SEO Q&A Week #6

TRANSCRIPT:

Michael 0:00
Hi guys, Michael here before we get into the show, if you’re a Twitter user head to at service scaling, I’m tweeting a bunch of stuff. I’ve learned scaling our digital marketing agency, and I think you’ll find it pretty interesting. All right, let’s get into the show.

Unknown Speaker 0:15
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 0:37
Hello, and welcome to the SEO show.

Arthur 0:41
Maybe I should do the intros moving forward.

Michael 0:43
Now. That’s fine. That’s exciting. Yep. It’s Tuesday afternoon. We’re excited to talk about SEO. I’m Michael Causton. I’m joined by sabich. Very upset looking at as always, oh, you

Arthur 0:54
need to work on your injury game.

Michael 0:56
No, I think that’s good.

Arthur 0:58
I think I’m going to start doing them moving forward. I’ve decided, Okay, I’m sorry.

Michael 1:03
Let’s go from the top, you can do it go.

Arthur 1:05
Welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I can’t do it on the spot. I need to think about what I’m gonna say. today. We’ve got an exciting episode, another q&a week.

Michael 1:14
There we go. Yes, we do. And guess what? We have an actual recorded question, because you may or may not know this. But on the Seo show.co. Our website, if you go on there, there’s a little widget that you can record yourself asking your question. And to date, no one’s used it. But I’m very excited to say that Dave has submitted a question today, but I don’t get to it just yet. Don’t get to it just yet. Are you going to do a joke thing?

Arthur 1:41
I was just gonna go.

Michael 1:43
For that context. Do you think it’s a joke that they’ve submitted a question? No, not at all. So um, we have him we have Dave’s question queued up on the tool that we do all.

Arthur 1:54
All the sounds, which we haven’t been using for potential, but we’re going to start using moving forward.

Michael 2:00
Yep. Starting with Dave’s question. But I just want to remind anyone listening, if you do have an SEO question, head to the FTO show, Dotco send it in that way, rather than sending it in by email, which is how we get most of them. Because it’s just cool to hear yourself on the show. So let’s jump into it. Let’s further ado. Yep. Do you want to do the honours of pushing the button? No.

Arthur 2:21
Which button? Is it? The first one

Michael 2:22
you know what? That’s a bloody good. No, no, that’s yeah, that’s a stolen from social media. I press that one. No. No. For fun. Okay. Gone. stolen.

Arthur 2:32
Stolen, stolen from social stolen. Okay, now we’ll persa I’m

Michael 2:37
sure one, the real one is this one. Okay. So this is Dave’s question. The first one off the rank this week in the SEO show, q&a episode.

Arthur 2:48
Putting your headphones I need to hear the question.

Michael 2:52
All right, you ready? Let’s go.

Unknown Speaker 2:54
Hello, gents. Love the show, longtime listener first time caller. My question for you is around how much you guys tailor your SEO strategy, depending on your clients industry. So I’m wondering if there’s a significant difference in your approach to, you know, content or link building for, you know, a university client versus someone who’s a, you know, a news publisher, or an E commerce business or something like that. Is there some nuance in terms of where you focus your time? Or is that can approach approach completely different based on the industry and maybe their competitors set or, or things of that nature? I’m curious to hear if it’s sort of a one size fits all, or how much tailoring happens behind the scenes based on those variables. So thanks. I’m looking forward to hearing back.

Michael 3:44
All right, that is very cool.

Arthur 3:46
Isn’t it? Very, very cool. I couldn’t hear the first half of the question, because my volume was right down. But I think I got the general gist of it.

Michael 3:52
Yeah, he’s basically asking, do we change our approach, depending on what the business does? So I’m gonna say yes, yeah. We do. Yeah. Well, there’s, I guess there’s two parts to this. Like, some parts of SEO are the same no matter what you’re working on. And then other parts. They’re very much nuanced, like he’s asking. So yeah. You start off with like, what sort of a business is it? Service econ publisher, he touched on there. Obviously, a service business has different goals and different needs and a econ business, you know, service business generating leads, maybe in a local service area, it comes trying to generate sales. Yes. Copywriting for an econ business. You might be using less copy on a page service business, you might be spinning up like huge amounts of copy for, you know, different location pages for different types of copiers or Yes, blog post, copy, your money page, copy, service page, copy, that sort of stuff. So there’s a lot of variants depending on what industry you’re in

Arthur 4:56
very much, sir. E commerce sites tend to be mostly e commerce site. I’d tend to be bigger and more technical. So you might be focusing more on the keyword research and technical, I guess, aspects of the site.

