SEO Q&A Week 7

TRANSCRIPT:

Michael 0:00
want a second opinion on your SEO, go to local digital.com. Today you claim a free proposal, we’ll take a look at your site, your competitors and your market and let you know what we think. All right, let’s get into the show.

Unknown Speaker 0:13
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 0:35
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. My name is Arthur fabic. And I’m here with Michael Causton. How’re you doing? Doing very

Michael 0:45
well. Doing very, very well.

Arthur 0:47
It’s weird when you get thrown in the intro, right? Like, I don’t know what to say. Sometimes

Michael 0:53
we nailed it. It was almost going to be the first ever intro that we didn’t acknowledge how bad the intro was.

Arthur 0:59
I didn’t think it was about intro saying it was a good intro.

Michael 1:01
I know that every episode we talked about the intro. We assess it on the spot along with the listeners. Sure they love it.

Arthur 1:08
They do, which is why we’re doing as well as we are

Michael 1:13
rocketing up the charts at the moment. Download count doubling month a month. It’s just up into the right. Yep. Which is always good in the SEO world. Nothing but green. Unless it’s era what would be bad. spammy negative SEO backlinks up into the right and that’s a good now this

Arthur 1:31
is a bad episode

Michael 1:36
when hedgerows and search console up and to the right no good. No. What else? This? This topic does not say Good. Yeah. Okay.

Arthur 1:44
We’ll move on onward.

Michael 1:46
So we’re doing a q&a week. The seventh instalment. Can you believe we’ve done seven of them?

Arthur 1:51
Is this episode 69? Or 70?

Michael 1:54
This is episode 71. Oh,

Arthur 1:56
wow. Geez.

Michael 1:58
You’re out of you’re out of sync because you don’t know when they get published? No. This is episode 71.

Arthur 2:03
I would have liked to be on episode 69. That would have been fun. You were Oh, okay. Cool. Well, I wish I would have known that was episode 69. Because we will use

Michael 2:10
that you can make an immature. Yes. 16 year old boy joke.

Arthur 2:14
Yes. Well,

Michael 2:15
I’m glad you didn’t know if that’s why. Well, I

Arthur 2:17
did it now, sir. Anyway, q&a Week, Week Seven.

Michael 2:21
Yes. We have a bunch of questions. 70 777 for seven, seven for episode seven of the q&a. Lucky seven. Let’s just get straight into it. Let’s all right. First one is coming to us from Lewis. Lewis wrote us an email in the first half is very complimentary, complimentary to us. I won’t read that part out. But just want everyone to know that there was compliment Sam. Yes. 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 has given his title, Fidesz 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 because 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 kind of pen and paper, it would always be the case that you’d put the brand name or the website URL at the end of the title tag.

Arthur 3:33
I think that’s what we still do. Now. That’s what I do. Yep. Yeah.

Michael 3:36
Do you believe it’s necessary to have the

Arthur 3:40
brand name Yeah. Um, depends on the page. I mean, not necessarily.

Michael 3:46
I don’t think I don’t think if I have to teach someone now, I would say it’s more about working the keyword into a title that is compelling like trying to click so putting in a number you know, like 37x or whatever Sure, make it compelling but just write the keyword and you don’t need to put the brand name at the end always and you can

Arthur 4:06
always just add it in or just be truncated or Yeah or ensure 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 4:17
Yeah, well I think he’s getting at with this 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. See how it works with it, the how it works without it, but as a general rule, I am a fan of the guy will I will still if I’m just going a basic let’s say it’s rhinoplasty if Sydney is the pages that’s the first thing that came to me I don’t know why you know why it’s from roof rhinoplasty Plano, Plano whatever that country that city in Texas that state. That suburb in Texas was yes. Do you remember a friend of the show because I remember the front of the show? Yep. Well anyway, I’ll for another show. rhinoplasties Sydney. You flush brand I often when it’s just a single keyword short keyword title. Yeah, I still put the Brandon.

Arthur 5:06
Yeah, if you’re doing like an E commerce site or something and templating out meta descriptions or metadata, sorry, page titles, you’re often just doing whatever the keywords that you want to rank for and then your brand.

Michael 5:17
But I would say I would prioritise above that work. 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 Yeah, I would favoured that over a keyword, a title tag that has a brand in it.

Arthur 5:32
Yes. Because you’re probably going to rank for the brand anyway, because of your URL, sir.

Michael 5:36
Yeah, Google knows what your brand is. It knows the site. It doesn’t need

Arthur 5:40
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. Louis.

Michael 5:51
Louis, hope you like that one. Let’s move on to the next question. You want to do this one?

Arthur 5:55
I can. So this is from Sammy. How do I know if the company doing my SEO is doing a good job or not? Good question. Semi.

Michael 6:07
Good one, sir. I think we’ve done I think we have done a similar one. We’ve done articles, not articles. What I think what 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?

Arthur 6:31
Is a traffic improving? Or ranking? Are your leads improving? Or 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 conversion, 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 100. And then, individual keyword rankings. Yeah, I’ve said that already. Yep. Yep. Basically, keyword rankings, keyword rankings. Yeah. So like, those would be the main things that I’d be looking at. But ultimately, it just comes down to like, are you getting more traffic and more conversions? Because 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. Oh, missa. I guess I did celeb

Michael 7:43
you pretty much full twice? Do we have an official rule about swearing? I think we do.

Arthur 7:49
Can we? Is that gonna, like, throw us out of like, the PG category and show off Spotify?

Michael 7:55
Probably. So yeah, I guess it’s less than ideal to okay. But um, 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 8:09
Why 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? Or they’re reporting on the links at the building? Yep. 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 8:27
mysterious creature. Some sort of SEO creature that

Arthur 8:31
I didn’t even know where I was going, though myself, but. But to me, those are the key metrics you look at, like the obvious ones would be traffic. Conversions. Rankings, usability.

Michael 8:44
Yeah, really. And if your campaigns young, like let’s say six months or less, you may not have a tonne of traffic and leads and sales button. Are you seeing the signs of you know, a lot more pages ranking? Yeah. And showing up in the SERPs? Yes. So I was saying I’ll say go back and listen to episode. II know what I was trying to find it while you were talking. And I realised I wasn’t really listening to what you were saying. And it was harder than I thought. So that’s, I’ve only found which is usually pretty good at not listening to you. But episode nine. Which was a topic what a throwback. That’s all of us. Listen. 10 That one nine. That sucks. 60 episodes ago. Geez, 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 game. 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 learned avoid it and make your life easier. So it’s sort of looking at the angles that dodgy SEO companies use so I guess he can listen to that episode, and then apply what you’ve learned there to the way these companies dealing with you and if they’re using some of those dodgy tactics or lines or or angles and then probably not doing a good job. Semi. So, hope that helps. Let’s move on.

Arthur 10:06
Let’s Question three. So this one’s for modern. Is having two or three different SEO agencies working on my website effective or not? Short answer, no, it’s not effective. So many cooks in the kitchen are what’s the one like too many cooks spoil the broth? That’s

Michael 10:23
the one. Yeah.

Arthur 10:25
SEOs can be funny. You know, some people might have conflicting opinions and 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

Michael 10:43
yeah, 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 work. That might be a good thing. Yeah, nailing different parts of it. So

Arthur 11:03
if you have, for example, someone that’s like a SEO like a content person and a link person, and they’re communicating and local SEO specialists, 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 rein on the site, yes, no, because it’s just going to cause problems.

Michael 11:23
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, they’re

Arthur 11:31
probably competing, probably old trying to steal. Yeah, your business away from what I will do

Michael 11:36
is blame each other when anything goes wrong. Yeah. 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, like, if you’re getting your house built, they they give me an allergy you get in your house filled. The builder has a whole bunch of studies 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 when if you have four different builders, who ultimately takes responsibility for

Arthur 12:25
control, you know, the role. So? Yeah. Knowing voters,

Michael 12:29
what do you reckon about that analogy?

Arthur 12:31
Not your best that may made sense. I got excited as it popped in my head. I could see the causes delightful. The cogs turning in your head as I was talking, you’re looking for an analogy. That was good. I liked it. Okay. Let’s see. So yeah, no, that’s not effective. Modern. Moving on.

Michael 12:47
Okay. What is the best PageSpeed 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 let me just get halfway the definition esoteric, esoteric, or what’s the word I’m looking for? Anyway? To me best means

Arthur 13:20
best is the most excellent or desirable type of quality. Yeah, there you go.

Michael 13:24
But are we looking at most 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 13:33
doing a throwback to Charlie and get into a library?

