SEO Q&A Week #9

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 am Michael Costin. I am sitting looking at Arthur Fabik. How are you going?

ARTHUR: I'm doing very well. Very well. I'm very excited. Why are you excited? We're about two weeks away from the Chiang Mai SEO conference.

MICHAEL: Ah, yes. Looking forward to it. We've been busily teeing up guests left, right and center, arranging meetups. It's going to be a hive of SEO activity, isn't it? A hive. It's going to be buzzing. Just one week of nothing but SEO. Nerdfest. Yep. Nerdfest. Nerdapalooza. Nerdapalooza. I like that. That can be our conference if we ever do one.

ARTHUR: It'll be good. It's been a while since we've been to a conference. So looking forward to the networking and just, you know, being around SEOs, talking SEO, kind of like we're doing right now.

MICHAEL: We are, we are talking SEO today and we're diving into another episode of Q&A. It's been a while since we've done a Q&A week. And I actually logged into an email account that all the questions go to and found a whole bunch of them that had been missed. So I apologize to the people that we haven't answered the questions for the last couple of months, but we've caught up on them now. So we're going to dive right in. I think we've got, we've got a handful. We've got five or so to go through today. And the first one is an audio question. My favorite type, like I love testimonial videos. And you love audio questions for the podcast. It's the best. So at the SEO show.com click the button in the header. There's a little widget where you can record a question and then we'll play it on the show like we're about to do. So this one comes from Grace and I'll let Grace take it away from here.

CALLER: Hey guys, I have a question. So my website has a domain authority score of 66. How can I increase this? It's been really hard the higher it gets to keep it growing. Should I be going for better quality links? What can I be doing?

MICHAEL: All right. So she says a DA score. I don't know if she means DA or DR. She said DR, didn't she? She said DA, which is the Moz metric. DR is Ahrefs. Now it was 66. So that's a pretty good score. It's a very good score. We don't know what sort of business it is, whether it's like a local business or a national e-commerce store, but generally, you know, if you're up 66, pretty decent. And she wants to improve it. My response, first off the bat, would be don't obsess over that score, because it is just a metric that a SEO tool has created out of thin air to try and, I guess, judge the quality of a domain's backlink profile or strength. But it's not necessarily what Google looks at. It's a little barometer for what Google looks at. But, um, it is not always the case that if you go from a DER score or DA score of 66 to 67, that you'll suddenly have more traffic. But, um, to answer her question, how would you improve if you're, if you're stuck on 66 and you wanted to hit the hallowed turf of 70 plus, what's your go-to moves?

ARTHUR: I'd just try to get higher quality links. So looking at links that have a DR higher than the actual site that you're trying to rank. And also looking at the outbound links. So making sure that the sites you're approaching aren't linking to, you know, hundreds of thousands of other sites. Because that's not going to pass as much link equity to your site generally. Yeah. Not always, but. it's something to look out for. And then also making sure that the sites you're getting links from are as relevant as they can be. Um, that always helps, but not always possible in some niches.

MICHAEL: So I would say as well, a link from a homepage of a DR 70 site is worth way more than a link from a random blog post that isn't really linked from anywhere internally. Yeah. So it's not always possible, but if you can be getting links from a homepage or a category page or just any page in that site that itself has lots of external links, that's going to send some lovely link juice your way. And for those that don't know, these scores are logarithmic. So going from a score of two to three, much, much easier than going from 66 to 67. you'll find that naturally, as you get up into those higher DR scores, it's always going to be harder and take longer to improve it. And you might, you could find you lose one link and your score goes backwards a couple of points because that link was really strong. So don't obsess over it. Look like to me, the, the ultimate score for links is What are the sites that are ranking first in Google at any given time? What links do they have? Because ranking first or doing really well in Google is a sign that Google likes what you've got going on. Really? Yes. Ranking first. Ranking first. So look at sites with tons of traffic and rankings in your niche. Go out and get those links.

ARTHUR: Don't so much care about DR. We've seen people manipulate DR as well. Like other agencies building really shoddy links that have high DR that like artificially inflates the client's DR, but it doesn't mean anything. So you might have a super high DR of like 70, but you're not ranking.