Michael 5:09
So I guess the general approach, you know, content links and technical is the same as what you’re working on. It’s just the different aspects of it. Yeah. Change. Yeah. Big one, though, like, outside of what the business does. For me, a big thing is looking at the competition, how competitive is the space? How far behind? I guess the main sites are you that feeds into the bulk of the decision making when I’m doing SEO? So, link building, for example, if you’re way behind the competition, you’re going to need to do a lot of links, regardless of what sort of industry whether you’re a service or an econ business? Yeah. The vertical itself as well, life really feed into that some way less competitive than others. So you might not need to do as many links as bonus content, that sort of stuff.

Arthur 5:57
I mean, you could do slate roofing, or you can be a massive insurance company, it’s going to be very, very different. I guess you’re right. You know, the general gist of it is the same. You know,

Michael 6:07
if you’re trying to rank for best credit card, your strategy is going to be very different than ranking for best flight roofing. Flight roofing. Exactly. Yes. I didn’t know what you were saying. slavey thing?

Arthur 6:19
No, no slight slight roofing? Yes, like roofing, you know those? Yep. Like roofs?

Michael 6:24
Yep. Yeah, neither one’s theory. Both of them are trying to get leads at the end of the day. But the link building aspect and the PR aspect of the best credit card is going to be through the roof has been numerical. And a lot of your time and effort is going to be focused on link building. Whereas maybe with slight roofing, it could be you know, a little bit of that, but making sure you’re on site is tight, and then maybe creating content, content around locations, that sort of stuff. So to answer Dave’s question, yes. Yeah. Haley, your strategy based on industry, the overarching principles of SEO links, technical content, are always there no matter what. But as tailored

Arthur 7:00
to the, to the business to the client, to the type of site it is, and to the vertical learn.

Michael 7:06
That’s it. So hopefully, that was a good answer to the very first audio question in our q&a episodes. Let’s move on. We’ve now got a whole bunch of bog standard boring line and length text questions that are boring. They’re not boring. We’ve

Arthur 7:22
got a few good ones.

Michael 7:22
I’m just, I’m just trying to advocate for people going to the FTO, show.com, and filling out no submitting an audio question. But um, this one is an interesting one comes from Tyler, and they have asked us what is the best way to get SEO clients?

Arthur 7:36
That’s a good question.

Michael 7:38
Have you considered ranking your website in Google? Tyler? By using Su? Mo Tyla? I know I’m talking.

Arthur 7:49
You’re looking like me?

Michael 7:52
That was me trying to make a joke, but the delivery? No, you want to go well? Do you know how much trouble we’re in now that Arthur’s discovered? We’ve we’ve used him like once in the past and eight times today since you’ve discovered them? But um, look? Yes, it’s pretty obvious. You can make your website to get SEO clients. But really what I would say is you need to do the work. Yeah, there’s millions of agencies, I might be exaggerating a little, but there’s a lot of them. Seemingly, there’s more and more starting up every day. So it’s a really tough slog out there to compete. Every business looks the same in the eyes of prospects. So how do you get clients where you need to do a lot of hard work to stand out. So growing your case, study library, your testimonials, your reviews, doing good work, to even be able to get them to begin with building that all up, then running paid ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, multi channel ad campaigns, even outbound prospecting and emailing and LinkedIn reach out to try and hit up your dream prospects. All of that stuff. Pretty Pretty bog standard, like mine in length, but there’s no I guess, hack, or quick and easy way to go and get clients you need to do the work.

Arthur 9:11
I’d say it might differ a little bit whether or not you’re a freelancer or an agency. The freelancers can maybe approach people differently, build build their own brand, the personal brand, sir, you know, get active in SEO communities. Stay involved, you know, creating, you know, Twitter or whatnot, and, you know, just getting out there and building their own brand per fall. Because that way, that’s a good way to kind of, you know, approach people people see that you’re active in the community.