Michael 13:35
Charlie? Yep. Actually, Charlie is on the line. Let me just bring him in. Charlie, how’s it going? Not just, just kidding. You guys thought we’d go on 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 to fast website, they’re gonna load it and see if it’s fast, and they’re happy when it loads quickly. Yeah. What is a metric that indicates let’s just say we’ll look at COVID vitals

Arthur 14:09
and Google metrics. Okay. So what do you think first, first and foremost?

Michael 14:16
To be it’s whichever one of those metrics indicates when a page if the client can see it and use it

Arthur 14:22
so LCP LCP, the one that’s hard to pronounce? Largest content all paid? Yep. Okay. Because that’s,

Michael 14:29
that means that someone’s typed in the address, click 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, but yes, usable. Good. I

Arthur 14:42
think that’s the one Google probably looks at the most as well. Yeah. When it comes to code vital, sir. Yep. I agree with that.

Michael 14:48
Don’t worry about time to first byte. I concur. Other metrics that other tools give you? Let’s just go with that one. Cool. Easy.

Arthur 14:55
Thank you, Charlie. Charlie.

Michael 14:57
I like that one. Let’s move on to markers with a mark hands Mark. Mark has its markers for the motorbike ride at Mark market to social media first name mark is okay. Sorry, Mark is sorry, that’s that’s me.

Arthur 15:13
This threw me off via social media links count as backlinks. Well, yes, yeah, they do because they’re a backlink. But but then they’re not technically like a SEO backlink in the sense that they’re going to provide much.

Michael 15:30
You don’t link equity links. Yes. Yeah. They don’t matter to your SEO. No,

Arthur 15:34
ultimately. So although they are technically a backlink, because they’re linking back to your website, they’re not going to move the needle needle when it comes to you know, rankings organic visibility, domain rating, things like that.

Michael 15:46
So they’re a backlink. You know, what they do count for? is like, your foundation Foundation, your pillar link.

Arthur 15:51
Yeah, for sure.

Michael 15:52
So I guess it’s you need to have them, but don’t think that you’re gonna go out and rank for rhinoplasty? Sydney? Yeah, just off building. You know, tweeting

Arthur 16:01
Alia, 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 a good rule of thumb. I like that one. So simple.

Michael 16:15
Yet, so yeah, I’m just trying to think of any holes in that, but I can’t think of any No,

Arthur 16:19
like, the easier it is. Well, the cheaper link is

Michael 16:22
Yeah, build. Yep. The less value it’s going to have that goes for everything with SEO really? My favourite things in life, I guess. Yeah. Really? The easier a cheaper something is generally the crappy narrative. Yes.

Arthur 16:36
I gotta say it’s crap. Ah, but it’s just not going to be. It’s not going to move the needle, the least the maple leaf less impactful live. I hope that answers your question, Marco. So Marquis or mark. Question six. How could you calculate Keyword Difficulty manually without any SEO tool? That’s from Cameron. So

Michael 16:57
first, I’d say

Arthur 16:58
why. Yeah. Why

Michael 17:00
can’t you? What? Time because yeah, there’s SEO tool. So just using that in this, maybe he hasn’t gotten the money, just subscription. There’s no budget for it at all, assuming that

Arthur 17:11
he has Keyword Planner, and he can see the search volume free keyword? Yep. I would say, I guess that’s still a toolbar if 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. Yeah, if the search volume is 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 17:34
That’s a good one thing and looking at the keyword itself, and figuring out like, is it commercial? You know, like question, what is pizza? That’s probably not kind of, you’d have to be an idiot not to know what pizza is first and foremost. But secondly, generally, questions like that informational things are less competitive than a commercial keyword like rhinoplasty, Sydney, I get a lot of mileage out of Yep. So or, you know, best mortgage broker near me. Generally, if it’s got commercial intent behind it, that’s going to be 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 10s of 1000s, or hundreds of 1000s. That’s going to be competitive because the product being sold is expensive. So the potential riches is on offer to the people that rank well. A high Yes. 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 cert. Yeah, but not so much these days. But like, yeah, because there’s

Arthur 18:52
no sites ranking. Yeah, exactly. Has this potential to be at the very top.

Michael 18:58
What you wouldn’t want to see if like, really well established, obviously, big brand website. Yeah. That looks like they’ve been around for a long time. Yeah, they would not probably have a lot of links. Like you can’t tell this because the homeless site or something like that. Massey, V chi

Arthur 19:13
or JB Hi Fi or mass works, guys. Yep. Okay, Ma. Yeah. Big W. Yeah.

