, your strategy is going to be very different than ranking for best slate roofing. Slate roofing, exactly. I didn't know what you were saying. I thought you said slavey thing.

ARTHUR: No, no, slate roofing. Slate roofing, you know those slate roofs?

MICHAEL: Yeah, I know the ones. So in theory, both of them are trying to get leads at the end of the day, but the link building aspect and the PR aspect of the best credit cards is going to be through the roof, astronomical. And a lot of your time and effort is going to be focused on link building. Whereas maybe with slate roofing, it could be, you know, a little bit of that, but making sure you're on sites tight and then maybe creating content, content around locations, that sort of stuff. So to answer Dave's question, yes. Yes. The strategy based on industry, the overarching principles of SEO links, technical content are always there no matter what.

ARTHUR: But it's tailored to the, to the business, to the client, to the type of site it is and to the vertical they're in.

MICHAEL: That's it. So hopefully that was a good answer to the very first audio question in our Q and A episodes. Let's move on. We've now got a whole bunch of bog standard, boring line and length text questions.

ARTHUR: They're not boring. They're not boring. I think we've got a few good ones.

MICHAEL: I'm just, I'm just trying to advocate for people going to the FCOshow.com and filling out, no, submitting an audio question. But, um, this one is an interesting one. It comes from Tyler and he's asked us what's the best way to get SEO clients. That's a good question. Have you considered ranking your website in Google, Tyler, by using SEO?

ARTHUR: I'm not Tyler. I know, I'm talking to Tyler.

MICHAEL: You're looking like me waiting for a response. That was me trying to make a joke, but the delivery was pathetic.

ARTHUR: No, you want to go.

MICHAEL: Do you know how much trouble we're in now that Arthur's discovered these pads? We've, we've used them like once in the past and eight times today since you've discovered them. But, um, look, yes, it's pretty obvious. You can rank your website to get SEO clients, but really what I would say is you need to do the work. Yeah. There's millions of agencies that might be exaggerating a little, but there's a lot of them. Seemingly there's more and more starting up every day. So it's a really tough slog out there to compete. Every business looks the same in the eyes of prospects. So how do you get clients where you need to do a lot of hard work to stand out? So growing your case study library, your testimonials, your reviews, doing good work to even be able to get them to begin with building that all up. Then running paid ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, multi-channel ad campaigns, even outbound prospecting and emailing and LinkedIn reach outs to try and hit up your dream prospects. All of that stuff, pretty bog standard, like line and length, but there's no, I guess, hack or quick and easy way to go and get clients. You need to do the work.

ARTHUR: I'd say it might differ a little bit whether or not you're a freelancer or a, an agency. So freelancers can maybe approach people differently, um, build, build their own brand, their personal brand. So, you know, get active in SEO communities, stay involved, you know, creating, you know, Twitter or whatnot, and, you know, just getting out there and building their own brand profile. Cause that way that's a good way to kind of approach people. People see that you're active in the community.

MICHAEL: Yep. And so like as a freelancer, you can say, Hey, I'm the agency beating freelancer. Like don't work with an agency, work direct with me and get all of that know-how. But like you're dealing with me, which is one thing. And then if you're an agency, you can say, Hey, don't work with freelancers, work with us. We have a whole team of people and all knowledge sharing amongst their business and training and process and all the rest of it to lean on. So you're going to change your messaging depending on who you are and what you do.

ARTHUR: And there's sites like Upwork as well. If you're starting out looking to do dribs and drabs of work, you know, you probably, you might not find clients per se, but you might find work and then build on that. So yeah, which is different approaches, I guess.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Which look at those people, people out there that make a whole living working on Upwork, but. There's a lot of price sensitive clients, customers on there. So it's probably not the best place in the world. I think it just comes back to, you need to, you need to be good at what you do first and get the runs on the board and then build on that, promote that fact. I would say as well, having a clear market that you serve or angle that you're going with for yourself. So we are the ultimate SEO company for slate roofing companies, for example. Finding a niche. Yeah, that can't hurt. Then working on your sales process as well. So optimizing your pitch decks and making sure that they tell a good story and they're designed nicely and that you have a good consistent approach to qualifying prospects and then doing discovery calls and then pitching and then following up. All that stuff is super important too. So spending a lot of time on that and improving it over time will help you get more SEO clients. So I hope that helped Tyler. Not too much. We don't want you to compete with us too wholeheartedly.

ARTHUR: Which one's the laughing button?

MICHAEL: I think the yellow one. I'm colorblind. No, who knows? But I'm going to make all of these buttons not make any sounds just to stop you from doing this. But I hope that helped Tyler. Let's move on to the next question.

ARTHUR: So Karina has asked, what is better SEO or PPC? That's a simple one. SEO. Yep. Press the button for the laughter. There you go.

