Q&A Week #10

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 another episode of the SEO show. I'm Michael Costin. Arthur Fabik is opposite me and he's raging. He's angry. He's upset. He's got a headphone on. He's got a microphone that's slightly blocking his screen and he's annoyed about it.

ARTHUR: I'm not very happy with these microphones.

MICHAEL: It's the microphones this time, more so than the headphones.

ARTHUR: Well, the microphones are very sensitive. You have to have them like a centimeter from your mouth and you have to be facing them head on. Otherwise it cuts off like this. It's infuriating.

MICHAEL: Yep. So from that baseline of that, that sort of foundation of infuriation, infuriation, is that a word? Whatever. Arp is bringing you this episode of the SEO Show. We're answering questions, listener questions. It's going to be done through the lens of furious, being angry.

ARTHUR: Well, I'm not happy I'm wearing headphones either. So I play the question and then I'm going to take them off.

MICHAEL: Yes. So we'll get into it. It's another episode. Do you notice episode 10 of Q&A?

ARTHUR: No, I do now.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Number 10. Episode 104. Episode 104. 10 of them have been Q&A weeks. And, um, yeah, for the, for the big number 10, we're going to kick things off with an audio question. Now I love these audio questions. If you want to submit one, you can go to theseoshow.co. Click the little hamburger dot icon thing in the menu there and you'll see there's a thing called speak pipe where you can record yourself asking us a question and We'll play it on the show and answer it and this way you haven't even heard this one Arthur. So you're gonna be freestyling I'm gonna cut to it. The guy's name was either Peter or Paul. Let me just make sure I've got his name, right and His name is Peter and he wants to know the answer to this question. You ready?

ARTHUR: Ready.

CALLER: Hello. I'm working with a digital marketing company that has one of the clients that has had a www in front of its URL and now the new website has no www in front of the URL. Does the sitemap with the original URL interfere with the new URL? And if so, do we have to eliminate the old sitemap with the www URL for it to work effectively? Please help me. Bye.

MICHAEL: Please help me. Please. So we're here. We're here to help Peter. So do you, the question is that used to be WWW.

ARTHUR: I heard the question and they've, they've, they've changed. Like, so they went from WWW to non WWW and is asking whether or not they need to update the sitemap. Correct. Yes. For it to work. Well, it should already be updated a lot of the time.

MICHAEL: Depending on the plugin that you're using that has built, I would say forget the sitemap. As long as your 301 redirects are in place from www to non-www. Yep. Then Google's going to, even if it goes to the old sitemap that has the original www in it. Google will go there and get a 301 redirect, which is telling Google this URL now lives here permanently. And it will look at that new URL as the permanent one. But then you should go update this XML sitemap anyway.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, it would be a new property in Google Search Console. That's true. So you'd have to go create, verify the new domain, the non-www, and then submit.

MICHAEL: Unless they've got the wildcard Search Console set up where it's everything on that domain. Yes, true. But like, as it comes to sitemap itself, not most of the time, let's say you've migrated to this new domain structure, but you're on the same CMS as before, that CMS, that will create the XML sitemap dynamically, like a basic page. So that will update, it should update automatically.

ARTHUR: Yes. But if it doesn't, then definitely update it.

MICHAEL: Yes. But make sure your 301s are in place, which you would have done, I'm hoping, when you change the URLs, which is first and foremost going to tell Google, hey, this lives over here now. Go look over there. Yeah. So I hope that helps, Peter. Do you reckon that helps? I think we've answered it. He needed help. He was a bit concerned. Yeah. I feel you'll be OK if you just tick those boxes there. All right. Let's move on to Meg. This is one we argue about. We don't argue about it, but there's a tool called SEMrush. I call it SEMrush. Arthur calls it, what do you call it?

ARTHUR: I call it SEMrush now. Well, what did you used to call it? SEMrush.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And there's always an argument, not really an argument, but in the SEO world, people say it one of two ways, those two ways. But this person, Meg, is asking us, does the term SEM have a different meaning in Australia? Because she's in the US, and SEM means search engine marketing, which encompasses both SEO and paid Google. But she thinks in Australia, people use SEM pretty much to mean Google Ads Management only.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I think that.

MICHAEL: Well, I remember when I first got into it, I thought what she did, SEM, was search engine marketing, which encompassed both channels.

ARTHUR: But definitely it's over the years grown to become… Because I think most, if you do research when you're starting out, when they talk about SEM, they talk about search engine marketing as a whole, not just paid, but anything to do with organic, Google, paid, Bing, whatever. But in the industry, they refer to SEM as paid. Yeah.

