SEO Testing with Logan Bryant

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show for another week. I'm Michael Costin and this week I'm joined by Logan Bryant. He is an SEO that I came across on Twitter. He's based over in the USA and he actually shared some content around some work he did for a B2B SaaS company over there called Tipolti. It's in the finance space and it was a great case study on generating leads, you know, using SEO to grow a B2B company, which can be tough to do. So I wanted to bring him on the show to talk about that and really delve into the stuff he does around testing So he had some pretty interesting approaches to testing things for SEO and we delve into that in this episode So look if you're interested in checking him out, you can check out loganbryant.com But otherwise, I've got about 40 minutes here where we go in-depth on SEO testing b2b sass and using SEO to grow Hope you enjoy For people who may not have heard of you, just let us know a bit about yourself and what you do and we'll get going from there.

LOGAN: Yeah, my name is Logan Bryant. I do content driven SEO for B2B SaaS is probably the best way I can describe it. I have been branching out a little bit from SEO in the past couple of years as well. going from purely focused on SEO to broader inbound demand generation, encompassing other aspects of digital marketing, particularly with an emphasis on CRO and paid search and a few other areas, ABM as well. But yeah, very deep background in SEO, and I do it in-house mainly for B2B SaaS teams. And at the moment, I'm actually branching out of in-house and starting to work for myself a little bit as well.

MICHAEL: Great. Awesome. Well, I came across you because of your work at Tipolti, you know, a B2B SaaS company and the work you did there on SEO. And we'll chat a little bit about that and some of the stuff you've got going on in the SEO world at the moment. But when people come on the show, I always like to find out how they discovered SEO and got into this world because it's a funny old world. And yeah, I'm always interested in what got people into it. So yeah. How did things start out for you?

LOGAN: I think that's a great question because I think SEO is the type of industry where everybody has a unique story. Certain other industries, you ask them and they have their path mapped out for them. Like, why did you become a lawyer? Well, my dad was a lawyer. Or why did you become a lawyer? Well, because law school was the next path after college or whatever it was. But with SEO, it's… People don't grow up thinking they want to become an SEO, so it's just like everybody stumbles into it in some unique way. For me, I actually did think I was going to go to law school. I was an English major. I enjoyed writing a lot. I went to college with an English background, thinking that I was going to Well, originally, before law school, I was thinking about creative writing, and then I realized that I didn't want to, you know, I wouldn't really be able to make a great living as a creative writer. So from there, I graduated with the English degree, still didn't know what I wanted to do. I was working for a, I was studying for the LSAT and working for a startup at the time, and doing multiple things for the startup. One of those responsibilities was managing the blog and optimizing the blog. And that's where I came across Whiteboard Friday videos. I had a couple of friends that were working for us. This was in Utah. I was, I guess, dating myself because I don't think this company is around anymore. But there was a marketing company called Orange Soda that looked interesting. And then I had a career counselor that gave me some pretty good advice. He said, you know, I was worried about what should I do with my career. And he was like, Sometimes a better question to ask is like, find a company that you would enjoy working for. And I was like, okay, this orange soda company seems cool. Ren Fishkin looks like he's having fun on his whiteboard Friday videos. And so it just seems more interesting to me and more like intellectually stimulating. And it seemed like the crowd that I wanted to be around, like the people just seemed friendly and open and you know, and that's still to this day, people share knowledge all the time. Everybody's quite friendly, I believe, in the SEO industry. So I shouldn't say everybody, but, but, you know, most of us are doing the industry, giving the industry a good name, I would say. So that's what got me into it.

MICHAEL: Yeah, great. Well, um, out of interest with that, our creative writing move and like deciding not to go down that path and what, you know, now in the SEO world, you know, chat GPT being the massive thing that everyone's talking about at the moment. Um, where do you see the future for creative writers? Do you think AI will get to the point that it can sort of put a lot of them out of work or is it going to be more just regurgitating stuff that's already been written before?

