SEO Takedown With Kat Zhu

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 episode of the SEO show. I am Michael Costin.

ARTHUR: And I am, were you going to introduce me or should I introduce myself? Go for it. And I am Arthur Fabik.

MICHAEL: There you go. How are you going?

ARTHUR: I'm doing well. Yeah. It's been about two weeks since we've sat in the studio and recorded an episode.

MICHAEL: People have been beating down my door with emails, messages. I find that very hard to believe.

ARTHUR: Where's the show?

MICHAEL: It's been two weeks. Where's the show? By people, do you mean your dad? Shout out to Barry. I do as a matter of fact, because I don't know if you know, but we are contractually obligated to provide an episode every week for our listeners. I haven't seen a contract yet. We've broken our unwritten contract with the listeners.

ARTHUR: Hey, I had a question. Yeah. How did we go in that awards? Did we win?

MICHAEL: Has that happened? We were in them. No, we didn't win. Some business news podcast won. Okay.

ARTHUR: But we were finalists. Yeah. That's still an achievement.

MICHAEL: Yes.

ARTHUR: It's an achievement. It is. Do we get a plaque or anything like a little nothing? Nothing. Should we print something out and stick it on the wall behind us?

MICHAEL: Probably. We shared something on our Instagram.

ARTHUR: Did we?

MICHAEL: Yeah. On our local digital.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Because multiple times you've said you're creating one for us and you never did.

ARTHUR: One day I will. Yes. Once we hit a thousand, um, listeners a day.

MICHAEL: Okay. All right. Settle down Joe Rogan. But anyway, we're not here to talk about that. We are here because it's not just the two of us talking today. We are joined by Kat Zhu, SEO specialist here at LocalDigital. How you going Kat?

KAT: Hello. Hello. Good to be here.

MICHAEL: Yes. Very good to have you here. We thought it'd be cool to bring you on the show today because, um, you've been killing it with the results for clients lately. And, um, we thought it'd be fun to do a bit of a, I forget what we said, live takedown. SEO takedown wasn't it? SEO takedown of one of your campaigns lately.

ARTHUR: We're going to take it down, tear it apart, rip it apart. Watson all look.

KAT: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Anyway, whatever you want to call it, welcome to the show. Thank you, it's good to be here. I think before we get into that though, let's talk SEO and how you found it and like a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, and then we'll get stuck into the client chat. So, um, yeah.

KAT: Yeah. So, um, I'm Kat. I am one of the SEO specialists at LocalDigital and I guess a bit of a background about me, how I got into SEO. So I was actually in a completely different career and industry previously. So I was actually working in social work. for quite a while, I think four years. And I was actually introduced into SEO by one of the other SEO specialists at Local Digital, his name is Rob, and was also a special guest on the show.

ARTHUR: Friend of the show, Rob White. It's been a while ago now. Yeah. Yeah, probably a year ago. Yeah. I have to get him back on one day.

MICHAEL: Anyway. I think this episode is going to be way better than that one. I reckon it's already better.

KAT: a bit of competition. Um, yeah, so Rob is actually one of my very good friends. Um, so he, um, referred me, um, because I was actually looking for a career change and, um, he showed me a bit about what he was doing day to day. And I took an interest in, in, in his work and you know, what he could achieve for his clients. Um, and I am a person who really likes to, um, see tangible results and the fact that you could achieve that through this role really drew me into SEO. So that's a bit about how I got into SEO.

MICHAEL: And you haven't, you're a true convert, you haven't looked back?

KAT: No, I haven't looked back and I'm really, really enjoying my time here and being able to grow my skills in SEO.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Well, that's very cool. And, um, I like that you touched on getting results and, um, having an impact in clients lives and well, yeah, lives, right? Like you have a good impact on a business and it's life changing in a lot of cases. We've got some life-changing results here that we're going to run. Life-changing. Cause, um, I'd like you to set the scene, maybe say who the client was and maybe what they did, what their goals were. And then we might get stuck into some of the tactical stuff that you did on onsite, offsite, technical, chat about SEO a little bit and what you did. And, um, yeah, I think the listeners will enjoy listening to that. So yeah. Who are they and what do they do? Well, not who are they? We might keep that under wraps, but, uh, yeah, bleep it out.

