SEO... But Stolen From Social #1

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 episode 49 of the SEO show. I am Michael Costin and I'm joined by Arthur Fabik.

ARTHUR: Good afternoon.

MICHAEL: How are you going? Did you know that it was 49?

ARTHUR: Where? Yeah, no, I didn't. Well, actually I did. I was looking at the run sheet before, so it's got 49 in the top left corner. It does?

MICHAEL: Half a century almost. I know. Maybe we should do something special for the big five-0 next week.

ARTHUR: What are you thinking?

MICHAEL: No cake. Maybe those little party things that, you know, where you go, blow them. Party, what do you call them?

ARTHUR: Party poppers? No.

MICHAEL: That's what I was going to say, but no, must have another name. You know what? Who cares? It's just another episode of the show.

ARTHUR: Well, if we're going to do that, we probably need to record it so that people can actually see what we're doing.

MICHAEL: Yeah. The high excitement.

ARTHUR: Maybe we will record next week. If it's our 50th episode, we'll make it special. Okay. Maybe we can wear a little party hat. We can. I'd love to see you in a little party hat.

MICHAEL: Done. Deal. Look, have you out of interest survived the helpful content updates?

ARTHUR: Have I?

MICHAEL: Yes, personally. Have you come through unscathed? Well, I'm here, aren't I? You've made it?

ARTHUR: You crawled in off your deathbed? Yeah, look, to be honest, I still haven't noticed anything really. No. Have you? Nothing. No. I've been keeping a very close eye on my clients specifically, and I have not noticed a single thing, which goes to show maybe we've done a very good job and we have nothing to worry about.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, look, um, I'm going to say yes to that, but I'm also going to say maybe it hasn't finished rolling out properly. Who knows, but from all like sort of, uh, investigations and, um, from everything we can see, it's been a bit of a nothing burger so far.

ARTHUR: Yeah. They said a week, two weeks ago when was, yeah, it was about two weeks ago when we recorded.

MICHAEL: Yep. So there has been, um, like a little bit of volatility of, days ago, I think it was now losing track of time, but I'm not, not major. Like all the signs are pointing to before the update happened. So watch this space. We'll see what happens. Touchwood touchwood. We're not here actually to talk about that today. We're here to talk about things we've stolen from social media. This, as you remember, it was, remember the last time we did this, a Twitter thread, they said we could make it into a segment.

ARTHUR: Well, I was wondering where you're going to go there because there's no title for this episode, so.

MICHAEL: It's called Stolen from Social. Stolen from Social. It's the next episode in the series. And I said I was going to make an intro last time.

ARTHUR: Is this why you want me to wear headphones?

MICHAEL: Put your headphones on. Arthur can hear this intro music that I've been slaving away on.

ARTHUR: All right, let's hear it.

MICHAEL: By slaving, I mean I made it in about two minutes. You ready? Hit play. OK, this week's episode of Stolen. St-st-st-st-stolen. Stolen from Social. What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: It's a lot better than I thought it was going to be.

MICHAEL: Good. That's good. Okay. Well we have a segment and we have some music for it. And basically the segment is us going onto Twitter, Reddit, places across the web and thieving ideas for our own show. And this week we have five ideas that we've stolen from social. The first one ties into what we were just talking about with the helpful content update. And it is a tweet that AJ from blind five year old shared on Twitter. And he said, if you've ever searched for the next season of a show you're watching, you should understand the target of the helpful content update, hashtag unhelpful content, hashtag Google.

ARTHUR: Hashtag SEO, you forgot that one. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Well that's implied. So, um, you know what I thought, not a bad idea. I'm going to go and search for the next season of a show that I've been watching lately, which was Blackbird. Have you seen Blackbird?

ARTHUR: I have not. Pretty good. You know that there's a lot of shows that I haven't watched. Yes.

MICHAEL: Normally it's safe to assume you haven't seen any of these good shows.