LOGAN: Oh man, that's, I think that's the question on all of our minds and I think it's, uh, What I think about in general with chat GPT is I think that we like to predict the future, and I just think that it can be a fun exercise, but I also think that the future usually ends up looking different than we all think. I look back at like, uh, there's a lot of predictions that haven't come true. Like, uh, we, we all, when Siri came out, we were all talking about the future of SEO. It's Siri was going to be the Google killer and everything was going to go to voice. And it was going to be like, how do you optimize for voice search? And I don't hear anybody talking about optimizing for voice search anymore. It doesn't mean I do think chat GPT will ask, don't get me wrong. I don't think it's going to be quite that. dramatic of a failure story i think it's gonna i think it is a game changer i do think it's gonna change not just seo but i think it's gonna. Change the broader field of technology and writing and communication and all of that exactly how it will change that part. So difficult for me to speculate to be honest i think it's the future is going to be different than even the experts think it will be in my opinion. Um, I mean, who could have predicted that? Like, I mean, who could have predicted that things are the way they are now? I mean, it's just, um, yeah. Speculation's a tricky one for me, but on the other hand, I did see like a, an article, there's like a guy that wrote a whole, um, children's book and published it in a weekend with chat GPT. And people were mad about it. They were like, hey, you know, like that's stealing our, you know, other creative writers work or, you know, like the, the, the AI is kind of like, you know, piggybacking on other creative writers work to get it published. So there was a lot of like controversy about that, but, um, I think the, the really, the, the, the hard one for me to wrap my head around is just the hard thing for me to wrap my head around is. how will we know what's true and what's not true? How will we know what's real and what's not real in the future? And that goes, doesn't just go for chat, but it goes for, um, uh, what's the, the visual one, um, Dali to Dali. Yeah. So like, there's so many things that it's just gonna be like, how can you tell what's real, what's fake in the future, especially as this gets more advanced. That's a little bit scary to me, to be honest. And back to your question of creative, creative writing, I think it's going to be really hard to distinguish at some point. And that's going to be tricky. So we'll see.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it's scary. It's scary. Like the video, like deep fake videos and the like in five years time could be causing wars, you know, if we're not careful. So hopefully it doesn't go down that path. But you know, for churning out content for SEO purposes, not so bad. But look, I wanted to bring you on because, as I said, I came across that article about your time at Tipalti. B2B, SaaS, you know, But in the B2B world, everyone always wants more leads. We need more leads for the sales team, we need to close more business. So I'm always interested to chat to people in that space about their work on SEO. And I saw that you're able to five times their SEO growth over your period there. And then out of that process, you had some cool stuff around VA testing and a few other bits and pieces. Yeah, maybe if you could give me a bit of a background about Tipalti, and I guess where things were when you came on there as an SEO, and I guess a little bit of the work you did there, and we can sort of delve into that a bit.

LOGAN: Yeah, no, Tipalti is a… Tipalti is, I think to this day even, still my most exciting, the most exciting part of my career. So I talk about it a lot. And when I joined Tipalti, it was in 2019. It was toward the Q4 of 2019, essentially. I think it was end of Q3. And they're a fintech B2B SaaS company. I joined at their Series C, and I stayed for just shy of four years or so. I left right around their Series F. So from Series C to Series F, I think at the moment, they're still valuated at, I want to say around $8.3 billion. So they're in that sort of like unicorn status of fintech companies. And, and that's, that's like, yeah, that's throughout that first, I would say, 2020 was when we saw the most growth with our organic program. And we 5x both on the level of traffic acquisition as well as SQLs. So those two metrics were 5x. And, you know, I should also clarify that the SQLs, the only reason they kept up with the traffic growth, because most of the time you see more traffic growth than leads growth. That's just the natural way of things. But the only reason that the SQL has kept up with the traffic growth was due to the CRO that we were able to apply to the website. So we grew leads, not just because of organic traffic acquisition, but also because of just improving the conversion funnel, so to speak.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and a lot of people in the SEO world are just so hyper-focused on traffic. You know, we need more traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic to get leads, but they don't always give so much thought to the conversion side of things, but it's massive. So, yeah, what was your approach? How were you able to generate such a strong conversion rate that your SQLs grew so much in line with your traffic? What sort of stuff did you focus on?

