SEO Q&A Week #12

INTRO:
It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, and welcome to the SEO show for another week, another episode. We are answering listener questions again this week. It's Q and A week number 12. I'm Michael Costin. You're Arthur Fabik. Am I? And we're excited, aren't we?

ARTHUR: Yeah, well, you look more excited than I do. Listen.

MICHAEL: Well, we have real questions. That's why I'm so excited.

ARTHUR: Voice questions.

MICHAEL: Yep. If you go to theseoshow.co, there's a speak pipe link. You know what is there? Because we changed our website. I don't even know if I put the, there is on the home page.

ARTHUR: Well, how did we get these questions if there isn't one there?

MICHAEL: Because one of them is six months old. I actually logged into the tool for the first time, but no, it's also on our site, like very prominent. Crisis averted. So if you ever want a question answered, go to the FCOshow.co and you can submit a voice question and hear yourself on the show. But today we have two voices. And then a couple of other questions. Just text ones. That's so exciting. Boring text ones. Yes, we'll answer them if you submit it that way. But come on, you speak pipe. Hear yourself on the show. Boast to friends, family. It might help you. Add on the dating apps. Okay, let's get into the questions. Did you hear I was on the SEO show this week? No way, really? Yep, let's get dinner. Let's have some drinks. That's what would happen. All right, let's start. No. Okay. Question one. Fine. Arthur's a bit grumpy. It's late in the day. He doesn't want to play. So we're going to get into it. We're going to start with the first question. I'm going to hit the button. Who's this question from? Well, you've thrown me under the bus here because I've added the questions to our mixer and I'm not sure which one is which. So we'll find out. We'll find out. And we'll tell you the name once we've hit the button. Okay. Question one.

SPEAKER_05: Hello guys. First of all, thank you for providing an informative and entertaining podcast. Big ups. To the question. I've been freelancing now as an SEO consultant for a few months. So my website is about five months old or so. And I'm trying to build links and not having a budget obviously makes it difficult. I registered my site on directories. I made some exchanges and about one guest blog, I think. But to be honest, guest blogging, I think it's a lot of time that goes into it. And in the end, I feel like, why don't I publish this on my own site instead of growing someone else's site, basically, even though it might give me a link in the end. I feel like it's a lot of time going into something that basically not worth the return. So correct me if I'm wrong in that sense, but also I would like to hear your perspective on building links to a personal site on targeting keywords related to SEO services. Thank you!

MICHAEL: All right. All right. Do you remember what we were talking about again? No. Bit of a, bit of a long question to unpack there, but I can tell you who said that. Who? Well, it's spelled V-I-L-L-I-A-M. William.

ARTHUR: Yeah. William, William with a V. Yeah.

MICHAEL: William with a V. Is that a question or? That's the name. You asked him before the name. I wasn't sure which button was which, but that was William's button.

ARTHUR: William.

MICHAEL: And he's talking about link building. Let's unpack it. He's got a personal site.

ARTHUR: Well, is it a personal site?

MICHAEL: Well, I don't know, because he's targeting SEO services keywords. So maybe he's a freelancer, consultant. He's going after some very competitive keywords in SEO services. Yes, there's value in link building in that space, more so than just publishing blogs to your site, I feel. Because in that world, if you just publish blogs rather than use that content to go out and get links, it's like screaming in a forest. What's an analogy I'm trying to use here? If a tree falls in a forest, no one's- Doesn't make a sound. That's not the right analogy. But basically it's like- Go with the screaming in a forest. It's like talking into a megaphone out to wilderness where there's no humans. Wow. That's awful.

ARTHUR: Gotta work on my- You're the king of analogies. I'm normally much better. You really screwed that up.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Anyway. You know what I'm saying?

MICHAEL: Moving forward. Do you know what I'm saying? Cause I don't. Now go on. Well, what I'm saying is he needs to build links.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah. So he's asking, how can you build links? So for me, if it's a personal blog, and then you're saying that's also SEO services, and it doesn't, to me, seem like a personal blog anymore, because you're obviously trying to attract people to turn into clients.

MICHAEL: Most likely.

ARTHUR: Most likely. So that's no longer, to me, a personal blog. Because we both have all personal sites. We both have personal sites, which are basically just full names. as a domain. And I couldn't care less if it ranks. I mean, I try to rank for my name to earn my brand, but outside of that, I'm not trying to achieve anything other than that. So unless, yeah, if you're trying to get clients and if you're trying to rank for SEO type keywords, you're probably going to have to do link building, proper link building. Like you're not going to get away with free links unless you have a lot of partners or like people that you can link back like from.

