SEO Best Practices & Tools Are Killing Creativity

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, it is time for another episode of the SEO show. I'm Michael Costin and I'm joined by Arthur Fabik and today we are trashing SEO best practices. Sounds a bit of fun, doesn't it? Best practices or tools or both? Both. Okay. Best practices. And because we had two topics here, we had the problem with SEO best practices. Yes. And then are SEO tools killing creativity? Yeah. But to do an episode on each of them, they're kind of the same of SEO-ness. So we're gonna combine them into one episode. Okay, let's do it. But before we do, Before we do a little bit of housekeeping here. First, our YouTube channel. Yep. 100 subscribers now. Wow.

ARTHUR: How many of them are staff and family? Not many, if any. I don't know. I haven't looked.

MICHAEL: Not many, if any. Yeah. How many are staff and family? How many are, you know what I'm saying?

ARTHUR: the song that where that lyric is from.

MICHAEL: But published a video on how I get DR 90 plus links on autopilot. Very clickbaity headline doing big numbers. Yeah. 600 views overnight. That's not overnight. That's good. Which is what's got me excited about YouTube because with this podcast, the reach of it, There's not anything really sort of publishing it. Like we're, we're in the charts on Apple. So people find it that way, but the discovery of it, it's not really sort of distributed big time. Whereas on YouTube, if your video gets a little bit of traction, it's instantly being put into people's feeds and your views go up and like, you can very quickly grow audience. I don't know if you know.

ARTHUR: I know how YouTube.

SPEAKER_01: No, it is good. It is good.

ARTHUR: You're going to get a lot more reach and hopefully more ears on the SEO show podcast.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so one video can do like a ton of subscribers. And time will tell, but promising.

ARTHUR: It sounds like it's doing well. What was your first video?

MICHAEL: The one that went viral? I can't remember. I got like 200, oh, it was Fiverr links. People seem to like links. As I always say, link building, number one topic in SEO. That was one bit of housekeeping. Another bit is, Did you know? We have a new website?

ARTHUR: How did you know? I don't know. I just, I had a feeling. Yeah. I could just feel it inside me that there was a new website.

MICHAEL: Well, you're feeling was right. Theseoshow.co. We have a new site. It's a bit cleaner, bit more modern. We have very detailed show notes and transcripts and timestamps for every episode now. Courtesy of AI. So we'll see if publishing all of that improves the overall visibility of that website. Not that we really do any SEO on it, but it has got some links there. Got a whole bunch more content on it now. It also looks a bit more modern. So if you want to go check it out, head to the SEO show.co. That's the housekeeping out of the way. Let's get into the topic of trashing SEO best practices.

ARTHUR: I love trashing things. Well, they're always the most fun episodes to do. Just trashing everything.

MICHAEL: Well, you know what I'm going to say about best practices? No. Yep. Well, I'll tell you. Who says it's a best practice? That's what I want to know. Off on Google, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah, but you can't trust what Google says. No, but I mean, they would have their, they've got their guidelines and best practices. Yeah.

MICHAEL: It's best practice not to do anything they say. Yes. If you want to do well with this. Yeah, very true. And a lots of people out there just regurgitate what they say or they'll make claims like guest posts don't work anymore. That's so 2010. Yeah. But they don't know, like they're obviously not doing it and testing it. Because if you're actually doing SEO on a smaller site, trying to rank it, you're not working on some big corporate site that gets tons of links naturally. Definitely. You would know that guest posts still work. Yeah. 100%.

ARTHUR: Well, it's just a scare tactic, isn't it? To stop people from doing it because they know that it works.

MICHAEL: Yeah, normally anything Google's telling you is stuff that works, and they're trying to control you by propaganda because their algorithm can't.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, I used to work with someone that was my boss at the time that would refuse to do link building because it was against Google's guidelines. To be fair, we were working on sites with really strong DRs, so we really didn't need it. But like you said, like, Not every site's going to be like a huge e-com website with a DR of 80 that you can just work on without really needing to do much link building. So definitely very important.

MICHAEL: Totally different types of SEO at that level compared to someone that's trying to actually rank a normal website.

ARTHUR: But then you'd have those like savvy clients, which would have read the Google guidelines. And then when you tell them that you're doing link building, they'll freak out and like, Oh, well, you can't do that. Why are you doing link building? Google said, you can't do link building, which hasn't happened in a long time, but it has happened in the past. And then you have to convince them that, well, in our world these days, we,

MICHAEL: No one's coming on board as a client.

