Chatting SEO With Koen Bongers COO at Techopedia

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: Hi Koen, welcome to the SEO show. For people that might not have heard of you, if you could give us a bit of a background about yourself and what you get up to in the SEO world, and we'll get going from there.

KOEN: Yeah, sure. So I did study marketing. I did study marketing, so I did get my bachelor's degree, but then during my master's degree, I decided to drop out and pursue a career in online poker. Obviously, my parents were absolutely delighted when I was doing that. But during that time, I set up a company with two friends of mine. It was like a staking and coaching company. I don't know if you're familiar with the concept, but essentially we're bankrolling people to move up into stakes higher in exchange for like a part of the profit. And that is what got me to Malta because it all became a little bit too big to be in the Netherlands and was a very unfriendly tax environment to be a poker player in the Netherlands back then. So we moved to Malta. The company did pretty well. I think at the high point we had like 60, 70 players playing for us, coaching, and we had a couple of other coaches as well outside of the main team that was running it. Decided to quit that, but that is really where I got my first exposure to SEO, because even though I had this marketing degree, There was like zero digital marketing over there. SEO was not mentioned in there. It was more, you know, broad frameworks that I ended up not using at all. So after I quit the poker stuff, I had a bit of a sabbatical, I'd say. So I was in Malta, it was summer, having to think about what I wanted to do. I always wanted to build a career. And eventually I decided, yeah, I'm going to stay in Malta. I'm going to stay in this gambling industry, which was absolutely thriving. Initially, I made the mistake of going to PokerStars. I was playing poker for six, seven years for a living. So it was all I knew, so it only made sense for me to go and start working at PokerStars, a massive company, and work myself up. It didn't really turn out the way I wanted it to. It's, like I said, a very big company, wheels are turning very slowly. I wasn't able to make the impact that I wanted, and I ended up through a mutual friend of mine in SEO at an affiliate company called Blexer. Mostly active in gambling, online sports betting, a little bit of Forex and some other niches, but those are really the main ones. Over there I was for six years, started in SEO, got more and more responsibility, became an SEO manager, and then I got CRM, a bit of PPC, some programmatic trials as well, eventually the content department. And yeah, that was really like where I got exposed to SEO and where I grew as a digital marketer in general. When I started there, we were about 15 people. And when I left, we were, I think, 110, something like that. So we went through this great growth trajectory. After that, I went to a much smaller company, mostly active in crypto gambling called Find.co. I was there for a short while when one of the owners of Phoenixio approached me for this project called Techopedia.com. I was pretty much immediately sold on it. I knew this guy Sam from my time at Blexer. He's very close to one of the owners from Blexer that I was directly reporting to. And we had a chat with the three of us, wasn't super active, but that's like where we met. And then, yeah, I was, even though it was for six years at Blackstar, I was only at fine for four months. And then I moved over to Phoenixio. So first, I initially started Techopedia project. It was a site, well, But a very niche audience. It was essentially tailored towards IT professionals. So you got a lot of Indian traffic because there's a lot of people in that business over there. But the site has been an absolute organic link magnet with ranking for stuff like, you know, what is ICT? What is the internet? What is a modem? And the strategy essentially has been to double, triple, quadruple down on what was already working. With the big difference being that we're turning it more into a generalist tech site. There was so much stuff that was untouched, like we didn't have much crypto content, for instance. And initially we were doing about or the previous owners were doing about like 12 pages a month on the site. Quite amazing how they ever got as authoritative as they are with that content strategy. And nowadays we're doing about just the informational content, so not taking the affiliate content into account, we're doing like 60 a week, something like that.

MICHAEL: Wow, wow. And can you share any of the numbers behind the site? So in terms of maybe traffic or, you know, the pages bringing in that traffic or…

KOEN: Yeah, sure. So we grew across the board, like in every single commercial vertical, but also the informational traffic has been growing very healthily. So at the moment, we're doing about 70,000 users a day. And they're spread out quite a bit over the commercial pages and the informational ones. Some pages are a little bit in the middle. So we do like, for instance, certain crypto coin price predictions, that kind of stuff, but it's highly volatile. Sometimes, you know, you had the Ripple lawsuit not too long ago with the SEC, and then you get like a huge spike of traffic, but next week it's gone. So the site has been very stable around that 65, 70,000 users a day mark over the last, well, few algo updates in the last few months. But at the same time, like the pages that are getting most of the traffic has been fluctuating quite a bit.