Michael 9:37
Yep. And so like as a freelancer, you can say, hey, I’m the agency baiting freelancer, like don’t work with an agency work direct with me and get all of that know how but like, you’re dealing with me? Yeah, one thing and then if you’re an agency, you can say, hey, don’t work with freelancers work with us. We have a whole team of people and all knowledge sharing their business and training and process and all the rest of it to lean on. Yeah, you can change your messaging depending on what you do.

Arthur 10:03
And there’s sites like Upwork as well, if you’re starting out looking to do dribs and drabs of work, you know, you probably you might not find clients per se, but you might find work, and then build on that. So, yeah, which is different approaches, I guess.

Michael 10:18
Yeah, we should look at this peak of people out there that make a whole living, working on up work. But there’s a lot of price sensitive clients customers on there. So it’s probably not the best place in the world. I think it just comes back to you need to, you need to be good at what you do first, and get the runs on the board, and then build on that promote that fact. I would say as well having a clear market that you serve or angle that you’re going with for yourself. So we are the ultimate SEO company for Slate Roofing Companies. Yeah, for example, finding a niche, yeah, that can’t hurt. Then working on the sales process, as well. So optimising your pitch decks and making sure that they tell a good story and the design nicely and that you have a good, consistent approach to qualifying prospects and then during discovery calls and then pitching and then following up all that stuff is super important too. So spending a lot of time on that. Improving it over time, will help you get more SEO clients. So I hope that helped tailor not too much. We don’t want you to compete with us, too, wholeheartedly.

Arthur 11:24
Which one’s a laughing button.

Michael 11:26
Pick the yellow one. I’m colorblind. Now, who knows? Um, I gotta make all of these buttons not make any sounds just to stop you from doing this. But I hope that helped Taylor. Let’s move on to the next question.

Arthur 11:41
So Karina has asked what is better? SEO or PPC? That’s a simple one. Ser. Yep. Press the button for the laughter

Michael 11:52
There you go. Beautiful. We did an episode on this episode. 22. So Karina, if you haven’t gone back and listen to that yet, go have a listen to it. Go to the Seo show.com. check out episode 22. We went in depth on this. We like SEO. It is the SEO show. But PPC has its place. Yeah. Depends on your goals, your timeframes the market you’re in. Do you want things quickly? Like are you trying to put food on the table next week? Then you would spend your money on PPC rather than if

Arthur 12:25
you can use our house analogy? Yeah, the PPC, PPC is like renting a place, whereas SEO is like building your own foundation building your own home. Yep. Takes longer takes longer, but it’s there, you’re going to be getting traffic visits to the site. Essentially no matter what, hopefully, unless you’re wiped out by an algorithm update. But it’s a long term on the topic of that. Oh,

Michael 12:49
there’s one today? Yeah. It’s been just been announced the September broad core algorithm update

Arthur 12:55
fun times, which means nothing a lot of the time.

Michael 12:59
Yeah, well, like the helpful content one did nothing in terms of sites. And then there was another broad core in August. They’re going gangbusters at the moment.

Arthur 13:07
Have you noticed anything from the content update at all?

Michael 13:11
I have seen some other people talking about five? Yeah, but I haven’t seen any, across any of our clients.

Arthur 13:18
Yeah, stuff. Just makes me wonder what it’s just targeting a different type of website than the general service ecommerce sites that we work with. Yep. Which is good. Good for us.

Michael 13:28
It is indeed. But coming back to Karina I, in my world both. There is no better. It’s not like it’s this tribal thing where if your team SEO, you’re only SEO and you won’t do PPC. You need to be doing PPC SEO you need to be doing you know Instagram Facebook ads you need to be doing email marketing you need to be doing outbound you need to have I guess, all these different avenues that people are using to find your brand your offer your website and get in touch with you. So

Arthur 14:00
I would say that PPC is better for generating traffic short term, whereas SEO is better for generating traffic longer term.