ARTHUR: Just assume I haven't watched it yet.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, anyway, Blackbird was a cool show, but it is a once and done type series in that like the whole storyline played out across six episodes. Wham bam. Thank you, ma'am. Show's over. So it's probably not coming back for season two, or if it did, it would be a totally different storyline, I guess. But, um, I went and searched Blackbird season two. You can see the first page is all these random sites like Web News Observer and Hidden Remote and Ready Steady Cut and Amazer Feed. And if you click into any of them, it's basically. very template, templated article. So you jump in and it has articles talking about Blackburn. It's like what the show is and what it's based on and how many episodes there are and what it's on. And you have to scroll and scroll and scroll before you get down to them saying, Oh, we don't know.

ARTHUR: Yes. So this has happened to me many times. Whenever I'm looking to see when a new season is dropping, like a release date, I get sucked into these websites and they don't actually have the answer. They have all this bullshit content and you're just left scratching your head thinking, what the, can't swear on this, can I?

MICHAEL: Well, you already did. Sorry. Do you know what I saw also actually totally random? Google podcasts, if you click into our show, it says- Explicit?

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Or maybe we should start swearing then if we're already- No, but like, and then I was going and checking a whole bunch of other shows I listened to and they're all having the same thing, even though they're not explicit anyway. You're floating with danger there, Google's already watching us. I'll be careful.

ARTHUR: But yeah, I know it's just nonsense you gotta read. I've been a victim of that many times. Yep. And another one that you mentioned as well is recipes, recipe sites. When you're going to find a recipe for shepherd's pie, before you actually get to the actual recipe, you have to scroll through what feels like an eternity of just- What is a shepherd?

MICHAEL: What is pie?

ARTHUR: Just the most random stuff. And it's just fluff.

MICHAEL: It's just fluff. So it was a very interesting tweet because I totally agree with that. These articles are painful. The helpful content update so far has seemingly not done much to- Hasn't lived up to its name. To address it. Yeah. This content is not helpful. It exists just to get traffic through to these sites so that they can collect ad revenue, but jokes on them. I have you block origin running, so they're not getting any ad revenue.

ARTHUR: So do I not on my work computer, but on my personal computer, I turn it on and off. I need to see ads.

MICHAEL: All right. Let's move on to the next one because I thought this was an interesting topic as a general premise. This one's stolen from Reddit. And the name of the thread is DA isn't real. And it is a user mighty before God post this.

ARTHUR: You skipped one though. You've got me a little bit confused.

MICHAEL: No, I haven't skipped one.

ARTHUR: Oh, you've doubled up.

MICHAEL: Ignore me. Speed up, speed up. Come on.

ARTHUR: You're in the right spot. Yeah. You've made a mistake here. I'll show you later. I'll be anyway.

MICHAEL: Okay. I doubt it. So I don't make mistakes. Let's move on. DA isn't real.

ARTHUR: Yes.

MICHAEL: User mighty before God has said, I've seen several people post concerned with their DA lately for those, those of you that don't know, or we're taught that DA is important. It isn't, it isn't a real metric. It is made up third party metric and Google doesn't use it or care about it. A high DA doesn't equate to good rankings and a low DA isn't the reason you're ranking. Well, I won't read the rest of it.

ARTHUR: I was going to say, just because it's a third party metric doesn't mean it's not real. It's still a real metric. This is true. It's just not the metric that Google looks at because we don't know. We know we have an idea of what Google looks at, but it's not something that's, I guess, quantifiable in a metric. So yeah.

MICHAEL: So I get the general premise is what they're saying. Like if someone's obsessed with DA and thinking that you don't know, going from DA 11 to 12 means they're going to outrank everyone that's DA 11. Sure. That doesn't make sense because DA is a third party tools metric.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's a unit of measurement that you can compare domains against one another.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it's like a barometer. It's like helps you quickly weigh up, you know, like as someone says here, they said, you know, if I see a site, it's DA50 verse one, that's DA10 as a linking partner, I'm probably going to be focusing my efforts on the DA51 because all around it's going to be a stronger site. For sure. Yeah. Someone, the most upvoted post on this one says the second someone mentions DA, we all know they're brand new to SEO and have zero clue what they're doing.

ARTHUR: Well, I get it because we talk about domain rating, DR. Same thing, same sort of metric. Same sort of metric, but I never look at Moz. DA is a Moz metric. Whereas I feel real SEOs, they look at our Ahrefs.

MICHAEL: Okay. But I guess what this person's saying is that if, if you think one of these metrics is important, you have zero clue what you're doing, which I think is unfair. It is unfair. Plenty of SEOs know exactly what DA and DR is and where it actually sits in the mix. Definitely. Um, And really it's just a, as someone in here says, it's a shorthand for domain trust and authority, which are things that search engines consider when evaluating a site's quality. So it's not a silver bullet that would get you ranked, but it isn't something that should elicit scorn. Exactly. Which I agree with. Yes. So, um, yeah, this thread was full of people hating on DA, but we think it's a pretty useful.

ARTHUR: It's useful for us for clients to show how our link building is improving the authority of their site. So without DA or DR or whatever you want to call it, there's no unit of measure for us to be able to demonstrate that. But because of Ahrefs and Moz have created this metric, we can actually show them the effects of our link building. So it is super useful for SEOs.

MICHAEL: Yes. Cause we actually have a question coming up that deals with the topic of convincing a client that SEO is more than a one-time thing, which we'll get to in a sec, but DA and DR for clients, it's, it's easy to understand, which is. Yeah. It's a good thing. Like, cause this SEO world, the old cliche of it depends and you know, like it could be this long, but it might be longer and nobody really knows how Google works and stuff. That's a bit of a murky world to navigate, but by using things like DR and DA and trust flow and trying to explain things. And as long as you explain what they are and how they work and how it's not Google, but it is a bit of a barometer. It is a useful tool, not just for assessing things, you know, in your own work, but for explaining things to clients. So, DA is real. We're going to argue with that topic of that thread. All right, let's move on to the next one. This is a bit of a fun one that we have stolen again from Reddit. The general premise is that someone just got hired to fix an SEO nightmare. And then they asked what are the worst nightmares that you've seen in the SEO world. So Arthur's got some here that he wants to talk about from his recent experience. I'm going to give an example of what someone posted in the thread to kick things off. Sure. So the thing before sunset, their SEO nightmare was 404s everywhere. Yeah, that's not great. No homepage rewrites. So the homepage loaded in HTTP HTTPS with the www without the www site dot index site dot index, PHP site dot HTML, et cetera, all loaded. So what I'm saying here is basically you could access the homepage, like one of 15 different ways. And all of them were able to be crawled and indexed by Google. That's not cool.

ARTHUR: It's not a nightmare.

MICHAEL: It's a bit of a nightmare. I'd say that's a nightmare. It's easy to fix.

ARTHUR: Yeah. To me, nightmare is, yeah.

MICHAEL: We'll get to yours and you can have your rant in a minute.

ARTHUR: That's not a rant. It's just constructive feedback.

MICHAEL: Feedback in the form of a one person ranting. No redirect from .com slash or .com. So every page loaded with the trailing slash and without. Some of these are things I remember when I first got into SEO, like trailing slash and without, and making sure that there's one version of the homepage.

ARTHUR: CMS has handled most of it.

MICHAEL: Yeah, they do handle most of it. So no canonical, 75% of the blog was plagiarized. The nav links were set up to go from the navigation into search results. And they had a 35 megabyte video embedded on the homepage that was hosted on the site. That ain't good. That's not good for your bandwidth or page load speed. So that's a good one.

ARTHUR: I'll still argue that those are nightmares because they're very, a lot of them are quite easy to fix.

MICHAEL: Depending on what CMS they were on. Sure. And what sort of a host. True. and other technical SEO things that we won't go into here, but let's let Arthur get on his soapbox.