MICHAEL: Guest posting, he says he doesn't believe works. Yeah, it does. Yeah, definitely does. But it's very time consuming. Yes. But like you can pay for it. We've spoken about this in the past. Yeah. Sweat equity or financial equity. Yeah. They're the two choices you have. So if you're not paying for links because it's a small personal site, aka you're a small freelance operation, you don't have the budget to do it, then you've got to spend the time on it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So I was going to say, like, if you're just a personal, like just an SEO person that wants to rank for their name, that's fine. You probably don't really need to do that much link building.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: But if you're trying to rank for SEO services in the city, then you're going to be competing with SEO agencies, which are investing a lot in link building. Yeah. So which case, you know, which one is it?

MICHAEL: Yeah, so I think like Google, for a keyword like SEO consultant, Google will show web pages for actual SEO consultants, even though agencies are going for it. The results will often be a mix of agencies and then legit consultants. So it is doable, but you do need links. I would say if you're trying to build links, maybe guest posting is it's a tough slog because most of them just want to be paid and you're going to have to sift through a ton to find ones that might take legit posts for free, but maybe trying to get featured in like expert roundup type posts. You see them all the time where an article might be, you know, email marketing trends for 2025 and there's eight experts featured. Maybe going down that path where you can get high DR links free of charge. It's a lot of time you have to submit responses to these requests for these types of content and hope that you get published. But if you're just chipping away at it for a few months, you'll start to get good quality links and then As long as your SEO consultant site is well optimized, has all the content in the pages, then once those links are coming in, you do stand a chance of ranking as a individual SEO consultant for those types of keywords, I think. But yeah, you definitely need to be building links of some form to compete in that space.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I agree.

MICHAEL: Cool. Let's move on to question number two. This is a little bit of an interesting one, right? Yes. Cause I get excited. I log into speak pipe and I see that people have asked questions. Um, we don't know, we feel this person's trying to do a little sneaky bit of marketing for themselves. Maybe we're going to play it and then we'll give her answer. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_00: Hi there, I'm wondering what you think of the keyword strategytool.com as a tool to help reduce cost per click, increase click-through rate, and reduce campaign costs, as well as improve the quality of your organic traffic and paid traffic. Thanks, it's John from digitalmarketinggroundworks.com. Cheers. Okay. So.

ARTHUR: We're not sure. Well. First of all, you thought it was real. I thought it was AI.

MICHAEL: Yeah, Arthur thinks that's an AI.

ARTHUR: Only because of just the way that the, I guess the speed, yeah, the cadence. Yeah. It could not, it could be a real person, but it does sound like a bit of an ad for said tool.

MICHAEL: That's John, by the way, just in case you were wondering. Okay. So an AI or person, we're not too sure. Yeah, we'll treat it as a real question. And he says, he spoke about some tool that we've never heard of, but we've gone and checked the tool's website out. Not entirely sold on it.

ARTHUR: Well, there's not really any information on what the tool does.

MICHAEL: No. But in his message, he's saying it reduces CPC, gives you strategy for paid media, SEO, blah, blah, blah. There's no tool that can give you strategy at all. Strategy is like overarching thought or plan for your campaign with various factors going into it. Tools are good for tactical stuff. Yeah. Go fix this. There's a problem here. Work on it. But you can't just plug a website into a tool and have it give you a proper strategy. Yeah. At least any tool I've ever come across.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And if it does, the strategy won't be very customised, I reckon it'll be very top level and you can probably just use AI yourself and do it without having to use a tool.

MICHAEL: Yep. So our general advice, have a healthy dose of scepticism about any tool that's making big claims about plummeting your ad costs and doing your SEO and all that in one tool and doing your keyword strategy for you.

SPEAKER_03: Yep.

MICHAEL: Use your human brainpower for your strategy and then use tools as a supplement to help you make individual parts of implementing that strategy easier.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So to answer the question, we don't know because we have not used the tool.

MICHAEL: Yes. It could be amazing, but. Yeah. There's a lot of tools out there. It's how you use them that matters and where they fit within your strategy and your strategy should come from you or someone that knows what they're doing. Not a tool. You agree?

ARTHUR: I agree. I was going to make a joke. Go on. When you said there's a lot of tools out there, I go, yeah, I'm looking at one. Very funny.

MICHAEL: That joke, that's at a better standard than my analogy, that's for sure.

ARTHUR: Oh, yeah. It's not hard. You set a very low benchmark.

MICHAEL: I know. Listen, I'm going to work. I'm going to go away and work on my game. My next analogy, because there will be another one soon. Next episode, probably.

SPEAKER_00: Can't wait.

MICHAEL: Top shot. All right, let's move on. We've got a little question here from Byron. This is a written one. He says, hello, have you done an episode about on-page SEO and some common errors SEO audits detail? Because I'm trying to fix up my on-page SEO errors and wondering how much time I should be spending on all this. Thanks, Byron. Have we done that?

ARTHUR: Yeah, I think we've done more than one. We've done many episodes.