MICHAEL: And out of those 70,000 a day, what would you say the split between informational and affiliate traffic is? And are you doing anything with those informational pages to try and funnel them through to those affiliate offers?

KOEN: No, not at all. So to the lowest extent possible, essentially. So what we want to do is we want to build a true tech brand. I think that is probably one of the best ways to de-risk yourself from Google algorithm updates. If you have a brand and people come directly to your site and people doing brand searches, those are going to be the KPIs for measuring how successful you're doing this. Then you make yourself kind of immune, knock on wood, kind of immune to these algo updates because you will have that direct traffic. But as some of the commercial niches that we're in, for instance, a good example is we do trading and investing now. This was something that was not initially going to be the plan or the focus. But once we started adding these pages, we saw that they were actually ranking pretty well. But this is not something that the average user that is coming to Techopedia is going to be looking for. So we're not pushing that upon them. So the only commercial vertical that we promote a bit more aggressively within the categories on the homepage is the technology affiliation. But that is just much more closely related to the type of user that is coming to the site for the information.

MICHAEL: Okay. What's that? Something like VPN or something like that?

KOEN: Exactly. So the site does a lot of content around cybersecurity. So VPN makes a lot of sense, password managers, antivirus. It has a lot of overlap with what we're covering on these other pages.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, cool. You touched on algo updates. There's been a lot of them lately, you know, let's say the second half of 2023, it's been non-stop. You've mentioned you sort of come through unscathed, which is great. What are you seeing on the front lines, you know, running such a big site with 60, did you say 60 a week or a day?

KOEN: No, 60 a week. Publishing, yeah.

MICHAEL: So what are you seeing that sort of, I guess, working and maybe stuff to steer clear from at the moment in light of all these algo updates?

KOEN: And in terms of SEO techniques, I think one of the big things that puts you at risk is focusing too much on the commercial content. We've seen this with some of the other projects within Phoenixio where we bought a site, it was a DR90, obviously extremely authoritative website, but there was no continuation of the old workflow and the old content that was being added. And the site essentially became a different site overnight. And they started putting the commercial content left front and center. It was in the top nav. It was in the footer. It was literally everywhere. And then the March algo update earlier this year came by and absolutely trashed the site. I think we lost like 70% traffic on that one. And I think that is one of the big things. That you would be doing wrong. It depends a lot on what type of site we're talking about. Obviously right now I'm talking about this extremely authoritative website that we just milked. Well, we just were flying too close to the sun with that one. Essentially pushed it and got punished. But for a very small site, it might be very different. Maybe you do want to go with a very commercial focus. Maybe it's just a churn and burn type of model. But let's say, assuming that you do not want your site to get trashed by the next algo update, I think it's very important to just keep putting out relevant informational content around your commercial pages. And make sure that you also have really good writers that are writing that content, so that Google can start making that connection between you being associated with expert writers in their fields.

MICHAEL: On the topic of writing, are you exclusively using human writers, or is it augmented with AI at all, your workflow?

KOEN: It's for the most part human written content. I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing to use AI. Some of the teams, some of the content teams working on Techopedia, they use it more as an aid for rewriting. So we have, for instance, we have a couple of really expert writers within the cybersecurity field, like PhDs, professors, but they're coming from countries like India, where They have a bit of a different writing style that doesn't necessarily cater as well to Westerners. So using a lot of analogies and sentences tend to get really long. So sometimes we do use AI to start rewriting stuff, but not to generate content.

ARTHUR: I was going to ask, what are your thoughts on EEAT?

KOEN: Well, I think Google confirmed it's not a ranking factor. That's what they're saying. But I do think that it's important to realize that all the focus that they're putting on it is only going to become more important in the future, right? So they've been trying this for a long time. We had the, what was it called? The Google authorship program back in, I think 2014.