ARTHUR: Give us the background.

KAT: Yeah. Um, so they are a, um, online tile retailer. So the e-commerce based site and they, um, have thousands of products. Um, so it's not like a small site. Um, there are quite a lot of URLs on their site. Um, a lot of categories, a lot of products on their page, um, on their domain. Sorry. So. I guess how they came to us was they were previously working with the agency but they weren't getting the results that they wanted. So one of their goals was to increase their organic traffic as well as increase their organic revenue. So that's why they awarded with us and they were seeking that difference with us for us to be able to achieve those results.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Did they have any, um, I guess targets in terms of volume, like, like percentage change or it's just, we want improvements because it was going nowhere before.

KAT: Yeah. Um, so they didn't really know what was. um, a good achievement for them because they weren't really getting any results with their previous SEO. So I guess they didn't really know, um, what to expect. Um, but I guess from the results of what we're getting them, um, they're pretty happy and yeah, we'll continue getting those results for them.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I think that's fairly common. I feel like a lot of people that start SEO don't know. They don't know what the ceiling is. They don't know what to expect. So it is hard to kind of have those tangible. I want this number of orders or this much traffic. Yeah. They just want more a lot of the time.

MICHAEL: Yeah. A lot of people we speak to don't tend to know their numbers as well. You know, like you'll ask a client, well, how many leads do you need to get X number of customers? How many are you going to convert? And like, what's your customer lifetime value and what's a good customer acquisition cost. And that sort of pluck stuff out of thin air, which is pretty common. You know, if you're sort of in the weeds running your business every day, you might not be thinking about that stuff. I guess the good thing about SEO is if someone's coming from somewhere where they have no results and then you do a good job, it really can be eye-opening and like just, I guess, knock your socks off, right? So it sounds like this has happened in this case. So what do we want? Maybe before we get into what was done, let's chat. Can we set the scene for some of the results? You know, what are we talking about when we're saying they're really happy? Set the scene.

KAT: Sure. So, um, I guess for some of the key words that they were looking to target, um, so we increased, um, their page one keywords to 50%, um, in three months. So right now they're ranking for over a thousand keywords on page one of Google. So that's the top 10 positions. Um, tiles being the highest search volume keyword that generates around 50,000 searches per month. And they ranked in fourth position in their highest position. Wow. Nice. Where were they before? Yeah. So they were, they were sitting around page six. That's massive.

ARTHUR: And how long?

MICHAEL: In three months?

KAT: In three months.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You don't go to page six, but you do go to page one of Google, don't you? So that is good stuff. That's amazing.

KAT: Yeah. And, and just some other keywords. So, um, so for some of the categories like kitchen, so kitchen tiles, they were, they're now ranking in eighth position. Um, and that is actually, um, so in the first month, actually they achieved page one, um, from page three in Google search results. Yeah.

ARTHUR: That's huge. Nice. All right. Well, I think the scene is set.

MICHAEL: That is a very good scene. They've gone from nowhere to somewhere in a quick short, you know, quick, not quick, short, a quick space of time, because we often like on this show, we always bang on like, you know, three, six, 12 months in this case, we're talking here. You're saying in the sort of, you know, all on page one in the first month, I see for that bathroom floor tiles, kitchen tiles, tiles. So. I guess there's probably a fair bit that's gone into that, right? So let's break it down. How do you, like, let's say a client comes along and they're nowhere to be found. They're frustrated with the results at their previous agency and they're coming to us wanting growth. Awesome. Where do we start? What did you do in this case?

