What Is Your Least Favourite Part of SEO

This week we’ve decided to go to the world of SEO Twitter and pillage content ideas from there (with credit, of course).
The inspiration for the episode came from a tweet JohnMu at Google shared – “What is your least favourite part of SEO”. Lots of good comments and replies there, so we picked a few topics that we thought were interesting to chat about in this episode.
You never know, more content inspired by “SEO Twitter” might be a regular part of the show moving forward, let us know your thoughts.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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.
Hello, and welcome to the SEO show for another week. I’m Michael. And as always, I’m joined by Arthur, how are you going?
Hello, I’m doing very, very well. First time recording in the new studio together.
It is. Well, I haven’t recorded in here. I had to get in a little booth the other day with Jeff Kennedy. Oh, yeah. Well, he wasn’t in the booth with me. In the UK. But yeah, it’s my first time in here too. How does it feel?
I like it. We need to do a little bit of decorating. But it’s a lot more convenient. Being able to pop in whatever we want and record a podcast.
Yeah, you can see your desk from where you’re sitting. Now I can. It’s a bit different to the old space.
You know what, it’s a good vibe. I reckon once we get everything set up. We’ll get some cameras set up, maybe have one facing the office, you can see, I guess, the wheels and cogs and motion
a high performance SEO team at work in the background. But we’re not here to talk about that. Are we? No, we’re not. We’re actually here we have. I’m going to call it a new segment. Have you prepared the intro music for the segment?
I didn’t know I was meant to. But I’m sure we can find something and overlay it. Now.
We’ll make something custom. You know what? No, we won’t. Why am I different? Why am I why am I going off script and talking about insurance? I don’t know. Because we have a segment I’m very excited about Okay. The general premise of the segment is we go on Twitter and see what people are talking about related to SEO, and then talk about it on here. Because Twitter, there’s a lot of good SEO chats going down on that, you know, if you follow the nofollow there, hashtag or the interest SEO, you’re gonna get some stuff popping up in your feed people chatting about SEO, interesting stuff pops up. And one of the things we saw that we thought was interesting was What is your least favourite part of SEO, which is a tweet by John moon, who is basically the mouthpiece for SEO from Google. Because he has quite a big reach. Lots of people started chiming in with their comments about their least favourite part of SEO. So it’s going to be a little bit of a downer and depressing type. Today, considering this whole shows about SEO, because we’re gonna talk about the least favourite parts of SEO, I’m going to pull out some of the replays that we thought were interesting and have a little chat about them. So do you know
what we can do after this episode about our favourite parts of ESEA? Yeah, just to counterbalance that a little bit?
Yeah, we’ll do one of them. And then we’ve got to let Twitter decide though, what the topics are for the new segment here that we’re going to have the intro music for and everything right. You don’t sound that enthused or committed to it.
Now I’m committed to it. I think it’s a really good idea. I think it’s a really interesting segment. And it’s definitely interesting to see what other people are talking about. Or I guess what other people dislike about SEO, and see if it’s, you know, similar things that I find annoying.
Well, let’s get into it. What was the first tweet or response to this tweet that you like the look of?
The one that caught my eye is something that we’re dealing with at the moment. So GA for being forced upon us? Yep. So as of, I think it’s July 2023. Google’s basically cutting the cord on Universal Analytics, and forcing everyone to use Google Analytics for which is the newest version of analytics. And that’s becoming, I guess, for us a bit problematic, because it’s a big job. You know, migrating all your clients across to a brand new GA. Yeah, I guess that’s a good starting point.
Yeah. The other starting point, not starting point. The other big problem with it? Is that GA four sucks. Yes. gonna say it. I hate it. Most people seem to hate it.
