From The Vault - Kyle Roof Interview

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.

ARTHUR: Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the SEO show. Today we have our first actual guest.

MICHAEL: Excited? Well, you know what? I am, but you failed to acknowledge our brand new intro.

ARTHUR: What about our new intro? I didn't know we had a new voiceover.

MICHAEL: Well, we do. This is the week it goes live. We've got rid of the old mate that used to call you Arthur. And we have a guy that just says Arthur. Sounds like an Aussie bloke.

ARTHUR: An Aussie bloke, yep.

MICHAEL: That's a bit more on brand, so I'm happy with that. Aussie intro, there's a little bit of a different outro too for those that stay to the end. A little nugget to stick around for. I don't think I've heard that. No, you haven't even heard that. I'm just chucking it in there. I have to listen to the show? You better listen to the end because it trashes you in the outro now. Really? No, of course not. Just asking for my favorite thing, which is for people to subscribe and leave us a review. I figure instead of us asking, we can just have the outro ask every week. Anyway, we're getting a bit off topic. So what is the topic? Who was our special guest? We had a chat with him yesterday.

ARTHUR: So we had Kyle Roof. So Kyle Roof, the co-founder of High Voltage SEO. And also the co-founder of Page Optimizer Pro, which is a tool that we have previously mentioned on the podcast. A very powerful on-site optimization tool that I use personally all the time. So I don't know how he managed to get a guest of his caliber on the show, but. Not complaining. Not complaining at all.

MICHAEL: Don't talk yourself down, Arthur. Don't talk yourself down. We are highly esteemed at the SEO show. So, yeah, it was a good chat with him. Obviously, we did it yesterday. So, we covered things like on-page optimization, a little… What would you say? He ran a little experiment that got him in the bad books of Google. So, we had a chat about that and just his software and he's taken SEO. So, it was a pretty cool chat. So maybe without further ado, let's cut to it and you guys can all listen to the sounds of me and Kyle having a chat and Arthur not really saying too much.

ARTHUR: Just being a passenger in this one.

MICHAEL: Yeah, he might have contributed a little bit, but look, the guest was Kyle. So that's what this episode is all about. So yeah, let's hear what he had to say. Hi, Kyle. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, no problem. Look, we're stoked to have you on the show, but you know, for our listeners who might not have heard of you before, if you could just give us a real quick overview of who you are and what you do, that'd be awesome. Sure.

KYLE: Uh, I have an agency. Uh, we're a multinational agency. Uh, we have offices in Phoenix, uh, Berlin and Melbourne. Uh, we do local to national to international, uh, to everything in between. Uh, I'm the, uh, inventor and co-creator of page optimizer pro, which is an on page SEO tool. And I am the co-founder of internet marketing goal. It's a place where we do tests on Google's algorithm. And then we also have a series of courses. I have several courses in there myself.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So you're a man of many hats and there's, you know, there's SAS there, there's agency, there's community there. And we'll probably touch on a few different parts of that as we chat. But I wanted to first start by just saying where I first heard of you. It was in my travels in the SEO world and the internet. I came across this guy who managed to rank a page of Lorem Ipsum. So like the dummy text. And I thought it'd be cool if you could talk about that to our listeners, just because, um, you know, people sort of think Google's this mythical being that you really need to be ticking all these different ranking factors to get a page ranking. But you've done it with Lauren Ipsen, so that's really cool. If you could tell them a bit about that, it'd be awesome.

KYLE: Yeah, you bet. That is what I'm most famous for. I think that's what most people heard of me. It was 2018. It was a SEO competition put together by SEO Signals Lab, and they're a Facebook group. The the competition was to rank the term rhinoplasty Plano rhinoplasty is a nose job and Plano is just outside of Dallas, Texas My team and I we decided to enter from the agency and I think 27 other professionals entered it was a 30-day competition and The stipulations were you had to use a brand new domain So you couldn't have done anything to the domain brand new domain and then after that you can pretty much do whatever you want And at the end of that 30 days, we took fifth, actually. And then about two weeks later, our site went to page one. And about two weeks after that, we went to number one, and then we went to number one on the maps. And then at one point, we completely wiped out the maps, and we were the knowledge panel. So we were Rhino, Platy, Plano. And at that point, people really started to lose their minds. And the reason they did was because we wrote the entire site in lorem ipsum. which is the dummy Latin text. But what we did is we did the math. We did the math on how many times we needed rhinoplasty planum, how many times we needed its variations, how many times we needed its contextual terms, and then we copied and pasted those words into the lorem ipsum in the places that Google is checking your page. And a lot of people think that we did it to make fun of Google. And that's not true at all. We actually did it to make fun of SEOs that tell you that you need to write good content. Because, you know, while you do need to write good content because you need to get people to convert, you know, to do what you want them to do when they get to the page, ranking is a whole other thing. Ranking is math-based because it's an algorithm. And if you can give the algorithm the math that it wants, then you can do very, very well. And that's the point that we were trying to prove and I think we were able to prove it.