KAT: Yeah, so first off, what I like to do, how I kind of tackle when I first see a site is I audit the site from a user's perspective. So what I'll do is I'll imagine myself as someone who's looking for tiles. So I will click around the site, have a browse, I'll actually add some of the products to my cart, look at some of the product descriptions, just see what is the process from when I first land on the site to converting, which in this case would be making a purchase. So for a more service-based business, that might be like, that might be converting through a contact form. So writing, like submitting a contact form or clicking the phone call CTA. So through this process, that really gives me a more intimate knowledge of what is the customer's, so what is my client's products. And also it gives me, it helps me to pick up any blatant issues that might be preventing a user from actually buying a product on the site.

ARTHUR: I love that because yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Not many people would do that.

MICHAEL: No SEO people can be like, I mean, if a client's coming in, they're just focused on SEO, acquiring, get people to the site. But what happens when they actually get there isn't always thought about as much as it should be. A lot of sites, there's a good saying, all websites, have conversion problems. Not every website has a traffic problem, but all websites have a conversion problem. You can always be doing more to convert the traffic you do have. And a lot of our business owners are pretty sort of very close to their website and what goes on with it every day. And they don't look at it objectively. So like a fresh set of eyes like that, you might be able to look at it and say, well, yes, we'll get traffic here, but it's not going to do anything because it's a convoluted process to even check it.

ARTHUR: I mean, I've worked on sites where their forms didn't work. The forms would just not send or there'd be just so many broken things on the site that the client didn't even know about. A lot of people might overlook that because they're too focused on just getting the keyword research and all the, you know, deliverables and everything that we do done. Meanwhile, people can't even convert or check out or do whatever action you want them to do.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And so out of that process, are you giving feedback to the client straight off the bat? Like, have you thought about this? You should go do this or, well, I guess what's the process from there?

KAT: Yeah, I guess it would depend on, you know, how important that is, um, for users. If it's like a, a really, you know, blaring issue, then I'll address it immediately. If it's something that, um, can be done over time, then, um, we'll implement, uh, uh, We'll make some recommendations to the client and, um, implement that over time.

MICHAEL: Cool. And then, um, let's say that's out of the way getting down to what's the saying getting down to brass tacks. I always come up, I always say sayings on here. He never knows anything. Have you heard that saying getting down to brass tacks? I'm such an old man. Yeah. I don't even know if that's right.

ARTHUR: I don't think, I don't think an old man would even know what I mean.

MICHAEL: Sure. Anyway, getting down to the nitty gritty of the SEO side of things. At that point, are you also looking at anything from an SEO sense?

KAT: Yeah, so after I've looked at the site from a user perspective, I then go in again and put on an SEO, I guess, glasses. SEO goggles. SEO goggles and look at it from an SEO perspective. So looking at whether there are any page titles implemented. So the metadata, any headers, is the content relevant? Is there even any content on the pages? And are they relevant to the keywords that we're looking to target? So basically looking at whether there is any SEO implemented and how well it is being implemented at the moment.

MICHAEL: Cool. And do you just sort of then get stuck in or how do you sort of come up with a strategy or what, in this case, what was your strategy, you know, based on looking at this site, what did you pick up and decide to do from them?

KAT: Yeah. So then, um, after, you know, going through the site, um, this allows me to quickly identify if there's any, um, small changes that we can make, but these small changes will have a massive impact in terms of SEO. So if there are small changes, then we can quickly implement those. What kind of changes would they be? Yeah. So things like adding keywords to page titles or headers. These are just some basic, I guess, SEO things that you can implement, but they do have a significant impact because page titles are a ranking factor. Very important. Yes. Very important. Yeah.

ARTHUR: And the thing is the sooner you get that sorted, the sooner you'll start seeing results.

KAT: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Bit concerning that, um, they were paying an agency beforehand to do this and it had to be done, but it's quite often the case, right?

KAT: Yeah. Um, yeah. So then like after we, um, so you're saying you did the page titles. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Quick wins, 80-20 SEO. Was there any blatant other issues with these guys or was it really just a matter of ticking the boxes of the quick wins that got these results?

KAT: Yeah, so actually we had to work with our developer because there were a lot of issues in the backend of the site. So a lot of outdated plugins, the duplicate plugins, unused plugins that were actually slowing down the page speed of the site. So through working with our developer, we were able to improve the page speed and that's also another ranking factor for Google. It plays into the core web vitals. So you can actually plug in a domain in the page speed insights domain and that will actually spit out a score for you. And we were able to improve that score for both mobile and desktop.