MICHAEL: You had to have your Google plus profile.

KOEN: Yeah, exactly. Google plus obviously also failed. Uh, but, um, I think that this is something that they're working very heavily on and it's also, I always think you, you should put your focus in, Making things easier for the search engines to understand your content, so that means schema, but also making these associations, because we know they're essentially building the algorithm on this entity-based database. So then it only makes sense that you get these expert writers, and sure, they're going to be much more expensive than paying somebody that just comes out of college five cents a word to write your content. But I think in the long term, it is going to make a big difference if you have these people that, you know, have knowledge panels showing up that have maybe written books that Google already has this entity graph for. And have these people also like share your pages or whatever they've been contributing to you, um, on their socials. And then you're really like creating this, this entity graph for Google saying, listen, these people are experts in their fields. We're experts in the field. And then, uh, yeah, make that association and just increase the trust score or whatever they would want to call it, um, within the, uh, within the algorithm.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I noticed as I was using the site there would be an article and it would be written by whoever but then you had a section that says fact-checked by a little sort of author avatar or profile picture hover over it and it had links to all their social profiles and that's largely that entity type play you know that you're using there and is it also for trust building with your audience or your readers or?

KOEN: Yeah, I think so, for sure, because especially when you get, we are active in some of these your money, your life niches, like I mentioned, personal finance and investing before. I think it makes all the difference that people can see that the person who wrote this article has actually been active in this space for a long time. And we also quite liberally link to competitors in that sense. If they have written for a NerdWallet, we'll mention that because that's an association you would want to have. Obviously, most SEOs get nauseous by the thought of linking to some competitors, but I think we have quite a lenient outlinking strategy anyway. And I think it's important because it kind of comes back to what I was saying earlier. You want to make the search engine's life as easy as possible. And if you are linking to competitors, which are often the most relevant pages for some type of content that you're creating, You're also helping Google, because if there are no links on the web, if nobody's doing outlinks, if everybody puts no follows on their tags, well, obviously, they stopped following that directive for exactly that reason when Forbes started no following all their links and stuff. But without links, the whole Google algorithm stops working. So you're only helping them. And I think in the long term, it will be beneficial in order to just, like I said, liberally link to the most relevant pages. And if that's a competitor every once in a while, that's fine.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so what I'm hearing is being super trustworthy with your content creation and I think, you know, I don't know if you've seen it with your site, but the most recent updates are seemingly favoring sites like Reddit, Quora, you know, sites where people will go on and have honest discussions and give their, in theory, honest discussions and give their opinions on the best products and services. Do you think your approach is able to combat Google favoring Reddit for that reason or have you seen much of an impact from

KOEN: So you have like, um, no, not really, but it was actually looking at some casino SERPs because I cannot help myself, uh, earlier, earlier this morning. And, uh, saw indeed that some Reddit posts started ranking for like best online casino in the U S. Um, some of these posts were really old. We're like five years old posts. So for me, like me personally, when I'm going to go and buy whatever, some new earbuds for, for jogging or whatever. I love to go to Reddit myself. Even though you have these sites from these big guys, from Future and Red Ventures, and CNET, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, all those websites, and they do actual physical reviews of these products. But at the same time, you're still incentivized to write about this product, and you're going to be using it for a couple of days at most, usually, with some exceptions. But if you go to Reddit, These are the expert users and they will have valuable information to share and see like, okay, this is the performance of this product versus that product and add graphs and whatever. But you know, the average user probably doesn't do much with that information. If you go to somebody that's on Reddit, then they might have been using this product for months on end, like in the exact same way that you will be using it. So probably the value is quite higher there. So when I mentioned the earbuds example, because this was a customer journey I went through myself a while ago, where there were a lot of these hidden issues that you'd get, especially when you're jogging with earbuds in. They get wet, and it's easy for things to break. And then I found some really good information that I'm not going to call out any brands or whatever, but they were the premium the premium brands for that were specifically designed for jogging and after three months tons of people on reddit are reporting issues so. To get back to your question, I find it personally very valuable. I think the way it is being done right now is terrible. I'm not even talking about Quora. Quora is absolutely terrible. It's just a spam fest over the last few years. But for Reddit, I mean, what are you going to do if you're Google, right? You can go and try and scrape whatever people's karma is, who's got the most uploads, but even that is a system that can be gamed. And I think that Google would probably not be very happy to, you know, also rely on somebody else's reputation score, um, so to speak. So I think there's a place for both of them. I don't feel threatened by, by Reddit at all. Um, but, uh, I do think that it's, that it's important, like, um, there's going to be customer journeys that are going to be touching both those UGC sites as well as, uh, the, the actual reviewing experts. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Um, let's switch gears a bit and talk about the content creation. I'm sort of interested, you know, with you guys churning out that much content a week, what's your process to ideate and create that content? And is it, is it sort of, you know, hunch based, you're leaving it up to the writers. Are you trying to build a topical map in certain areas? What's your sort of approach at the moment?

