ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

SPEAKERS
Tom Demers, Dave Erickson, Botond Seres

Dave Erickson 00:32
Welcome to the ScreamingBox technology and business rundown podcast. In this month's podcast, Dave Erickson and my co-host, Botond Seres, are going to search for answers about search engine optimization with our guest, Tom Demers. Tom has more than a decade of online marketing experience and a deep expertise in search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. He is currently the co-founder and Managing Partner of Measured SEM, an online marketing firm, which helps clients significantly increase their web traffic and grow their businesses. Tom is also a prolific writer and writes for sites like Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. Today, we are looking to find out exactly what SEO is and how it can be applied to various business and technology solutions. So Tom, did I miss anything? Is there anything you'd like to add to our humble intro?

Tom Demers 01:28
No, I think that's a good synopsis. Thanks.

Dave Erickson 01:30
All righty. Well, search engine optimization is an abbreviation, which means it can mean a million different things to a million different people. You know, some people think search engine optimization is as simple as adding Yoast SEO to their Wordpress site. And some people think it's about content. And others think it's all about keywords and all kinds of other things. So maybe we can kind of start off with a kind of a conversation about what is search engine optimization, and maybe you can break down, kind of, the parts of search engine optimization.

Tom Demers 02:11
Yeah, absolutely. So I think, off the top one thing that people might come at, you know, SEO or Search Engine Optimization from different angles for, is what platform you're optimizing for. So really, technically search engine optimization, the way that most people think of it is, I want to show up higher in Google, right in organic listings that are not part of their paid ads. You could think of search engine optimization as encompassing other alternative search engines like Bing, or even other platforms entirely. So there's, you know, the concept of app store optimization for search, Amazon search optimization within, you know, amazon.com platform, or YouTube, right. And those are actually increasingly a couple of the biggest search engines outside of Google. But I think the most common way that people think about it is optimizing for Google, right and showing up higher in Google search listings. So when you think about optimizing for Google, and there are some commonalities, but really, it's fundamentally different than a platform like Amazon, or YouTube. The things that we're thinking about for Google, I think of them kind of at a high level as three different buckets and there's some overlap between the three. But just, you know, sort of briefly to think about it, there's sort of off page factors, which are external links. So obviously, a major factor for Google since the dawn of Google, and still is; the external links that point to your site, meaning other websites that are linking back to your site, the volume of those sites and the quality of those sites and the relevance of those sites and the linking pages. So that's one piece. Another piece is what I would think of as on page factors. So that would be things like the actual content on your page, the way that it's marked up, you know, with HTML, your images on the page, the way that those images are marked up, and how quickly the page loads and the experience that the person has when they come to the page. So that's another bucket. And that bucket overlaps with, a lot of times, with what I would think of as the third bucket, which is what I would call technical SEO, which is, obviously, impacts the on page factors, but encompasses things like information architecture, the way that your pages are interlinked, the way that Google is able to index and crawl your site, and the way that you're leveraging things like redirects throughout the site. So there's three different, again, right, like those are three different buckets. And I think one of the things that's really interesting about SEO, is the relative importance of those three buckets varies a lot based on the type of site that you have, the age of the site, the type of business that you have. So a b2b SaaS company is going to have very different dials across those three buckets in terms of what's the most important than, say, an ecommerce store,right, or a local, you know, plumbing service business, right, which will encompass things like local SEO, too. So there's a lot of moving pieces. And there's a lot of I think, like, a theme, for me always is answers to a lot of, you know, high level SEO questions are kind of independent, right. So there's a lot of variance, because there's so many different ranking factors that Google is taking into account, but at a high level, that's a, I think, a useful way to think about it.

Dave Erickson 05:30
I think a lot of people are focused a lot on Google searches, you know, that's what they stick in their mind. You know, as a small business or medium business, you know, how do I rank? Because they see traffic only coming from that one source, and they probably clump all, you know, search engines like Bing, and Google into one thing. But I think as businesses become more savvy, as they grow or get experience, they'll start looking at a lot of these others. And I do agree that things like YouTube are, it’s own search engine is growing as well as the various others and, and how images versus text all relate. I think that is a changing ecosphere.

Botond Seres 06:16
I mean, you socially produce, think bigger things. And for me, it's a topic almost as obscure as the arcane studied by Dr. Strange, right? So at the low end, we can pay someone on Fiverr to push our pages to the top of Google search results for a day for five bucks. Or we can subscribe to a high end service to keep it there for weeks, months, years. But the question remains, what are you doing? How are you doing it? And why is it even a thing? Like what,why does it matter?