MICHAEL: Some people that sell links will redirect 301 a really strong domain to a junk domain. Yeah. Wait for Ahrefs to pick it up. And then that domain has a high DR, then they'll sell links on it and then remove the redirect and that site collapses. And so, you know, again, it's a good benchmark, but we use it as a, I like saying barometer. Is it a barometer? Bit of a barometer for results, but yeah, hopefully that helped Grace. Let's move on to a question from Joshua. Now I'm a little sad that we missed this when it happened because it's been sitting there in our inbox for how long for, I don't know, a little while. He's giving us, he's giving us a bit of props and we haven't responded to it. So Josh, this one's for you. We've gotten to it, you know, I guess, uh, better late than never. He says, just wanted to let you guys know you have the best podcast on SEO. The best, the best, the best Jerry. I appreciate that Josh. We're a little amazed that we sit here and talk into a mic and other people out there listen to it and then think we're the best. Not too bad. But he says as an aspiring SEO and fellow Aussie, I can't get enough of your content. Keep it up. So thanks. We will. It's motivating. Yeah. Very motivated. But, um, he says, thanks for the inspiration. But before he goes, where's he going? Just, well, before he finished that email three months ago, which is better for entry-level work? Wait, wait, wait, let me reread that. Which is better for our entry-level work for an agency or freelance? What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: In my opinion, probably, well, not probably, definitely agency. That's how I started. Cause it's, it's one of those things, you know, you can do as many courses as you want on SEO. You really need that kind of hands on practical experience and you have to play around and test different things to kind of know what you're doing. So it's difficult to, I guess, like with most industries, just jump from like the practical stuff and then straight into it.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: So working for an agency will give you experience probably across multiple clients, different niches, e-com, lead gen, different CMSs. And then, you know, maybe after a year or two or however long, you should be pretty experienced enough to be able to do it freelance.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I agree. And you're in an agency, you're hanging out with other SEO people talking SEO, just nerding out on it. You're going to, it's like an incubator for SEO. Whereas if you're out there on your own, you've got to be very much self-driven and self-starter. Yep. And I would also say as a freelancer, you might think that I'm just going to be a freelancer and, you know, have clients, but having clients is hard. Finding them and winning their business is hard. So as a freelancer, you're really a salesperson first and foremost, you're not doing so much SEO. You're out there trying to find them. Where's leads? I need leads. Then you've got to close the leads. You've got to follow up. You've got to be doing all of that. And you're going to convert leads better if you know what you're talking about. So you need to do SEO first to become a good freelancer.

ARTHUR: Yeah. People will look at your LinkedIn profile and see how much experience you have. So if they see that you've got absolutely none, they'll be reluctant to sign with you. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So it's fine if you have a foundation in SEO to be out there on your own, but otherwise get into an agency, get exposure to everything's SEO, and then go down that path later on. And we actually covered this in an episode, episode 55, it was called how to become an SEO or something like that, where we went quite into depth on this topic. So if you're interested, dig into episode 55 to hear a little bit more of our thoughts on that. I'll let you take this next question, because it was one of the ones that you were very excited about. Yep. I don't know, who asked this one? What was their name?

ARTHUR: I didn't write it down.

MICHAEL: I think it was Callum.

ARTHUR: Yeah, but Callum, if it was Callum asked, is losing clients a regular thing in the SEO industry? So he had a little bit more saying that he's been working in digital marketing for five months now as an entry-level SEO. And basically there's one client that he just couldn't get traffic for. He's been working on them for three months and they finally had enough with the lack of success and just left. Said he felt horrible about it and just wanted to know if it's a common occurrence in SEO. Yes. Yes, it is. Yeah, definitely. You lose clients. Yeah. Not just SEO, but any service industry. Really?

MICHAEL: And clients churn for a combination of things. So sometimes it's 100% because of what you did or didn't do. Yep. Sometimes it's purely because of their own reasons that you have no influence over. Exactly. But the fact of the matter is that there will always be a level of churn. You don't keep every client forever.

ARTHUR: No, you can keep them for a long time if you do a very good job and build a good relationship, but yeah, realistically I'm not going to stick around for life. So I would say, um, three months though is pretty quick.