MICHAEL: Beautiful. We did an episode on this, episode 22. So Corinna, if you haven't gone back and listened to that yet, go have a listen to it. Go to the SEOshow.com, check out episode 22. We went in depth on this. We like SEO. It is the SEO show, but PPC has its place. Depends on your goals, your timeframes, the market you're in. Do you want things quickly? Like, are you trying to put food on the table next week? Then you would spend your money on PPC rather than SEO.

ARTHUR: You can use our house analogy. Yeah. The PPC, PPC is like renting a place, whereas SEO is like building your own foundation, building your own home. Yep. Takes longer, takes longer, but it's there. You're going to be getting traffic visits to the site essentially no matter what, hopefully, unless you're wiped out by an algorithm update, but it's a long-term on the topic of that.

MICHAEL: Oh, there's one today. Yeah. It's been just been announced the September broad core algorithm update on times, which means nothing a lot of the time. Yeah, well like the helpful content one did nothing in terms of sites. And then there was another broad core in August. They're going gangbusters at the moment.

ARTHUR: Have you noticed anything from the better content update at all?

MICHAEL: I have seen other people talking about sites like that, but I haven't seen any across any of our clients or our stuff.

ARTHUR: It just makes me wonder what it's just targeting a different type of website than the general service e-com sites that we work with. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Which is good. Good for us. It is indeed. But coming back to Karina, I, in my world, both, there is no better. It's not like it's this, um, tribal thing where if your team SEO, you're only SEO and you won't do PPC, you need to be doing PPC SEO. You need to be doing, you know, Instagram, Facebook ads. You need to be doing email marketing. You need to be doing outbound. You need to have, I guess, all these different avenues that people are using to find your brand, your offer, your website and get in touch with you.

ARTHUR: So I would say that PPC is better for generating traffic short term, whereas SEO is better for generating traffic longer term.

MICHAEL: And PPC is better if you have a lower budget because you're going to get runs on the board quicker. Yeah. You're going to be antsy. You're going to want results. SEO is good if you're serious about building a long term asset so that's it building a house yeah it's like building a house episode 22 though go back and have a listen to that one Let's move on to Simone's question, who has asked, what are some easy WordPress SEO hacks? So not only are they hacks, but they need to be easy. Easy. Easy. And we don't even necessarily know, you know, define hack. Like we think it means something that can be done quickly and easily and saves you time. That's what we're going to answer it based on. I hope you're not asking us how to hack WordPress.

ARTHUR: Yeah, we don't want that. We don't want any WordPress sites hacked. Do you want to start or should I start? You can start. Cool. So the one that comes to mind for me would be just any SEO plugin. So there's plenty out there. Yoast, RankMath, SEO Framework. What's the one that you like at the moment? SEO Press. SEO Press. So they more or less all do the same thing, but It allows you to customize your metadata and all the basic SEO elements on the, on the page. So that's a good start. And I guess you just want to make sure you're targeting the right keywords on each page. So, you know, that's a quick hack if you will. I'm not really a hack, but yeah, a quick and easy way to start getting SEO results.

MICHAEL: Yes. By hack, if by hack you mean doing SEO.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Which is what I said when we were writing this down, but it is essentially an easy WordPress SEO plugin that you can start using. It's better than not using it. So you're going to get better results than not using a plugin at all.

MICHAEL: I'm going to give a couple of what I consider to be hacks. Add link whisper. It's a plugin that adds internal links. That's going to save you a ton of time because it will go through posts and suggest internal links. And then you can also set it so that if a keyword is used in, you know, pages or blog posts on WordPress, it will automatically turn that word into a link to another internal page on your site. So. For example, let's say on our site we said the word SEO agency needs to be always a link to our SEO agency page. It's going to go and add that in to anywhere that SEO agency is written on our website. Beautiful. Internal linking is awesome for SEO and having Link Whisper just do that for you is a hack, saves a ton of time. Nice.

ARTHUR: I reckon. That's a good one. I'm very aware of it. I use it myself.

MICHAEL: I feel good about that one. And in the same token, ShortPixel, all similar. All similar. Yeah. So other image compression plugins, ShortPixel is the one I like to use. You put that plugin in and then it compresses images, makes them smaller. And then every time you upload an image, it will make it smaller as you do it. Again, saving time. Very good. That's a little hack. I don't know that like my next one.

ARTHUR: Does it convert them into is it web P images?

MICHAEL: Yeah. I think like they have paid versions where it does that for you. Okay. Yep. And when I say pay, it's not expensive. Don't know what it is off the top of my head, but yeah, well worth it. The other one I put here, looking at it now written there may not be a hack. It's definitely not a hack. No, it does save time.

ARTHUR: It's as much of a hack as Yoast or any of these things.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Cause there's, yeah, there's no, you know what?

ARTHUR: It is a hack. It is a hack because it's. easier than setting it up manually and putting the code in and all that. So yeah, it saves time. Google site kit, basically. It allows you to set up search console, analytics, GTM on the site easily without having to manually insert the code. I'd consider that a hack.