Michael 14:07
And PPC is better if you have a lower budget. Because you’re going to get runs on the board quicker. Yep. You can be antsy, you’re gonna want results. SEO is good if you’re serious about building a long term asset. So that’s it. Right house. Yeah. Like building a house. Episode 22, though, go back and have a listen to that one. Let’s move on to Simone’s question. Who has asked what are some easy WordPress SEO hacks? So not only are there hacks, but they need to be easy? Easy, easy, and we don’t even necessarily know you know, define hack like we think it means something that can be done quickly and easily and saves you time. Yes, we’re going to answer it based on hope you’re not asking us how to hack us.

Arthur 14:54
Yeah. Yeah, we don’t want that. We don’t want any wordpress sites hacked. Um Do you want to start off? Should I stop? You can stop. Cool, sir, the one that comes to mind for me would be just any SEO plugin. There’s plenty out there, Yoast rankmath SEO framework, what’s the one that you like at the moment? The general SEO press, SEO press. So they’re more or less old do the same thing. But it allows you to customise the metadata and all the basic SEO elements on the on the page. So that’s a good start. And I guess you just want to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords on each page. So, you know, that’s a quick hack, if you will, the not really hack, but yeah, a quick and easy way to start getting SEO results. Yeah,

Michael 15:41
by hack. If by hack, you mean doing efia. Yeah.

Arthur 15:45
Which is what I said, when we were writing this down. But it is essentially an easy WordPress SEO plugin that you can start using, it’s better than not using it. So you’re gonna get better results than not using a plugin at all.

Michael 15:59
I’m going to give a couple of what I consider to be hacks. Add Link whisper, it’s a plugin that adds internal links, that’s gonna save you a tonne of time because it will go through posts and suggest internal links. And then you can also set it so that if a keyword is used in you know, pages or blog posts in WordPress, it will automatically turn that word into a link to another internal page on your site. So, for example, let’s say on our site, we said the word SEO agency needs to be always a link to our SEO agency page. It’s gonna go and add that in to anywhere that SEO agency is written on our website. Beautiful internal linking is awesome for SEO and having linguist would just do that for you is a hack saves a tonne of time.

Arthur 16:41
I reckon that’s a good one. No, I’m very aware of it. I use it myself.

Michael 16:46
I feel good about that one. And in the same token, short pixel or similar, or similar. Yeah. So other image compression plugins, short pixels is the one I like to use. You put that plugin in, and then it compresses images makes them smaller. And then every time you upload an image, it will make it smaller as you do it. Again, saving time. Good. That’s a little hack. And I know that like my next one, does it convert them into web P

Arthur 17:13
images? Yeah,

Michael 17:14
I think like they have paid versions where it does that for you. Okay. Yep. And when I say pay, it is not expensive. I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. But yeah, well worth it. The other one I put here, looking at it now written that may not be a hack. It’s definitely not a hack. No, it does save time.

Arthur 17:32
It’s as much of a hack as Yoast or

Michael 17:35
any of these things. Yeah. Because there’s, yeah, there’s no the

Arthur 17:39
you know what, it is a hack. It is a hack, because it’s easier than setting it up manually and putting the code in and yeah, a lot, sir. Yeah, it saves time Google Site kit, basically. Yep. It allows you to set up Search Console analytics GTM on the site, easily without having to manually insert the code. I’d consider that a hack.

Michael 17:58
I would too, because that used to be something you’d you’d instal GTM via, like headers and footers or something, then you have to go into GTM and individually instal all the different bits of code. Now, it’s just one plugin, and not at all. The, I guess, conspiracy theorists to me would say, you’re just giving Google like, you’re plugging Google right into your WordPress, and he knows what they’re doing with that. But they already know everything about everything anyway, they do. I don’t think it’s a problem. Now. Let’s move on to clocks. Question. What o’clock asked, clock asked, which is the best free SEO tool. So we’ve got one edge. What’s your best free SEO tool? Well,

Arthur 18:44
my free SEO tool is Google Search Console. Because I think is legitimately the only free SEO tool out there that you don’t have to pay a subscription for.

