SEO Case Study Update

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 podcast. I am Michael Costin. You sounded like a robot.

ARTHUR: Hello and welcome to the SEO. You know what? And I'm Arthur Fabik.

MICHAEL: That is a robot. I'm testing AI tech. I've taken a model, trained it. Speaking of that, you just- Trained the AI on our back catalog. And now it says things like happy SEOing.

ARTHUR: Have you tried, have you ever tried using that? Like dubbing, AI dubbing? No. I've seen ads come up on Insta, like the different languages. So you can double your stuff into different languages and they make it look really cool and really seamless. I'd be curious to see how well it actually does it. Like maybe we should try and record an episode and get it dubbed in like German or something.

MICHAEL: Let's do it for 2024. We'll put that one on the list. I reckon it'd be cool.

ARTHUR: It would be cool. Yeah. I'll do it in like Polish so I can proof it and actually tell you whether or not it's. Let's do it. Translating it properly.

MICHAEL: Let's do it. You know what? I'm going to open notes right here. Record, podcast, use AI to dub to Polish. See if it works. Very good. There we go. That's not what we're here to talk about today. Sorry, hijacked. We are here to give you, this is a much requested, we've got people pounding down the door, bang, bang, bang. Wanting an update on the case study because we teased the fact we were doing a case study We sure did tease it and then we've gone silent on it. We've been doing all sorts of other episodes So today we are here to give you a little update on what's been done. Mm-hmm Probably won't reveal the domain even though we said we would I don't think we will. Too soon? Yeah, the site's not finished, so.

ARTHUR: It's far from finished, but it is ranking.

MICHAEL: It's ranking. Don't say. I'm not saying, I'm just saying it's ranking. That's all I'm saying. Bottom of page one and page two for a few good keywords. Yeah, that's it. That's all I'm saying. Yep, that's what you're saying. I didn't even say it, you said it.

ARTHUR: You said it. So I just said it's ranking.

MICHAEL: Yep. Anyway, we are going to finish the site before we release it. It'll probably be ranking in the top spots for the target keywords by the time we reveal. Don't jinx it. Knock on wood. But let's give an update on what's been done today. And I've got to admit, Arthur's done most of the work here. I've been moral support on Slack. Barely. When he says what he's going to do, I go, yep, do it.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And now it's happened. So tell us, what's happened? What's happened with the site since we, AKA you, started work on it?

ARTHUR: Well, that's a very good question. So I guess we'll start with the host. Good place to start.

MICHAEL: It's got to live somewhere.

ARTHUR: So we decided to go with Kinsta. I think we mentioned that in the earlier episode. We've talked about Kinsta a lot on the show. Great managed WordPress host. So that's why we decided to go with it. WordPress, obviously, I've mentioned it just now. So we built the site on WordPress. GeneratePress is the theme we opted for. And Elementor is the builder. For now, I think it's just the easiest route for what we're doing. Quick and easy. Quick and easy. Probably not the best when it comes to like code and stuff, but for the purpose of this, I guess. Case study.

MICHAEL: It's perfect. So we just with generate personnel and mentor have made it look the way we want. We're not using like a theme off the shelf that looks a certain way to begin with.

ARTHUR: No, I don't think we are. No. Yeah. Well, we got our dev to help out with that, but we had like a reference site that we wanted to kind of use, mimic. Sorry? Thieve. Not Thieve, but like, you know, base it on. So yeah, they, yeah, they use that as like a reference. In terms of, I guess the pages, maybe actually before that, maybe we'll talk about some of the plugins. So the only plugin we've installed at the moment is the SEO framework, which is just like a basic, I guess, SEO plugin, very similar to all the other SEO plugins. You can just, you know, update your metadata, page title, meta description, like no index pages, a whole bunch of different things. They're all very, very similar.

MICHAEL: Pick one and use it. SEO plugins don't make a difference to you. No. One isn't going to be more SEO friendly than another.

ARTHUR: Maybe it will. Some might be. Like some are lighter, some are like.

MICHAEL: But it's not like, but there's best. You know, like with hosts, there's like shit slow ones and there's really good fast ones.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's not going to make or break your SEO really. As long as you can like edit the things that you want to edit, then go for it. Honestly, that's the only plugin so far. Haven't really had a need to install more, but we definitely will. I've added GA4, GTM. Painful. It is painful, but installing it was a breeze. Oh, sorry, there is another plugin I installed, like a code injecting plugin. to add the GTM code. I don't like using like GTM specific plugins. I just like inserting the code into the page.

MICHAEL: They seem super heavy, like needlessly slow the site down, code bloat. They'll have prompts like in your dashboard, like rate us, review us.

ARTHUR: Yeah, no, no, no. It's like a simple just header for the type. Added the GTM code, installed GA4, and then verified Google Search Console as the first step. What else? So in terms of pages, we have a homepage template built out, which is pretty basic. It's just, can we talk about the layout really briefly? Talk about what you want. It's your baby. Well, it's our baby. So it's just like a bunch of different competitions. We haven't actually started filling out the different types of competitions, but it's like a blog. Imagine a blog. It's just like a list of posts. Yeah, that's it. And then it's got the punk punk. competition name and then like a link to enter the comp. And then below that. featured competitions and then below that, just the SEO copy. A wall of text that we wrote using AI, didn't we? Yeah. So the wall of text will eventually become like read more accordion hidden. FAQs and stuff. Yeah. FAQ style text. But for now I just added it because I wanted the text on the page to crawl it.

MICHAEL: So we use koala.sh to write this content based on the target keyword we want to rank for. Yep. Um, and it's churned out a bunch of content after looking at the search results and seeing what ranks.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I had to edit it a bit, but it was very good for, I guess, this case study. Perfect. Yep. Um, I was going to say something.

MICHAEL: We've done some keyword research on the, the, like what content's going on the site, like, cause you know, there's a homepage obviously, but we're trying to think about how we wanted to structure it. So as everyone knows, the topic is when a car like car giveaways type things. Yep. So the homepage goes through the main keywords. We used, so the way I went and researched it was, I went and got, first I wrote down every keyword that I thought was obvious. Yep. I loaded that into ChatGPT and I said, give me a whole bunch of like similar keywords and then also any keywords that I might have missed that cover the topic of this, you know, winning a car. It sped out a whole bunch and then I put that in, I pulled out some more from Ahrefs and I got them all together and then I took those keywords, put it into ChatGPT and said turn this into a topical map so that each page has a focus and it's done that and we've basically between that and then just using our heads, you know, what pages should the site have. Let's run through the categories here that we've come up with. Home page, then there's a page for sweepstakes because a lot of people are searching car sweepstakes and car sweepstakes online. Then we have categories, so classic cars, luxury cars, sports cars, electric cars, JDM cars, Euro cars, muscle cars. So all of them are going for like classic car giveaways and competitions or electric car giveaways. The content on the page will be very focused towards those keywords and then obviously all of the posts on the page that are linked from it will be giveaways related to those overarching categories of cars. Then we have some brands, so we don't need ChatGPT or Ahrefs or anything to tell us that. We've just gone and looked at what are the top selling car manufacturers in Australia. And so we've gone ahead and we're going to be building pages for Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Tesla, BMW, Ford, Kia, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Mercedes-Benz as well, because people like to try win Benzes. So those pages will just be like win a Toyota as a title tag and all the content. Then we have some location pages because things like Winnicar Melbourne, Winnicar Sydney were topics. So we're going to build out location pages. Then finally, the blog section of the site. There's going to be a lot of content on there to try and build up the topical, I guess, authority of the domain. Yeah. So things like car giveaway terms and conditions and understanding the legalities and then pro tips increasing your chances in car giveaways because people are searching keywords like how to win a car giveaway or chances of winning a car giveaway. Avoiding scams because people are searching you know scams and are they legit. So all that sort of stuff even how to start a car giveaway business that's all stuff that people are searching for. We're going to go out and build informative blog content around that. So between the blog, the location pages, the car brand pages and the category pages for the car types themselves, we're pretty much covering everything that we could find with our keyword research across chat, GPT, Ahrefs and using our brains and Google, you know, people also ask that sort of stuff. Is that right? Have I missed anything there?

ARTHUR: Nope. I think you covered everything though.

MICHAEL: So, um, when we say, when we say the site's not finished, it's because we haven't yet gone ahead and done the work to create and publish all those pages.

ARTHUR: That's right. Yeah. So we've got like templates and we know how these pages are going to look like. We just need to go and actually build those pages out. Yeah. Um, and then actually start populating different car competitions because obviously that's the whole purpose of the site. So yeah.

MICHAEL: We haven't noindexed the site, so Google's been able to find it. It's crawled what's there, it's indexed it. Yep. We have built some foundation links.

ARTHUR: Yes, we have a lot.

MICHAEL: What did we do? How many?

ARTHUR: 100 directories and citations. We try to go for Australian directories. And look, to be honest, just with that, we started to rank, which is great. We've also started doing some authority link building. So we started off with 10 Australian.com.au authority links, which are being built out, like I said, as we speak now. So once they're live, once they're crawled, touch wood, we should be ranking pretty high up. I mean, we are already very high up without actually doing much.

MICHAEL: And now what I would personally like to do normally is try to build out like the guts of the site and not let Google index it, then let it loose on the site when there's a lot on there. But we've just let it go loose. So for the purposes of this, it's sort of found Google knows it exists and we just need to get this content finished on the site quickly so that we can take advantage of the links that have been built and not have Google think the site is like a half-finished piece of crap that doesn't deserve to rank. Which is the rift, but we're going to get it finished quick enough that that shouldn't happen. We by me. Yep. Google's, Arthur says he'll have it done by Christmas 2025. There's a lot going on at the moment, you know, work, end of year, that sort of stuff. So we're trying to fit this in around all of that, but Arthur guarantees to have it done by Friday, 22nd of December.

ARTHUR: I want to try to get it done by the end of the year. There we go. try like get all the competitions off, get all the pages that we talked about up.

MICHAEL: And we don't even need all the competitions.

ARTHUR: Like we need some competitions, but I think just getting those, like the pages that were outlined in your topical map, very important. And then from there, just slowly start uploading competitions, maybe do a bit more link building, see how, the site reacts with the initial burst of link building that we're doing. And then I'm pretty confident, you know, it's going to be ranking really well. Yeah. Basically all the keywords that we're trying to target, because like I said, without with little effort, it's already ranking quite well.

MICHAEL: So we've got the exact match domain for a good keyword. Yep. We're going to have lots of content, the links.

ARTHUR: Yep.

MICHAEL: Topical authority. Topical authority. It's just SEO. It's going on all over the place here. So. That's it really for this update. Next update, we promise we'll reveal the site. Might not need to do many updates after that.

ARTHUR: We'll be like, Hey, we're in top spot. Yeah. Next update would be good to have it obviously finished and then reveal the site domain and then give everyone an update on where we're ranking.

MICHAEL: Wait for the negative SEO to start once people find out the domain.

ARTHUR: Well, I mean, it's a little case study, isn't it? So go nuts if you want to destroy it, but it's just for you guys, really, just to show you how SEO works and the process of building a site and getting it and ranking it.

MICHAEL: So we might've been in 2024, do more video because talking about a site is one thing, but just showing it. Yeah. Maybe it can be a big video reveal on a YouTube. What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think the conversations we've had about video, it's difficult to record a video that translates well into a podcast without the visual references and yeah, we'll need to record it both. Well, you could do both. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, you could just, you could just release it as a podcast and if you, someone really wanted to can watch the video.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: I mean, we did a pretty good job explaining it without a video now, so.

MICHAEL: Time will tell. We'll come back to that, add it to the list of stuff to do. But, um, that is our update for the SEO case study. We'll be back with another episode of the SEO show next week. It's going to be our predictions for 2024 and our recap of our predictions on 2023. What did we get right? What did we get wrong? So look forward to that. But until then, happy SEOing.

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