Yeah, I want to look, I’ll I haven’t used it. As much as I probably should have bought. So far, I haven’t enjoyed it. That’s not to say over time, you know, it’s like everything new, it takes some time to adjust. But at the moment, it’s it is a pain in the ass, because a lot of the stuff that’s in Universal Analytics, or the reports that we’re so used to looking at every day, then are there. You know, the data is different. The whole UI is different. So, you know, trying to find something that takes me maybe, you know, 1015 seconds. I can’t even find nga for so.
Yeah. Like we were saying before, they’ve basically taken everything we know about GA everything we know and love and removed or changed. It just made it more difficult for some reason. Yeah. Which Google seems to do a lot with their products. They make big changes to them change the UI and it often is worse than what it was before.
You Yep. You think that someone the size of Google would invest in someone to look at the UX and UI? And which I’m sure they do. But yeah,
yeah. But yeah, sometimes they come up with solutions that are looking for a problem. Now, with GA for, I feel like Jeff was designed for their advertising world and playing nice with all their ad tools, and they don’t care about SEO, and weather SEO for getting the information they need out of the reports. So you know, we’ll have to see, like a lot of things as well, this will improve over time, they’ll add more features. And when they change to the most current version of the Google Ads interface, remember how annoyed we all were? Yeah. And we were clinging on to the old interface for ages trying to avoid it as much as possible. And now I can’t even really like off the top of my head remember exactly how that looked? I’m so used to the new one. So
because it was a gradual, gradual change. I feel like they didn’t kind of you know, with GA for it’s completely different. The new Google ads or AdWords interface. You know, it took a little bit I think they did a bit by bit. It wasn’t like a instant rollout
night. Well, that’s the thing. Yeah. This J for that same by July 2023. Universal Analytics is gone. So they’re just forcing it upon. Admittedly GA for they’ve been teasing it for a long time. You’ve been able to use it for a long time. Yeah, people haven’t been because it’s just not good. It’s garbage. Like is painful. Listen to it. If worst user interface, less features. Migrating over is a pain. Yeah. So why would you use it? Maybe this? Is Google just trying to force people to use it, because no one has been really taking them up on it.
Yeah, I think the last point for me is historic data. So once it’s switched off, it’s going to be hard to do comparisons, you know, year on year, going back further, it’s just going to be a pain. No more conversions. Everything’s in event. That’s another thing. You can’t set up goals. You know, if you have destination, URL goals, they no longer exist. You have to create events. There’s just a whole bunch of things that are frustrating about it, but let’s not dwell on it. Too long. It’s kind of got a whole whole list of things to talk about.
It’s kind of like Game of Thrones, winter is coming. It is and winter and is in the fall note. You know, I haven’t watched Game of Thrones, you should have by now. What about you should watch it this winter? Winter is coming? Why don’t you watch Game of Thrones every winter?
It’s just not interested in to be honest.
Enough. Moving on. Let’s have a look at maybe we should name drop the people that are actually replying as well. Okay, since we’re stealing content,
so that one was from Kyle. William.
Okay. And I’m gonna go with his Twitter handle at SEO underscore markers. Is his answer to the question. What is your least favourite part of SEO? His answer is my answer is not provided in brackets. Sorry, you will never know. Good little SEO Jack. Like that one. That one tickled me. Yep. Did it tickle you?
I found it. So obviously, I liked it. It’s fitting with the, I guess the previous tweet.
Yeah. And I swear there. For those of you that don’t know what the hell we’re talking about Google Analytics, in their infinite wisdom, removed the ability to feed keyword data for organic traffic, and just bucketed all keywords in together in the not provided category. But if you pay them for Google ads, they’ll show you every keyword and what it’s doing. So yeah, that was a little SEO joke there. Let’s move on. Let’s see what ad G fear really, one had to say. I’ll let you read this one.
Working hard and seeing that nothing you recommend has been implemented months after you delivered your recommendations. And mostly because of bureaucratic bottlenecks.
Something we’ve spoken about quite a bit in the past.