ARTHUR: Before, yeah, before I get on my rant, I wanted to add in internal links to a staging site. So a lot of the times a client will launch a site and forget to edit the internal links within the copy. There'll be linking to the development site or staging site. And it's just the poor experience for whoever clicks on it and not great for SEO, obviously. Yes. But I guess if you want to call it a rant. Essentially the one more recently was we had, it kind of goes, let me start again. So we had a client who wanted us to build out certain pages on their site. So we agreed to build out these pages and we wanted to do it the right way. So we decided to do it on a staging site. Our dev was working away for about two weeks on these pages, creating templates, adding content images, just putting out the pages. In the meantime, we were unaware that the client was actually making changes on the live site at the same time. So they were up there just making copy edits, uploading blog posts and things like that. So two weeks pass, what happens is the client reaches out to their dev agency and asks them to push this live site onto staging because they don't want to lose any of the work that they've been working on over the last two weeks. So we came in two weeks, one day later, went and had a look and all the work that we've been working on over the last two weeks was wiped. We had no idea. We were confused trying to figure out what happened. We thought that we broke something and then yeah, spoke to the dev agency and found out that they had overridden the site because there was live changes that the client would have pushed to staging and had to basically redo all the work.

MICHAEL: And had the client chasing you up for the work and complaining it was late. Yes.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Which is, I don't want to get into that part, but yeah, definitely. That was a nightmare because we were, we had a deadline to get these things, the pages live. bottlenecks already as it were, but yeah, that, that to me is a, is a nightmare. So the logistics of it, the, you know, expectation management and resources involved trying to get it all set up.

MICHAEL: So many different stakeholders, like there's, there's us, there's a development agency, there's a client in the middle communication going from one to the other without the other being across it. Uh, the easy thing there would have just been to take a backup of the live site instead of pushing it to staging to, uh, yes. Well, yeah. Anyway, don't want to dwell on it. We might've suggested that if we had the chance. Yeah. Um, what about there's, there's one here that I think is a little bit of a nightmare. What do you think about this one? Which one? The website has been around 22 years, a thousand pages, no indexing rules, no canonicals, 95% of the pages are less than a hundred words. So Google's already not indexing about 700 of them. Most pages have Google selected canonicals, which are pointing to non-contextual other pages on the site. All headers are duplicates or H1 headers and the like are duplicates and internal links are pointing to like external URLs where they've plagiarized the content from.

ARTHUR: Stop right there. That's already a nightmare.

MICHAEL: Is that a nightmare? That's a nightmare. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Google selected canonicals are a nightmare sometimes as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah, 700 pages not indexed because there's only 100 words on them and this client wants their website indexed.

ARTHUR: Well, that's a nightmare. Like that specific thing, Google selected canonicals. We've had that issue with clients in the past where pages got indexed and we want another page ranking and Google just won't rank it because they've selected the canonical back to this page and it's just- Annoying. Yeah. It's hard to get it to rank, so. Anyway, that whole thing sounded definitely not ideal. That was a legit nightmare.

MICHAEL: Yes. All right. Let's not dwell on the nightmares too much. You can move on to the last one. Is that the last one? Second, last one. This one is pretty cool. This is the one we spoke about earlier where it's how do you convince the client that SEO is more than just a one-time thing.

ARTHUR: You only love this one cause you're the king of analogies.

MICHAEL: So I love analogies. And this thread, it was a Twitter thread started by Adriana Stein at Adriana K Stein. If you want to follow, if you want to follow up. Yes. I love my analogies and also my videos. Yeah. They're probably the top two of all things. Not of all things, but I reckon they're up there and then my kids and then everything else. No, I'm just joking. So how do you convince a client that SEO is more than just a one-time thing? I like it because of the analogies and also I like it because a lot of people will, when they build their site, let's say a development agency says, oh, we'll do your SEO for you, you know, and they think their SEO has been done because the developers put some title tags on for argument's sake. But there's a lot more to it than that. And there are some pretty decent analogies in there. So I'll let you read this, the first one here by Lyndon.