ARTHUR: Beautiful. Nice. How big was the improvement? Do you remember?

KAT: Yeah. So, um, for mobile, I think they were sitting around 20 and now they're, I would say around 70. Okay. It fluctuates sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.

ARTHUR: All fluctuate. That's respectful.

MICHAEL: Probably feeds back into, um, UX let the user experience side of things before. Like, did you notice it was slow when you were using the cycle?

KAT: Oh, definitely. It was very slow.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It's a nightmare. People, people will just leave if that's the case.

KAT: Even like a few seconds, if the page hasn't loaded, they're just going to bounce.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, cool. And so was this sort of stuff, like how long does it take when you're doing that? Like we talk a month, one here, month two or.

KAT: Yeah. So, um, the stuff about, um, just making the small changes, um, that can definitely be implemented fairly quickly. Then we also have a few deliverables that we implement. Um, that's all in the first month as well. So. For SEO, there's three different pillars. There's an onsite pillar, technical pillar, and authority. And through these deliverables, we are improving each of those pillars. So onsite, that is basically all the content on the page, like what the user can see. So like content and page titles- All the keywords. Images, yeah, basically all of that. So by improving the onsite, what we do is a deliverable called Keyword Research. So this is a process where we're identifying all the relevant keywords for our client's industry, making sure that they're quality keywords as well, and that they have a good search volume. So what quality means, quality can mean different things for a different client. So what I like to focus on is the search intent of keywords. Amazing. So for example, a good way to kind of gauge what a search intent of a particular keyword is just by typing into Google and then looking at the top like three or four search results or even the top page of search results. So something like buy tiles would have a much more geared search intent for transactional users rather than a tiles, which can encapsulate a much more broader type of users.

ARTHUR: Exactly, yeah. And a lot of people will fixate on the broader keywords with the highest search volume, but they're a lot more competitive and it will take them forever to rank for that keyword when there's all these other, like there's a goldmine of different keywords you could be targeting to drive more intent and more, more traffic to the site.

MICHAEL: And intent is probably the part that most people miss like the most, like, cause we'll have clients come in and they might do, let's say they build wood tables. And they want to go after like carpentry training or something, because like, you know, we might get a few people from that, but like the intent's just way off from what their site actually does. And it's never going to work, but they're sort of trying to think way too outside the scope of the intent of their users. So particularly for something like e-commerce, it's so important, like you could get a ton of traffic to your site off broad head terms, but what good is it if it doesn't convert? What's the example we've used in the past, the sport blog?

ARTHUR: On the go. I wasn't not supposed to name them anymore. I guess they had a data blog post on the site, which is the top 10 sports in Australia. And that was driving so much organic traffic to the site, like tens of thousands of sessions, but no one converted. Everyone just bounced because people were just interested in what the top 10 sports are.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So they, and they did, um, sport custom sport apparel apparel. Yeah. So they, then they'd be freaking like, why is our bounce rate so high? You know, time on the site, not that long.

ARTHUR: Well, what would happen is that blog would rank really well. And then one day it would drop off. So their organic traffic would plummet and then they'll panic. Yeah. Why is our traffic down? Why is it down 30%? Yeah. It's because this blog post doesn't rank anymore. Yep. So intent, very important.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So cool. Awesome. So love that. The intent of the keywords that's in your keyword research. What happens once you've got like you've got this massive list of keywords. Yeah. Good in a spreadsheet but then it's going to actually do something right.

KAT: Yeah, so then we actually take those keywords and implement them in something called keyword mapping. So in keyword mapping we list out all the URLs, all the important pages, like category pages, the homepage, and then we select a few of the keywords that we identified in keyword research to then implement for each category page. So we're selecting the ones based on what we think is relevant and is quality and has good search volume and then applying that and implementing that for each category page or each important page.

ARTHUR: So the keywords you want to rank for basically or whichever page you want to rank for those keywords.