We have Yeah, we did. Not a whole podcast on it. But yeah,
we did. Well, we sort of did one we did one back in the early days on like, if it you heard in your SEO? Yep. And I think even recently, we answered what that one user sent in a question. We’ve done so many now it
all blurs into Yeah, one big podcast for me. But um, I guess it’s something we can relate to sometimes. So clients being the bottleneck, delaying things, delaying, you know, implementations of, you know, documents, metadata, content, things like that. Sometimes they think they know better. It happens from time to time, you know, you’ll, you’ll provide recommendations, and they will, I guess, challenge everything that you’re saying. It can become frustrating. And it can have a negative impact on results, and ultimately, leave both yourself and the client unhappy so
and I guess in that tweet, he said and mostly because of bureaucratic bottlenecks. That might be an example of that might be you’re working on a large site and they have like 10 Different people having their say, an input and someone might not want to, you know, someone high up might not want to change the content on the site because it’s not in the right brand tone of voice or something and it’s content that’s never going to be written like Google will read and get a feeling for the page. And you know, needless blockages like that can be really annoying, particularly if you’ve already done a lot of work on the keyword research and the mapping and the content recommendations and all that just sit there and gather dust. Yep. Why not one other outside of clients contributing to it would be maybe developers as well, the battle between SEOs and developers can sometimes be one that leads to stuff not being implemented. So if they if a developer doesn’t agree, or they push back, or it’s not a priority for them, because they’ve got so much other stuff to work with just trying to, I guess, deal with that side of things, and having it impact on the work you’ve done can be frustrating as well.
Yeah. I mean, occasionally, sometimes you’ll have developers charging ridiculous prices for implementation of something that takes you know, 10 minutes. So we’ve had bottlenecks with clients previously, even even recently tried to get a plugin installed, you know, simple plugin $420 or whatever they charge just to instal the plugin. That’s a bottleneck, you know. Yep. Ridiculous to charge someone that much to instal something that simple, but
it happens a lot. Yep. All right. Well, let’s move on. We’ve got another little negative, I guess it is things that annoy you about Fe are all going to be negative and let we’re not no, not not annoying. your least favourite part? C least favourites a good way of phrasing it because it’s all favourite because it’s SEO, but it’s just the least favourite part. But I’m at Jacobs stoops said the negative reputation and misconceptions that we often battle when trying to get our work done. Which sort of ties into that last point. It can be, you know, misconception or something on the developer side or the client side, that means that the work doesn’t get implemented. That ties into that last point. But then also, I think a lot here is to do with people being burnt in the past, you know, negative reputation. Yeah, you’re like a used car salesman. You’d like a dodgy real estate agent. You’re GSU snake oil salesman? Yeah. That sort of stuff. What do people want to do SEO? They know that it’s important channel for their business. But they’re very gun shy if they’ve been burnt in the past, right?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we did a episode on this as well. Yeah. Or at least a section of an episode. Yeah, for
sure. Yeah. But how do you deal with that?
In terms of, you know, client repeat reputation expectations?
Yeah. If you’ve had, like, let’s say you’ve had a bad experience, you got a negative perspective of SEO?
How do you deal with it? Or how does the SEO deal with it with the
client? Both really? I’m fishing for an answer.
Educate. Yeah, basically, educate yourself, or that’s what I do. Whenever I have a client that’s, I guess, hesitant or has, you know, cold feet? Is you educate them? You explain what you’re doing? Why you’re doing it? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is what it is really?
Yeah. So like, on the client side, listening to a podcast like this. Yeah. Educating yourself, you’re not gonna have a bad experience. If you sort of take everything on board that we’ve spoken about in the past around selecting agencies and yeah, shouldn’t shouldn’t be done that sort of stuff.
Yeah. And if it’s a good agency, they’ll have frequent communications with with the agency with the client, you know, there’ll be up to date, they’ll be getting reports, they’ll have an account manager that’s, you know, keeping up keeping them updated on what’s happening day to day, you know, to give them peace of mind that there is someone working on their campaign trying to get good results.