LOGAN: The big one for us was, and a lot of people will think that, you know, blogs are for top of funnel to a large extent they are, but there's a lot of bottom of funnel in a content strategy as well. And the big one for us was that we mapped out our topic. So it's almost like if you could think of content, I'll speak to it in terms of topic clusters, because that's something that resonates with a lot of SEOs. If you could map out your topic clusters on a B2B SaaS site, and then pair those topic clusters with a relevant gated asset, because that's one of the things that a lot of sites get wrong. Most sites either don't have a CTA at all on their content, so they'll write a post, they'll get it ranking, and the traffic is there, but they haven't given the users anything to do. Or they'll have a CTA and it'll be like, talk to sales, book a demo, you know, watch our video. It's not necessarily the right CTA for those users. So Topalty fortunately had a large library of gated assets. Some companies don't even have a large library of gated assets either. So we were fortunate that we actually had enough gated assets where we could do almost a one-to-one with the topic cluster or the topic hub and the gated asset. So by figuring out which gated asset is going to be most relevant to that topic and then pairing those up across all of our topic clusters, we saw better results than if we just said, hey, here's an article, book a demo with us. You know what I mean? So that was very effective for us.

MICHAEL: And how, when you say gated, how gated was it? Were they having to give like contact number and name, email, everything, or just email? And then you would warm them up over time.

LOGAN: Yeah, we did have a few fields. I can't remember the exact number, more fields than I would care to have. Right. I think most, most of us marketers, uh, would prefer fewer fields, uh, to more fields. Although the same time you do, we did have company limitations where, you know, you do have to meet, the system's requirements for counting that as a lead. So for us, I think it was like, I don't want to, some of this I don't even know if Topalty would want to speak to. So I would say check out Topalty's fields for yourself. But I think there were about, I want to say about six fields maybe, six or seven fields that users had to fill out in addition to name and phone number.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. And so another thing I came across was the link acquisition work you did whilst there. Because there's all sorts of different ways. Link building is such a massive part of SEO and there's all different attitudes towards it. Some people just refuse to do it whatsoever. Others will be paying for links left, right and center and not caring about any potential downside of that. I saw that you guys went with the approach of quite high quality assets on your website that you would use as link bait. Could you maybe delve into a bit that you did on the link acquisition side of things because I thought what you did was pretty cool.

LOGAN: Yeah, uh, well, we did, we, we explored a lot of link acquisition in different areas. Um, we, we not only did your traditional guest posting, we also did some digital PR. Um, I think those were the main two that we explored. Uh, we also did some kind of, uh, partnership link building and, and, um, leveraging existing relationships to build links and things like that as well. Uh, the digital PR, um, campaigns. I do want to give a shout out to my friend, James Brockbank. He's over, uh, he's based out of the UK, runs a company called digital loft. They helped us, um, uh, mainly with that digital PR side of things. I was too busy and had my hands full. There's no way I could have run that successful of a link building campaign, uh, with the internal resources that I had. And so, um, came up with the idea. One of them was profit per profits per employee. Where we research the top the companies that had the most profits per employee so looking at fortune five hundred companies for example looking at the profits of the number of employees they have and which ones were most profitable in other words like. This is not a real number, but if Visa had 500 employees and a certain amount of profits, then some of the numbers were ridiculous. Every employee was making the company a million dollars in some cases or something like that. So you can imagine, like, oh man, my salary as an employee, whether it's Visa or Goldman Sachs, these are just hypothetical examples. You'd be like, man, I'm making the company that much just by being employed here? It's pretty crazy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And that, that's the one I saw. And as I sort of laid out very nicely, the content, you know, different graphs and that sort of stuff. So when you say digital PR was, was this, um, agency would then go out and promote that to journalists, the marketplace, and then they would cite that in, you know, articles and you'd get links that way. And, um, yeah.

LOGAN: Oh, sorry. Go. Yep. Oh no, just, um, that's exactly right. I think it for, for a digital, um, My my thoughts on why they were successful i think one is having most important thing is having a catchy headline just like a page title like that's the first and most important thing that a journalist is gonna see it makes or breaks whether they even open your email. How that catchy headline so profits per employee being a good headline was. I'm part of the success and then just having a good research methodology and then building it out in a very digestible. Page format so if you look at that piece of content that's on topology dot com just really well designed. Really easy to get in and engage with and just overall it was really well done and then like you said the distribution and the outreach was a huge part of that as well.