KAT: And, uh, for these, um, clients, um, one of the issues that. Kind of identified for them was there were some of some category pages that actually had repeating keywords. So, um, that was affecting something called keyword cannibalization where your, you actually might be inhibiting your ability to rank higher because there are so many pages that are actually targeting the same keyword. Yeah. Yeah.

ARTHUR: And that confuses Google because it doesn't know which page should rank for that keyword.

KAT: Exactly. Yeah. So in keyword mapping as well, we consolidate, um, you know, only honing down on one keyword for each. Um, sorry, not, not one keyword, but I mean like, um, one keyword for each category page and not making sure that they're not duplicated throughout the site.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Each page needs a theme or a purpose. Cause Google. Why are you smirking? I was smirking at Google being confused. Google's this all powerful being that knows everything about everyone, but then it gets confused by keywords being on multiple pages, but it's totally true. Like it can't figure out which one it wants to show if there's so many saying the same thing, you know, unless you have a really, really strong domain, which most people don't. You want to be avoiding keyword cannibalization.

ARTHUR: Slightly off topic, but have you seen the Russell Brown Google bit that he did? No. I'll show you later.

MICHAEL: No, come on. Give us a, do some stand up for us now.

ARTHUR: He basically talks about how like, um, whenever you search something or search something incorrectly, Google's like, did you mean, Oh yeah. Did you, have you seen that one? Nah, I think I've heard you say that before. Did you mean like passive aggressive? Yes. Very passive aggressive. And then he just does this whole bit and he's just like, yeah, it's good. Yeah. I can't, I can't replicate it because I'm a Russell brand, but Yeah. Okay. I'll share it later.

MICHAEL: Sounds good. Sorry. Derailing the episode. We'll put the link in the show notes for anyone that's interested. All right. So cool. You've got the keywords, you've got metadata and everything done for every page. No keyword cannibalization. Is there anything else that sort of, I guess we're talking onsite here, right? At the moment. Yeah. What else were you doing in this case?

KAT: Yeah, so another thing I like to do is a competitor analysis. So what I do is actually input the client's domain into a tool called Ahrefs. It's my favorite. It's your favorite tool? After Natch.

ARTHUR: After Natch, shameless plug. Don't worry, Ahrefs is my favorite tool.

KAT: It's my favorite tool. Um, so I, I plug in the client's domain and, um, a few of the other competitors, online competitors, um, that they're competing against. And I, in this way, I am able to identify, um, where they're not ranking keyword gaps. And then implement that to the client side. So.

MICHAEL: In these guys, did they have like missing categories or was there certain areas that they didn't have that the competition did have?

KAT: Yeah. So there were different categories that they were actually bundling into one category. But that was affecting their SEO because they weren't able to effectively target each individual category because they were bundling it all together.

MICHAEL: Yeah. That's pretty common as well. You see lots of people will come to us where they have, let's say a services page. And it's just one big long page with like an H2 heading for each service and a little bit of text. And that's it. When really as SEO nerds, we know that each of them should be a page with a lot of content on it because each page is a, what is it? It's a fish in the sea. No, a net in the sea that catches fish and brings that fish to your website. That's an analogy we've used in the past. It is. Yeah. Yeah. The more nets in the sea you have, the more traffic you get.

ARTHUR: So, um, so in this case you did that, you split out the pages. Okay. And it worked well.

KAT: Yeah, for sure. Because, um, then they started ranking for keywords that they went previously. Amazing. Just splitting out the pages.

MICHAEL: And so by when you split it, were you, was it just like a new page with a list of products or were you having to do content for it? Or was it just as simple as splitting it out into new category pages?

KAT: Yeah, just as simple as splitting it out. Yeah, like even like it didn't really matter so much what products were in there, but it was mainly that we had appropriate headers, appropriate page titles. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Awesome. All right. Well, let's talk technical. Did you do much on that front with these guys?

KAT: Yeah, so as I mentioned before, their site was not in great shape. They had a lot of outdated plugins and they really needed an update in terms of their WordPress core, which is what they were using for their CMS. So basically it worked with our developer to identify how we can improve a lot of their page. So their page loading speeds, things that were affecting the backend of their site. So their site performance and the crawlability of their site, how their site was structured.

ARTHUR: So did he look at things like image sizes and things like that and how he can reduce them to speed up the page load speed and things like that?

KAT: Yeah. Okay.

MICHAEL: What's your process to discover that stuff?

KAT: It is a bit of a process. So we actually use a tool called SiteBulb. And what that does is it crawls the whole domain and identifies if there's any critical issues that we need to look at immediately. So I'll go through the list of issues that it's identified and I'll actually work with our developer to say, hey, is there anything that we can improve here so that we can improve their performance and structure.

ARTHUR: Beautiful. And you prioritize that based on, I guess, the impact the change will have.

KAT: Hmm. So how many URLs it might be impacting, um, whether, whether the URLs that are being impacted are actually important because this is an e-commerce site, so there are thousands of URLs and not every URL is important. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL: That's sort of the thing I often find with SEO tools, um, Sitebulb included, but like any sort of crawling tool that will crawl and then spit out like you know, red alert or, you know, the colors it uses for things that don't really matter. And, um, as SEOs, we, we know how to sort of sift through all of that, but like as business owners, you can sort of sometimes find that you freak out. Like I've got 4,000 toxic issues with my site, according to this tool. Well, you have 4,000 images missing alt tags.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Or like toxic links is always another big one. Like got to clean up the toxic links, but it's just one tool that's saying that. And meanwhile, your site's ranking well in Google. You may not need to clean that link up.

ARTHUR: Yeah, even worse if a client runs that tool and then he shares it with you and he starts panicking or they start panicking because they think that you have toxic links.

MICHAEL: Well, some other agency runs a tool and says, look at all these toxic things you have. Yeah. So I guess that's why we do this show to give people the knowledge that you can use to try and avoid those scenarios. All right. Well, I think we need to talk everybody's favorite topic in SEO. What is that? Let's see if Kat knows. What is everybody, everybody's favorite topic in SEO?

KAT: I'm going to hazard a guess, backlinks.

MICHAEL: Yes, you got it in one. Good that you agree. We always joke about that on this show. Like it's not a joke. It seems to be the thing that gets the most interest on like blogs or social media or from me when we're talking about it on here.

ARTHUR: So your eyes light up whenever we talk about link building.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Just love a bit of link building. So, um, what did we do? Let's chat links.

KAT: Yeah, links, very important. So they are also an important ranking factor. Out of the, I think 200, maybe more, ranking factors for Google, this is one of them. So for links, what we do is, first off, a bank, not bank, a backlink audit. So what that basically means is we go through all of the domains that are currently linking to our client, And we will assess whether they are a good quality link or whether they are spammy, don't really add value to the client, or could potentially actually be harming the client's backlink profile. And that affects the client's authority and trustworthiness in the space. So for our client actually we identified 200 URLs 200 domains that were considered harmful to to their domain So by identifying these we were able to let Google know. Hey, can you please ignore these? We don't want them associated with our site

MICHAEL: Nice. Yeah. What, um, you don't have to go too deep into it, but what, what, why were they no good? Like, is it not as simple as just using like an automated tool, right? Where you've sort of, you're analyzing it and deciding, Hey, this, this link stays, this link's got to go. What's an example of one? Like what, what are you looking for when you're looking at that?

KAT: Yeah. So very simplified way of explaining it, but, um, there are sites like that will be blatantly obvious, obvious that they are bad quality. So they might not look like they're relevant to the clients. Um, they could have a very high domain rating, but no traffic to the site. Um, sometimes they might be what we call PBNs. Private blogging networks, private blog networks. So those are sites that just are purely created for the purpose of link building. They're not really a natural link which Google looks for.

MICHAEL: Yep. And you'll find as in this client's case, often if you've done SEO with an agency in the past and it hasn't really been the best, there's often PBNs used because it's cheap for the agency to do that, but it doesn't get results. So what did you do once you found them and there's all these dodgy ones.