Alright, well, we’ve got it. We’ve got one coming up here. I’m gonna let operate this one because it’s got it. It’s got a lot of words in it in jeez, but it’s by at? Yes, yeah.
Yes. Yeah. So sorry, just got a bit distracted there. So yes, yeah. Seeing competition, do everything Google states they should not do. Horrible, error ridden, non mobile friendly site using regurgitated content from the agency that is used on many other websites across the country, failing core web, vitals, etc, yet, they’re still ranking at the top of Google.
That is a least favourite part of SEO for sure.
He’s mentioned a lot there. So there’s a lot to digest. I’ll tell
you the first problem. He says there thing competition do everything Google state say should not do bingo. Don’t Don’t ignore, as a general rule, ignore Google’s SEO advice. Exactly. Or at least take a grain of salt when I take a grain of salt when looking at it. That doesn’t even make sense. But you know what I’m trying to say? Because often what they say and what they reward two very different things.
Yeah. And I think on the I guess, same topic, if if they are ranking first, you’d be reverse engineering what they’re doing to try to replicate it. So you know, basically, what you said if whatever whatever they’re doing is working then you should be trying to do that on your website as well. Yeah. Be link building you know, be what Above,
don’t just take no advice, particularly Google’s advice blindly about SEO, especially about SEO? Yes. Because they don’t have. I guess they don’t want you not doing well with SEO really. So you should always be testing really with SEO. Like, if if you have a website and you see that someone is doing really well with their site, you should be implementing what you think is working for them. And testing. Don’t just settle for doing what the best practices in air quotes are, or what Google recommends Rules are made to be broken. They are you’re a rebel, FC, a rebel, rebel. And anyway, who says Google sets the rules. You know, like, if that is a search engine we’re trying to rank in? Google does. Yeah, but their rules, like designed to get them more AdWords or Google Ads income? Yeah, absolutely not. It’s not grounded in I guess, SEO. This. I’m gonna say best practices. It’s not grounded in what actually works works in the SEO world. You go, that was the word I was looking for. What do we have here? We’ve got a little lamb. What do you want to call it a thread? How do you have three?
Tom Selleck. I’ll let you read this on our Read the last one. It says
Tom Selleck, but I think we’ve handle it at Mitch Berg. He says his least favourite part of SEO is that Google just move sites to the top of the list because they have high da, and then content isn’t even relevant to the search. Google rewards sites that buy backlinks, which is supposed to be frowned upon, supposed to be supposed to be. And then at search triggers says, when someone with worse content and more authority ranks higher than you. So bad content, but more links. And then Yeezy, which is m punk vert off at M punct Runa. Buying backlinks Don’t tell me I shouldn’t even with better product, better design, average page time from 10 minutes very high engagement, good conception rate. I have no chance against shitty suits with dozens and hundreds of strong BL that frustrates
I’ve got a feeling this guy had a few drinks before he talked about his weight
certainly raised that way. But um, there’s a general common thread to those responses, which is link building, and how important that is. Absolutely. If you’ve listened to more than one episode of this show, we’ve banged on about links a lot in the past. And it’s because it works. And that’s what these people are saying, you know, sites will move to the top of the list just because they have really good links, even though content isn’t relevant. Or someone you know, you’ve got terrible content, but they’ve got tonnes of links, and they rank high. And then old, Made Easy is just saying doesn’t matter. He’s got better product, better design, blah, blah, blah. But there’s a dodgy site with doesn’t a good conversion rate, and a good conversion rate. So we have spoken about it. You all know it, if you work in SEO, if you’re trying to rank a website, links are super important. And again, this ties back to that last point, ignore what Google says because Google says don’t go out and build length yet their search results reward sites that do. Simple, simple. Let’s have a little look at what
Bertie ser you can read this one I was planning to,
oh, you’re taking a big long pause for dramatic impact.