MICHAEL: You deal with like marketing managers, clients, that sort of stuff. There's definitely that delineation. SEM is Google paid. Yes. SEO is organic.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think by definition, SEM is everything. It is search engine marketing.

MICHAEL: Yes. Yep. I remember when I was originally looking for marketing jobs as a 20-something year old. A long time ago. A recruiter told me, would you be interested in search engine marketing? I was like, what the hell is that? And that's how I first discovered it. And it definitely was all-encompassing of all channels at that point, but now we agree that I don't think even in the US. She's saying in the US it encompasses both. What's SEA? She's got… Search Engine Advertising.

ARTHUR: Oh. No, I haven't heard that.

MICHAEL: C. Yeah, no. Yeah, it's a bit confusing. But I think even in the US they refer to SEMs, Google Ads, more so these days. I think so. Not that I'm in the US or dealing with US people a lot, but that's what I think.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Everyone I've dealt with since the start has always referred to SEM as paid, and then just SEO as SEO. So SEM paid, SEO SEO. But then SEMrush, the tool, does both. I thought it was more geared towards paid.

MICHAEL: No, it's SEMrush, it's got heaps of organic.

ARTHUR: It does have organic, but I always found Ahrefs was more geared towards organic and then SEMrush was more geared towards paid.

MICHAEL: Yeah, maybe in the past, but definitely.

ARTHUR: No, I know. I know that it does have a strong organic presence, but.

MICHAEL: Strong organic presence. Ranking well in the search results.

ARTHUR: Nice. Struggle there.

MICHAEL: On that note, let's move on because Meg, we're telling you SCM is, yep, it's just paid media these days. Search paid media. Let's move on to how does website speed affect SEO rankings from Kumar. Kumar, we've spoken about this on the show before.

ARTHUR: You put here, not as much as you think it does. That's correct. Oh, okay. Speed, people… I beg to differ. You beg to differ? I think so, yeah.

MICHAEL: No, I think as long as your site is decent enough at loading, you're fine.

ARTHUR: Like people seem to think… What's decent though?

MICHAEL: A few seconds.

ARTHUR: OK. Yeah. So we're talking about Core Web Vitals and metrics like that, or are we just talking about face value speed?

MICHAEL: At the moment, I'm talking about if I go to a search result, I could type in a keyword, non-brand keyword, get a list of search results. Sometimes I'll click on a site that takes ages to load, but it's still ranking well. And yes, Google pushes Core Web Vitals and speed being important. Speed's super important from a conversion point of view, usability, UX. So it's very important. I feel like Google and the SEO world have done a bit of a sales pitch on like speed being like a very important ranking factor that I don't necessarily always see because there's some sites that I'll load that take forever to load and they're ranking very well even in niches that are competitive. What do you reckon? You want to argue?

ARTHUR: I always want to argue. No, I found that more recently working with a few clients they would be outranked by sites that have far less authority, are far newer, and then just on face value shouldn't be outranking them. And the one thing that we can find that the sites are doing better is they have significantly better Core Web Vitals scores and page load speed. So if you run them through PageSpeed Insights, they score well, they pass all the Core Web Vitals, and then GTmetrix scores are all very strong. Whereas this website that I'm referring to would have failed all the Core Web Vitals, would have slow server response time. On face value still was loading fast enough, not to the point where you would leave, but would fail. Like the scores would all be very low.

MICHAEL: So. But is it very low? So on face value it loads okay, but the tools are saying they're crap. Like the load speed's no good.

ARTHUR: Yes. I mean, look, it is noticeably slower, but it's not slow as in like what you're referring to, that you're sitting there and you're like, what's going on? It's just slower. But the other sides. their shit sites because they're, you know, very basic, but they load very quickly.

MICHAEL: So, and this is in a competitive nation competitive where they've got better authority, much better authority, better content.

ARTHUR: Yes. Better links, everything been around for a lot longer. It could be even, it could be a lot of other things, but I just, I think that it does play a big part more so moving forward as well. Maybe not in the past, but.

MICHAEL: So Kumar, you're getting a bit of mixed messaging there. On one side I'm saying it's not important, but I just don't think it's as important as people might be led to believe. On the other side, Arthur is saying pretty important.

ARTHUR: So look, you can't just have a site, build a site that has no links, no authority, not without good content, but it's very fast and expect it to rank. Yes. But I think, you know, if you've exhausted all the other avenues and you're trying to figure out why your site's not performing, that could be the reason as to why.

MICHAEL: Yep. But when it comes down to it, in a competitive niche for mine, more links is usually the answer, as opposed to improving Core Web Vitals scores a little bit. But you know what, Kumar? Why don't you do some work? Why don't you test your results? Try and speed things up. Use a speed optimization service. See if your core web provider is improving. Go to theseo.co and leave us a speak pipe.

ARTHUR: Do you remember how we used to use NitroPack on sites and the rankings would almost immediately improve? A lot of the time.

MICHAEL: I don't, I personally can't even, it's been so long since I used it that I don't remember like results coming on the back. Are there any examples, good examples off the top of your head?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, I can't remember the exact clients, but I remember we rolled it out over a number of clients and whenever we'd run it through like GT metrics or whatever, scores were trash. We'd install NitroPack and then the scores would be A, almost a hundred percent. And then we'd see off the back of that improvements in rankings. I can't, like I said, it's been a while, but I remember that we started rolling it out across a lot of other sites. The only problem with that was it would, in time, break sites because it was a Band-Aid solution. You weren't fixing the, I guess, the core issues. You were basically using a plugin to try, trick Google in a way.

MICHAEL: trick, but like maybe when you put that tool on the sites would like be snappy, fast to use, but I just remember it would break your site on you without you realizing. And it's.

ARTHUR: Well, it had a whole lot of different settings, like standard ludicrous, like you could really ramp it up and get those scores as close to a hundred as possible. Yeah. It did speed up the site. And from my experience, I found that rankings didn't improve off the back of that.

MICHAEL: From my experience, I found if you click the wrong button, it breaks your whole site, but you don't always notice it straight away. And it can cause like, over conversions.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd have, I remember the reason we don't use it anymore is because we would run it on sites. The site would break over the weekend. We'd have to figure out what happened. And it was 90% of the time due to that plugin failing or having issues with other plugins or whatnot. So yeah, long-term it wasn't worth it, but.

MICHAEL: Cool. Well, let's, let's leave it at that one for Kumar. Um, I, I implore you Kumar to leave us a speak pipe. If you get a chance to do a bit of testing on Sitespeed yourself, let's move on to Jack who asks, does going to university have any relevance for digital marketing? I never went to university, so I'm going to say no, it doesn't. What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: I went to university. It was a long time ago though. So. I don't, I don't think that Let me have a think about this. So when I went to uni, there was like a digital marketing subject, maybe one out of the 30 subjects that I did. Mind you, this is like in 2010, so it was still pretty fresh. It wasn't like a core unit, but I didn't find that anything that I learned in my degree applied to my first SEO role directly. Indirectly, yeah, I guess so, but, It's not like I went out of uni and knew SEO and got into an SEO role and killed it, like started from the bottom doing link building and outreach and stuff like that and then worked my way up. So, you know, that they definitely didn't teach that at uni. They might do nowadays.

MICHAEL: There's probably a lot more around digital marketing, but they're so rigid and take so long that it would be all old news by the time you're done anyway, probably.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think very rarely do you leave uni or college, um, with the skills. Job ready. Yeah. It's stuff that you would pick up as you kind of get an entry level role, start from the bottom and then grow.

MICHAEL: I have pretty strong views on uni and whether it's worth it. This is outside, I guess, well, there's a scope of whether for helping with digital marketing, but then just look, it's life in general. I agree with you. It's a big cost. Like if they have massive profit making machines now where these people sign up for this stuff, are paying it off for ages, like burdened by the cost of it. And it's not like if you're doing like engineering or you're a doctor or law or something like that, where you really need that qualification, that education. But to move into the digital marketing world, for me, when we're looking at people we want to hire, we're looking for personality traits and interests that are conducive to being good at SEO and practical experience, or at least showing a bit of initiative to go try and work on sites and build it. And all of that is much more potent than saying they did a business degree at some uni.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That wasn't the case though. When I went out of uni, everyone looked at what uni you went to, what degree you did, what your scores marks were. Um, and I think as well, To a lot of employers, it kind of demonstrates that you are capable of doing something and completing something. Do you know what I mean? Because it's not easy, you know, going to uni three years, studying, like passing, getting good grades, kind of demonstrates that you can knuckle down, finish off tasks, learn. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So relevance, it might be for helping, like, as you say, employers see that you can get stuff done, but the actual digital marketing itself, it's practical, real world stuff experience. That's going to be more important, whether that's working somewhere or using your own initiative to go out and do it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So to put things into perspective, like the best SEOs that work here don't have a marketing degree. They did like design and, um, psychology and then they kind of, you know, somehow ended up in SEO. So you don't necessarily need to be doing a marketing degree. No. Um, to be good at it. No. And the thing is with psychology, there's certain aspects of it that apply in SEO. Likewise with design and conversions and all that stuff. So it all kind of can apply to it.

MICHAEL: Psychology for digital marketing in general, like design, copywriting, that sort of stuff.

ARTHUR: Yep.

MICHAEL: Yeah, if I was advising some person in school that for some reason knew they wanted to go into digital marketing now, I would advise them not to spend the money on uni and instead try and build up their practical skills, show runs on the board building sites and try and get some sort of entry level marketing role that you can then use to segue in. Learn about the different tactics, tools, thought leaders in the space. That will get you into an agency, and then from there you can go client-side or whatever, without having to settle up for all the… But then I guess people that went to uni, though, have lifelong bonds with their friends that they meet there, and that sort of stuff. So there's a lot of stuff about it that's good as well.

ARTHUR: Maybe I'm doing a 180 here and saying, you know, I, you know what, if you went out of school, finished your HSC and managed to land an entry level, like role at a marketing agency, digital market agency in three years time, you'll be miles ahead of anyone that comes out of uni. Yes. Yeah. So like, if you can do that and your like passion is marketing and you want to get into digital marketing, then I'd probably do that. If I could do it all over again, I'd probably do that. But I think, like I said, during my time, I just knew, I knew it was very difficult to get the foot in the door without any like, yeah. Qualification, not qualifications, like qualifications. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Wigged out there for a second.

MICHAEL: Let's move on. We've only got one more question here. It's from Amanda. You can read this one since I've read all the others.

ARTHUR: Sure. So Amanda asks, can you recommend any tools or software to help with internal linking? Yeah, there is a whole bunch of different plugins that you can use depending on what CMS you're using, but most people would be using WordPress. And the ones that I've used in the past are RankMath and Yoast. So they're kind of all-in-one SEO plugins that do everything from, you know, meta descriptions, page titles, canonicals, all that. And then they have, I think in the paid or pro versions, internal linking. So basically what that'll do is it'll find keywords on the page and then it'll give you recommendations on other pages that you can link to. And then there's other tools like Link Whisper that we've used in the past and basically it does the same thing. Um, that's more of a standalone internal linking tool and it just, yeah, it does the same thing. It will crawl the page, find keywords, and then give you recommendations on pages that you can link to. Uh, and basically all you do is hit apply or whatever, and it inserts those internal links for you.

MICHAEL: There's another one we've tested, well I've tested, called autolink.ai, which is like Webflow. Um, I would say though, as a general rule, I find these tools, Well, back up. I prefer being strategic and going in to add internal links with a lot of purpose behind it. Yes. And I find these tools try to just like look for keywords, although intelligently scan your site and recommend stuff. Yeah. But then I often find it's linking from one page to another that I don't think should happen because it's going to like leak link juice or whatever. Yep. And it can be tempting to be sucked into just accepting what these tools say and applying it, and going, you know, tick the item as done on your list and move on. But unless you have a massive, massive site with a lot of stuff to cover, probably doing it manually first is what I like.

ARTHUR: Well, it's a good way to learn why internal linking is important rather than just letting.

MICHAEL: Like helpful and then you don't necessarily know always what's been done unless you're really digging through the results and whereas if I like let's say I create a new location page and then I might go back to a few of my other ones, make sure they link to it, make sure the main category pages link to it, like pages that have links externally are all linking to it, and try to shape it, use the right keywords myself, but then not have, because some of these tools even inject external links just randomly into your stuff as well. Yeah, I don't know. I know the world is headed the way of automate everything. But if you've only got a small site, do it manually.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I think so. You agree? Yeah. I mean, that's the way you will learn. And you don't want the tool to just link random pages to other random pages, because that's not going to be effective. So you need to put some thought behind it. Yeah. There's a lot of guides on how to like do internal linking properly, how to do an internal linking audit online. So I would recommend starting there and reading and watching and then giving it a crack yourself.

MICHAEL: Yeah. At its core though, any page on your site that has links pointing to it from other websites, that's a powerful page. You want to link from that page to the pages that matter. So your main category pages and Use a keyword rich internal link and you're good to go. You can do that manually rather than a pay. A lot of these tools you gotta pay for as well, which, you know, paying a hundred bucks a month to have internal links on your site because they've got AI in their name. The power of AI, I'm not sure is always, always worth it unless you've got a massive site. Hope that helps Amanda and Jack, Kumar, Megan, Peter. That is all we have for this episode of Q&A. For episode 11, we're putting the call out for Speak Pipes. Go to theseoshow.co, submit your Speak Pipe, you'll hear yourself on the show. And hopefully Arthur's not furious anymore.

ARTHUR: You seem pretty good.

MICHAEL: You've had your headphones on the whole time. I forgot to take them off. Exactly. It's not that bad, is it? That's okay. Yeah. So we've got the commitment from Arthur. He's wearing headphones from now on. Our audio quality is going to go through the roof. But until next time, happy SEOing. Happy SEOing. See you next time.

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.