MICHAEL: Okay. And you touched on guest posting as the other, I guess, pillar to your link building approach there. When it comes to that, you know, a lot of websites you go, you'll reach out to them and they'll say, yep, a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, 500 bucks, whatever the case may be. Where do you stand as an SEO on that and paying for links? Do you think it's a sort of must do because that's the nature of the world or do you shy away from that and try and get links other ways?

LOGAN: Yeah, I think, you know, I think Google would tell us don't do it. But on the other hand, I think that with everything you have to take, you have to take, you have to test things out for yourself. So that's, that's the mindset that I take with link building with digital PR with content with with anything. And so I think that just I think a lot of us seasoned SEOs have learned this by now that if you just go along with what Google says all the time, you may not be quite as successful as you could be if you occasionally questioned what information you're getting. So for me, I do think it is okay to buy links as long as you are very scrupulous about it. And as long as you know what you're looking for when you're buying links, there's ways to quickly get in trouble when you're buying links, as a lot of us know. And so you do have to be careful. But on the other hand, I think that, you know, we've seen a lot of programs work successfully with, you know, when it comes to buying links. I mean, if you and on the other hand, if you think about it, we're always buying links. I mean, when I hire a digital PR company to run a digital PR campaign, I'm not buying one link at a time, but I am buying their services to go out and build links for. If I were to hire an in-house link builder, an outreach manager to go out and do that link building, we're buying their services to go and build links. And so there's a cost, an inherent cost to link building. The only way that that cost is not there, where Google might say it's purely ethical or purely, I shouldn't even say ethical, because I think even buying links is ethical, But where it's purely, I guess, white hat is if you're just acquiring links through publishing your content and building a brand and things like that. And luckily for Tipalti, we had a brand and there was a lot invested in brand building too. So fortunately for us, we could rely on that brand presence as well. And that was a big part of our success too.

MICHAEL: Yeah, great. Yeah, totally agree. There's so many semantics at play when it comes to link building. You can't exchange value or time or anything like that for a link. Google's propaganda machine is out there talking about it and that's what they say and then the reality of the world and what works and the fact that most of it's not being detected if you do it the right way. So I guess as SEOs, you've got to be able to wade through that and make the right decisions.

LOGAN: And again, I would just put one extra thing on that, which is just you do have to know what you're doing. You have to really be cautious about it. I know SEOs, seasoned SEOs that have gotten their sites penalized from building links, and they know what they're doing when they're buying links. So, uh, you, you still have to really know what to look out for. You have to be able to look for the side, the signs of like, is this link part of a con, uh, part of a, um, a, uh, a PBN or is this link, you know, um, uh, I guess, uh, yeah, there's, there's a lot like, is the right for us page explicitly advertising or, you know, there's all kinds of things to little subtleties to look out for.

MICHAEL: um when you're purchasing links that just you know i think it's okay to do for sure but i also think that you do have to be very cautious yeah absolutely well um another thing i i really liked about your time at topolti was the the testing side of things that you sort of got into so let's say over your time there you created content link acquisition that sort of stuff is going on but Where I thought it was pretty interesting was you were using a team of VAs to help you with testing different SEO elements like title tags, for example, to see what impact that would have and if you can boost a ranking from, say, position 5 to 1 by tweaking title tags. And that's, I think, probably something that a lot of businesses aren't necessarily doing or even agencies running campaigns for businesses. You might do keyword research and mapping at the start of a campaign, get it all up and then kick off that, you know, your meta title tags are done. But where you were coming from was that you can test that and see if you can improve things. So could we delve into that a little bit? Sort of, I guess, how you set up your testing program, what you were testing and yeah, how you went about it.

LOGAN: Yeah. So, um, what, what I'll say as well is that that was like the first thing that we optimized or one of the first things, uh, when I started the campaign, in fact, anytime I work with a new client, that's one of the very first things that I try to get our projects that I try to get out the door as quickly as possible is which title tags looked under, under optimized and which ones can I test quickly Because if I can test a few title tags quickly, I can then demonstrate to the client that, hey, we can actually get your results in weeks rather than six months that everybody else is talking about. It doesn't mean that you're going to get leads immediately. It doesn't mean that you're going to get the end result in a matter of weeks. But to be able to at least show the client that, hey, we got you more traffic. And we did it in a matter of weeks. You know, there's not a lot of teams or agencies that are doing that right now. And so that's why that's the first thing that I did. So coming in and optimizing those title tags, or testing those title tags is what we did. Typically, I would do all of the in terms of how our program was set up, I had a process that functions somewhat similar to like what a CRO process Looks like where you like it's a lot of them will have like a road map or a kind of a priority log so i built out my testing dashboard. And then i would identify the opportunities and usually that's by looking for things like hey what's the gap between clicks and impressions in other words if there's a lot of impressions but very few clicks i could probably do something here and then. Or what are the pages that the client cares about? These are what I like to call the client's money pages. Where does the client really want to rank or where do they make the most profit if we can get them from five to one or even from five to three or whatever that looks like, right? So identifying the high value money pages, doing some of that opportunity analysis, And then I would just do, I would go spend a lot of time doing some search and surf analysis. And by a lot of time, I don't mean you have to like. It varies, you know. You can do it quickly sometimes. Sometimes just by doing a screaming frog crawl, you can see all of the under-optimized page titles, right? I'm sure we've all been there before where we do that screaming frog crawl and we're like, oh, clearly a developer built this website that doesn't know how to optimize their titles. And then taking that and then doing some SERP analysis, and then I would write the titles myself. And then I would simply have the VA go and implement the titles on WordPress, just because, you know, I could certainly do that myself, but it was more efficient for us to do it with a VA.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. And so over time with testing of title tags, were you finding certain formats for them in terms of the structure or, you know, I see sometimes people talk about putting emojis in title tags to try and influence click through rate. Were there any learnings that you were able to pick up along the way with your testing?

LOGAN: Absolutely. I think that the, the, uh, the writing of title tags, I think of it, like I think of all of SEO as an art and a science. And that's actually one of the things that attracted me to SEO. I came from that creative background. I wanted something where I could use that creative thinking and that writing ability. But I also was interested in the science side of SEO, the data, the technical aspects, etc. That is very much true with title testing because you are collecting the data, you're finding opportunities based on the data, you're very data-driven in this whole process. But when it comes to the writing of the title tag, that is more of an art. And so treating every one of these titles with a hypothesis is really the way to do it, especially since, as most of us know by now, every single search result or search page is totally unique. And these SERPs are changing week by week, day by day, sometimes hour by hour. So whatever formula you could possibly create for a well-optimized title tag, you have to go into every SERP environment without those assumptions. Because I may find a formula that's going to work like gangbusters in one area, And then I might go to another area and find that same formula doesn't work quite as well. Now, there are still patterns that do work. For example, anytime you're on a comparison, where the search intent is mostly comparison-based, like if somebody is searching for AP automation tools or AP automation software, and you have like Gartner or Capterra or other, you know, kinds of software review sites that are taking up that space. It is a best practice to include a word like best in the title tag. The best 23, you know, a number. And so those are formulas that can be applied in multiple areas, right? We know that numbers work. We know that sometimes these superlatives like best or top or things like that kind of work. But on the other hand, there's times when just doing that thing that everybody else is doing just doesn't work. You're not differentiating yourself. And so I do like to think creatively and I like to think a lot about the user intent and the search intent and go a little bit deeper on that. But then the other part of the art is that you have to fit it in a small 600 pixel space. So like doing all of that, like how do you differentiate? How do you have the best click through rate? How do you outrank your competitors? How do you make it an engaging title and how do you do all of that in 600 pixels? And so that's where the testing comes into play and you don't know until you actually test it and see if that time works.

MICHAEL: And so in this day and age with title tags, like when I first started SEO, when we would do keyword mapping, we would just take like the two highest value keywords for that page, the topic of the page, and just put it in the title tag with like a pipe or a dash in between it. And then maybe the brand on the end. And that was it. Because you're trying to get as much context, as many keywords in there. Whereas now we're in the era where Google rewrites title tags if it feels like it and that, you know, it can sort of, understand the whole page a lot more and the title tag still is the number one factor on a page. But are you biased more towards writing towards the user and trying to make it compelling and focus on click-through rate? Or is it important to try and shoehorn those keywords in there still because Google does need that context? What are you seeing with your testing?

LOGAN: Yeah, I do as often as possible, try to include the exact match keyword in the title tag. As often as possible, there's definitely times when you can break from the exact match, but you still want it there in some sort of a phrase match kind of a fashion, right? Like it still has to be there in order for Google to really kind of give you credit in that title tag. So You want the keyword in the title tag for sure, whether it's exact match or phrase match. And I think it is much more, Google is far more capable now of understanding context. And it's far more capable of understanding that keyword in the context of the surrounding words or phrases or even the full article itself that goes along with it. So, whereas before you, you would, like you said, you'd just be like, okay, primary keyword dash company name, or sometimes like two or three keywords dash company name. And that did work like that. I was there for that. We did, we did that a lot. It worked for a while, but to your point, it's evolved to a point where you, there's other parts of the search intent that get that, that Google picks up on due to related searches. And we can usually see those other questions people have in like the people also ask section or, um, or in the auto suggest or, or other other ways. So we know that Google is understanding these keywords with much more broad context now and making your title tag, keeping that broader context in the title tag creation process is also, and the article creation process for that matter is also important. So, you know, if, you know, if somebody is wondering, you know, like, what, what is I don't know, I'm trying to think of a good keyword example, but like, what, what is. the best SEO podcast, like, you don't want to just say, what is the best SEO podcast, you might want to say, what's the best SEO, or what are some of the best SEO podcasts for 2020, 2030, you know, so things like that, knowing that there's you need, you need to have some, like, in that case, having the year might work, right. But in other cases, it won't. So I think these are things that SEO is broadly know. But I think that That additional time thinking about the search intent and placing yourself in users shoes is something that we don't always make enough time for and i think that's what is able to. look, I would rather have one article rank, uh, in the top three for a really, really important search term, then have to do the work of going out and creating 40 different articles to get the same traffic levels on, on long-term keywords, right? So that's where title testing can be a, um, a competitive differentiator for some, uh, for some companies.

MICHAEL: Very cool. And with the testing app, is it as simple as, you know, you create a new title tag, put it in and then monitor rankings and search console, click through rate, and then report back in X amount of time to, to see if it's worked, you know, using your VA to handle that process. Was that sort of how you did it?

LOGAN: Yeah, exactly. So, um, that is exactly how we did it. Uh, there were times one, one of my first tests at Topalty, We saw results within 24 hours, like in Search Console. I think the keyword was iBAN numbers. That was the keyword. We had a page already. We did a test with it. And then the next day, the day after I did the test, I got excited because I saw clicks going up. And I pulled my CMO over, I was like, Hey, and this was like, within, like, I think I was maybe two weeks into the role there or something like that. So I was still trying to show that like, Hey, I can actually do this job. I can get you more clicks and things like that. So, uh, and I just showed him, came over to my desk, checked out the monitor and he saw that we had gotten more clicks for I bet number. He's like, that's pretty cool. I've never seen results that quickly. So that, that was in the 24 hour period, but. That's not always the case. More often than not, that page happened to be getting crawled relatively quickly and things like that. More often than not, you have to do the optimization, resubmit the page to Search Console, and then check over the course of two to four weeks, I would say, in most cases. And if your site is not getting crawled as often, or if it's on a more competitive search environment, those results could be slower or even really hard to detect and measure. There's definitely times when you do a test and it doesn't go anywhere, and that's why it's a test. But there's also times when you do a test and it does go somewhere and you get really happy about it.

MICHAEL: So outside of title tags, was there any other areas that you were able to test and see clear-cut examples of improvement?