Severity has written working with incomplete data. So sample queries in Google Search Console, lack of conversion data for queries, search volume inaccuracies, et cetera. And that was followed by this by Jen curls, I believe. chorales who cares? Sorry, Jen. Yeah, so basically, yeah, we don’t really get the same level of data that Google Ads dos. So even Search Console which is good, is incomplete and has inaccuracies. So sometimes it does feel like we are flying blind but yep, it is what it is. Google doesn’t like us years.
Yep. Even ja like sampling like if you have too much data in the sampling. It makes making totally accurate decisions or I guess being very confident in your decision is tough in some cases. But yeah, as I said, it is what it is that’s a good way to sum that one up you can’t really do anything
you can try reverse engineer it like we do. Sometimes. I remember when not provided first came in people were you know, selling tools that you know, you can we will link up all your data we will link up Search Console and you know, we’ll give you the keywords but it’s not the same. And never will be the same.
Yep. All right. Well, let’s move on. Have a look at shortening train. Now. I like this. This guy his Twitter handle is really good. I’ve noticed that he’s at Wolf of boards. And it’s a little photo of a bald guy. I enjoyed that. Anyway, he says Is his least favourite part of SEO is honestly, reliance on Google? I wish there was one or two other choices with significant search market share.
So why sometimes? Yeah, we
hear Wolf of Wall Street. But I guess like the last question, it is what it is. Google own everything.
Maybe one day, but don’t hold your breath.
Yeah, no. All right. Let’s move on. This could be the last one. We got one more. We’ve got a couple more. Okay. All right. Okay. Okay. Well, at proxy mo webs said, crawled non indexed, sticking out tongue face. What do you want to what do you want to talk about on this
one, something I’m seeing more and more frequently in Search Console. So basically, Google has crawled the page seen the page, but it’s decided not to index the page for whatever reason. And then that whatever reason is usually down to one of two things content. So either having duplicate or thin content on the page, or poor website architecture. So you know, poor internal linking. Yep. I found, even with some of my clients, we’ve had pages set up just SEO pages, unique copy, or find ranked world that have now been removed from the SERPs. Google still crawls it here and there, but because the internal links to that page are missing, there’s only one link, Google doesn’t view doesn’t crawl that page as frequently and has decided not to, it’s not important enough. Likewise, you know, if you’ve got pages with the same copy, just changed up, I guess, you know, just changed up a key word, the key word, I can’t talk at the moment keyword or two, you might run into the same problem. So we had a, again, I guess it comes down to internal linking, but we had a site that we worked with before previously, that had 1000s of pages, or location pages, then content. All you know, 10,000 pages were removed. Yeah. I would say kind of rambled on
there a little bit. No, no, that’ll make sense. It
came out better than it sounded.
That sounded Okay. In the ears, I think. Okay, cool. I did tune out a bit. You are waffling. I was getting the last one to that point, I would say that as well. The authority of the domain is important. Like if you have a really weak domain, tonnes of pages, they’re probably not going to be indexed. No.
Yeah, but I think website architecture more and more important internal links. 100%. So
we’re seeing like, if you go in and add internal links into body copy on pages, where there weren’t any, has all sorts of positive impacts on SEO. So it’s an area a lot of people overlook, you get caught up on external backlinks and crafting the ultimate meta title tag and copy and that sort of stuff, but maybe not so much on your internal linking. But anyway, let’s move on here. What at genre 79 had to say his least favourite part of SEO was
the waiting.
What do you reckon? It is annoying? Yeah. It is what it is, again, SEO is a long term game. Have you always say, yep, that you’re not
gonna see results overnight? I guess there’s certain things that take longer than others, you know, but it is definitely a long term play. And you have to have patience.