MICHAEL: Well, we've done many. Episode 3, we spoke about the onsite pillar. Episode 11, we spoke about 80-20 SEO. Focus on this 20% of stuff and get 80% of your efforts, 80% of your results from that. So that's a good one. Episode 48, SEO quick wins. If you want to go work on a page, here's where your quick wins are going to come from. Common errors SEO audits detail, this is coming back to tools. Tools might give you all sorts of stuff that are problems, you know, red, yellow, green, throwing out all these reds for supposed problems that you have with your site. But really, as long as your title tags optimize, your H1 tags optimize, they sort of complement each other. You've got the keywords that you're targeting on that page in the copy a few times, and you've got enough copy on it. You make it sound so easy. That's basic on-site SEO, depending on your site. Like, I don't know what this guy does. Maybe he's got some complex e-commerce site or enterprise site, and that advice is useless.

ARTHUR: And we don't know what the errors, the tools returning are.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but he's talking about time, and obviously being conscious of spending too much time in places that aren't going to add value. Really, common errors SEO audits detail. Maybe start with those three episodes we've spoken about there, but just be conscious. Tools will give you a list of stuff, but you need to prioritize the stuff that's going to make a biggest impact.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah. Tools should also give you a list of prioritized lists as well. And the tools that we've used in the past as well give you information about what the problem is and explain what the issue is and how to fix it. So yeah, again, it comes back to what tool you're using. So it's hard to answer.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But I guess we can answer the first part. Have you done an episode about unpaid SEO? Yes. Check those three out. So there you go, Byron. You get that personalized feedback just by submitting a question. That could be you listening if you head to theseoshow.co and submit a question. Moving on. Two more to go. Google is changing my landing page title. How do I stop it? That one's from Rush.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, you can't stop it. Sometimes Google just likes to change the page title depending on what keywords you use to search for a specific page. Nothing you can really do. So your page title is set on your site. When you click on your site from the SERPs, you will see that your page title is whatever you've put in there. It's fine. You don't have to panic. It happens all the time.

MICHAEL: Yeah. They're not actually changing it. They're just rewriting it in their search results. It's not changed. It's not like Google's going into your code and changing.

ARTHUR: No, no.

MICHAEL: It is annoying when you see your meta description is just gibberish. Yeah. Um, Google is meant to be this all wise, know it all being, but like, it'll change your title tag sometimes to not even read to make sense. It's annoying, but it is what it is. They do it. You can't stop it. That's your answer. Don't worry about it. Try Rush. Try not to worry about it because it's outside of everyone's control. All right, moving on. Moving on. Question five. This is a little bit of a joke one. Why should I ask you SEO questions instead of chat GPT? That one comes from S Altman.

ARTHUR: Is that a real question?

MICHAEL: No, it's one I made up.

ARTHUR: Oh. Sam Altman. You said it was funny, though. What? Didn't you say it's a funny SEO? What did you say? Was it SEO joke? When did I say that?

MICHAEL: At the start before you said the question. Did I? You know what? No, it was a little bit of a funny one. Why should I ask you SEO questions instead of chat GPT? You didn't get it. S Altman. That's Sam Altman is the guy from open AI. Oh God. Too subtle. Either the joke is too subtle or Arthur's just. No, I didn't say that. So why should I ask you SEO questions instead of ChatGPT? You know what? You probably can't ask ChatGPT SEO questions. It's going to give you good generic answers, but at least we make jokes or try to, or we give analogies that sometimes hit, sometimes don't. You're not going to get that from ChatGPT. If you ask it to make jokes, it's cheesy as.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You're going to get a generic response as well. We have decades of worth of experience and real life, you know, stories that we can tell you.

MICHAEL: So yeah, you can hear yourself on the podcast too. If you ask via speak pipe, I guess you could upload yourself into chat GPT and say, we can talk to chat GPT. Yeah. But you don't get to hear yourself on a podcast, an esteemed SEO podcast.

ARTHUR: Very true.

MICHAEL: So look, but you know what, there is a little angle to this. Use ChatGPT as a little sounding board. So going back to, um, who Byron, some common SEO errors, audits detail, ask ChatGPT. It'll probably say similar stuff to what we did, you know, focus on the essentials. Don't worry about the noise. And then come to us if you want great analogies, awesome jokes.

ARTHUR: That was not even funny. That was just the worst thing.

MICHAEL: Listen, you know what- That's ultimate.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Why should I ask you- And then you said you're starting off, you're finishing off with a little joke. And then when I asked about it, you- I forgot and I made it. You forgot that you told me that's a joke.

MICHAEL: You know what? Maybe you should start using chat GPT. Pretty good, pretty good case being made for using chat GPT instead of Askia. What a fine Q&A episode. I reckon it's all right.

ARTHUR: It was good. Up until you derailed it at the end, but.

MICHAEL: Listen, the audience will forgive us for that because we're going to be back next week, maybe, or the week after, with another cracking episode of the SEO show. But until then.

ARTHUR: Start writing your analogies.

MICHAEL: I will do. See you later.

INTRO: Bye. Happy SEOing. 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.