LOGAN: Absolutely. We did URL switch tests, which is interesting. Not a lot of SEOs do URL switch tests for good reason. It can be dangerous to change your URLs. And when you're doing a URL switch test, you do have to use a redirect, whether that's a 301 or a 302. But you do have to use a 300-level redirect on a URL switch test. Um, and you know, and, and so that's more tricky. I like to do URL switch tests when I'm fairly confident that the new URL is going to be better. Um, cause I've also done URLs switch tests where it didn't go well and it was harder to revert that change and get the search engine to recognize that. So it's a little more tricky, but it also works like the URL in my mind is treated somewhat similar to a title tag. just in the sense of what the string is. To me, it doesn't matter which subfolder it's in. It's not a site architecture kind of thing where you're trying to have pages in a content hub based on URL structure. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the keyword context of the URL. Again, just like a title tag. Is the URL Accurately describing what the page is about and is that connected to the search intent is the URL like the title connected to the search engine or at least the primary keyword in some fashion so. That's a good test we. I would say the second. highest, um, next to title tags, the thing we got the most results from, uh, would be answer box. So featured snippet testing, um, re rewriting those, whatever our answer was on that page. Um, we would look for any first, we would look for the opportunities. Once again, look for any pages that were in striking distance, usually bottom of page one, middle of page one, where we thought, hey, if it's middle of page one, and I'm at least close to, you know, the top three results, then if my answer is just a little bit better, maybe Google will give me that answer box. And we treated that like a test. The difference there is that it's a lot easier to see if your test was a positive or negative or neutral test, because if you get the answer box, it's just binary, like, hey, we got it. That's a winning result, just getting the answer box. You don't have to worry so much about measuring the traffic to see if it worked or didn't work.

MICHAEL: Did you find with that, you're trying to optimize for the answer box, just changing the content is enough or were you doing things around, you know, like sort of jump links in the pages or the structure, you know, like heading tag in the answer and the way you structure the page as well?

LOGAN: Yeah, we did. Usually, where we got the most results was changing the answer, making it more direct, cutting out the fat, or trimming the fluff, making it super direct, making it the most accurate that we could possibly make it. And so the paragraph itself, or if it was a list, maybe it was a list, or the table, whatever it was, optimizing that was really where we got the most wins. but sometimes just changing the h1 that went with it helped a little bit more um sometimes i think um trying to remember what worked for us um and you know usually i'd want the answer high up on the page i'm a little bit rusty on my answer box stuff i'd probably spit out a bunch of our learnings uh if i was if i'd been doing the more of this in the past month or so but um Yeah. I mean, we did test out other things. We tested out moving it higher up on the page. We tested out changing the heading that was connected with it. It wasn't always the H1. A lot of times it was the H2. And I would say, yeah, but by and far, most of the time it was changing the context of the paragraph itself was the most impactful, was the easiest way to win anyway.

MICHAEL: I've found keeping it direct and just looking at sentences and cutting out fluff and cutting it again and just cutting it within an inch of its life so that then for Google's purposes they can just scrape it and put it in their search results. You want to make it easy for them to do what they're trying to do with it.

LOGAN: Yeah. And even rewording it, like we would sometimes just take that whole paragraph that we had, we would just scrap it entirely. We would check out what other people wrote and then we would just like rewrite it. Like, and that would cause like sometimes a more radical revision of that paragraph would help us win as well. So I would say for SEO is don't limit yourself to just. Yes, we want to make it direct. Yes, we want to cut things out. But don't limit yourself to that. It's easy to get in that box of thinking, well, I'll change this. I'll change that. But saying, hey, I want to throw this out entirely. And I want to do a whole different paragraph here. That's not quite as common. But that can be really effective, especially when you're stuck and you're not getting there. So don't be afraid to really rewrite.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree with that. Well, this has been really interesting. I think SEO testing is something that a lot of people might be scared to do. You might think the work's done, I don't want to mess with anything because it might go the other way. But the wins that can be had by going out there and testing things and seeing what works and then rolling that out definitely, in my opinion, far outweighs the risk of ruining everything. So it's been great chatting with you about that. What I want to do is, you know, before wrapping things up, I'd like to ask everyone that comes on the show the same three questions about SEO, just to get their perspective on things and maybe learn some new things. So I'm going to fire off three questions at you about the world of SEO and get your take. The first one is, what do you think is the most underrated thing in SEO?

LOGAN: Uh, well, I am biased, but I'm going to say SEO testing. Um, so that I am bias as, as you may know by now, but, um, yeah, that's just been my observation that it's just not being utilized enough in the SEO industry. And, and what we were able to do was scaling up to a high, high velocity testing program. Uh, to me, it was a clear indicator that we're under utilizing this as a lever. And we have a lot of levers at our fingertips, linking, you know, we have linking external links and internal links, we have, you know, rewrites, we have new content, there's a new content, still one of the most impactful levers. But I would say testing is the most underutilized lever, in my opinion.

MICHAEL: Okay. And then conversely, what do you think the biggest myth in SEO is?