Michael 18:53
That isn’t like freemium. Yeah, there’s lots of free in commerce, but they don’t really let you do anything and make you pay to actually yes, at

Arthur 19:00
all. So it’s certainly true SEO tool, free SEO tool out there that I know of anyway. But I think every site should be using Search Console. From within search console, you can see any crawler as you can get valuable data. You can see what people are searching for the queries, you can have a look at your code, vital metrics, making sure that all your pages are being indexed. So it’s just a, an netstat necessary tool that every site should be using. And yeah, super simple to set up. And, yeah, as far as I know, it’s any free tool. Yeah. That freemium like you said,

Michael 19:38
I’m going to go with something that is a little outside the box, you might not be expecting this as an answer. Because it’s not a tool. But what I’m saying here is that education is the best investment you can make them yourself. Definitely not at all and you can get a great education for free so your brain is a tool in this case, and you need to fill it with Good stuff. So the University of YouTube podcasts, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, following people that are doing this stuff practitioners talking about what’s working, what they’re implementing. Then taking that and putting it into action is the best free SEO tool.

Arthur 20:15
I see. What do you reckon about that? Yeah, really taken that out of the box or outside of the box. I think it’s really, really good rain is the best free SEO tool. It is. Alright, it’s a good answer.

Michael 20:28
Thank you. I’m proud of that one. One last question. rocketed through them this week. We have. But APA has a meeting in 10 minutes. So let’s bang this one out. What is your single best piece of SEO advice? This is what Ashley has asked us. The good one. What am I Yeah, so my answer here? No. I can start with one. Yes, that

Arthur 20:54
one’s a bit of a joke. So a long, long time ago. I got the you got your hand ready. Hovering over the laughing? Yep. Awesome. So a long, long time ago, back when we were working at our previous agency. I guess my mentor at the time, told me that there’s no second place in ser What do you reckon? Well, there’s definitely a second place in SEO and second place is not that bad, sir. Yeah. And third place. Page one sometimes is pretty good. So yeah, I mean, that’s always kind of stuck with me. Okay, I thought it was funny. I thought I’d share that. Okay.

Michael 21:27
That’s your single best piece. Oh, it’s not, but it’s what I’m going to run with today. All right. Well, mine is the best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is right now, then don’t ever stop. So the temptation can be to dip in and out of us. Yeah, definitely. Like the it’s the businesses that started yesterday, and have been going consistently with that again, and be doing really well in a month’s time, compared to the businesses that didn’t even start at all or have gone out. And

Arthur 21:56
actually, I retract my, my advice. My that’s my advice. Now don’t stop. So you’re saying Same here? Yeah, I’m stealing your advice, because too often people will get to where they want to be, and then stopping them to get overtaken by the competition. Yeah. Which is frustrating, because you put a lot of hard work into it. And some of this like, disappears.

Michael 22:16
Don’t stop. And I saw a tweet by Glenn from Viper chill. Where he spends time looking at earnings reports like for public companies, whether they’re talking about, you know, what they’re up to in the quarter or half yearly earnings and the like. And increasingly, more and more of them are talking about SEO and their investments in SEO and the results they’re getting from SEO, where it never used to be spoken about in there. And the reason I’m saying this here, if they all these big brands that this understand the value of it more and more and more now and are investing in it consistently. And if you’re being half hearted or dipping in and out of it, you just can’t compete because like we spoke about the other week, you know, running a race, and that’s running consistently ahead. If someone’s like having a little nap, they’re gonna get left behind. So keep going, keep going. Even if you didn’t start yesterday, start right now. And the work you do now is going to have an impact. You know, a year down the track. Two years down the track five years down the track

Arthur 23:12
my Arnold Schwarzenegger quote, which I can’t remember him.

Michael 23:16
Yeah, well, we’ve listened to last week, or the one before, just keep

Arthur 23:20
going. Don’t stop. Yep. Just because you’ve gotten where you wanted does plenty of potential to target different keywords, create content and get better and better and stronger and stronger. Build that moat around you. Cool. I think you’ve used that one before at the moment.

Michael 23:33
Yeah, I feel that way. And now what we’re talking about here is exactly the same as two episodes ago. So on the topic of just keep going, don’t stop. It is time for us to actually stop. We will be back next week with another episode of the SEO show. But until then, happy SEO and goodbye.

Unknown Speaker 23:52
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.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai