SEO Takedown With Kat Zhu

TRANSCRIPT:

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hi guys, we don’t run ads on this show, we don’t try and make money from it. We don’t even really promote our agency on it. So we’re not asking anything of you normally. But I do have a little ask now, if you’ve enjoyed the show, if you’ve got value from it, if you could please go leave a review wherever you get your podcast. It’ll really help us get this show in the hands of more listeners and help more business owners. All right, let’s get into the show.

Unknown Speaker 0:23
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.

Unknown Speaker 0:46
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I am Michael Causton. And I am where you going to introduce me or should I introduce myself? And I am Arthur fabic. There you go. Hey, going. I’m doing well. Yeah, it’s been about two weeks since we’ve sat in the studio and recorded an episode. People have been beating down my door with emails messages.

Unknown Speaker 1:10
Where’s the show? It’s been two weeks. Where’s the show people? Do you mean your dad

Unknown Speaker 1:15
set out to bury? 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. Hey, I had a question. Yeah. How do we go in that awards? Did we win? Was that happened? We were in them? We’re not read him in some business news podcast. Wow. Okay. But we were finalists. Yeah, that’s still an achievement. Yes, it’s an achievement. It is. Do we get a block or anything? Like a little nothing? Nothing. Should we print something out and stick it on the wall behind us? Probably. We should have something on Instagram. Did we? Yeah. Oh, now local digital. Yeah. Because multiple times. You’ve said you’re creating one for us and you never did one day I will? Yes. Once we hit 1000 listeners a day.

Unknown Speaker 2:07
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 cat Zoo. SEO specialist here at local digital. Hey, go and cat. Oh nine. Hello. Good to be here. Yes, very good to have you here. We thought it’d be cool to bring you on the show today because you’ve been killing it with the results for clients lately. And we thought it’d be fun to do a bit of a I forget what we said live takedown takedown, SEO takedown of one of your campaigns like we’re gonna take it down, tear it apart. Yeah. Rip it apart, warts and all. Yeah. Anyway, whatever you want to call it. Welcome to the show. So it’s good to have you. 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 yeah, yeah. So I’m Kat, I am one of the SEO specialists, Alico digital, and I guess a bit of 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

Unknown Speaker 3:20
for quite a while, I think four years.

Unknown Speaker 3:24
And I was actually introduced into SEO by one of the other SEO specialists aliqua Digital, was Rob hands was also a special guest on the show friend of the show wrote while ago now. Yeah, probably a year ago. Yeah, I have to get him back on one day. I think this episode is gonna be way better than that one.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
Bit of competition.

Unknown Speaker 3:48
Yes, sir. Rob is actually one of my very good friends. So he referred me because I was actually looking for a career change. And 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, or his clients.

Unknown Speaker 4:11
And I’m a person who really likes to 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, and you have to convert you haven’t looked back? No, I haven’t looked back. And I’m really, really enjoying my time here and being able to grow my skills in this year. Yeah, awesome. Okay, well, that’s very cool. And I like that you touched on getting results and

Unknown Speaker 4:45
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, because

Unknown Speaker 4:58
I’ll let you set the scene. Maybe

Unknown Speaker 5:00
say who the client was, and maybe what they did, what their goals were. And then we might get stuck into

Unknown Speaker 5:06
some of the tactical stuff that you did on site off site technical chat about SEO a little bit what you did. And yeah, I think the listeners will enjoy listening to that. So yeah, who are they? And what do they do or not? Who are they? Who might keep that under wraps? But yeah, bleep it out. Give us a background.

Unknown Speaker 5:24
Yeah. So they are a online tile retailer. So they’re ecommerce based site, and they have 1000s of products. So it’s not like a small site. There are quite a lot of URLs on this site. A lot of categories, a lot of products in their page, on their domain. Sorry. So

Unknown Speaker 5:48
I guess what 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.

Unknown Speaker 6:03
So that’s, that’s why they embedded with us. And they were seeking that difference with us, for us to be able to achieve those results. Yeah, awesome. Did they have any,

Unknown Speaker 6:14
I guess, targets in terms of volume, like, like, percentage change? Or it’s just we want improvements? Because it was going nowhere before? Yeah. So they didn’t really know what was a good achievement for them, because they weren’t really getting any results with various a CSA. I guess I didn’t really know what to expect.

Unknown Speaker 6:37
But I guess from the results of what we’re getting them, they’re pretty happy. And yeah, we’ll continue getting those results for them. Yeah, I think that’s really common. I feel like a lot of people that start SEO don’t know, they don’t know what the ceiling is, I don’t know what to expect. So it is hard to kind of have those tangible. I want this number of orders with this much traffic. Yeah, they just want more. A lot of the time. Yeah. A lot of people we speak to don’t tend to know their numbers as well. Sure. You know, like, you’ll ask your client, well, how many leads? Do you need to get X number of customers? How many you’re going to convert? And like what’s your customer lifetime value? And what is it good customer acquisition cost? And that’s sort of pluck stuff out of thin air? It’s pretty common, you know, if you’re sort of in the weeds running your business everyday, 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 Jeff, I guess knock your socks off? Right? Sounds like this has happened in this case.

Unknown Speaker 7:36
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 you’re saying they’re really happy at the scene?

Unknown Speaker 7:48
Sure. So I guess for some of the key words that they were looking to target. So we increased

Unknown Speaker 7:58
their page one key words to 50% in three months. So right now they’re ranking for over 1000 keywords. We’re on page one of Google. So that’s the top 10 positions,

Unknown Speaker 8:10
tiles being the highest search volume keyword that generates around 50,000

Unknown Speaker 8:18
searches per month.

Unknown Speaker 8:21
And they ranked in fourth position in their highest position. Wow. Nice. Where were they? Yeah. So they were they were sitting

Unknown Speaker 8:30
around page six.

Unknown Speaker 8:33
How long in three months? In three months? Well, yeah, you don’t go to page six. But you do go to page one or Google. Good stuff. That’s amazing. Yeah, and just some other key words are so that for some of their categories, like kitchen, so kitchen tiles, they were they’re now ranking in eighth position. And that is actually so in the first month, actually, they achieved page one from page three in Google search results. Yeah, that’s huge.

Unknown Speaker 9:06
All right. Well, I think the scene is set. That is a very good thing. 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 612 months. In this case, we’re talking here, you’re saying in the sort of, you know, on page one in the first month, they say 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 results at their previous agency, and they’re coming to us wanting growth. Awesome. Where do we start? What what did you do in this case? Yeah, so first off, what I like to do,

Unknown Speaker 9:56
like how I kind of tackle

Unknown Speaker 9:59
when I’ve

Unknown Speaker 10:00
SCSI 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, you know, have a browse. And I’ll actually add some of the products to my cart. Look at some of the product descriptions.

Unknown Speaker 10:25
Just see, you know, what the what is the process from the when I first learned on the site to converting, which in this case would be making a purchase.

Unknown Speaker 10:37
So for one more service based business, that might be like,

Unknown Speaker 10:44
that might be

Unknown Speaker 10:47
converting through a contact form. So writing, like submitting a contact form, or clicking the phone call CTA.

Unknown Speaker 10:57
So, through this process, that really gives me a more intimate knowledge of what is the customers? So what is my client’s products?

Unknown Speaker 11:09
And also, it gives me I can under like, it helps me to pick up any latent issues that might be preventing, like a user from actually, you know, buying a product. Exactly. Yeah. I love that. Because yeah, I was gonna say the same thing. Not many people would do that. No SEO people can be

Unknown Speaker 11:29
like me, for clients coming in, they just focused on SEO, acquiring get bid get people to the site, but what happens when they actually get there isn’t always thought about as much as it should be? No, a lot of sites what, there’s a good thing, all websites

Unknown Speaker 11:44
have conversion problems. So like, 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 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, like a fresh set of eyes like that, you might be able to look at it and say, Well, yes, we get traffic here. But it’s not going to do anything because it’s a convoluted process to even check. I mean, I’ve worked on sites where their forms didn’t work, it would the forms would just not send or there’d be just so many broken things on the site that we declined, 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, 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. 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, like, what’s the process for them? Yeah, I guess it would depend on you know, how important that is. For users. If it’s like a really, you know, glaring issue, then I’ll address it immediately. If it’s something that can be done over time, then we’ll implement.

Unknown Speaker 13:00
We’ll make some recommendations to the client and

Unknown Speaker 13:04
implement that over time. Cool. And then

Unknown Speaker 13:09
let’s say that’s out of the way. Getting down to what’s the thing getting down to brass tacks.

Unknown Speaker 13:16
I’ve come up. I always say things and he never knows any. Have you heard that saying? Getting down to brass tacks? I’m such an old man. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t think I don’t think an old man would even know.

Unknown Speaker 13:28
Sure. Anyway, getting down to the nitty gritty. What’s the SEO side of things?

Unknown Speaker 13:36
At that point? Are you also looking at anything from an SEO sense? Yeah. So after I’ve looked at the site from a user perspective, other than going again, and put on an SEO, I guess, glasses,

Unknown Speaker 13:52
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 it even any content on the pages? And are they relevant to the keywords that we’re looking to target?

Unknown Speaker 14:12
So basically, looking at whether there is any, any SEO implemented and how well it is being implemented at the moment? Yep. Cool. And do you just sort of then get stuck in or how do you sort of come up with the strategy? Or what in this case, what was your strategy? You know, based on looking at this site? Yeah. What did you pick up? Differ today from them? Yeah. So then, after, you know, going through the site, this allows me to quickly identify if there’s any small changes that we can make, but these small changes will have massive impact in terms of SEO.

Unknown Speaker 14:50
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

Unknown Speaker 15:00
To page titles, or headings,

Unknown Speaker 15:04
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. And the thing is, the sooner you get that sorted, the sooner you’ll start seeing results. Yeah. Good concerning that. They were paying an agency beforehand.

Unknown Speaker 15:27
Yeah, to be done. But it’s quite often the case. Right? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 15:33
And

Unknown Speaker 15:38
yeah, so then, like after we.

Unknown Speaker 15:44
So you’re saying you did the page titles? Yeah. Quick Wins at 20? Seo?

Unknown Speaker 15:50
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? Yes. So actually, we had to work with our developer, because there were a lot of issues in the back end 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.

Unknown Speaker 16:18
So through working with our developer, we were able to improve

Unknown Speaker 16:24
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 PageSpeed. Insights.

Unknown Speaker 16:39
Domain, and that will actually spit out a score for you.

Unknown Speaker 16:44
And will be able to improve that score for both mobile and desktop.

Unknown Speaker 16:49
Beautiful, yeah. Nice. Um, how big was the improvement? Do you remember? Yes. So for mobile, I think they were sitting around 20. And now they’re, I would say around 70. Okay, it fluctuates sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. will fluctuate, that’s respectable, probably back into UX. Let the user experience side of things before. Notice. It was slow when you were using the site. Definitely. It was very slow. Yeah. It’s a nightmare. People people will leave. Even like, a few seconds. If the page hasn’t loaded. They’re just gonna bounce. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And there was this sort of stuff like how long does it take when you’re doing that? Like we’re talking month one here, month two, or? Yeah, so the stuff about just making the small changes, that can definitely be implemented fairly quickly, then we also have a few deliverables that way implement,

Unknown Speaker 17:44
that’s all in the first month, as well. So

Unknown Speaker 17:49
for SEO, there’s three different pillars, there’s the on site, pillar, technical pillar, and authority. And through these deliverables, we are improving each of those pillars. So on site that is basically all the content on the page, like what the user can see.

Unknown Speaker 18:10
Like content and page titles, images, yeah, basically, all of that.

Unknown Speaker 18:17
So by improving the on site,

Unknown Speaker 18:22
what we do is deliverable called keyword research. So this is a process where we’re identifying all the relevant keywords for that our clients industry, making sure that their quality keywords as well, and that they have a good search volume. So what quality means quality can mean different things for different clients. So what I like to focus on is the search intent of keywords. Amazing, so far.

Unknown Speaker 18:59
So for example,

Unknown Speaker 19:01
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.

Unknown Speaker 19:16
So something like bi tiles would have a much

Unknown Speaker 19:23
more geared search intent for transactional users, rather than I tiles, which can encapsulate a much more broader

Unknown Speaker 19:33
type of users Exactly. 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 can be targeting, to drive more intent and more more traffic to the site. And intent is probably the part that most people miss, like the most like because, yeah, we’ll have clients come in and they might do let’s

Unknown Speaker 20:00
They have a build wood tables.

Unknown Speaker 20:03
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 intensity is 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 the users. So particularly for something like e commerce, it’s so important, like you could get a tonne of traffic to your site have broad head terms, but what good is it if it doesn’t convert?

Unknown Speaker 20:28
Or what is the example we’ve used in the past for the sport blog? On the go?

Unknown Speaker 20:34
was not supposed to name them

Unknown Speaker 20:36
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 10s of 1000s of sessions, but no one converted. Everyone just bounced because people were just interested in what the top 10 spots are. Yeah. So they and they did sport, customer sport apparel apparel. Yeah. So they then they’d be freaking out. Like, why is that bounce rate so high? Yeah. No time on the site not that long. Well, what would happen is that blog would rank really well. And then one day drop off, so their organic traffic would plummet. And then they’ll panic. Yeah. Why is that traffic down? Why is it down? 30%? Yeah, well, it’s because this blog post, yes. doesn’t rank anymore. Yep. So intent really important. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. So love that the intent of the keywords that’s in the keyword research, what happens once you’ve got like, you got this massive list of keywords? Yeah. Good in a spreadsheet, but then it’s gonna actually do something, right. Yeah. So then we, we actually take those keywords and implement them in something called keyword mapping. So in keyword mapping, we list out all the URLs, or 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.

Unknown Speaker 22:00
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. Yeah. So the keywords you want to rank for basic? Yeah. Are you what, whichever page, you want to rank for those keywords? Yeah, yeah. And for these clients, one of the issues that kind of identified for them was there were some of some category pages that actually had repeating keywords. So

Unknown Speaker 22:35
that was affecting something called keyword cannibalization, where you’re, 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. And that confuses Google. Yes. It doesn’t know which page should rank for that. Yeah, exactly. Yep. So in keyword mapping, as well, we consolidate, you know, only honing down on one key word for each.

Unknown Speaker 23:05
So not not one key word. But I mean, like, one key word for each career page and not making sure that they’re not duplicated throughout the site. Yeah, each page needs a theme or a purpose. Yeah. Because Google,

Unknown Speaker 23:21
why are you smoking? I was smoking, being confused library, because it’s all powerful being that knows everything about everyone. But then it gets confused by keywords being a mobile pages, but it’s totally true. Like, I can’t figure out which one it wants to show if there’s so many things, same thing.

Unknown Speaker 23:39
Unless you have a really, really strong domain, which most people don’t. You want to be avoiding keyword cannibalization, slightly off topic, but have you seen the Russell Brand Google that he did? No. Okay. I’ll show you later. Come on, give us a do some stand up for us now. He basically talks about how like,

Unknown Speaker 23:58
whenever you search something or search something incorrectly, Google’s like Did you mean Oh, yeah. Did you have you seen that one mapping? Did you mean like, passive aggressive? Yeah, it’s very passive aggressive, and then he just does this whole bit. And he’s just like, yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I can’t, I can’t replicate it. Because I’m also grandpa. Yeah. Okay. I’ll share it later. Sounds good. Sorry, derailing the episode, the link in the show notes.

Unknown Speaker 24:22
anyone that’s interested. Alright, so cool. You’ve

Unknown Speaker 24:26
got the keywords.

Unknown Speaker 24:29
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 on site here right at the moment? Yeah. What else were you doing in this case? 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 H refs.

Unknown Speaker 24:53
It’s my favourite. It’s your favourite tool often notch. Shameless plug. Don’t Don’t worry H refs.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
is my favourite. It’s my favourite tool.

Unknown Speaker 25:03
So I plug in the clients domain and a few of the other competitive online competitors

Unknown Speaker 25:12
that they’re competing against. And I, in this way I am able to identify

Unknown Speaker 25:20
where they’re not ranking keyword gaps, and then

Unknown Speaker 25:26
implement that to the client side. So

Unknown Speaker 25:33
in these guys, did they have like missing categories? Or was there certain areas that they didn’t have that the competition did have? Yeah, so there are different categories that they were actually bundling into one category.

Unknown Speaker 25:47
But that was affecting the SEO because they weren’t able to effectively target each individual category because they were bundling it together. 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 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 Yep. So. So so in this case, you did that you split out the pages. Okay. worked well. Yeah, for sure. Because then they started ranking for keywords that they weren’t previously. Amazing. Just splitting out the pages. 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? Yeah, just as simple as splitting it out?

Unknown Speaker 26:57
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. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Awesome. All right. Well, um,

Unknown Speaker 27:12
let’s talk technical.

Unknown Speaker 27:14
Did you do much on that front with these guys? Yeah, so as I mentioned before, that their site was not in great shape.

Unknown Speaker 27:24
They had a lot of outdated plugins. And they really needed an update in terms of their, their WordPress core, which was what they were using for their CMS.

Unknown Speaker 27:38
So basically, it worked with our developer to identify how we can improve a lot of their page.

Unknown Speaker 27:49
So their page loading speeds,

Unknown Speaker 27:53
things that were affecting the backend of their site, so the site performance and the crawl ability of their site, how the site was structured. Okay. So did you look at things like image sizes and things like that? And how how he can reduce them to speed up the page load speed? Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 28:13
What’s your growth process to discover that stuff?

Unknown Speaker 28:17
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 there, hey, is there anything that we can improve here, so that we can improve their their performance and structure plentiful and you prioritise that based on I guess, the impact the change will have? How so how many URLs it might be impacting

Unknown Speaker 29:01
whether

Unknown Speaker 29:03
whether the URLs that are being impacted are actually important? Because this is an E commerce site? So there are 1000s of URLs and not every URL ism is important. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That’s sort of the thing I often find with SEO tools.

Unknown Speaker 29:21
sitebulb included, but like any sort of curling tool, it will crawl and then spit out like,

Unknown Speaker 29:26
you know, Red Alert, or you know, the colour that uses for things that don’t really matter.

Unknown Speaker 29:31
As SEO 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 4000 toxic issues with my site according to this tool, or you have 4000 images missing alt tags. Yeah. Yeah. Or like toxic links is always another big one, like, gotta clean up the toxic links, but it’s just one tool that saying that and meanwhile, your site’s ranking well in Google, yeah. Not need to clean that link up. Yeah, even worse, if a client runs that tool, and then it’s

Unknown Speaker 30:00
If he shares it with you, and he starts panicking, or they start panicking because they think that you have toxic links, or some other agency runs into

Unknown Speaker 30:08
toxic things. Yeah. So I guess that’s why we do this show to give people that knowledge that you can use to try and avoid those scenarios.

Unknown Speaker 30:17
All right, well, I think we need to talk. everybody’s favourite topic in SEO. What is that? Let’s see if cat knows what is everybody everybody’s favourite topic in SEO? I’m gonna hazard a guess. backlinks. Yeah, got it. And one. Good that you agree.

Unknown Speaker 30:36
We always joke about that in the show. Like, that’s not a joke.

Unknown Speaker 30:40
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. So your eyes line up whenever we talk about link building? Yeah, just love a bit of link building. So what did we do? Let’s chat links. Yeah, links, very important.

Unknown Speaker 30:59
So they are also a important ranking factor out of the, I think 200, maybe more ranking factors on Google. This is one of them.