ARTHUR: I'm going to have to zoom in. You need glasses. I do need glasses, but that's a separate topic. Linden and a Darth autocrat by explaining that it works kind of similar to music charts. You might have a top seller for that genre for that day, week, month, and people may play it a lot, play it a lot afterwards, but one hit wonders, seldom keep them. I'm butchering this on. I seldom keep the money coming in a stable of tracks does.

MICHAEL: And having more songs that are more popular, more often tends to make more money.

ARTHUR: I didn't even see those more. I definitely need glasses, don't I?

MICHAEL: It seems most clients get it after that sort of analogy. You know what? I find that one a little bit difficult to follow. You have a top seller. I think someone, some of these other people did a better job. Yeah. The gym one is. Christine Shaoqinga, can't even do this one. Shaoqinga? Shaoqinga. Yeah, that's a tough name, but she likes to use house analogies. We love the old SEO is like a house you own and paid media is like a house you rent analogy. Her one here is, Do you just build the house and let it sit for 20 years? Or do you continually have to maintain it, check it, upgrade it, et cetera? Well, that's SEO.

ARTHUR: That is SEO. It is.

MICHAEL: Christine nailed it. Nailed it. And Joe, at Joe May Lee, he was in a similar vein, SEO. You buy an awesome indoor plant for 250 bucks that is said to grow healthy for the next 10 years. Do you order it only once? Your website is a plant. Take care of it often.

ARTHUR: Hashtag SEO, hashtag Google. Ads. I thought it said Google it.

MICHAEL: Google leads. Wow. And you work in digital marketing.

ARTHUR: Well, I saw it. I shouldn't have said anything. I thought it was funny.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I like it. Google leads. That's going to become a thing now for me. I'll let you.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Can I do the gym on? You can do that one. You can't expect results from one visit. The more you do, the better results you get. Just keep going and see the results.

MICHAEL: Very true.

ARTHUR: So we both go to the gym here and we both know very well that It takes a lot of effort to get results in the gym.

MICHAEL: So I've been a hundred times. I don't have results. So yes, your, your website is like a muscle and it has to be worked on to grow.

ARTHUR: There you go.

MICHAEL: It's like pre-workout link building is like link juice is your pre-workout. What's your, um, I can't even think of anything else people. What's the protein powder? What's the building blocks of your- Your technical audit is your nutritional plan.

ARTHUR: Your macros and everything that you, yep.

MICHAEL: Protein powder would be links and content, like the solid building blocks for growth.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yep. And what's, anyway.

MICHAEL: Look, I think we're on a pretty good little detour there.

ARTHUR: Might even use it.

MICHAEL: Right. Here's a good one. I thought this one was a pretty good one. Say you bought a car. If you want to make use of it, you need to put in gas, go to the mechanic, et cetera. If you don't, you'll have a pretty, but useless chunk of metal in your garage. Same with your website.

ARTHUR: Depends what sort of car you bought, whether or not it's pretty anyway, or electric. Oh, very true. If it's an electric car, you don't need gas, but it still needs to be looked after. Definitely.

MICHAEL: Uh, this one's a good one by at scene digital competitors are active. So if you're not, you'll fall behind. Google constantly updates its guidelines. And if you want to be really pedantic, the clue is in the name optimization, three points or pretty good points.

ARTHUR: That was by seen digital. It was, I'll let you take this last one by, uh, you know, I can't read very well on this laptop Boyd Norwood from nozzle.io. So Boyd said, it's like running a race. If you slow down or stop, then all your competition will pass you by, which is true. There are only 10 spots on page one, and there are plenty of other runners, web pages that are running this race to get to the top 10 or top three. If you stop, you will lose your spot. Pretty much. That's a good one. I like that one. That's probably my favorite out of all of them.