ARTHUR: No one said it in years, but I have had clients maybe six, seven, eight years ago that would bring up like Google's guidelines.

MICHAEL: Well, agencies would try and skirt around the fact that they did link building years ago. True. Oh no, we go out, we talk to people, we try to place content, but really they're paying for links. Yeah. Anyway, let's trash some SEO. Do you remember the AdWorld guy?

ARTHUR: that wigged out mid-presentation. And he's like, when we buy links, well, no, no, no, no, we don't, no, we don't buy links. No, no, we don't buy links.

MICHAEL: Whatever happened to that? Remember Adworld? Is that still around? Yeah, it's still around. I used to get hammered by ads.

ARTHUR: I still did. You still do? Yeah, this year I did. Yeah. Okay. I just don't really pay attention to it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I haven't seen it for ages.

ARTHUR: But yeah, whenever I think of not buying links, I think of that guy, mid-webinar, just wigging out that he's just confessed that he buys links.

MICHAEL: What do they call it? A Freudian slip? Freudian slip, yeah. Anyway, let's get back to trashing stuff. What's an SEO best practice that, in your opinion, is problematic?

ARTHUR: Geez, I don't know. You put me on the spot.

MICHAEL: Well, the whole bloody show we're doing is about this.

ARTHUR: I don't know. What do you think? You tell me.

MICHAEL: Well, there's always one that we like, which is lots of these tools use like traffic light signaling.

ARTHUR: Oh, well, yeah. If we're talking about tools, 100%. Green. So Yoast.

MICHAEL: Don't get too much green. Yoast is one.

ARTHUR: Yoast is one of the main ones. I remember that.

MICHAEL: Page Optimizer Pro does it.

ARTHUR: Well, Page Optimizer Pro is a bit different to Yoast because it's analyzing content against content that's already ranking.

MICHAEL: So I'll tell you, no, sorry, I shouldn't have yet. Page Optimizer Pro is a bad example. Our email software, when we write a subject line, it uses AI to estimate what the click-through rate is. And you put in like a subject line that's pretty good and you think will do well. And it goes, expect a click-through rate, 4%. And then it says it's projected. It gives you like ones that you could use instead. And they're the most generic, basic AI sounding things ever with like an emoji in it. And it'll say 40%. And you could very easily go for that because it makes yours red and theirs green. If you just rely on that stuff, it's not really best practice, but it's like tools killing creativity. Well true, yeah. Which is probably like best practices are a pain, but like, if you've been in the space for a while, you would probably know, as we just said at the start, ignore things that Google say, best practices says who, like do your own research. Well, that's it. Yeah. But like tools killing creativity.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Like what about AI killing creativity? Different topic, I guess.

MICHAEL: But we can come back to that. Yeah. What about tech orders? Like.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, so using tools that will automate the whole tech audit. Yeah. And we'll spit out a score, right? It's a proprietary score. And then it's up to the tool to determine what is high priority, what is low priority. Like they're good tools, but a lot of the time you're just blindly relying on them and you don't really understand what you're trying to fix. Which is a problem, because I think, you know, back in the day we would spend a lot of time learning about each one of these things that the tool's looking at, having to do it ourselves. Because we didn't have the luxury of, you know, Sightbulb. That would just do it and automate it. So, I remember the first tech audit I did was like 70 or 80 pages long. That took me like a month, even longer, to do it. Because you're basically doing it all manually. But on the plus side, you're learning, and you're understanding what you're looking at. So when you go to a client and say, well, this is what you need to fix, and then they ask you why, you can confidently tell them, this is what it does, this is the impact, this is why you should do it. And the team here do that because they understand it. But I think a lot of people will pretend to be SEO consultants that will just spit out this PDF. hand it to a client, they'll ask them, okay, why should we do this? They don't know. They'll just read the little blurb that Cyborg's put there and they don't understand what they're fixing. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So it's like making things easier, but you're not learning.

ARTHUR: Yes. So don't get me wrong, Sightbulb is amazing because it has made something that can take a long time, like almost instant, but it's the understanding part of it, right? Yeah. So it's just making people maybe lazier in a way because they don't feel the need that they have to learn it because why do I need to figure it out? Like someone, like a tool is going to figure it out for me.

MICHAEL: Which is coming back to your AI point. That's pretty much everything. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Well, I guess that's it. Like using AI to write content and stuff like that. I mean, it's good, but.

MICHAEL: Not even write content, like everything, like developers would use AI to help them finish stuff now and like.

ARTHUR: Or debugging code or whatever it's called.

MICHAEL: In SEO, like doing your HT access file, doing like redirects or whatever, you used to have to figure it out or coming up with regex. Remember you used to have to use regex in analytics and it was so painful. Yeah, tell some specialist person to figure out. Which, so it's good, it speeds things up, but like as a society, We're going to have a bunch of people not understanding what's going on with what they're actually delivering.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And I guess it also comes back to like what impact these tools actually have. So like if you were to tick all the green boxes in Yoast, is your site going to rank? Probably not because it's just looking at one.

MICHAEL: Sounds like a good test we could do. Yoast?

ARTHUR: Well, like, yeah. Well, you've got your sites, don't you?

MICHAEL: Yeah, that test is still running at the moment, but like we could do new ones where we go green in Yoast, but not do anything.

ARTHUR: Well, okay. Not doing anything and using Yoast, you're probably going to see better results, obviously, because at least you're inserting keywords and doing like super basic SEO, right?

MICHAEL: We'll have to find a way to make the test fair. Yeah. Probably, probably too hard. There's probably too many variables to test whether these tools work.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But then there's so many different tools, right? So you're looking at so many different scores. Yes. So like Yoast, that's not really a tool, it's a plugin that has its own score. Ahrefs, they've got their own score. Sightbulb, there's so many different tools out there and you're trying to optimize for every single one of them trying to, you know, get to a hundred percent. But what are you really optimizing to? It's just a proprietary score that they have like made up themselves.

MICHAEL: And I think that can lead to a problem like some of these content tools.

ARTHUR: over-optimization. Yeah. Like you, you have to, is that what you were going to say? Yeah. Yeah. I noticed that with, um, page optimizer pro they have like an option to look at over-optimization and when you rerun content that you did in the past, which was supposedly like optimized now it's over-optimized because you've just stuffed the keyword in everywhere it's asked you to. Yep. And you've over like, yeah, you just over stuffed stuff basically.

MICHAEL: And we don't know, how is it figuring out it's over-optimized? Like what is really going on in the background there? It needs a human touch to decide that.

ARTHUR: Well, wasn't the whole, I guess, purpose of Page Optimizer Pro is it looks at pages that are ranking already, right? And the whole idea is that, you know, this page is ranking number one, two, three, four. This is what the content looks like. So in theory, if you were to replicate that content, you would rank as well. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So. Which is fine. That all makes sense. Yeah. But then when you go ahead and like page optimizer pair will spit out a ton of keywords that you need to include with the target range. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You shoehorn that all into your content. Yeah. And you get a good score. 80% plus, whatever. Put it up and then run it through the over-optimized thing and then it goes over-optimized. Yeah. Does it tell you like, does it give you examples of, Why? How?

ARTHUR: So then you got to go. Just shows you the range and it shows you that you've over optimized. So basically the same way it shows you to optimize. Yeah. It shows you how to deoptimize. So reduce. Use of certain keywords. Yes, basically. So I don't know how it does that. I don't know if it's just, I don't know. I really don't know. I'm sure we could probably find out.

MICHAEL: But I guess the point we're making here is that just strictly relying on a tool is problematic, because what if that tool might change how it assesses things in a month's time? So you need to use your own mouse to Have the final say on what copy is going up on your site. What are you trying to achieve? Don't just blindly try and get these scores up, because from what we've seen, it leads to poor looking copy or too much time spent on stuff that's a waste of time, like getting all greens on Yoast, for example. What else does it? What's another problem?

ARTHUR: I guess relying on just one tool and not using different tools. So if someone might be just strictly Moz or whatever, or strictly SEMrush. How many strictly Moz people do you reckon? Maybe not Moz, maybe more so SEMrush. So not using other tools to kind of verify what one tool is saying. You know what I mean? So some people will look at, clients will look at SEMrush, which is fine. And they'll say, oh, look, my visibility is dropping. But like, OK, look in Ahrefs, because it's actually going up. So you're panicking because one tool's telling you this. But in reality, a tool that, in my opinion, is significantly better for SEO is showing the opposite. You run into a problem, because you're just relying on one tool. So using different tools and cross-referencing what the tool's saying to make sure that it's actually accurate. Or just to paint a better picture of what the data shows, I guess.

MICHAEL: Another one along those lines is toxic backlinks.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah. What was that? SEMrush did that, right? They all do it, but like SEMrush had that specific feature where it would have that, like that PDF that your client will show you and go, oh my God, I've got toxic backlinks. And it'll just show you some spam, like some directories like link. And it's got that big red, like exclamation point, toxic. Like this is going to kill your site.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And like a lot of agencies use that to try and get clients. So they'll put fear into the owner of the website who then want to act on it, but they're not, again, they're just acting based off a tool.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But they believe it because the tool is telling you that this is a toxic link. It's going to, this is going to harm your site. It's going to harm it. It's going to be hurt if you don't remove it. But in theory, if you start disavowing links that aren't really harming your site, you're probably just going to do more harm than good that way. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So here's a good one. You look happy with yourself. With tools, right? We bang on about looking at competitors, success leads clues, that sort of stuff. But you can get too focused on that and be copying stuff that is detrimental to you. So for example, if someone is ranking well at the moment, and they've been using dodgy link building, and then you go out and copy it all, And then they get blasted in a update. You'll probably go down with them because you've been copying them. You've been using tools. More true, yeah. Stifling your creativity to go out and like pick your own sites, you know. You're just taking a shortcut copying what other site is doing in your space. Yeah. Like I know this from looking at other SEO agencies. Yeah. That some of them like a couple of years ago would have astronomical amounts of traffic, and now have, like they're in the cellar.

SPEAKER_01: Gone.

MICHAEL: All the traffic's gone. And that's largely down to crappy link building that they were doing.

ARTHUR: But the same could be said about content. Like Page Optimizer Pro is looking at the top ranking pages that could have super strong DRs, but the content might actually be rubbish. Exactly. So basically, your average DR site, you're trying to replicate average content on a super high DR site, you might even harm it. Because the content you have now might be better than the content you're trying to replicate. Yeah. So yeah, that's a big one.

MICHAEL: You look happy with that. Well, it's very true because like, as we've seen with Google, like of late, particularly like since helpful content update is that DR and authority trumps everything at the moment. Like, so if you, if you're comparing yourself to people that are like much more authoritative than you, their domain, there's other things that they're sort of operating at a level that you're not, you don't even have a ticket to the game. Yep. So just copying their content is, you know, not it. You really need to be focusing on building your own authority, probably first and foremost, rather than obsessing over whether you're at 80% or 78% in some content tool.

ARTHUR: There's one point here that I thought was interesting as well, like not prioritizing user experience, so prioritizing SEO. So getting too zoned in or honed in or whatever the saying is on SEO elements and neglecting user experience, which is ultimately also a signal that's going to harm you if you neglect it. So over-reliance on trying to get everything perfect for SEO and not focusing on the people that are actually going to be visiting the site, That's a good point.

MICHAEL: That's a big one because a lot of like really SEO optimized sites are just walls of text and they're quite horrible to use. I guess the old trade off, isn't it though? Like, would you rather have a site ranking?

ARTHUR: Well, but you can also rank well and have text and not have it in a wall.

MICHAEL: Like you can use different, but if you find that in a space, the ones that do well are the ones that just sort of, yes. What, what, which one are you going for?

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, it depends on where the text is, but I think it's just, I think more so the point here is just not focusing on other things like conversions and other, like other elements and just focusing on SEO. So like having an obsession about ranking first, second, third, whatever, but neglecting, you know, things like conversion rate, how are people going to like reach out all that stuff? CRO basically.

MICHAEL: Yep. What about creativity with the type of content you create too? Like if you're just using Ahrefs to analyze keywords and like competitors, you'll go create sort of more or less the exact same pages that they have. but maybe there's some outside of the box type stuff that you could be doing.

ARTHUR: Do you know what I saw recently? There was a dentist, like a dentist website where a lot of the traffic was coming from a jokes section of their site. Yeah, so they literally had like a blog that was just dentist jokes and it ranked really well. They were getting so much traffic because there was a lot of people searching for it and the jokes were ranking. But I just thought it was interesting, right?

MICHAEL: So SEO agency's done that. Now they can say, look at all the traffic you're getting.

ARTHUR: Exactly. Yeah. But that's like, I guess that's kind of thinking outside the box in a way, not in a good way, but in a way that's just kind of triggered that.

MICHAEL: It is. Yeah. But I guess with, um, like just trying to think of an example, maybe with a business that sells Beehives. Well, I'm trying to think of, I'm thinking here's one cane furniture and rattan furniture. They're similar. If you just do focusing on cane furniture.

ARTHUR: Who's buying cane furniture in 2024?

MICHAEL: I don't know, but I'm just like an example, like trying to come up with an example here and you're trashing me. I know you get all excited about trashing things with an episode, but don't trash me.

ARTHUR: So yeah, Kane Furniture and Rutan.

MICHAEL: I'm just saying like, if you get all like focused on that first one, because that's the one with all the search volume, blah, blah, blah. But then do nothing with the other ways that it could be searched for, you're probably missing out on easier opportunities to rank. Good sources of traffic that will convert that you're not going to go for because, you know, the tools telling you go for this, competitors all seem to have that. You haven't actually taken the time as a human to look at it and think about, the ways people will search for this sort of thing. So I guess maybe, like, what would it be for service? Like, there could be different ways that people- Different ways people search for the same service.

ARTHUR: Correct.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I'm trying to think of something. Tools might favor.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Tools will favor.

ARTHUR: The high volume, the money. The most competitive ones.

MICHAEL: So then everyone's out there pumping out the same sort of pages, optimized very similar. But there's like black holes.

ARTHUR: There'd be like a more long tail version of the keyword that has less search volume. But good intent. Good intent. That you're neglecting because you're too focused on trying to get that, you know, main keyword ranking. Correct. Yeah. Hard to think of one at the top of my head. I, yeah. The second we stopped recording and we're like, I'll have 10.

MICHAEL: We'll put it in the show notes. We'll put out those 10 examples in the show notes.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Had one recently. I just can't remember.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Happens all the time. That's the thing. Yeah. And most sites, every site will have that problem.

MICHAEL: Like in, let's say our world, for example, we have a page SEO agency that we might have one for Sydney, Parramatta and stuff. Yeah. But maybe we could do SEO agency for big commerce, you know, which is. I'm sure lots of agencies do that, but like getting more niche with it. SEO agency for medical link building or something. So very low volume, but high intent. Having the content there is going to ultimately lead to dribs and drabs of leads that you can convert. But if you were looking at a tool, it's never telling you to build a medical link building page. It's probably not the greatest example, but you get what I'm saying. I get what you're saying. What else, anything else you want to trash while we're here with SEO best practices or tools killing creativity?

ARTHUR: Um, no, I don't want to trash it because I think tools are important. Like at the end of the day, they make life a lot easier and they streamline a lot of things that would normally take a lot more time. But I think it's just, if you want to become a good SEO, you need to understand what the tools are talking about. Definitely use them, but try to like, wrap your mind around like why, you know, why is this saying this? Why do I need to insert a keyword here? Why do I need to like fix this technical problem? What impact is it going to have? Like when you start learning and understanding, it's going to make a lot more sense. And I can tell you now nothing worse than being on a call as a new SEO, doing a tech audit, and then having the question, sorry, having the client just bust your ass asking why, why, why? And you have no idea how to answer it. That's like an SEO's nightmare, right? In my opinion. Yes. One of them. One of them. That's probably not the worst thing that can happen to an SEO, but I mean, in general, like you want to be prepared and you want to know what you're doing and you don't understand, like, yes, you don't want to be making diagnosis prescriptions that you don't understand. Yeah, it's like going to a doctor and then just typing everything into AI and then just saying, well, here, AI said that you have probably one of these three things. OK, how do you know? Oh, I don't. AI's just told me.

SPEAKER_01: That's exactly the same thing.

ARTHUR: So learn about what you're telling people, how it impacts their site, what sort of results they can expect.

MICHAEL: Use your human brain. Use your human brain. Be creative. Don't just follow the stuff that this box spits out. Yep. Likewise, don't follow blindly stuff that Google says, or people regurgitating Google's talking points on Twitter say, because a lot of the time these best practices, in inverted commas, are just nonsense that's made up and sort of repeated verbatim by people with that, again, without even understanding it or testing it themselves. So, yeah.

ARTHUR: Use your brain. And just test, like you said. Do SEO. You always make fun of me because I never penalize the site. But you always say good SEO has gotten penalties because it would test stuff on their own sites and stuff. So like just test. Like if you want to see what sort of impact something has, build a site, test it, figure it out yourself. You might find something that someone else hasn't figured out before and become a millionaire. I don't know. Become the next big SEO guru. You could do. You could? That's true. You don't know until you try. So if you're not confident, give it a crack on your own site, not a client site.

MICHAEL: Well, you know what, on those very motivating words, I think it's just the right time to wrap things up. Everyone's ripping and roaring, ready to get stuck in after that. So happy SEOing. We'll see you next week. But until then.

ARTHUR: You already said happy SEOing.

MICHAEL: Happy SEOing. But until then, yeah, see you later. Bye.

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