KOEN: Yeah, so for the commercial pages, we will be having very elaborate plans and they will be based on, yeah, keyword mapping, creating topical clusters, making sure you're not cannibalizing, that you don't take it too far with targeting some long tails and then be hurting the main pages for the commercial content. For the informational content, the people that are writing for the sites are bigger cybersecurity experts than I am. They're bigger AI experts than I am. They're bigger crypto experts than I am. So in that case, I leave it up to them what they're going to be writing about. They are in these circles all day. They know what is alive within that niche on any given day. So for that type of content, I'll leave that up to the experts because I'm not nowhere near any of these guys. I'm just a generalist across the verticals, essentially.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Are they using AI at all to like figure out topic clusters and speed up the process or is it more of a manual process?

KOEN: It's more of a manual process at the moment. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Okay, cool. So I guess your DR is very strong already. What's your approach for link building and how do you attract high quality DR sites? Yeah.

KOEN: So this is where, uh, where there is keyword research involved, SEO research in general, in order to see, you know, what attracts organic backlinks and what we can rank for as well, because, uh, we can start, um, uh, targeting topics that, you know, Forbes is ranking for, but that's going to be a long-term play. So we do need to do need to, even though the site is very respectable, we still need to try and find like our niche. We had a couple of pages that did extremely well, the classic statistics type pieces. We had a couple that were doing really well. And quite recently we had one post absolutely blew up and it fitted perfectly in the topicality of the site. It was a tech layoffs prediction piece. And we went to all these experts, got their two cents of it. It was ranking for tech layoffs in a period where we had so many different big tech companies knocking people off. So that one got like, I don't remember, I think it had like 140,000 users in the first 24 hours. I think I was one of them.

ARTHUR: From memory, yeah, yeah.

KOEN: Yeah, it could be. So that one had massive reach. And essentially, the assumption is whatever is getting traffic is going to get links. But it's a little bit tricky sometimes to properly analyze this because even the best SEO tools like Ahrefs, they're going to be lagging behind and Majestic is going to be lagging behind in terms of what referring domains you pick up. So you need to allow for quite a big time window after publication of the post before you can actually start thinking, oh, these type of topics are getting more referring domains and these type of topics are not performing as well. So in general, the assumption is the more traffic something gets, the more organic backlinks we're going to receive. Nice.

MICHAEL: On the link building side of things, are you ever going out and straight paying for links on like a commercial page to try to boost rankings? Or are you keeping it to that organic sort of natural process?

KOEN: Mostly, mostly organic. Yeah. Like we do want to, we do try to do quite some PR stuff as well. So it's kind of gray area because while you are paying for it, we also did a few little experiments which were quite successful where we just take informational pages and run PPC campaigns on it just to get organic links. So we're not paying the site directly, but we are getting links by paying for it. But, you know, anything that costs time or resources is essentially also paid, right? Exactly, exactly.

MICHAEL: It's such a game of semantics. Exactly. I'm out of interest on that PPC to a commercial page. I see it a bit in the VPN world, you know, some of these top 10 VPN sites where they just run ads. And I would imagine it's near on impossible to do it profitably because of You're up against the VPNs themselves, so you know your cost of acquisition is going to be so high on Google Ads, how do you compete with those VPNs? Do you see anything of that sort of world on your side, or is it purely just a sort of trying to get links and you put a bit of budget behind it?

KOEN: Yeah, so like I ran quite some PPC campaigns in my years, but like SEO has always got to be closest to my heart. It's just because the ROI is impossible to replicate from doing SEO. So in PPC, it's always a race to the bottom. So for instance, at my company, Blexer, at the previous company, Blexer, we did PPC campaigns in the UK, regulated casino market. And, you know, we're talking like 30, 40 pound CPCs. And, you know, whoever is going to be willing to make the least amount of money on this traffic is the one who's going to be winning out. So you will never be able to get, or at least not for the long term, you will never be able to get 200, 300, even more percentage returns within a very competitive market like VPNs, like gambling and PPC. So yeah, like personally, you can use it as a supplement. It's good to test markets with it. If you, for instance, now with Techopedia, like we're entering the tech affiliation niche, which is very new for us as a company. So Fenixio is traditionally strong in crypto and gambling and investing, finance, that sort of thing. Not so much technology. So what you can do there is in order to just validate, like, what is the conversion going to look like? Because I don't know what the conversion is going to look like for 4k TVs. It's going to be very different than, uh, you know, somebody, um, opening up a Bitcoin account and just going to start trading a little bit. So, uh, this way we can actually, uh, look, test some product categories before you can commit to like this massive content plan.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Love the sound of that. On the topic of content and plans with content, we spoke before about links and how, you know, you've got to leave it up for a while and see how many links come through to it on the content side of things. If you put content up and it's not getting much traffic, do you ever prune it and get rid of it to sort of try and maintain health of the site? Or do you leave it there as like a topical sort of, you know, covering the whole topical map sort of approach?

KOEN: Yeah, that's a very relevant question actually, because Techipedia, so look, the cornerstone content are these definitions, like what is ICT, what is a blockchain, that kind of thing. And it did have quite some legacy in terms of a lot of these pages would be very thin. I'd still prefer not to remove them. They still add value. They still get a lot of internal links on the site as well. I think one of the things that makes Techopedia as strong as it is, is that the site is still relatively light. So we have about 19,000, 20,000 indexable pages. It's very small compared to where we want to be, a tech radar, a times guide. I think that I'm not a fan of removing content at all, unless we have a legal reason for it, or it's cannibalizing with a different page. So then I would rather just start looking at, OK, how can we start improving this content? If it's still relevant in any way, if there's still search volume, we can redo the page, and we do it the way we create new pages now. But yeah, like in general, like a content pruning, I'm not a big fan of. Even though one of the other projects at Phoenixio had a really good pruning case, and that was when they started the adult content to a site. So that was a site that was flying too close to the sun. And it was ranking for everything that we were putting on there. It was absolute SEO and easy mode. And yeah, I guess we got greedy. They put adult content on it, like only fans affiliation, that kind of stuff. barely making any money with it, even though it became the biggest traffic getter. And I'm sure that played a role in that site eventually getting a big slap from Google in the next core algo update as well. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So we actually had some other chats with SEOs about user engagement metrics. So, you know, you might create content and Google rewards it with a bit of traffic and it's trying to test, you know, does this content deserve to be in our SERPs? And is it answering questions? Do users like it? Maybe with something like that, you know, there's a lot of traffic coming over, but you're saying they're not converting, you're not making money out of it, there might be a bit of a misalignment. With what you're doing on the SEO side of things with your team on Techopedia, are you doing much by way of testing user engagement and trying to, let's say YouTube, you know, watching a full video and then going and watching another video is a very strong signal to the algorithm. Are you testing that sort of stuff with your SEO?

KOEN: No, not really. So like the engagement on the site is something that we're working on quite heavily because I think the average pages per session is 1.3, something like that. It's very low, but it also makes sense for the type of content that we have. When somebody's looking up, you know, what is IT, then they find the answer. It's not like a very logical way to go to like a different definition. Usually people are, you know, whatever, working on a project, seeing this term, just want to have like a quick definition. That's what they'll get. They'll bounce. That's it. So we don't really do a lot of engagement testing in that way, but it is something that we need to work on because I think it also comes back to what we were discussing earlier about like building a brand and making sure people come directly to the site. Then you do need to have that stickiness and you need to have relevant other content apart from like the main content that somebody has been reading in order to like keep people on the site. So, but we don't do enough at it is the short answer.

ARTHUR: I had a question more around like it sounds like there's a lot of moving parts and you mentioned before that you had a copywriting team that writes human copy. How big is the SEO team?

KOEN: Uh, the SEO team. So what we do is we were adding in a couple of new languages at the moment. So each new language will generally be, uh, headed by like a head of SEO or a head of content, uh, type role. Um, and, um, we have a one general, uh, SEO head of SEO who is, uh, managing across all the different languages. Um, she's recruiting at the moment for a couple of people to join because we're, we're very light on SEO for the amount of content that we're doing. But yeah, that's essentially what the team looks like. Each language has a head of SEO slash head of content. Myself, like Phoenixio as a company, almost everybody has an SEO background. I know you guys will be talking to Chris later on as well. So Chris is the group level CEO of Phoenixio, but he's an SEO more than anything. And the owners also have SEO backgrounds, which I think is always like this underappreciated fact when you're working in SEO. If the people you're reporting to or the people owning the business and making the big decisions do not understand SEO, you're not going to have a good time practicing SEO over there.

MICHAEL: You're having to explain and teach half the time and then trying to get what you want done the other half.

KOEN: Exactly. And yeah, well, you guys having all kinds of external clients, I'm sure that there's some conflicts there too. Oh yeah, all the time.

MICHAEL: We've got a bank of analogies we use to try and make things easier for people, but even then it's not so good. Interesting, the international SEO side of things, we haven't really spoken about that a lot on the show, but on a big site like that, let's say you're going into a new geo, or in general, what's your approach to international SEO? How do you structure subfolders, subdomains, hreflang tags, what's your approach to it?

KOEN: Well, it's definitely subfolders. That's 100% the way to go. When you're on a subdomain, the authority tends to pass very differently. I've seen this on a couple of sites. It's almost always. I don't like using absolutes like that too much. But I think this is one where I draw the line, where I'll die on that hill. It's going to be subfolders. But then, yeah, for the general approach, I think the biggest challenge is because if you have an extremely authoritative domain and you start adding new languages to it, especially if this authoritative domain is already ranking in English, it's going to pick up real quick in other languages, even when you don't have, you know, like the referring domains going to that subfolder that would, you know, give you the right to rank. So it will pick up really quickly. So I think the biggest challenge is It's twofold, really. One of them is, where do you stop? Because you can keep adding these new languages, but every single one, if you did your research correctly, every single one that you're going to add is going to be adding less value than the last one. And that brings me to the second part of the answer. That is that you still want to make sure that the quality on all these languages is going to be very high. Because I've seen this on other sites as well, where you would be adding a language and the content quality often in hindsight, of course, because you're not going to allow that to happen. But then the content quality in hindsight was like below par in quality and it can pull the entire domain back down. So where do you stop and how do you ensure that the quality is going to stay as high as in English? Because for, you know, I'm Dutch. So when we're doing Dutch, this is not an issue. I know some German. So when we're doing German, that's not an issue. when we're going to do Korean or Japanese, I have no way of knowing whether this content quality is higher, lower, or the same as the English content. So that becomes an issue and yeah, potentially lose a little bit of sleep over it in the sense of, I don't know how this is affecting the rest of the site.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And do you take existing content and translate it or do you start fresh with all new posts when you move into a, like a geographic area?

KOEN: Yeah, so it's a mix of both. For the informational content, because we have such experts writing this informational stuff, we generally translate that. We'll get a native editor, of course, to translate this, go through it. get at the fact check by, of course, um, for the commercial content is always written from scratch. Uh, the commercial content, this is often very different in terms of, um, you know, what type of pages are favored in a certain country by Google. So the structure of the page is often very different. It wants to see different. Entity mentions, different partners might have different levels of popularity within that geo. So the commercial content is always written from scratch. And then we also do some original content in each of the languages that we cover. So when we find like a German cybersecurity expert, we reach out, try to do an interview, maybe turn them into a guest contributor. And sometimes we'll translate that straight back to the English version as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah, awesome. And what dictates a country that you might choose to go into? Are you looking at disposable income or something there? Are you looking at traffic to your site and, you know, saying we're getting a bit of traction here, maybe we need to go into their native language with the content? How do you sort of map it all out out of hundreds of countries that are in the world that you could go into?

KOEN: Yeah, I actually do pretty much exactly that. So like it's a, it's a very easy formula to look at. Okay. This is the population of a country. This is our search volumes. You can just look at some of the main terms. Sometimes search volumes work. Sometimes traffic potential is better because some countries have a lot more long tails that would be for like the same, uh, like essentially synonyms. But, um, that's essentially what it looked like. I look at. like a top X number of keywords within a given vertical in that country, times the population. I sometimes use some Google trends numbers in there as well, because you can very easy see what the proportion is of popularity of a given topic. Only works when it's an entity though, not when you get like the little search term bit underneath the keyword that you're looking for. But it will work. And then essentially multiplied by GDP divided by a couple of hundred million, so you get a number that is readable. And then you can prioritize based on that. And obviously, we have a lot of internal knowledge as well, especially about the niches that we've been active in for the last half a decade. So we know what markets look like there. Once we go into something like technology, then these type of formulas come in handy.

MICHAEL: So, um, we've been speaking largely about Techopedia, sort of, let's say that's a site where you're, you care about it existing, you want it to continue to exist, but you've also spoken about, you know, keeping an eye on the casino world, gambling, that sort of stuff, maybe, you know, with other projects and the like, um, what sort of stuff would you say is working or is interesting in that space that you, you know, you call flying close to the sun, I guess, with the other sites that you've done, you know, is there anything at the moment that's working that you could chat about?

KOEN: So, yeah, like the main development in the casino industry has been that over the last five years or so, it's been more and more like the general authority websites that are taking over. It's the parasites that are taking over. And, you know, I get it. John Mueller even directly addressed this in a tweet a couple of years ago where some affiliates were complaining about, you know, like, what are these sites doing there? And I think John's exact words were something, yeah, why should some random affiliate site rank? And it makes sense. It makes sense because when you're the Miami Herald, supposedly you have a bigger authority to keep up than if you're whatever some Grey area online casino affiliate, but like we've already seen that it doesn't work. So I do think that in the longer term. Google needs to do something about the parasite SEO when I was checking the rankings this morning again. Still, All Times Union and Outlook India, and they're everywhere. And at least from the numbers I see, the conversion is going to be much worse there. And it makes sense because the content is generally not that good. You don't have that eat. And it just looks like a sponsored post for the most part. But, um, like a lot of these gambling affiliates, they're very actively, um, made all these media partnerships. So you have, uh, for instance, uh, one of the big ones is Telegraphico UK has a, as a partnership agreement and they've been ranking for betting sites for three, four years now. And just with the sub folder that they manage on that, on that site. And you see this everywhere. They're doing this in Sweden, where you've often blotted, which is essentially like the mirror, but for Sweden, they have a subfolder. It's managed by one of these big gambling companies. And yeah, it's easy for those sites to rank there. I think that something needs to be done, especially, like these media partnerships, I don't have any issues with, because now you still have that editorial, oversight, because it is actually managed by one of these usually publicly traded gambling affiliate companies and the content quality will be better. But if you look at Times Union and Outlook India, and anybody can buy a post there and send them to like the dodgiest casino, whatever, with pretty much no consequences, that is something that needs to be addressed. Apart from the fact that It's not really that helpful for the SEOs that are placing these posts either because Outlook India will take your Best Online Casinos post and three hours later there's another one. Oh yeah? Oh yeah, that's how it goes.

MICHAEL: Okay. Yeah, I didn't know they did that. I've been seeing a lot of… Outlook India is a big one at the moment, everyone posting about it all the time, like how easy it is to post on there. It's just a bad experience, isn't it, at the end of the day? Like if Google's been trying to combat that by pushing up Reddit, for example, where it's supposedly better, You've got to think they're going to keep hammering away at that parasite SEO in the long term Yes, I think so sort of a pretty we made that prediction a year ago We do a prediction at the end of every year and we said Parasite SEO will be attacked at some point by Google because the end experience for the user Looking at something like that compared to a techopedia with a you know, an expert checking it all is night and day different

KOEN: Yeah, exactly. And it's also very often the case for these big authority websites going into different niches. So for instance, Forbes, the content on Forbes Advisor, which is their whole affiliate folder, is generally not that great. But they just rank on pure Forbes DR. But what also happens is that, kind of similar to what we did when we went into the OnlyFans stuff, you go into irrelevant niches. So a good example now is that I saw that CNET is now ranking for multivitamins. So who would want to get multivitamin advice from CNET? It doesn't make any sense. So I think that to get back to your question, really, the general trend, not just in casino, but also outside of it, has been to favor these higher authority websites. And I get it. Why? Why? Because like I said, they have more to lose. They have higher reputation. So it's a easy assumption for Google to make that they would actually be providing better value to the users. But I do think that that needs to be a bit of a comeback of topical authority. Hopefully having, you know, this aspect in there of having expert writers. so that, you know, we won't be buying multivitamins from CNET. 100% agree.

MICHAEL: 100% agree. Well, this has been great, mate. What we like to do with everyone that comes on is ask the same question just to see the different perspectives out there. And it's pretty straightforward. In the SEO world, we all love our tools and software and so tools and software could be, you know, SAS tools, it could be browser extensions, you know, anything you use to get the job done, plugins from WordPress, that sort of stuff. If you had to pick three to get the job done, you couldn't use any others. What would be your go-to tool suite?

KOEN: Okay, the cost don't matter.

MICHAEL: Cost don't matter.

KOEN: I think when you're managing large websites, you want to have a good cloud-based crawler, because it's a pain. I love Screaming Frog. It's the best value for money any SEO can get. But at the same time, once you have a lot of big websites, you need something cloud-based. Personally, I like Botify the best there. Lumar closed second. But Botify would be my go-to solution. Then secondly, we'll be using Ahrefs. Look, you know, we were talking a bit about the new credit system earlier, but we have to give them credit where credit is due. And if you compare where Ahrefs was five years ago compared to SEMrush, they absolutely crushed it, in my opinion. And it's a far superior product at the moment. if they're not having any technical issues, because there have been quite a few. Are you listening, Tim? And then for the third one, this is going to be a bit of an awkward one, I would say JavaScript bookmarklets. So I have a lot of this stuff and they're just like easy time savers where I have a bookmark for opening a page on the keyword page on Ahrefs whenever I'm on a page. I just click and then it does it. Or I do a site search on Techopedia or do a localized US search. I have a ton of these bookmarklets. I think it dates back to my poker days where And in my poker days, sometimes I would be playing like 20, 24 tables at a time. So I had a lot of shortcuts and stuff. So everything that saves me time, it gives me more time to think. And just that whole, how would you call it? I don't know, that whole mindset has always stuck with me since then, where if you can save a little bit of time every day, a couple of times, in the long run, it's going to save you a lot of time. So yeah, that would be my third one. Awesome. Love it.

MICHAEL: Well, look, if people want to connect with you after the show or find out a bit more about you, where should they head?

KOEN: Probably my LinkedIn. I don't really post too much on there, but I'm always open to having some chats about SEO. So LinkedIn profile will work. I'm not on Instagram at all. My Facebook is dead. I don't use it at all. It's just a check-in for whatever likes I got on Techopedia and some of the other projects that I have running. So LinkedIn is probably the best way.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us on the show, Gunnar. It's been great chatting to you.

KOEN: It's been a pleasure. Thanks guys. Thank you.

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