MICHAEL: I would too, because that used to be something you'd install GTM via like headers and footers or something. Then you have to go into GTM and individually install all the different bits of code. Now it's just one plugin that does it all. The, I guess, conspiracy theorist in me would say, you're just giving Google, like you're plugging Google right into your WordPress and who knows what they're doing with that, but they already know everything about everything anyway. I don't think it's a problem though. Let's move on to Clark's question. What did Clark ask? Clark asked, which is the best free SEO tool? So we've got one each. What's your best free SEO tool? Well,

ARTHUR: My free SEO tool is Google Search Console, because I think it is legitimately the only free SEO tool out there that you don't have to pay a subscription for. That isn't like freemium as well.

MICHAEL: There's lots of free and inverted commas, but they don't really let you do anything and make you pay to actually use the tool.

ARTHUR: So it's the only true SEO tool, free SEO tool out there. that I know of anyway. But I think every site should be using Search Console. Within Search Console, you can see any crawl errors, you can get valuable data, you can see what people are searching for, the queries, you can have a look at your core vital metrics, making sure that all your pages are being indexed. So it's just a necessary tool that every site should be using and yeah, super simple to set up. Yeah. As far as I know, it's the only free tool. Yeah. That is a freemium.

MICHAEL: Like you said, I'm going to go with something that is a little outside the box. You might not be expecting this as an answer. Because it's not a tool, but what I'm saying is that education is the best investment you can make in yourself. That's definitely not a tool. And you can get a great education for free. So your brain is a tool in this case, and you need to fill it with good stuff. So the university of YouTube, podcast, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, following people that are doing this stuff, practitioners talking about what's working, what they're implementing, then taking that and putting it into action is the best free SEO tool.

ARTHUR: What do you reckon about that, Ash? Yeah, really taking it out of the box or outside of the box.

MICHAEL: I think it's really, really good.

ARTHUR: Your brain is the best free SEO tool. It is.

MICHAEL: All right. It's a good answer. Thank you. I'm proud of that one. One last question. Rocketed through them this week. We have. But Arthur has a meeting in 10 minutes, so let's bang this one out. What is your single best piece of SEO advice? This is what Ashley has asked us. It's a good one. What have I? Yeah. So my answer here, I don't know.

ARTHUR: I can start with mine. Mine's a bit of a joke. So a long, long time ago, you got your hand ready hovering over the laughing button. So long, long time ago, back when we were working at our previous agency, I guess that my mentor at the time told me that there's no second place in SEO. What do you reckon? Well, there's definitely a second place in SEO and second place is not that bad. So yeah. And third place is good. Page one sometimes is pretty good. So yeah. I don't know. That's always kind of stuck with me, but I thought it was funny. I thought I'd share that.

MICHAEL: Okay. That's your single best piece. No, it's not, but it's what I'm going to run with today. All right. Well, mine is the best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is right now. Then don't ever stop. So the temptation can be to dip in and out of this. Yeah, definitely. Like it's the businesses that started yesterday and have been going consistently with it that are going to be doing really well in a month's time compared to the businesses that didn't even start at all or have dipped in and out.

ARTHUR: Actually, I retract my advice. That's my advice now. Don't stop. So you're saying same here. Yeah. I'm stealing your advice because too often people will get to where they want to be and then stop and then get overtaken by the competition. Yeah. Which is frustrating because you put a lot of hard work into it and it's almost like it just disappears.

MICHAEL: Don't stop. And I saw a tweet by Glenn from Viper Chill. where he spends time looking at earnings reports for public companies, where they're talking about what they're up to in the quarter or half yearly earnings and the like. And increasingly more and more of them are talking about SEO and their investments in SEO and the results they're getting from SEO, where it never used to be spoken about in there. And the reason I'm saying this here is like all of these big brands like this understand the value of it more and more and more now and are investing in it consistently. And if you're being half hearted or dipping in and out of it, you just can't compete because like we spoke about the other week, you know, running a race and that's running consistently ahead. If someone's like having a little nap, they're going to get left behind. So keep going, keep going. Even if you didn't start yesterday, start right now. And the work you do now is going to have an impact, you know, a year down the track, two years down the track, five years down the track.

ARTHUR: My Arnold Schwarzenegger quote, which I can't remember again,

MICHAEL: Yeah, well we've listened to last week's episode or the one before.

ARTHUR: Just keep going. Don't stop. Yep. Just because you've gotten where you want to, there's plenty of potential to target different keywords, create content and get better and better and stronger and stronger. Build that moat around you. Cool. I think you've used that one before, right? The moat.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I feel that we're now, what we're talking about here is exactly the same as two episodes ago. So on the topic of just keep going, don't stop. It is time for us to actually stop. We will be back next week with another episode of the SEO show, but until then happy SEOing. Goodbye.

INTRO: Thanks for listening to The SEO Show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.