MICHAEL: Absolutely proved it to the point where didn't Google come after you or something like that? They wanted to get rid of the site or de-index some of the other sites.

KYLE: That is also true. What's funny is I have a course on white hat SEO that I put out last year. And in doing the course, obviously I need to read the guidelines again, just to reacquaint myself. And as I'm making notes and I noticed under automated generated content, there's, there's a rule that says you can't have a page that doesn't make any sense to the reader. but contains keywords. And I was like, well, when did that rule go into effect? And so I put the URL into the Wayback Machine. And before the competition, that rule isn't there. A week after the competition ended so that people could see the sites and see what we did, it's there. And then, so I didn't know this at the time, but then three months later, there was an article written about this, like Google ranks site in lorem ipsum, in Search Engine Journal. And about six hours after that came out, my site was de-indexed. Which, that's fair play, I guess. But then, that night, from about 1.15 a.m. to about 1.25 a.m., Google de-indexed 20 of my test sites. And those test sites had absolutely nothing to do with the competition site. They were on different servers, different everything, different hosting. And they didn't link to, it was just, those are sites that I just used to test the algorithm. And Google went and took all those down. Which wasn't really fun in the moment. But it actually worked out pretty well because Basically, what they did is they validated everything that I was doing. Like if I was getting lucky or just, you know, they would have rolled their eyes and moved on. But what I showed is how you can learn about the algorithm, how you can test the algorithm, how you can see if something is or is not a ranking factor. And then they made a rule trying to stop you from doing it. I have not stopped.

MICHAEL: I used to like getting a penalty, you know, manual penalty or something like that as a bit of a badge of pride. You know, you've got to be pushing the limits in SEO and seeing what works. And if they're rewriting their guidelines, I think that's taking that to the next level.

KYLE: I think that's pretty good. And then I also, using that same method that I used there, I also now have a US patent. on if determining something is or is not a ranking factor in Google. Awesome. So I might be one of the few people that has both a patent in SEO and a Google rule. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And so I guess, is that what led to all that sort of work you're doing there, the testing and sort of pushing the limits and math? I really like you coming at it from that angle. Like we always talk about the fact that, you know, an algorithm that just has its inputs and then there's the outputs and you're really looking at what those inputs are. Is that what you're doing with your page optimizer pro? You know, the side of things, the SAS business. Can you tell us a bit?

KYLE: That's exactly right. Um, I've done, I think more than 400 on page tests on Google's algorithm and then have repeated them. And the knowledge that I've gained from that is what is coded into the algorithm of page optimizer pro. Um, one of the things I learned early on about when I was testing, what occurred to me was the Google can't read. You know, Google can't read like a human being would be reading, you know, kind of going left to right and top to bottom. Google is just doing math. And so if you can then satisfy the algorithm, if you can give the algorithm the math that it wants, then you can be very successful in your SEO.

MICHAEL: So when you're saying math, for our listeners, let's say they're wanting to go do a little bit of math in their content on a weekend, have a lazy weekend doing that. What are the main areas that you can sort of hit to be pleasing to Google, I guess, so to speak?

KYLE: You actually don't even have to go as nutty with it as I do, but really the top four places to put a keyword are in your URL, your title tag, your H1, and in body text, in paragraph tags. Those are the top four places. If you take one thing from this and just put your keyword in those four places, you've probably done 60% of SEO right there. The rest is minutia. A lot of people intuitively do that, and they actually have a lot of success because those are the most important places. Those are the factors that are the strongest. Because when Google breaks down a page, it doesn't look like, as it's not reading, it's also not looking at a page as a whole. It's looking at specific places on the page. And some places are more important than others. And so those are the top four places. If somebody's brand new to SEO though, one warning is if you have a page that's ranking and it's been around a while and you realize you don't have the keyword in the URL, don't change the URL because you'll be giving Google a brand new page. But if you have a page that's just starting out or a page that you're building now, Put that keyword in the URL.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. And so is pop looking at that stuff in general or how, how sort of deep does it go? What sort of other things does it look? I know it looks at competitors a bit as well, doesn't it?