Unknown Speaker 31:09
So for links, what we do is first off a bank, click not bank,

Unknown Speaker 31:16
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,

Unknown Speaker 31:33
don’t really add value to the client, or could potentially actually be harming the clients backlink profile. And that affects the client’s authority and trustworthiness in the space. So, for our client, actually, we identified 200 year, ELLs 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. Ice. Yeah, what? Um, you don’t have to go too deep into it. But what, what why were they good? Like, it’s not as simple as just using like an automated tool, right? We have sort of, you’re analysing it and deciding, hey, this, this links, Dave’s this links gonna go?

Unknown Speaker 32:30
On? Like, what what are you looking for when you’re looking at them? Yeah, so very simplified way of explaining it. But

Unknown Speaker 32:37
there are sites like that will be blatantly obvious that they are bad quality. So they might not look like they’re relevant to the client. They could have a very high domain rating, but no traffic to the site.

Unknown Speaker 32:55
Sometimes, like, they might be what we call PB ns. Private logging networks, like networks.

Unknown Speaker 33:03
So those are sites that

Unknown Speaker 33:06
just are purely created for the purpose of link building. They’re not really a natural link, which Google will explore. Yep. And you will 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 PBN views, because it’s cheap for the agency to do them, but it doesn’t get results. So what did you do once you found them, and there’s all these dodgy ones?

Unknown Speaker 33:38
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? Yep. So forgive me, Google friends, wash my hands of these

Unknown Speaker 34:08
life. And so then

Unknown Speaker 34:11
everybody’s favourite topic in SEO link building. What do we do with they’ve definitely 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 our new category pages and doing all the metadata. And that sort of stuff has driven a lot of this result, but what sort of length were you able to build in the sort of short time that led to the through that? 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 clients industry. So

Unknown Speaker 35:00
that might be so for these guys, that would be like Home Improvement,

Unknown Speaker 35:06
maybe lifestyle, things that are related, like blog blogs that will be related to the industry. Yeah. And will attract the right type of user. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 35:20
So we identify

Unknown Speaker 35:23
these kinds of links, and then we then we have a team that reaches out to, to the people that own these links. And then, you know, ask them, Hey, can we get a link from you guys in exchange,

Unknown Speaker 35:36
and they provide content?

Unknown Speaker 35:39
So that’s it. That’s a whole process, essentially, you gotta 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 asked for some publishing fee.

Unknown Speaker 35:59
Yes. Which we’ve touched on quite a bit on the show at the end of the day, cost money to build links. To do it the right way. Like a PBN cheap. Yeah, what you’re talking about, they’re real websites owned by authentic people that you’ve got to deal with, then not It costs money to do that? Well, exactly. It gets results, right. Like, like at the start, you’re talking about 50% increase in PageRank 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. So that’s well, that’s been a really good recap of 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. Another thing I guess, I should 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 giving them the most optimised results. So for a lot of the 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

Unknown Speaker 37:17
I guess, most importantly, the most important content or information you’d want to put at the very top of the page, and then

Unknown Speaker 37:26
the as you read down less than 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 hidden under a read more button. Nice. Yep. 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. Let’s face it, no one reads that.

Unknown Speaker 37:56
When you’re looking for tiles, you’re not reading maybe the first paragraph like the first line. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Reading in depth. And even on mobile, right. Like it’s, yeah, 100 a mobile, you’re not just scrolling through this text to get to the products you want to see. Every just bounce. So yeah, yeah. So

Unknown Speaker 38:15
after I did that, I actually monitored how that affected the rankings. And I could say, like, just shut up. Well, after that. Yeah. That’s amazing. Nice. Well, I have enjoyed chatting about your results there. How’s that for you? First time on a podcast. That was less daunting than I thought it would be. You killed it. You’re not sure. We’ll have to get you back for many more episodes in the future. Actually, you could be the new co host. Maybe I’ll retire. Yeah, we’re sort of 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 I plan it all out. But look, that’s been a great chat. We’d like to wrap up every show by saying until next week.

Unknown Speaker 39:04
Happy air sealing FPF yoing.

Unknown Speaker 39:08
Bye, bye.

Unknown Speaker 39:10
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.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai