SEO Q&A Week #8

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, I'm Michael Costin and I'm joined by Arthur Fabik for another week of the SEO show. You looked at me shocked just then. Were you shocked by me saying your name?

ARTHUR: Well, because people don't know that you had to redo that intro because you messed it up. I never messed it up. You kind of did, but it doesn't matter. We're here now on the other side.

MICHAEL: We're here for another episode of Q&A week. It's been a little while since we've done one. And to be honest, there hasn't been many questions come through, which is a little disappointing. So if you have a bugging SEO question, head to the SEO show.co. You can either fill out the form and we'll read it out and answer it on air or even better. If you use the speak pipe feature on the side, you can record your voice asking a question and we'll put it on the show. We've only ever had one person do it. We have in two years, two years. Yeah. So I'm putting a call out. How long have we been doing this? About that, yeah. Geez. We've only done 80 episodes in two years. Only?

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's about 40. It's a weekly show.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Then we take the break. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That's pretty good. It is pretty good. This is episode 80. It is. If we release it when we plan to. Yeah, it's episode 80. Episode 80.

MICHAEL: Nice. Not bad. What a milestone. It's not really a milestone. It's just a number.

ARTHUR: Like 50 was a milestone.

MICHAEL: 80 is just 80. Maybe to you. All right. Well, you can, you can sit over there and enjoy 80. What are we doing for our hundredth? I don't know. You wanted cake. You wanted cake for our, do you do it based on number of episodes or just birthday of the show? Cause birthday of the show would be about now. Right about now. June 2021, 2021. Yeah.

ARTHUR: We need to find out. We'll find out.

MICHAEL: Maybe it's been three years.

ARTHUR: No, no. Two. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, we'll find out when our birthday is and then make sure there's a cake and then we'll also also celebrate our 100th episode and with a special episode.

MICHAEL: If you want to hear yourself on the show, if you've got a bug in question, go use the speak pipe at the SEO show.co or if you want to be on the show. If you want to be a guest, use the form there. Just put in the call out. We're about tapped out in the limits of our ability to produce the show. We need to lean on everyone else in the SEO community to come.

ARTHUR: Take people off the street.

MICHAEL: Hey, do you want to come talk about SEO? Stranger in the street. Anyway, onward. Let's hear what Mark had to say. Mark Preston. Do you want me to read that one out?

ARTHUR: You were just looking at me. This is your one. I'll let you do this one. Sure. So a question for the hashtag local SEO community. Assuming that all the foundation stuff has been completed recently, what do hashtag SEO agencies and freelancers actually do on a monthly basis? Nothing. Good question. They sit there and collect the paycheck. Some of them do. Some of them do. And send out an automated report.

MICHAEL: But let's assume they're a good legit agency. What are they doing? A whole bunch of things. What are you doing? Link building. What is our team out there doing right now?

ARTHUR: Well, a lot of, I guess, after a while you often kind of… I guess once you've done a lot of the foundation stuff, you move on to content and link building. So link building is a big one. Maintaining the site, making sure that it's technically sound, because a site can change as it evolves, as it grows, as you start adding content, as you update it. So making sure that, like I said, it's technically sound, there's no technical issues, it loads quickly. Looking at Core Web Vitals, making sure it ticks all the boxes. Another thing is monitoring your competitors. So having a look and making sure that you're producing enough content, making sure that, you know, you're producing and getting enough links to make sure that they don't overtake you. Reporting.

MICHAEL: Reporting. That's a big one. Yeah. It's not a big one, but they should be reporting. Meeting with the client.

ARTHUR: Meeting. Content creation. Yeah. So rolling out a content strategy, blog posts, doing content gap analysis, looking again, looking at your competitors and having a look at the type of content they're producing, replicating it, making it better. Yep. That's it.

MICHAEL: That's pretty much SEO right there.

ARTHUR: Yeah. After the foundations ticked off. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So if they're not communicating about that stuff being done, that's a little red flag.

ARTHUR: I guess the other thing is if there's an algorithm update and it has affected the site trying to figure out what has happened and trying to rectify it, which can take up a lot of time and energy. So. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And then meetings, phone calls, Google meets, whatever the case may be, all that stuff as well, which sometimes clients don't really think about like that can take a lot of time to attend, a lot of time to prepare for, which all comes out of their investment in the SEO retainer each month.

ARTHUR: Some meetings like bigger, you know, quarterly meetings can take days of preparation, pulling the data and making it digestible to the client and putting together the slides. And you know, it takes a long time to put together. Yep. That's where it goes. That's what we do on a day to day, a typical day.