Yes. And when you’re investing 1000s per month, it’s not always easy to have that patience. No. So you need to be confident in the strategy and the people working on it. But as opposite and as we’ve said many times already, this podcast, it is what it is. That’s a new unknown, the SEO world the thing It depends, is a bit of a meme. You know, the answer to everything? Like how long is it going to take? It depends how much more traffic could I get? It depends. That sort of stuff is true. Now it is what it is, is also we’re going to make an effort to advocate that as the new meme in the SEO world. Get it trending. might reply on this Twitter thread and see what people
just reply on every single one of these hashtag it is what it is. See if you can get it trending.
Alright, well, we have at WWE Alucard moil Academy. We are located anyway, my boys was Yeah, Moises is his name on there.
I wonder if that’s actually him.
Anyway, so he’s saying his least favourite part of SEO. And there’s actually again, this is a little thread because there’s a couple of tweets here in this vein, because Shavon underscore Fagan also says something similar. So let’s go with them boiler cloud. First he goes, my machine generated rubbish content ranking above well done content. I don’t know why he thinks that’s his least favourite part. If his dodgy contents doing well, I’d be happy with that. Yeah, maybe he’s just more ethical maybe. But Shavon says the enormous quantities of bad content written in an attempt to game the system and the increasingly poor SERPs that result? And Christo ferch says you have AI to thank for that. Yeah, well Do you reckon? Um, I don’t know. I am again. I’m just I come from the school of if it works,
yeah, well, yeah, I mean, it is annoying that if 100% You spend a lot of time writing good quality content for the end user and only to be outranked by some gibberish that’s frustrating as hell. So I can I can relate.
Well, he’s frustrated by his content. Yeah. Which is gibberish. Anyway, use it to your advantage if you can get. Yeah, because like, we’re not saying create a whole page of gibberish need to think about your user, it needs to convert first and foremost needs to you know, get your customers or whatever your goal is. But if adding some AI spun content, deep on the page, improve the ranking. Yeah. 100%. Yes. But the search results, yeah, they like in some nations that just an absolute mess of just junk pages and good quality pages that are doing things seemingly right, you know, either not getting the rankings to begin with, or losing them for some reason. But um, again, it is what it is, you know, yeah. It’s a you’ve got to go look at what works and just replicate it. You know, that is SEO at its core.
There’s two more here. Two more that I accidentally removed. The funny ones. Ah, yeah. Yeah. So recur isn’t recur? No, my eyes are bad, Nicola gal, right? The Oh. So the optimization, search optimization. You probably probably shouldn’t be doing SEO. That’s his least favourite thing of SEO.
That’s the most time consuming part. Because definitely, the other part is just a search engine.
And then the last one hit by victim missa. My least favourite part of SEO is Google. No doubt. Yeah. Also can relate.
Yes. It’s a bit of a weird one, because they would pretty much be no SEO without Google. No, considering they have 90% plus of the market. But they’re also very, can be annoying. Some of the stuff they come out with, like forcing GA for people when it’s not a nice product to use? No. But it is what it is. Yeah, you have to work with Google, because that’s where the traffic comes from. So they were the ones that stood out to us on that Twitter thread. Already fun. There were a lot
more so maybe we can, like you said and make it a recurring segment. Yeah, because I like it. It’s fun.
And look, there’s going to be bringing, you know, different perspectives of people that aren’t necessarily guests on the show, but we think are interesting. And looking at what’s going on in the world of Twitter, I think could be pretty, pretty good way of coming up with new topics for the show. But another way that we like to do things is with our Q and A’s. We’re going to be doing another episode soon. We’ve had some questions come in. But if you have any questions about the world of SEO, if you have any questions where you want us to tell you that the answer is it depends or it is what it is, then let us know head to the FBI showed up close send your questions in Do we have a Twitter?
No. Maybe we should make one.
You know what we’ve spoken around Instagram. We’ve spoken about intro music, Twitter, probably Twitter would be the most relevant thing. So we can chime in on these combos and yeah,
let’s do it. Alright,
well, by the next episode, you’ll have that set up right.
I’ll do my best. You know what? Yeah, I will also remind me next episode.
I will do but until then, happy Yes. yoing. See ya. Bye.
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