KYLE: Sure. The, the concept is that the secret is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you the sites that it likes and it likes them for their on page, their off page or a combination. And so you can learn what Google likes for your keywords by looking at the sites that it's currently rewarding. And then what Pop does is it looks at that, and then with our algorithm that we've written, we look for competitive edges. Because there are times to get an edge on your competitors, you want to do more than what they've done, maybe exactly what they've done, or a little bit less. And so Pop looks at those different factor areas that are on your page, and then gives you a recommendation for how many times you should use your terms, your exact keyword, its variations, and the contextual terms. Well, I don't realize those, those, um, those variations of your keyword actually do a lot of heavy lifting. You don't want to put your keyword on the page a thousand times. Um, one that doesn't really help that much, uh, a bit it can, but it's, uh, it's also gross to do, but, um, those variations actually do a lot of heavy lifting. And, uh, if you count those terms and then put them in also those places, like your title tag, like your H one and, and, and paragraph tags, you can be very successful.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So we, um, we use the tool quite a lot ourselves in our business and we, we sort of see good results, you know, not always, but like quite a lot of the time, you know, looking at the competitors, the length of the content, the use of the keywords and all those supplementary keywords, not just banging on the top keyword all the time. So definitely works. You touched on, um, links there a little bit. One thing I want to go back to this, um, the rhinoplasty. Was that site ranked? What was the link side of things there? Was there much going on with link building? Was it purely content?

KYLE: So I did two rounds of citations, uh, for local SEO purposes, uh, because we did get a verified GMB. Um, and, uh, then, and then we, um, then we did citations. So we did a round of citations, and then I did a round of web 2.0s. I think it's a good practice to own your brand name across the web. And so you want to have yourbrand.wordpress.com, yourbrand.tumblr.com, et cetera. So we did a round of those. And I did those for the signal of that we're a real entity, that we're a real thing. And I also did it for indexing purposes as well, because I wanted these pages to get indexed. And then I did fire just a few links at the page just again to get them indexed. And we also had a silo built out. That was also on lorem ipsum. And it was pointing up to the target page. So we built a few links to the silo pages just to get them indexed as well. But under 100, under 50, it was just a few links to go and just to kind of get the ball rolling.

MICHAEL: And just foundational, like we, we call them foundation links, like the web 2.0 citations, like the bread and butter stuff. Every business website should have really, but you didn't really.

KYLE: And a lot don't do for some reason. Yeah. And they're the easiest to do and they're the safest to do. And they, they have a lot of benefit and they kind of build a nice little fortress around your site for you. And a lot of people don't do it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I heard you touch on silo there. So did you have a sort of the main page for the rhinoplasty location and then silo pages for other keywords that were also just lorem ipsum, but with a keyword related to that main topic? Is that sort of what you were doing with the silo?

KYLE: That's exactly right. So I think I had seven, we had seven silo posts and they were, um, uh, like people also ask type questions, which are really good to use for, for silo posts, uh, or related keywords, uh, related to, uh, rhinoplasty Plano. And then, uh, what we did is we interlink them all. So A to B, uh, B to A and C, C to B and D, et cetera. So we link them that way. And then they all link up to the target page. And then we had one link from the target page coming back into the silo. So it kind of completes the silo. so that Google can track through all the pages and then back up to the target page.

MICHAEL: Cool. Cool. And so let's say a local business, you know, they are wanting to, to rank a page. Do you find there's more value in that silo approach where that you have the sort of main theme and then all those supporting pages or going super deep, you know, like a really long in-depth page and just trying to go for everything on one page.

KYLE: Well, Google shows you the pages that it likes. And so what a really good approach is to say, okay, Google is, is rewarding this type of page and it has 2000 words. That's the type of page you should do. I don't think you should try to teach Google something new. That's very difficult to do, and not the path towards success. So I would see what Google's rewarding. And in this case, I think at the time, it was like about 1,500 words for the target. So we had 1,500 lorem ipsum words on the target page. After that, what you'll find, though, is there are often I would use people also ask on those target pages or on your target pages because those are obviously questions that people are asking about your particular thing and related keywords are also a good idea. But sometimes you'll find some that are just a little too far afield for maybe the target page. Those are the ones that are excellent for your supporting pages. Not only, I mean you get that initial link, but once they start to rank for their own keywords, because you won't make that a long tail kind of a keyword, a longer phrase, it'll start to rank for its own keywords, it's gonna build the strength of your site. Sites that rank for more keywords do better. So this gives you an opportunity to start ranking for a lot of keywords, especially as it might take some time for your target page to be successful, but you're within the ballpark, you're within the realm of what you're going after, so you should be getting good impressions, good clicks, the kind of people that you want, and at the same time, you're raising the value of your site.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Okay. Awesome. And do you think this would work today, Laura Mipson, or is it a hole that I Google's plug?

KYLE: It does work today. I do it all the time. I think, um, so, uh, I got a lot of hate mail after doing it. And, um, a lot of people said like, uh, no, you can't do that anymore. Uh, and they, they, they would list a series of reasons as to, as to why it wouldn't, um, work. And so the following year on my speaking circuit, um, I spoke in LA, uh, Bali, Vietnam, Chiang Mai, and in Milan. And I ranked a page on page one in lorem ipsum for each of those cities. Beautiful. And then I think of those, I think three of those pages are actually still up on page one.

MICHAEL: Sorry, just moving on in terms of topics here. When it comes to writing these pages, let's say you're writing a page. You're not going to chuck Laura Mipson in there. You want to rank a page legitimately for a client. How do you sort of approach it? Do you just sort of pick a keyword and say, writers, off you go? Or is there a bit more structure to the way you brief them in? Like, are you trying to brief them in with this sort of pop mentality behind it before? Or are you going in and SEOing the page afterwards, as some people like to call it? What's your sort of approach in the real world?

KYLE: It's kind of tricky. I find it's tricky if you tell a writer, I need 2,000 words and I need 400 of them to be from this list. I think it's very difficult for writers to do, especially those that aren't necessarily SEOs. I think the right approach is to think about, okay, we've got this page and we need 150 or 1500 words on it. Let's say that's five sections. What I'll do is I'll actually find the terms I want for the section. So those would be like the people also ask or related keywords. So I'll give them the title, I'll give them the section headings, and those would become your H2s on the page. And then after that, I tell them just fill all this in. you know, answer this question or provide the information needed for this section. And what happens is, is that you kind of get very close to your necessary counts. I would then run that through POP, and then you're just doing tweaking on the editing, you know, adding in a term here, taking out a term there, not trying to do the SEO process from the start when it's kind of tricky to do it that way.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And you end up with a, I guess a more naturally reading piece of content that way, rather than, you know, we are the best, uh, dentist Melbourne that Melbourne has to offer.

KYLE: Exactly. You get something that's a little more readable for humans, but you're also getting something that's going to, um, uh, the Google will like too, because you're getting the term frequency in there. The amount of times you need the terms should be pretty close or you've got terrible writers. Like they completely missed what you were supposed to, what they were supposed to write about. And that's, it's impossible for that to happen when you give them those sections. I think an important point for people though, is that SEO is a game of probability. As you mentioned, it doesn't work every time, right? But the idea is to make enough good decisions so that you are right more times than not. Normal SEO is, in my experience, is only right about 30% or 40% of the time. That's one out of three pages. Good SEO is right. Maybe 50% of the time. And if you think about it, that's a coin flip, you could make all the other decisions the other way and you do just as well. And that's why people I think get frustrated with SEO is because they see it as like, this is just a coin flip. So the idea is to have a repeatable system, to have a repeatable process, things are going to do over and over again. So you can get to that 70% range to maybe 80%. And at that point, You are winning, you know, your, the coin is rigged in your favor and it won't work every time, but it's, it's, it's going to work most of the time. And I think if you take that to the page level, you might not rank for that target keyword, but if you have those sections with the people also asking them with the related terms, you can win those. And you can still have a very successful page ranking for hundreds or thousands of keywords. But maybe not that top level term, but it's still going to do very well for you. So with the idea of this is a game of probability, you want to give your page the best chance to rank for as much as possible. And then then you can be very successful in SEO.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Awesome. Okay. And so with your, your testing, you know, we might run into scenarios where we find a page is ranking well, and then rankings maybe start to plateau or fall off. And you might think, Oh, well let's throw some more links at it or something like that. But do you find there's much value in re-popping a page or, you know, refreshing content just to give it a little nudge? Do you sort of find that stuff in the testing that you've been doing?

KYLE: Yeah, absolutely. The goalposts shift. When you move on to page one, the reality is you've knocked somebody else off of page one, and they might not be very happy about that. And I think we often forget that we aren't the only SEOs in the world. We're not the only people that are interested in particular terms. And so when you knock somebody off, they want to do something about that. And it's possible for them to push back up. So things will shift as people do more SEO. And then at the same time, there are also algorithmic updates, the big ones and the small ones. And those can also affect your page. And so you to update proof your page or to protect yourself, you should have benchmarks for what you did. How many times these important terms were needed in these places when an update happens or when somebody new moves on to page one, you can rerun something like pop and look at the new benchmarks and see, that's how you can tell if you need to tweak something to stay relevant, to keep your page up or to move your page back up onto page one.

ARTHUR: Awesome. One thing I like to do is we created a tool that actually monitors whenever a competitor changes the copy on the page. Once they do that, we rerun the page and pop and see what they've done. Perfect. That's exactly what you should do. That's perfect. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Find that really helpful. Yeah, for sure. On the topic of algorithm updates, maybe not even algorithm updates, but. We sort of anecdotally, we haven't done any sort of in-depth testing, but we used to see back in the day over-optimized anchor text, really aggressive exact match keywords in the anchor text pointing to internal pages did a bit of harm. But we're seeing increasingly in competitive industries, a lot more of that going on. Have you been doing any testing in the world of link building lately? And is there anything interesting in that side of things?

KYLE: Well, in the same way that they're on page benchmarks, like what do I need for this particular key? Because it's different keyword to keyword, niche to niche. So in the same way that there are benchmarks for your on page stuff, there are benchmarks for your backlinks, including anchor text and stuff like that. So for sure, those are the kind of things that you do need to measure. And you do want to check from time to time as well, like as you would rerun pop, you rerun to see what your competitors are doing in terms of the links that are going on, especially after an update. Then you really want to see, uh, like if anchor text ratios have changed significantly or if like now the pages have a lot more links, which is often the case. So yeah, that's something we want to benchmark as well. And for sure it's extremely important.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Cool. And on the content side of things, and again, this is in that realm of what we find people are often scared of from a penalization point of view is the good old duplicate content. And that can mean so many different things to different people, or a lot of people don't even necessarily understand what it means. You know, with things like, you know, let's say, let's say I'm thinking of a local service business and they might have pages for the different suburbs they offer, their service, maybe 10, 20 suburbs or something like that, doorway pages, so to speak. What's your testing? Well, what's, you know, the world of pop more, you know, ranking more MIPS. And I would imagine you could create pages like that and change a little bit. And you're probably going to be in the good graces of that, that math formula. But what are you seeing on that side of things?

KYLE: A test I did years ago, which was a lot of fun, was so duplicate content is really on your own site, right? And you can see if your pages have been filtered. There's a duplicate content filter. And so you can grab a paragraph off one of your pages, search for it, and if you have that paragraph on multiple pages, you'll see if you're actually getting hit with the duplicate content filter, because it's that little blue line that says, we've removed these results. We removed 100 results from the service because we think they're duplicate. And you can click on that, and then they appear. So you can actually see if your pages are being filtered because of duplicate content. And more times than not, you're not getting filtered. The bar is very, very low. But a test that I ran was, so we've got completely identical pages. And then the idea was to see what's the least amount that we can change to then get past the filter. And it was, so we started out changing every 11th word and that worked. And then we tried every 13th word and that worked. I think we took it up to 20 something. So basically just going out and changing every 20th or so word would get you past the duplicate content filter. Uh, so the bar is very, very low. Then I looked at like just chunks on the page. And if you have a page that is about 60% unique in chunks, that will also get past the filter. So, um, the, the, the, the bar is very low. And I think a lot of people think they have duplicate content issues when they probably don't. And then you can check for it. You can actually see if it is a problem. And if it is a problem, it's not that difficult to fix because you can just start changing words here and there and look sections on your page and you'll probably get past it.

MICHAEL: Very, very cool. And so in that example where you're just changing every 11th word, was the, all the big ticket items like your H ones or the metadata, was that the same on every page? Yeah.

KYLE: This was all just within the paragraph text. Yeah. Wow. So for like the pages you were talking about in local, because you're putting a, like a geo, tag or geo-specific term in your title and in your H1, often that is enough because that's such a strong signal that just putting something unique in there, like the location, that's usually enough to get past the duplicate content filter.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. That totally agree with what you're saying there. Like we've seen the same sort of thing in our testing. It's, you just sort of walk into, well not walk, you run into hesitancy out there, I guess, because some people will be like doorway pages or duplicate content. You can't do that. And you've got to put a thousand words of like expertly crafted copy on there to get around this stuff. But it's sort of not the way it really works in practice.

KYLE: No, you're right. And also though, um, the definition for doorway is an interesting one. When you look at the guidelines, because, um, What it infers, or what I think it says, is that it's not necessarily that you've got pages that are pretty close for all those different locations. It's that they funnel the user somewhere else. The idea is to grab the search and then move them to somewhere else on the site where you want them to convert. So if they can't convert on that page, if that's the intention of the page, that they come in and they can convert and do the action you want them to do on the page, it's probably not a doorway page. And even if it's really close in concept, like the location pages that you're talking

MICHAEL: So we used to work at an agency before we work together at our agency now and we had eBay as a client and back in the day, they got a massive penalty applied on them because of doorway pages. They would have listings of products for every search that's ever searched on eBay and they just spin them all up programmatically and you'd have to land on it and then go into the product to convert and they were crushing it and then Google brought down the hammer on them and we had to sit there at that business. They came up with a system basically where they would feed pages into it and we had to mark whether it should exist or not exist manually, like thousands of pages and the whole thing. It was overtime for all the teams. So people were loving it, staying back to sort of 8pm, getting food bought and all that, but it was pretty painstaking work. So it was a nightmare.

KYLE: It was a nightmare. I can't even imagine. I remember when Yibi got hit for that. Yeah. That was one of those moments like, huh, like a note to self, do not do this. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. They always have those sort of big ticket takedowns every so often to strike the fear of Google into everyone.

KYLE: You know, though, that fear then actually then sparks and kicks off like a whole bunch of misinformation where people see that and then they misinterpret what happened. And then they tell you, like, you can't do X, Y or Z. And that's simply not the case. And that's actually where I think something like testing does come in. Like you can run your own tests. You know, if somebody tells you something, You know, we've got this situation, you can test it and you can actually see for yourself. And that's almost always a better way to approach your own learning of SEO.

MICHAEL: And so I guess let's say from the perspective of like a business owner, someone toying with this stuff and they've got other stuff on their plate, what would be a way that they could maybe test things? You know, would it be as simple as just tweaking copy and seeing what happens or do you need to be a bit more strategic with the way you go about it?

KYLE: No, I mean, that's a perfectly valid test. You know, then you, you will learn something. The only caution that I would give is, uh, don't test on a site that you care about. Um, you know, if something goes horribly wrong, you know, you, you might not be able to change your, you know, your brand name. Um, but, uh, run a hobby site. You know, whatever your passion project is, you probably won't mind writing about it and reading about it and researching about it. Have a little hobby site set up for something that you like. And then anytime you hear the latest and greatest new technique, do it on that site first and see what happens. You know, try those techniques, try the products, try the shiny objects on that site. And then the ones that work for you, then that that can then go over to the site that you care about.

MICHAEL: Yep. Cool. Good advice. Um, so on the topic, let's, let's, let's keep our hat on for talking to, you know, a business owner. If you, you know, let's just say you're, you've got limited funds, but you've got a bit of time. You know, we talk about link building, we talk about content, we talk about technical, we talk about doorway pages, where, where should you, or where would you, if you were going to work on a business website, be spending most of your time each week to try and get the most bang for your buck. Content for sure.

KYLE: All day. It can't get you in trouble, it's evergreen, and sites that rank for more keywords do better. So if you have a site that ranks for 20,000 keywords and I have a site that ranks for 2,000 keywords and everything else is equal, we launch the exact same page, you will outrank me. Your site is stronger. So the best thing you can do is to continue to pump out content and rank for those terms. Don't be afraid of like zero, click terms, zero search volume terms, those are cash money because they're usually lower competition, so they'll rank quite quickly. As long as you're staying within your field, then you're going to get good clicks, good traffic, good impressions. But those pages, as they rank for more and more keywords, will raise the strength of your site. And so I go content all day, every day.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. You mentioned they won't get you in trouble. Content won't get you in trouble. Something that will get you in trouble, I'm sure you know where I'm going with this, is link building. Um, what's your take on link building? Are you for it? Are you against it? Do you like paying? Do you try to get links for free? Um, how do you approach it?