MICHAEL: And maybe if you're in position one, you're way out in front and you slow down and then, uh, maybe even stop, have a little nap on the side of the road while the other runners are continuing at the same speed, they'll go past you. You wake up from your nap and they're way down the distance and you won't even be able to close that unless you really sprint and you're already stuffed from the running you were doing before. So. The key there is to not stop. It's to just keep going, always on, invest in it forever and build your site up instead of letting your competitors get that far ahead of you.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I feel like people make that mistake. They get to a certain point and they're happy with the results and then they decide, Oh, you know, I'm getting leads, I'm getting traffic, I'm getting sales. I'm going to stop SEO. I've gotten, I've gotten to where I want to be. And then like you said, they fall behind, you know, they might be getting results for three, four months, but month five, month six onward, they start to drop. And then you basically have to, don't have to start from scratch, but it's an uphill battle trying to, you know, get ahead of the competition because they've just been doing it for that much longer. So yeah. Yep. Arnie, Arnie actually made a, I'm going to butcher this. Maybe I should have looked up the quote, but he said it in pumping iron and it was him and Lou, uh, yeah. Lou Ferrigno. Have you watched pumping iron?

MICHAEL: I've watched it once, maybe like 10 more years ago. So.

ARTHUR: It was his last Olympia and he was competing and Lou Ferrigno was going for the title of Olympia. And Arnold basically said, you know, like maybe next year you can, you know, you'll win, but I'll still compete for us to be training for another year. So basically he's always got it one up him. And that point was trying to make is no matter how long you train, I'm always going to one up you. Cause I'm still going to train. So I guess similar kind of.

MICHAEL: That's very good. That is SEO right there. It is. The people that are consistent, dedicated and like have that, I guess, moat, I always like to say, you know, the idea of a moat is that you can't get over it. The people that have really consistent with their SEO are building a moat that's very tough for your competitors to get over.

ARTHUR: And he's implying you'll be stronger next week, but I'll be even stronger. Yeah. That was a cool line. I like that.

MICHAEL: Good movie. What a good little tangent we've gone on of analogies or metaphors. Sorry.

ARTHUR: I want, we've got one more. Do we? Yeah. Soft skills. Your favorite. Oh, we've got one more point. That was your favorite one at the start.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. Well, let's just talk about it. This is the last one. This was a tweet by Garrett Sussman. Garrett Sussman, S-U-S-S-M-A-N. Sussman I think it's pronounced. Yeah, Sussman. He says, in the world of SEO, we like to insist that the fundamentals are always the same. We do? That was me saying we do. That may be true, Garrett says, but in every profession, experience allows us to see nuance behind the curtain. Things change and you need to adapt, never stop learning and question everything. And he's basically shared three soft skills that all successful people in SEO have in common. And I agreed with him, so I wanted to read them out. You already did.

ARTHUR: Not the three things. You need to adapt, never stop learning and question everything.

MICHAEL: Well, yeah, but like the way he's okay. The way he said it is they don't trust anyone, but the data and even then they still question the data. So I agree with that. They never stop iterating. Being an SEO is like being a shark, not in the jaws, take your lunch money sort of way. Did you know some sharks need to keep moving for oxygen or they suffocate? He's saying that's what SEO is. You just got to keep iterating, testing strategies that used to work, may not work in the future. So you've got to be across all of this stuff at all time, competitors pop up out of nowhere, and then you've got to be able to fight back that sort of stuff. So constantly be iterating and experimenting and. Looking at data and adjusting and rinsing and repeating. Totally agree. And then the last one SEO has never stopped learning. They have a thirst for knowledge. Stay hungry. Keep on learning. Listen to the SEO show. That's my word. It's not his.

ARTHUR: Oh, I thought he wrote that. No, but shameless plug.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Plug to the show that you're actually listening to, but I agree with all of those three things there. So I wanted to throw it in at the end. You had a point you said before about those. Do you remember what it was?

ARTHUR: Um, no. When did I say it?

MICHAEL: Was it before the show? Yeah. It was really poignant and it was a throwaway line. And you know, I'm just going to have to leave everyone hanging because we're not going to remember what it was.

ARTHUR: Give me three seconds. If I can't think of it, then we can move on. Okay.

MICHAEL: Ready?

ARTHUR: Go. Okay.

MICHAEL: All right. Well on that note, we'll be back next week with another high quality episode of the SEO show, but until then happy SEOing. See ya.

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