KAT: Yeah, so we compiled this, compiled all of them in a list and then sent them off to Google in what we call a disavow file. And then that just lets them know, hey, we don't want these associated. Can you please remove them? Yep. And then yeah, they'll go through their process. Maybe in a week or two they'll be removed or unassociated with your domain.

MICHAEL: Yep. So forgive me, Google friends, but I'm going to wash my hands of these links. Nice. And so then everybody's favorite topic in SEO link building. What did we do with these guys? Cause we got really results in like three months. Right? So I imagine there wasn't really even that much link building done yet. Like a lot of what you spoke about earlier, like fixing up the technical base and then creating all new category pages and doing all the metadata and that sort of stuff has driven a lot of this result. But what sort of links were you able to build in the sort of short time that led to these results?

KAT: Yeah, so when we are doing link building, we make sure that we're only linking to sites that will add value to our client. So we make sure that they have a relatively good domain rating, that they are getting a lot of traffic to the site, and they are relevant to our client's industry. So that might be, so for these guys, that would be like home improvement. maybe lifestyle, things that are related, like blogs that will be related to the industry and will attract the right type of user. Yeah. So we identify, these kinds of links and then we have a team that reaches out to the people that own these links and then ask them, hey, can we get a link from you guys in exchange? And they provide content.

ARTHUR: So it's a whole process. Essentially you got to go find all these sites, approach all of them, a lot of back and forth and liaising, and then having to work with copywriters to write the content. And then there's always some sort of back and forth there. And then finally, a lot of the time they ask for some publishing fee. Yes.

MICHAEL: Which we've touched on quite a bit on the show. At the end of the day, it costs money to build links. To do it the right way, like a PBN is cheap. What you're talking about, they're real websites owned by authentic people that you've got to deal with. They're not, it costs money to do that, but it gets results, right? Like, like at the start you're talking 50% increase in page one keywords in a couple of months, just on the back of this sort of work. The proof is in the pudding because before that they weren't doing this stuff and they weren't anywhere. That's well, that's been a really good recap on what you did for these guys. Was there anything else, I guess, that we haven't covered off any tools or process or anything that you did along the way that you think would be beneficial to the audience or we pretty much covered it?

KAT: Um, another thing I guess, um, I could point out is that they did have a lot of content on their page, but the content wasn't situated in a place that was, um, giving them the most optimized results. So for a lot of their category pages, they had SEO content right at the bottom of the page, but the way Google reads sites and the way users read sites is top to bottom. So, I guess most importantly, the most important content or information you would wanna put at the very top of the page. And then as you read down, that has less importance. So what I did was bring that content up high into the page. And then because it is quite a sizable amount of content, reducing that so that it's hidden under a read more button. Yeah. So in that way it doesn't affect the user's experience because you have to read through all this content to be able to get to the products. Yeah.

ARTHUR: And let's face it, no one reads that content.

MICHAEL: When you're looking for tiles, you're not reading. Maybe the first parrot, like the first line. Exactly. But yeah. Yeah. Reading in depth. And see even on mobile, right? Like it's compounded on mobile. You're not just scrolling through all this text to get to the products you want to see. Probably just bounce. So.

KAT: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, after I did that, I actually monitored how that affected the rankings and I could say that I just shot up after that. Yeah.

ARTHUR: That's amazing.

MICHAEL: Nice. Well, I have enjoyed chatting about your results there. How's that for you? Uh, first time on a podcast.

KAT: That was, um, less daunting than I thought it would be.

MICHAEL: You killed it. You're a natural. We'll have to get you back for many more episodes in the future. Actually, um, you could be the new co-host. Maybe I'll retire. Yeah. We'll sort of maybe just sort of have a rotating cast of hosts on the show in 2023. Sounds good. I think that's a good idea. Yeah. You never, never know. We'll have to talk, confirm this off air and plan it all out. But, uh, look, that's been a great chat. Um, we like to wrap up every show by saying until next week. Happy SEOing. Happy SEOing.

KAT: Bye. Bye.

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