SEO Q&A Week 7

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 everybody and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. My name is Arthur Fabik and I'm here with Michael Costin. How are you doing? Doing very well. Doing very, very well. It's weird when you get thrown the intro, right? Like I don't know what to say sometimes.

MICHAEL: We nailed it. It was almost going to be the first ever intro that we didn't acknowledge how bad the intro was. I didn't think it was a bad intro. I was saying it was a good intro. I know, but every episode we talk about the intro, we assess it on the spot along with the listeners. I'm sure they love it.

ARTHUR: They do. Which is why we're doing as well as we are.

MICHAEL: Rocketing up the charts at the moment. Download count doubling month on month.

ARTHUR: It's just up and to the right.

MICHAEL: Yep. Which is always good in the SEO world. Nothing but green. Unless it's your, uh, what would be bad? spammy negative SEO backlinks up into the right. It's not so good.

ARTHUR: Now this is a bad intro. It's all right.

MICHAEL: Um, episode and search console up into the right. Not good. Nope. Um, what else? This, this topic, this topic. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Okay.

MICHAEL: We'll move on. Onward. So we're doing a Q and a week, the seventh installment. Can you believe we've done seven of them?

ARTHUR: Is this episode 69 or 70? This is episode 71. Oh, wow. Geez.

MICHAEL: You're out of, you're out of sync. Cause you don't know when they get published. No, this is episode 71.

ARTHUR: I would have liked to have been on episode 69. That would have been fun. You were. Oh, okay, cool. Well, I wish I would have known that it was episode 69. Cause we would have used that.

MICHAEL: You could make an immature 16 year old boy joke.

ARTHUR: Yes.

MICHAEL: Well, I'm glad you didn't know if that's where you did it now.

ARTHUR: So Anyway, Q&A week, week seven.

MICHAEL: Yes. We have a bunch of questions. How many do we have? Seven? Seven for seven. Seven for episode seven of the Q&A week. Lucky seven. Let's just get straight into it, eh?

ARTHUR: Let's.

MICHAEL: All right. First one is coming to us from Lewis. Now Lewis wrote us an email and the first half is very complimentary to us. I won't read that part out, but I just want everyone to know that there was compliments there. Let's get into the question. I was wondering if you would be willing to give some insight into if you believe it is still relevant to structure your titles for Google as so. Then the structure he's given is title, website name. So that's the structure or what he wants to know is, is this no longer important? The extra space on the title could improve click-through rate and other factors. So what do you think about that one? Do you, cause it was always the, you know, when I first started doing SEO, doing keyword mapping documents, Jesus, that's going back. We used to do it on pen and paper. It would always be the case that you would put the brand name on the website URL at the end of the title tag.

ARTHUR: I think that's what we still do now. That's what I do.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. Do you believe it's necessary to have the brand name?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Depends on the page. I mean, not necessarily.

MICHAEL: I don't think it, I don't think so. Like if I was to, if I was to teach someone now, I would say it's more about working the keyword into a title that is compelling, like trying to encourage a click. So putting in a number, you know, like 37 X or whatever to make it compelling, but just work the keyword and you don't need to put the brand name at the end always.

ARTHUR: And you can always just add it in or just be truncated or go and show. So like you can still have your whatever, how many pixel or character length you want for your page title. Just don't worry about the brand being cut off.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, I think he's getting at with his question does removing the brand from it and not having it truncate improve click-through rate potentially, you know, that's something you'd need to test yourself in search console and see how it works with it and see how it works without it. But as a general rule, I am a fan of, look, I will, I will still, if I'm just going a basic, let's say it's Rhinoplasty Sydney is the page. That's the first thing that came to your mind. Yeah. I don't know why. You know why it's from Kyle Roof. Rhinoplasty Plano, Plano, whatever that country, that city in Texas, that state, that suburb in Texas was. Yes. Do you remember? Friend of the show? Yes.

ARTHUR: I remember the friend of the show.

MICHAEL: Yep. Well, anyway, our friend on the show, Rhino plastic, Sydney slash brand. I often, when it's just a single keyword, short keyword title. Yeah.

ARTHUR: I still put the Brandon. Yeah. If you're doing like an e-com site or something and templating out better descriptions, I've met a data, sorry, page titles. You're often just doing whatever the keywords are that you want to rank for and then the brand.

MICHAEL: But I would say I would prioritize above that. Let's say you had two keywords that you're going for. You can work them both into the title along with like something that makes it compelling to click on. I would favor that over a keyword, a title tag that has a brand in it.

ARTHUR: Yes. Cause you're probably going to rank for the brand anyway because of your URL. So.

MICHAEL: Yeah, Google knows what your brand is. It knows the site.

ARTHUR: It doesn't need that. So unless you have like OCD, like some people and want to have everything like consistent. No, you don't need to have the brand. Yeah. In your page title.

MICHAEL: Lewis. Lewis. Hope you like that one. Let's move on to the next question. You want to do this one?

ARTHUR: I can. Uh, so this is from Sammy. How do I know if the company doing my SEO is doing a good job or not? Good question, Sammy. Good one, Sammy.

MICHAEL: I think we've done. I think we have done a similar one. We've done articles, not articles. What am I saying? We've done podcast episodes on this. Off the top of my head, I don't know. But by the end of this answer, I will have found the ones that we've done on this very topic so I can reference them. But how do you know if your company is doing a good job or not? Well, the first and most immediately obvious one would be, do you have traffic? Is your traffic improving?

ARTHUR: Are you ranking? Are your leads improving? Are your rankings improving? Yes. So there's going to be different KPIs and different metrics you want to look at. I guess typically when you're reporting, when we report for an SEO client, we report on organic traffic, the conversions, so whether it's form submissions, whether it's phone calls or revenue like transactions. And then rankings as well. So we'll monitor a bunch of keywords and track the rankings. We do a benchmark report where we look at, you know, the domain rating, different metrics related to organic visibility. So, you know, top three keywords, page one, keywords, keywords, and positions 11 to a hundred, um, and then individual keyword rankings.

MICHAEL: Have I said that already? Yep. Yeah. But basically keyword rankings.

ARTHUR: Keyword rankings. Yeah. So like those would be the main things that I'd be looking at. Um, but ultimately it just comes down to like, are you getting more traffic and more conversions? Cause that's the most important thing at the end of the day, like rankings doesn't matter. You can rank for number one for everything, but if you're not getting conversions or leads or revenue, then who gives a shit. Yep. I'm gonna swore there. I guess I did swear.

MICHAEL: You pretty much swore twice. Do we have an official rule about swearing?

ARTHUR: I don't think we do. Can we? Is that going to like throw us out of like the PG category and show us Spotify? Probably.

MICHAEL: So yeah, I guess it's less than ideal too. Okay. But I would also say, what about, what about the way they communicate? You know, like, do they stay in touch? Do they let you know what they're doing and why?

ARTHUR: Well, are they, yeah, are they giving, are they sending through a report? Are they keeping updated on the results or are they, you know, building links? Are they reporting on the links that they're building or are they just this mysterious creature in the background that you're paying a lot of money to just, you know. doing nothing potentially, so.

MICHAEL: Mysterious creature. Some sort of SEO creature there.

ARTHUR: I didn't even know where I was going there myself. But to me, those are the key metrics you look at. Like the obvious ones would be traffic, conversions, rankings, usability.

MICHAEL: That's really it. And if your campaign's young, like let's say six months or less, you may not have a ton of traffic and leads and sales, but Are you seeing the signs of, you know, a lot more pages ranking content showing up in the SERPs? Yes. So I would say also go back and listen to episode nine. You know what? I was trying to find it while you were talking and I realized I wasn't really listening to what you were saying and it was harder than I thought. So, um, I've only found, which is usual, you know, I'm pretty good at not listening to you, but, um, episode nine. Which was a topic. What a throwback. That's less than 10. That one nine. That sucks. 60 episodes ago. Jeez. That episode might not even, we used to have just intro music with no voice. Do you remember that? Nope. Then we had the super American guy and now we have the Australian guy. This one may or may not be the just music intro, but anyway. That one is SEO salesman BS, learn it, avoid it and make your life easier. So it's sort of looking at the angles that dodgy SEO companies use. So I guess you can listen to that episode and then apply what you've learnt there to the way these companies are dealing with you. And if they're using some of those dodgy tactics or lines or angles, then they're probably not doing a good job, Sammy. So I hope that helps. Let's move on.

ARTHUR: Let's question three. So this one's for Martin is having two or three different SEO agencies working on my website effective or not short answer. No, it's not effective too many cooks. In the kitchen or what's the one like too many cooks spoil the broth. That's the one. Yep. SEOs can be funny. You know, some people might have conflicting opinions on certain things. So that obviously was an issue if they're all working on one site. you don't know what they're all doing as well. They're probably not communicating to one another. So it's just, yeah, you don't, there's going to be clashes and yeah.

MICHAEL: One could be building good links. One could be building terrible links. One could be focusing on, let's say content. The other is saying that local SEO is important. I guess if that was happening, it might, that might be a good thing because they're nailing different parts of it. So,

ARTHUR: If you have, for example, someone that's like a SEO, like a content person and a link person and they're communicating.

MICHAEL: And a local SEO specialist.

ARTHUR: And they're working together, then I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. But if you've just got three different separate SEO people just all doing their own free reign on the site. Yes. No, because it's just going to cause problems.

MICHAEL: And that's kind of how I understood this question is having two or three different ones working on it. They're not going to be working together most of the time.

ARTHUR: No, they're probably competing, probably all trying to steal your business away from.

MICHAEL: What they'll all do is blame each other when anything goes wrong. What happens in the SEO world is, you know, a client can be working with an agency and then some other agency will come along and just try and find little things to say that will make the client think the agency is doing no good because they want to win that business themselves. And. I can just imagine the nightmare that would be involved with having multiple agencies or doing stuff on the site. Who do you turn to when something goes wrong? You know, it's like, if you're getting your house built, you're getting your house built. The builder has a whole bunch of subbies working on it that any of them could damage something or do something wrong. And you're not going to care about that. You've got the builder to go to and complain about. But if you have four different builders, who ultimately takes responsibility for- I can tell you none of them also.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Knowing builders. What do you reckon about that analogy? Not your best, but it made sense. I got excited as it popped in my head. Yeah, I could see the cogs turning in your head as I was talking, you're looking for an analogy. That was good, I liked it. Okay, thank you. So yeah, no, it's not effective. Modern, moving on.

MICHAEL: Okay, what is, The best page speed metric Charlie wants to know the best out of all metrics. So where there's multiple tools, each of them have metrics of their own and we have to pick what we think the best is now. Best. What does that mean? What does best mean? Let's get, uh, let me just find the definition. Esoteric here. Esoteric or what's the word I'm looking for?

ARTHUR: Anyway, to me, best means like best is the most excellent or desirable type of quality.

MICHAEL: Yeah. There you go. But are we looking at it as an SEO nerd? Like, wow, that's super fast, but users don't care about it. Or are we thinking about best in terms of the best for the people using the website?

ARTHUR: Do you want to throw it back to Charlie and get him to elaborate?

MICHAEL: Charlie? Yep. Actually Charlie's on the line. Let me just bring him in. Charlie, how's it going? Nah, just kidding. Just kidding. You guys thought we'd gone to another technical level with the show, but no, Charlie's not on the line. I'm going to speak for Charlie and say, that it's for the user ultimately. For me, like if you, clients when they want a fast website, they go load it and see if it's fast and they're happy when it loads quickly. Yeah. So what is a metric that indicates that?

ARTHUR: Let's just say we'll look at Core Web Vitals and Google metrics. Okay. So what do you think first, first and foremost?

MICHAEL: To me, it's whichever one of those metrics indicates when a page is, the client can see it and use it. So LCP? LCP. The one that's hard to pronounce? Largest Contentful Paint. Yep. Okay. Because that's, that means that someone has typed in the address or they've clicked the link and then they're seeing something on the screen. They're seeing the site. They know what they're on. Now they can start moving off to other parts of the site, which is usable.

ARTHUR: And I think that's the one Google probably looks at the most as well. when it comes to core vitals. So yeah, I agree.

MICHAEL: Don't worry about time to first bite. I concur. Other metrics that other tools give you. Let's just go with that one.

ARTHUR: Cool. Easy. Thank you. Charlie.

MICHAEL: Charlie. I like that one. Let's move on to- Marques. Is it Marques? Marques. I think it's Marques. It's like the motorbike rider, Mark Marques. Do social media- Oh, this is the first name, Marques. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, Marques.

ARTHUR: That's all right. That's me. You threw me off here. Do social media links count as backlinks? Yes. Yeah, they do. Cause they're a backlink, but they're not technically like a SEO backlink in the sense that they're going to provide much.

MICHAEL: You know, link equity. They don't matter to your SEO.

ARTHUR: No, ultimately. So although they are technically a backlink because they're linking back to your website, they're not going to move the needle when it comes to, you know, rankings, organic visibility, domain rating, things like that.

MICHAEL: So they're a backlink. You know what they do count for is like your foundation, your pillar links. Yeah, for sure. So I guess it's, you need to have them, but don't think that you're going to go out and rank for rhinoplasty Sydney just off building, you know, tweeting a link.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I just read something not long ago, which is, makes perfect sense. You know, the easier it is to build a link, the less value it's going to provide to your website, which is good rule of thumb. I like that one. So simple, yet so effective.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I'm just trying to think of any holes in that, but I can't think of any.

ARTHUR: No, like the easier it is, or the cheaper a link is to build, the less value it's going to have.

MICHAEL: That goes for everything with SEO, really. Most things in life, I guess. Yeah, life. Really. The easier or cheaper something is, generally the crapper it is.

ARTHUR: Yes. Not to say it's crapper, but it's just not going to be, it's not going to move the needle. The least less impactful it is. I hope that answers your question Marques or Marques or Mark. Question six, how could you calculate keyword difficulty manually without any SEO tool? That's from Cameron. So.

MICHAEL: First I'd say, why?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Why can't you?

MICHAEL: Well, it sounds like time. Cause yeah, there's SEO tools. So just use them.

ARTHUR: Then this maybe hasn't got the money.

MICHAEL: There's no budget for a tool.

ARTHUR: Assuming that he has keyword planner and he can see the search volume for a keyword, I would say, I guess that's still a tool, but it's not an SEO tool. So using keyword planner, if you have a look and see the search volume, and I guess have a look at the CPCs, if the search volume's high and the cost per clicks are high, then you can assume that it's going to be a very difficult keyword to rank for, is my rule of thumb.

MICHAEL: That's a good one thing. And looking at the keyword itself and figuring out like, is it commercial? You know, like a question, what is pizza? That's probably not going to, you'd have to be an idiot not to know what pizza is first and foremost. But secondly, um, generally questions like that, informational things are less competitive than a commercial keyword like rhinoplasty Sydney. I get a lot of mileage out of rhinoplasty Sydney. Yep. So, or, um, you know, uh, best mortgage broker near me generally, if it's got commercial intent behind it, that's going to be a more difficult keyword. Yes. Look at the industry you're serving and you know, what are people spending in this? You know, let's say it's a personal injury lawyer where the lawyers make tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. That's going to be competitive because the product being sold is expensive. Yeah. So the potential riches on offer to the people that rank well are high. Yes. I would maybe look at the search results themselves. I always used to be able to see a weak search result by searching like a commercial keyword and seeing if yellow pages and random like directory sites ranked back in the day used to always be an example of a weaker SERP. Not so much these days, but like, yeah.

ARTHUR: Because there's no sites ranking, which means there's potential to be at the very top.

MICHAEL: What you wouldn't want to see is like really well-established, obviously big brand websites that look like they've been around for a long time. They would not probably have a lot of links. Like you can't tell this because you don't have a big e-commerce site or something like that.

ARTHUR: Massive e-commerce site.

MICHAEL: Like a Meijer or JB Hi-Fi or Officeworks or Good Guys or Kmart or Big W. Or even like Finder, Compare the Market, like those big lead gen comparison sites.

ARTHUR: There's a lot of ads as well.

MICHAEL: Yep. Yeah. What? Yep. Yeah. Look at how much ads. What about his one? You could get the domain of the top rank sites and run a who is check on them. Can you see, you can't see how long the domain has been registered for Australian domains. So forget that one.

ARTHUR: You can probably run it through web archive and see how long the site's been like, there you go.

MICHAEL: So if it's been around for ages and then you want to come in as this, uh, Johnny come lately and rank, you're probably not going to.

ARTHUR: Johnny come lately. Did you make that up?

MICHAEL: Was that another Johnny come lately? It's a thing. I haven't heard that yet. Another that you haven't heard every episode. You just, what are you doing?

ARTHUR: The age gap.

MICHAEL: We just confirmed earlier that we're both millennials, different ends of the confirmed, confirmed. All right. Well that's about all. What else could you do with that at all? That's a fair bit there. You're going to be able to figure it out.

ARTHUR: I think we've given a lot of information there for Cameron.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I hope you like that one, Cameron. All right. Now, Melissa, Melissa wants to know, this is a big one. How do I permanently remove a page from Google? Okay. But what I want to ask first and foremost, Melissa is, do you control the page or do you not? Oh, good question. Cause if you don't control the page, that's going to be hard.

ARTHUR: So I guess assuming that she is controlling the page.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: So the assumption is it's her site. There's a URL that's on Google been indexed and she wants to remove. How would you go about doing that?

MICHAEL: I would. Go into my robots file and make sure that the URL is blocked out in your robots. Yes. I would also go into the code for the page and make sure that I have like no index. Yes. I follow all of the nodes in there. Yeah. I would make sure that's all done. Then I would go to search console. and I would remove URL by search console. And then in theory, when Google goes back to it in the future, it won't be able to, because we're telling it all over the place not to crawl and index it. It's up to Google to honor that, whether it does or not is up to them, but most of the time they do.

ARTHUR: So how long is it? Is it three months to 90 days? I can't remember. It's been a while since I've removed a URL. I think it is 90 days. Something like that. So then, yeah, you have to make sure you've got your noindex, your robots.txt file updated. So when those 90 days pass, Google won't find that page anymore.

MICHAEL: Now is the page still going to exist as well?

ARTHUR: Yeah, if it doesn't as well, if it's 404ing, like if you just remove it, then it's not going to be there. So that's another option. So it depends on why you want to remove it from the SERPs in the first place.

MICHAEL: And if it's on a site you don't control,

ARTHUR: Well it's not much you can do about it.

MICHAEL: Reputation management I guess, like if there's something embarrassing there or you don't want there.

ARTHUR: So if you do a search for your name and some questionable things come up then.

MICHAEL: The only way to try and address that is to create a lot of other content around your name.

ARTHUR: A lot of profiles as well. So like SoundCloud, MixCloud. Yep. All the social profiles. All the socials, like Twitter.

MICHAEL: Yep. Do a press release about yourself and see if it's syndicated. Yeah. No, seriously. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Not that I have anything to hide, but.

MICHAEL: If you own like a business website, creating a page about yourself on it, all that sort of stuff. And even then, if it's something particularly egregious, like let's say, you've done something bad in your past and there's a news article about it or whatever, Google will probably still show that news article because in a search result for like a person, like a, you know, a person entity, it's going to pull in all sorts of random different things about them. And a news article about them is pretty noteworthy. So negative, not negative reputation management can be quite difficult in this day and age.

ARTHUR: The old Googs. Yeah. It depends. Yeah, exactly. Depends on what you're trying to hide.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. Well, that was it. Seven questions. Wham, bam. Thank you, ma'am. We've banged them out in about 23 minutes.

ARTHUR: Seven questions for Q and A week seven for episode seven T1.

MICHAEL: Correct.

ARTHUR: Nice.

MICHAEL: Yep. Seven, seven, seven. So on that poor bit of maths from Arthur.

ARTHUR: That was a maths, I wasn't calculating anything.

MICHAEL: That's true. That's true. You were struggling with numbers. So, so I just said maths. Happy SEOing. Happy SEOing. See ya.

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