MICHAEL: Three months is quick chat in SEO. Like, cause when we're talking in timeframes of 12 months, if someone comes on board and leaves within three months, it's going to be normally because of, Misaligned expectations. Definitely. So in the sales process, promises were made that shouldn't have been made or the client sometimes just hears what they want to hear. Yep. A lot of the time. Yeah. So if you try to set expectations and they, yep, yep, yep. But then once work starts, they're like, I thought we'd have more results. That sort of stuff does happen. Yeah. But expectations being very crystal clear at the start is important. Um, the other reason someone might churn within three months is because the work delivered is garbage. Poor work, poor communicate. Communication is probably the biggest part. I find, especially at the start. Yeah. Constant, constant comms, singing about wins, early wins, building trust. So important at the start and will help reduce churn. If you are not doing that very well, an ANSI client will churn. Because they say in sales, you know, just getting them to sign on the dotted line is only part of the job done. You got to keep selling to them then by way of getting results and showing you know what you're doing and building trust as you say. And if you're not doing that, they'll get buyer's remorse, because people, once they sign up for a service, will immediately start questioning, you know, have I made the right decision? Could I have gone with someone else that was going to get better results? And, you know, if you're not communicating well and, I guess, delivering good work in that time, they're going to churn.

ARTHUR: So to answer that question, is churning a client normal after three months? I wouldn't say it's normal. No. You shouldn't be churning clients after three months. Client churn is normal, but after three months, there's probably a red flag somewhere.

MICHAEL: Yep. It's going to be the sales problem. Sales, comms, or results. And I would say the biggest cause of churn is where the perceived value of what they're getting is less than what they're paying you. So as I say, the best way to avoid this is over communication, particularly in the early days. They feel like they're getting a lot of attention, a lot of service, and it buys you the time to get the results that we all know SEO takes a longer time to get. So yeah.

ARTHUR: It was a good question, Joshua. That was Callum.

MICHAEL: Oh, Callum. Be okay with a level of churn. You're going to have to grow a little bit of a thick skin working in the agency land servicing numerous clients. All right. Laura, Laura asks, I'm taking a new in-house SEO role and want to be successful as an in-house SEO. What skills slash tactics do you think are valued in this sort of role? Good question. Hmm.

ARTHUR: I would say first and foremost, comparing it to an agency role.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Is that what the question is? So being, yeah, an in-house SEO as opposed to doing it for yourself or agency SEO is what I assume. That's how we're going to answer it. Okay. Um, I'm going to say you, you might know SEO really well and in depth and like a canonical tag is like, you know, easy for you. but everyone else in the business probably doesn't. So it means you need to be really on your game with your comms and educating everyone in your team and ditching that jingo, jingo, jingo, what's the word? Lingo. Ditching the lingo, the SEO, you know, as SEOs we can get a little bit in the weeds with techie, nerdy stuff and conversations that ultimately people in a business like product managers or C-suite or whoever you're dealing with will never understand. They don't care. So put things in terms that they do care about. Like if you have revenue goals, how is the work that you're doing going to contribute to that and why?

ARTHUR: Working with a lot of marketing managers for big, I guess, businesses and companies and brands. One of the pain points they always talk about is how they can tangibly explain SEO to everyone else in the business because they know that it's working, but they just can't, a lot of people just can't kind of comprehend it or grasp it properly. It's just interesting. You know what I mean? So you could explain to them, you know, SEO, this is all the traffic that's come through organic through SEO. They just don't get the amount of effort and work and what's gone behind it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Cause I always tend to get Google ads. Yes. I spent this on ads. Here's my return. Here's my cost per click. You know, this is a ROAS SEO is a little bit. It's everything thrown into a pot. It's a bit intangible.

ARTHUR: They just assume it happens. They assume it happens. And if they were to stop doing it, it would continue. And it might for a while, but it'll always eventually go backwards. But yeah, that's what I found.

MICHAEL: I would say another thing you need to be good at as an in-house SEO is SEO. Yeah, definitely that you need to be good at building relationships and being diplomatic with other teams. So like in the SEO world, there's often heads are butted with developers. Yes. So like, Oh yes, it is. Pardon? Yes, they are. And you know, that's fair enough. Like let's say we're going to developers and saying, well, we need to bring down our time to first bite as much as possible. So what are you going to do? Can you please optimize the server to make it load quicker? And to them, all they're hearing is more work and they have other priorities. They have like a load of tickets that they've got to work on themselves. And I think a big part about being a successful in-house SEO is building positive relationships, like personal friendships with these people, or just getting them to like you, I guess. And then also helping them. like framing things that you're requesting in ways that are ultimately going to make them look good. So let's say you're asking them to work on site speed improvement. You can say, look, we think by doing this, the conversion rate is going to improve X percent, which is going to lead to this much more revenue. And because you've contributed to that, that's going to be something that can be sent up the line to whoever the people are that are looking at this stuff. Trying to, I guess, help them look good whilst also getting what you need done, is going to be a skill as a in-house SEO. What do you reckon about that one? Yeah, I've never worked in-house, so. I could see your eyes glazing over there and I thought I was delivering straight fire.

ARTHUR: You were, no, everything you spoke was truth. It was all facts, so.

MICHAEL: All right, I'll let you take the next one here.

ARTHUR: Yeah, who's this one from? Monica. Monica, yeah. Question. So how does one build topical authority without ending up cannibalizing other keywords? So a bit of a backstory. From what I understand, you must constantly create relevant content within your niche to achieve EEAT or EE, basically answering all possible questions surrounding your primary key, primary keyword, which is whatever your niche is. However, how do you avoid cannibalizing your other content's primary keywords?

MICHAEL: Two, I feel that a couple of topics are conflated here. Topical authority, one thing. Yeah. EEAT, another thing. Yeah. So what is topical authority? So topical authority, we actually had a Andy Chadwick, friend of the show, come on and talk about topic, topical authority. Can't remember what episode that was, but we can go back. That one was like an hour long where we went deep into it, but As a general gist, topical authority is really just covering a topic super in depth. So you might have a parent topic and then you create content around everything to do with that parent topic. And all of that content links back up to the parent topic. They often sit in a silo. And so that when Google comes on the site and crawls it, it sees that you are comprehensively dealing with that topic. Therefore you're in authority traffic. Yep. But EAT is more, first and foremost, I've, I'm not the biggest fan of EAT generally. Okay. And you know, I don't, I know Google can look at this stuff and figure out if you're an authority. So it might be an example is a doctor. that has cited works in medical journals and publications and they're publishing on a website and like they have their LinkedIn link to it and all that sort of stuff. And they're able to figure out that you are an expert in that field. Yeah. But just publishing tons of content to get topical authority is not going to be a big EAT factor. No. So reading their question, I'm, they're really talking about topical authority, not EAT. They're saying creating tons of content to try and be topically authoritative is going to cannibalize stuff. Well, what do you reckon? Is that a problem?

ARTHUR: I don't, I don't think so. No, I don't think so either because the, It depends on, I guess, if you're writing content about a specific topic or a specific keyword, there's always going to be keywords that are related. There's always related keywords to every single keyword. So as long as the keyword that you're focusing on, like the primary target keyword, isn't cannibalized and you can have a look and search it and make sure that there aren't other pages competing for it.

MICHAEL: And it shouldn't be a problem. And in this, like you often, you could search something and see that there's three or four listings from one website sometimes and different articles in similar topics. Yeah. They're not necessarily cannibalizing though, if they're showing on the first page there.

ARTHUR: So I can give you an example. Um, so let's just say, well, we're talking about hampers a couple of episodes ago. So having a page that's targeting hamper delivery, Sydney, and then if you were to have a page that was same day, hamper delivery, Sydney, that'd be cannibalizing because essentially the very similar, very similar. Um, but then there might be other keywords that,

MICHAEL: hamper delivery for men, hamper delivery for women, hamper delivery for sports fans, hamper delivery for romantics, hamper deliveries for mothers, anything. That's not cannibalizing. And if the topic is a decent enough topic, you should be able to generate a lot of content to build up topical authority without cannibalizing yourself.

ARTHUR: Just do keyword research. Cluster your keywords together that make logical sense and then focus on those keywords on one page. There's always going to be some overlapping keywords when you're working in a specific niche. You can't just ignore a specific keyword on a page because you're worried that it's going to cannibalize. That's the key. Do your research at the start. Keyword research and yeah, cluster the keywords together. And that's it. You can write as much content as you want about each one of those clusters.

MICHAEL: And so if you build out a huge, it's called a topical map where you're really addressing that topic and go ahead and create all that. And then once that's done, you don't need to just create content after content, after content, after content.

ARTHUR: Do you think it helps though, if you just do it, like if you were to just get chat GPT to bust out just a whole bunch of like FAQ content around a specific topic on a site and just place it, hide it behind accordion, like FAQ. It depends on the topic and the niche, of course, how competitive it is.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But I think it would work if you build a massive topical map out at the start and then go and publish all of that and publish it live on the site. Then I don't know that there's a huge benefit in continuing to create more and more and more content in that world when you might be able to expand into another like adjacent topic or, you know, so you might start out as a website on Sewing and then you expand into quilting or something, you know. But I guess all of this is not dealing in the realms of EEAT. Like if you just wrote nonstop about, what did you just say? Binoculars? Binoculars. You won't be perceived as an expert on binoculars just by publishing a lot of content about it. You need to have all of those sort of external citations and signals as well.

ARTHUR: But you just said at the start, you don't believe in that.

MICHAEL: I've always, look, I always thought EAT was a little bit. Yeah. So did I. A little bit wanky. So did I. Certain things, sure. Like your money, your life type top niches. Yes. Where. Google might be investing a lot of time, but if you're just trying to be an expert in sewing, I don't know that EEAT is a big thing. Yeah, I don't think so. Like it comes back to what we always talk about on this show, building authority links, publishing great, well-researched content, making sure all of your internal linking's on point and your site's fast. That is what's going to get you very, very far. 80-20. Yeah. Worrying about like EEAT to be an expert in binoculars or sewing needles. I don't think, but people do tend to get hung up on that stuff. Like there's a lot of articles about, you know, EEAT and yeah, I don't know. I've just never bought into it because we get great results in all sorts of different niches without even giving a second thought to EEAT. E-A-T, which became E-E-A-T.

ARTHUR: But it is different type of, yeah, different type of content, isn't it? Because I guess the content that we publish outside of blog content for clients, it's, you know, category pages, SEO pages, it's all SEO focused content that doesn't require having that kind of profile or anything. So. It's not really relevant to what we do. Like if you're rolling out content for e-commerce websites. Yeah, it's not.

MICHAEL: How are you trying to run a big affiliate website in the medical space or like financial advice or that stuff? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. But most people interested in running SEO campaigns for their business.

ARTHUR: Those sites are getting wiped out anyway by the new update, so it's all gonna be Quora and Reddit anyway, so it doesn't matter.

MICHAEL: Yeah, they could have had epic E-E-A-T and they've been obliterated.

ARTHUR: You should start working on your karma on, is it karma on Reddit? Is that what you're building?

MICHAEL: Yeah, karma. That's the future. I have no idea what my karma is. I don't use Reddit anymore. I do. Since they changed the API and to stop third party apps, I've really stopped using it. You don't read anything on Reddit? Not so much. Maybe if something happens, I'll go look for stuff.

ARTHUR: Where do you get your content?

MICHAEL: Twitter. More so now?

ARTHUR: Yeah. I still like Reddit. I still think there's just a lot of content on there.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. But I loved Apollo.

ARTHUR: I've never used Apollo. I missed out. But I never had any issues with the way Reddit worked anyway. So I didn't know any better. So to me, it was fine. I just remember everyone striking and all the blackouts they did, all the subreddits, which is annoying. I got annoyed at the moderators. They didn't want to read my content, so they lost anyway, so. Reddit always wins.

MICHAEL: Time will tell when they go public. Are they going public? That's why they were doing this. I think it was also to stop, um, scraping of like AI scraping of all their data to train their models.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Maybe it was that it was a whole bunch of reasons, but yeah.

ARTHUR: I thought they were owned by that gaming company that does pub G 10 Tencent or Tencent or something.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I know they had big Chinese investment. Anyway, this is not SEO talk, so let's move on. Actually, there's nothing to move on to. We've done all our questions, so we'll move on with our days. And until we speak next week, happy SEOing. Happy SEOing. See ya.

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