KYLE: You have to do it. It's, it's, it is a massive part of the algorithm. Um, I listened to your episode on, on link building. And, uh, the one thing that people misunderstand a bit is that, uh, Google doesn't want you directly paying for a link, but you are allowed to advertise. And, uh, in advertisement, You can do native advertisement. Native advertisement is an ad that looks like it's legitimate, like it was. something that happened organically, but it's an ad placement. A guest post is native advertising. So as long as you are clear that this is an ad, you can pay for that, and it's an acceptable link. So as long as you're clear as to what you are doing, you really avoid a lot of problems with link building, and especially in the concept of paid link building. But this also goes back to people saying, oh, you can never buy a link. Well, true. You can't buy a link for the sake of the link. But you are allowed to advertise your product, your service, your websites, and all that. So as long as you can stay within that realm, there's a lot that you can do with links that's very powerful that still keeps you within Google's guidelines.

MICHAEL: And on the topic of that, uh, I guess the native or the advertisement side, you know, they've got their real sponsored type of tributes that they want people to apply. What's your take on that? Have you done any testing or sort of seeing if it does adding that discount the, uh, I guess the SEO benefits or no, it'll, it'll still give you juice.

KYLE: Yeah. Um, it still works. Uh, keep that, keep in mind though, that is, uh, for the protection of the site owner that you're getting the link from. Not necessarily you. So that's on them to put that in there and what you just need to be clear to them is this needs to be obviously marked as an ad. This is an ad. And as long as you made that clear to them and they are marking it as such that it is an advertisement, I think you're okay.

MICHAEL: Cool, cool. Awesome. All right. Well, look, thank you for your time today. We just wanted to wrap up with a couple of quickfire questions here about SEO. Fire away. Let's do it. What's the most underrated tactic in SEO?

KYLE: most underrated. I think it would be putting the keyword in those places that I mentioned. People really overthink it, right? Your title that you give Google and your title that you give humans should be identical. But for some reason, people want to get super creative. They want to out-clever Google. Don't do it. Do the foundational stuff. Put your keyword in those four places, and you'll do really well. And then tinker away from there.

MICHAEL: Awesome. We refer to that as 80-20 SEO here. the sort of couple of places that you focus on, the basics are going to lead to the bulk of your results. You don't need to get too cute with it. So awesome. Totally agree with you on that. But, uh, what would you say is the biggest myth in SEO?

KYLE: Uh, uh, that, um, just write good content. And that is an absolute myth that will not get you any kind of ranking, you know, And every business owner has had this experience. They've had the experience where they've written a page and they've said, I know this is a better page. It is better written. It's better researched. And they'll say something like, this guy on page one doesn't even do it. That's not even relevant. They've all had that experience. And I think the idea is I think Google's making some sort of value judgment. And Google isn't. Google's not saying, I am now a better algorithm for having read your content. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. That doesn't happen. So it isn't just writing good content. It isn't just writing good content and Google will find you. It's doing the math. That's what I would go with that. Uh, you have to be conscious of, of the algorithm and you have to do things to, to optimize your pages.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So there's no such thing as write it and they will come. You need to be, it does not happen.

KYLE: I promise it won't work.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And let's say shock horror, you're limited to three SEO software tools because we love our tools in this world. What are you picking in your arsenal if you had to go with three?

KYLE: Uh, so obviously I have to choose my own tool, don't I? So you need something for your on-page. You don't have to use my tool, but you need something to benchmark your on-page. So a tool like Page Optimizer Pro. You do need to benchmark your backlinks and see what your competitors are doing. So pick your Poison on Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, that kind of tool. And then I do really like correlational software, something like Coral, for example, with a, you know, Correlation isn't causation, but causal factors correlate. And a lot of people miss that point. And so if you can see that this appears to move the needle, those are good things to keep your eye on, especially if you're in a tougher nature and you need some edges. Those edges can often come from things you can identify as like, you know what, the top sites are all doing this. And if it's a little hanging fruit, takes you five minutes to do it, do it. And you'll find that you can be very successful with that.

MICHAEL: Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show today, mate. It's been really great chatting to you and we're going to pop a link to pop in the show notes. So if you guys are interested in checking that tool out, we can totally recommend it. We use it ourselves. So if you're wanting to spend a bit of time working on your onsite optimization, why not get started with that? So thanks. Thanks for joining us. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

OUTRO: 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.