LOGAN: Uh, biggest myth. I think there's a lot. I think there's, um, I was thinking about this earlier. I think there was a lot of myths. Um, do you mind if I do two or three? Yeah, go for it. Um, the biggest one on the, this is less of a myth amongst SEOs, but more of a myth about SEO from, hiring managers and C-level folk, which is that SEOs don't need resources or that if we hire an SEO professional in-house, that person will be able to solve all of our company's SEO problems and they'll grow traffic and it's going to be magical. But in reality, you know, I'd say the biggest method amongst amongst those hiring managers and executives is is thinking that one in-house professional is going to do the job without resources when in reality. if you're hiring an in-house SEO professional, you need to be able to create a budget and that SEO professional needs to be able to manage that budget in the same way that hiring a PPC professional without any budget would be a mistake, right? So that's one. And then on the more specific to the SEO industry, some of the myths that aren't exactly myths, but are more like things that we as an industry, over index on or over invest in, which I would say, like, on the technical side of things. And let me be clear, I don't think these are myths. I think these are just ways our industry could do better. So like on the technical side of things, I think we're a little bit over invested or over indexed on A lot of things technical, uh, core web vitals being a very strong example. We like to talk about things that are sexy. We like to talk about things that are in the news. So when Google says something about core web vitals being built into the algorithm or, or anything around that, it becomes like conversation fodder in our community. But that doesn't just because it's conversation fodder doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be the most effective thing to do for our clients. And, and we get, we get tripped up by that all the time because we're talking about these things. They, they're, they're sexy to talk about, but they're not necessarily effective. Now, core vitals can be effective for clients, which is why I say this isn't a myth. It's just something we sometimes over overdue a little bit. And then. Same with link building, I think, is the third one. I think sometimes we over-index a little bit on link building. Not to say that link building doesn't work. Clearly, we've done link building at Tipalti, and I'm a fan of link building. But on the other hand, it is hard to measure ROI, and we got much stronger results from our content program than we did the technical or the off-site side of things.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. Yep. I would agree with that. The SEO news machine and the echo chamber on Twitter, I think the example I like to think of along those lines is when helpful content update was first announced, whenever it was last year, the world went into meltdown if you were on Twitter. People were off rewriting their website because they thought they were going to be smashed. the update rolled out and you know, it was a bit of a blip on the radar. So people can sort of, I guess, buy into the hype without testing things, you know, coming back to the topic of testing, it's really about what is actually working on your site, you know, in reality, as opposed to what's the hot new thing in the SEO world, so to speak. Yeah, totally. Cool. The last question I have, you know, we in the SEO world, bit nerdy, we like our software, we like our tools, but if you had to pick just three to get the job done, you know, and you couldn't use any other tools, where would you be going to complete your SEO arsenal of tools?

LOGAN: Three tools. I, uh, I'm a fan of Ahrefs for sure. That can be interchanged with SEMrush. So I would almost put them as one tool because you could you could be a summer fan or an Ahref fan. They fill mostly the same, uh, mostly the same, uh, purposes, not, not all a hundred percent, but, um, so I'd go with one of those. Um, and then I would do screaming frog is definitely a must have. And then I would do, um, probably something like, um, like clear scope, uh, for, for content optimization. Although I did leave out, you know, a lot of people might add chat GPT in there now, but we'll see. I haven't quite made that. It hasn't quite gotten into my top three, but it could be, could be one day.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, it's only a couple of months old. There's a lot of Chat GPT experts around at the moment for a tool that's only been around for two minutes. So I think in time we'll find cool, cool ways of using it, but definitely. Yeah.

LOGAN: Don't know if it's, like I said, when a topic's hot, everybody wants attention. So. Yeah, they're going to jump on it.

MICHAEL: Well, look, it's been great chatting with you, Logan. For people that want to connect with you, get in touch after the show, where can they go to get in touch?

LOGAN: My website is good. It's just loganbryant.com. So that's a good place. I've got Twitter, handle it, Twitter's Logan's Notions. And then I've got LinkedIn as well. And that's just, I think, the LinkedIn slash IN slash Logan Bryant. So I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, I would say out of the platforms, but I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn, and on the website.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the show. It's been great chatting with you.

LOGAN: Have a great day. Awesome. Thank you, Michael. Cheers.

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