MICHAEL: Yep. Let's move on to Veronica. Veronica asked pretty simple question. What types of links are the most valuable? Easy. Web 2.0's every day. Citations, directories. Yep. No, I would say contextual links. So a link in the body copy of a page, not in the footer, not in the menu, not like shoved in a sidebar, but like actually in the page body copy. where the paragraph that it's in is relevant to the site that it's linking to. And ideally if you can, which is rare that you get it, but if you can from the homepage, cause that's the strongest page on a website, not on like a deep, deep, deep, deep blog page or a blog tag page or something like that.

ARTHUR: That would be hard to get a homepage link.

MICHAEL: but they do exist out there. Let's say you have a, you've given a testimonial to a software tool that you use and in the testimonial they link to your brand. Wow. That's a homepage link, but it's not really a, as good as it gets because it's not like totally contextual using a exact batch anchor. So. I'm just freestyling here the absolute best. The creme de la creme. Most valuable. Your dream link. My dream link would be, I'll tell you an example. If we on the homepage of local digital, yes. Link to the SEO show podcast. Yes. With the word SEO podcast. In the body. In the body copy.

ARTHUR: Have we done that?

MICHAEL: We are known for producing the world's leading. Have you done that? SEO podcast? No. But that's an example of like a, of like the most valuable link you could probably get. What do you reckon? I agree. Cool. Moving on. This is your one.

ARTHUR: I'll let you do this one. This one's from Tala. Is that how you pronounce it? Looks like it. Yep. Question for us. How long does it take a page for, how long does it take a page for indexing on Google after a change? That's a good question. So.

MICHAEL: Wait up, don't answer it. What you need to start with is the famous SEO line. It depends.

ARTHUR: Well, it depends. Yes, it does depend. It can be anywhere between a couple of hours or even a couple of minutes to a couple of weeks. Depends how frequently Google visits the site. Depends on whether it's like a homepage or a deeper page or even a deeper page. Depends on whether you've asked it to come. Yeah, manually gone and asked it to re-index and crawl the page. So typically, a homepage a day. If I go in, like on a bigger site, if I go and recrawl it, it can take a day. Sometimes if I'm trying to recrawl a deeper page with not that many links, internal links to it, man, it can be upwards of a week. Frustrating.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So, so the key is always you should have access to search console. Yes. Webmaster tools. I was going to say. And then ask Google to crawl it. Please come crawl at Google. And that's going to be your quickest.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You can also see the last time Google, when you run the URL, the last time Google visited that page. Um, and if it's been a long time, then you probably need to build some links to it and internal links and try to encourage Google to visit the page more frequently. Yep. Update your sitemap frequency. See what that's set to, but just, yeah, make sure it visits the page more frequently, update the content more frequently, keep it fresh, all that stuff.

MICHAEL: Cool. Well, hopefully you like that answer, Tala. I'm going to let you answer this next one too, because this is up your alley, the one from Elaine.

ARTHUR: Elaine, what has she asked?

MICHAEL: Why does my page title appear differently in the SERPs than it does on my page? I tell ya, it's annoying when this happens. Yeah. You've crafted a beautiful title, perfect use of characters. It's not truncated, just really well crafted, compelling, engaging title. And then Google turns it into something totally shit. Yes. Often.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So I guess short answer is when that happens, it's just because Google feels like it can create a better page title than you. So it just changes it. So it doesn't necessarily mean your page title has changed. It's just displaying or Google's just displaying what it thinks would be a better, better page title. Hmm. And like you said, 99% of the time it's not better. So it's often like brand name first, super truncated, keywords like truncated, you don't know what the page title actually is.

MICHAEL: There was one I saw, you know, Salesforce, their name is Salesforce all one word. So lowercase force.

ARTHUR: Yes.

MICHAEL: But Google was rewriting their homepage as capital S sales space, capital F force. Yes. Forcing that. Yeah. And they couldn't do anything about it. Yeah. And like annoying when you like, yeah, if that's your brand.

ARTHUR: Yeah, we've had clients search for themselves and then find one of these like Google generated page titles and freak out. Yeah, and then blame us. How can you have this like as a page title? Why is it showing up in Google? And you have to explain to them, well, it's not actually the page title that's set to the page. It's Google messing it up. Sometimes it can play around with it and it's always testing different things. So depending on the search query, it will show a different page title to try to match it better. But yeah, it's very, very hit and miss.

MICHAEL: It's going to be interesting to see what happens now with this generative AI being used more and more and more in the SERPs, what they're rewriting a page titles is going to evolve into.

ARTHUR: They should just stop doing it. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I don't know why they do it. It's probably related to them making more money off AdWords somehow.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, I guess if they mess up the page title and you're not, it's not quite clear cause they do it with meta descriptions as well. Sometimes you'll have crafted the best meta description ever. And then all of a sudden it's just pulling random shit off the page.

MICHAEL: It'll pull links from your footer.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: That is your description.

ARTHUR: Frustrating.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I would say that it's because they've tested it and figured out that they make more from Google ads.

ARTHUR: It funnels more people up to the ads because they don't know what they're clicking on and they're like, Oh, what's this junk? Yeah, potentially.

MICHAEL: Well, you know me and the way I think about Google.

ARTHUR: I know you and your Google conspiracies.

MICHAEL: Not even a conspiracy at this point. Yeah. Broad match in, um, in no exact match in Google ads is now pure broad.

ARTHUR: This is an SEO podcast.

MICHAEL: Okay. Moving on. I'm going to answer. Getting worked up again. I'm going to answer Toby's question. This is the last one. We only had a few because of, um, low, low interest, low volume of questions. That's probably because we haven't been, we haven't upheld our end of the bargain by putting out episodes every week. So, um, guys, I'm going to remind you speak pipe on the website, theseoshow.co.

ARTHUR: Is it anonymous?

MICHAEL: Well, you could just say, my name is Terry.

ARTHUR: Can I send in questions with the voice generator?

MICHAEL: Yes. Go on. Um, Toby has asked, asked, asked, asked, does the Google sandbox exist now? Hey, what is the Google sandbox? Well, That is something that people believe exists where if you launch a new website from scratch, new domain name, totally fresh, put the website up, Google comes and crawls it. And there's like an artificial ceiling that your site will hit in terms of rankings. And it won't be able to go past that for a period of time. It's called the sandbox where Google just doesn't allow you to rank and get visibility on a brand new domain and website.

ARTHUR: What is there like a specific period of time or just like a unknown?

MICHAEL: Unknown. And it might be different depending on the niche. So I, we don't know for sure if it exists, Google won't admit one way or the other, whether it does, there's been plenty of people, particularly more competitive niches that will try and, you know, launch a site, get a crawled index and all that. And it just doesn't work for 30 days, 60 days, whatever the case may be. And then it suddenly does. Um, but anecdotally I've launched sites. We did a case study where we ranked, um, tuck pointing.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I was going to bring that up. That ranked really quickly, didn't it?

MICHAEL: But that's in such a, uh, uncompetitive niche, I guess that maybe the sandbox wasn't relevant. And in that case, we'd own the domain for a while. So the domain wasn't brand new. So part of the sandbox might be Google looking at when was a domain registered. If it was in the past 90 days, we'll sandbox this for a period of time to stop spammers from just blasting out tons of websites that instantly get Google visibility. So it makes sense to me that a sandbox would exist. Maybe. But, um, Google, of course, in their, the way they are, will not confirm one way or the other.

ARTHUR: But in theory, the more competitive a niche, and there's only 10 pages on Google, right? Technically.

MICHAEL: 10 results on the first page.

ARTHUR: No, 10 pages as well. Oh, sorry. Right. Yeah. So a hundred results. The more competitive the niche, the harder it's going to be to crack that top 100. Yeah. So although like there might be this sandbox, even just general nature of a new site and the competitive niche, it's not going to start ranking and outranking sites that have history and like links and things like that.

MICHAEL: But maybe a new site launching with the programmatic SEO play where it's going after long tail, where it just creates millions of pages and suddenly exists and gets traffic that way.

ARTHUR: Has no one tested this?

MICHAEL: I feel like this is something they have, but I don't know that I've seen concrete, like I believe it exists.

ARTHUR: Right. So you believe there's a period of time Google just doesn't rank a site until it does basically on a new domain.

MICHAEL: Yep. You're not going to be blasting straight into the top spots. This is why people buy age domains. But like you said, SEO takes time and a new domain is not really going to do well against well-established entrenched competitors, regardless of the sandbox. You know, it's going to take you longer to build the links and the content than the sandbox exists for anyway.

ARTHUR: But that is it. Oh, there's more than a hundred results.

MICHAEL: That is it, geez. And you're hosting the SEO show.

ARTHUR: No, cause I was looking, it doesn't matter. I'll tell you off air. I was reading something interesting about like- This is your conspiracy you brought up before.

MICHAEL: The dead internet theory, yeah. Yeah, last time you brought it up, I wasn't quite sure what the hell you're talking about. So definitely an off air chat. Yes. But that is it for this week's episode of the SEO show. We'll be back next week with another one. Probably a stolen from social. Maybe. Who knows?

ARTHUR: Unless we get, unless we've got some good questions to answer. Q and A back to back you reckon?

MICHAEL: Well, depends on the people. So that's it people. The ball is in your court. Uh, until next time, happy SEOing.

INTRO: 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.