Michael 19:19
Or even like, David, compare the market like, lead gen comparison sites.

Arthur 19:24
There’s a lot of ads as well. Yep.

Michael 19:28
What? Yep, yeah. Look at how much ads. What about. Here’s one, you could get the domain of the top rank sites and run a Whois check on them. Can you see you can’t see how long the domain has been registered for Australian domains. Right. Forget that one.

Arthur 19:42
You can probably run it through a web archive and see how long the site’s been. There you

Michael 19:45
go. So if it’s been around for ages, and then you want to come in as Johnny Come Lately, and rank you probably not going to

Arthur 19:53
Johnny come lately. Did you break that off

Michael 19:57
was out another Johnny come lately? Thing

Arthur 19:59
I haven’t heard that yet another

Michael 20:01
that you haven’t heard. Every episode is just what do you say Age? Age gap? We just confirmed earlier that we’re both millennials. different ends of the Confirm. Confirmed. All right. Well, that’s about all what else could you do with that a tool? That’s a fair bit that you’re gonna be able to figure it out?

Arthur 20:19
I think we’ve given a lot of information there for Cameron. Yeah. Hope you like that one, Cameron.

Michael 20:22
All right. Now, Melissa? Oh, 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, Alexa is do you control the page? Or do you not? Oh, good question. Hmm. Because if you don’t control the page, you can have are going to be hard.

Arthur 20:46
So I guess, assuming that she is controlling the page. Yeah. So that the assumption is it’s her site. There’s a URL that’s on Google been indexed. And then she wants to remove? How would you go about doing that?

Michael 21:00
I would go into my robots file, and make sure that the URL is blocked out and your robots? Yes, I would also go into the code for the page and make sure that I have like no index. Yes. No. Follow all of the nose in there. Yeah. I would make sure that’s all done, then I would go to Search Console. Yep. And I would remove the URL. Yep. via search console. And then what in theory, when Google goes back to it in the future, will be gone. It won’t be able to because we’re telling it all over the place not to crawl an index at Google to honour that. whether it does or not, it’s up to them, but most of the time they do. Yeah.

Arthur 21:42
So how long is it? Is it three months that 90 days? I can’t remember? I can’t remember a while since I’ve removed the URL. Yeah, I think it is 90 days, something like that. Yeah. So then you have to make sure you’ve got your no index, your robots dot txt file updated. So when those 90 days pass, Google won’t find that page anymore.

Michael 22:04
Now there’s a page still going to exist as well.

Arthur 22:07
Yes, if it doesn’t is all if it’s for a flooring lock. If you just remove it. Yep, then it’s not going to be there. So that’s another option. So depends on why you want to remove it from the subs in the first place.

Michael 22:18
And if it’s on a site, you don’t control Well, it’s not my chicken, deputation management, I guess, like if they have something embarrassing there, or you don’t want there.

Arthur 22:27
So if you do a search for your name, and yeah, that’s somehow things come up, then.

Michael 22:33
The only way to try and address that is to create a lot of other content around your little profiles

Arthur 22:37
as well. So like SoundCloud, Mixcloud. Yep. All the social private socials tweet like Twitter. Yep. Do a press release about yourself. And Redis indicated. Yeah, no, seriously. Yeah. Well, did I have anything to hide, but

Michael 22:52
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, and you’re passing, there’s a news article about it, whatever. Google will probably still show that news article because in a search result for like a person, person entity, it’s going to pull in all sorts of random different things about them and a news article about them. It’s pretty noteworthy. Yeah, so negative, negative reputation management can be quite difficult in this day and age. Yeah. The old Gulags Yeah,

Arthur 23:24
depends. Yeah, exactly. Depends on what you’re trying to hide. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael 23:31
Well, that was it. Seven questions. Wham. Bam. Thank you, ma’am. We’ve bang them out in about 23 minutes. Seven questions

Arthur 23:36
for q&a week seven for Episode Seven. T one. Correct. Nice. Yep, that was seven, seven.

Michael 23:44
So on that poor bit of maths from alpha. That was a matter of calculating anything. That’s true. That’s true. You were struggling with numbers. So I just said enough.

Arthur 23:56
Happy SEO and happy FBI.

Unknown Speaker 24:00
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.

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