Tom Demers 06:51
The reason it matters? So basically, when you look back at the early iteration of Google, particularly, part of the reason that it kind of won against other search engines, was the idea of using links as a signal for quality were the idea was, it was actually I think, Larry and Sergey, the founders of Google, took it from, you know, kind of the same concept that people would use with research papers, right, where if your research paper was referenced in other authoritative research papers, that was an indication of quality and authority, so same premise is true for your website. So if you're getting links from authoritative sources, a volume of links and increasingly, if your, the links have contextual relevance, those are seen by Google as an indication of authority. So in other words, you know, if you have a plumbing site, and you get a link from a directory that nobody else is linked to, that's sometimes better than nothing, but not super valuable. If you get a link from a very authoritative directory, that's more valuable. If you get a link from a very authoritative directory of plumbers that's hard to get into, that only links to really high quality, you know, plumbing services, that's kind of the perfect Nexus. Right? So, and then when you think about link building, you know, we do different sort of tactics for different sites of different clients. And again, right, I think it's really an independence, right? So depending on, you know, what you're trying to rank for, so again, for that plumbing service, super competitive national keywords might not make a lot of sense, because they're trying to get, you know, local, you know, business, and they're trying to rank for, like town name plumbing services, right? So they don't necessarily need a super expensive, you know, PR, you know, outreach campaign. They may need, you know, really organized links from all of the local directories. They may need some links from local websites, where they're doing more things like, you know, sponsoring local events, right, and or pitching stories to local news publications. And by doing a lot of that work, they'll actually show up at the top of a lot of the terms that they're trying to rank for. So I think the way that you want to think about it is looking at your goals and what you're trying to accomplish, how competitive the terms that you're trying to rank for are, and then what your resources and capacity are, right, and how you eval. And one of the things that's really difficult about link building is figuring out link building ROI. Right? Because it's ,kind of a, it's just one aspect of SEO, and a lot of SEO ROI is sometimes difficult to back out, especially if your business doesn't do a great job of tracking lead sources. Right? So figuring out okay, you know, and I think a standard metric that we sort of anchor people's thoughts around is, you know, you might pay anywhere from $300 to $600 for a link, right? So what does that mean? If I get a guest post, right, which is basically I pay someone to do outreach to a blog, hopefully a relevant authoritative blog. Get a piece of content posted on that blog that content links back to my site? Again, the standard pricing might be anywhere from $300 to $600, for that link, so you have to kind of think about the global ROI. Okay, what am I paying for these links? What am I paying for the content on my site? What's my overall SEO investment and does that back out when I look at the return that I get from my SEO traffic? So that's a challenge with link building. And again, I would say, you know, the, and then, you know, another thing to incorporate there, too, is your risk threshold, right? So you mentioned both on the Fiverr links, right? So the thing about, you know, spamming link building, is, it's not uncommon that it might work for a period of time, and then get your site burned. So if your risk threshold is, okay, this isn't a business for me, this is a site that's a churn and burn, and I'm gonna, you know, invest X and hopefully get Y, and maybe that site gets burned to the ground in two years, or six months or three months, then you might be fine with that. But if you have a business website, and you're doing a lot of branding around your business, and you want to have, to change the name of your business, or you know, buy a new domain, then you're probably going to be a little bit more risk averse. So you want to stay away from those and, you know, go towards safer tactics, like some of the things that I mentioned. Right?

Botond Seres 11:18
So,right. So if I start a new drop shipping business selling junk, then I want to go to Fiverr for link building.

Tom Demers 11:25
Potentially, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right? And, you know, again, it's like, I think the people who, you know, one of the things to keep, keep in mind, too, right, is a lot of people who push specific tactics have an incentive to push that tactic, right. So, you know, if you're doing the high end, super expensive PR link building, you're gonna talk a lot about how the garbage link building doesn't work, and maybe vice versa. Everything works to an extent for a certain period of time, right? But it works until it doesn't sometimes, right, and if it's executed properly.

Botond Seres 11:54
Okay, for sites that get burned to the ground, like, so you mentioned that the site may burn to the ground with garbage link building. But how does it look? Does it just get erased from Google?

Tom Demers 12:06
Yeah, it can be. And so one of the things that's interesting, I would say, in the last two years, so I've been doing this for, you know, 10 plus years, It had been the most turbulent in terms of the volume of updates that Google rolls out, algorithm updates, and how swingy the search results can be for specific sites. So you know, when I say burned to the ground, that could mean zero, right? So there are sites that will get hundreds of 1,000s, millions of uniques a month, shoot right up again, on some of these different, aggressive or spammy or tactics, and then just go to zero, right, again, like really burned to the ground. And so again, right for that particular operator, that might be an acceptable outcome, because maybe they made their money back on, right, whatever spammy links they bought in the four months that they ranked, right? But again, right, like, if you're trying to build a sustainable business, A., you're not necessarily going to be great at evaluating which of those. That's kind of a science in and of itself, and you need to be pretty, you know, again, a lot of the stuff that you will buy on Fiverr, will have somewhere between a negative impact to no impact at all and you'll never get that first, right? But if you're really good, and you kind of can evaluate what, what link patterns will work for a period of time, then again, you might get a short-lived burst from it. But you know, there's super high risk there and burned to the ground could be not only that your site goes to zero traffic, but that it's de-indexed, meaning like, if somebody's looking for your brand, they can't find you, right, which again, if you're a business, that's, that's a pretty pretty, pretty strong downside, right?

Dave Erickson 13:35
It seems like Google created the index for those businesses who are legitimately trying to, you know, promote their business and do the right thing and if you do that, you're probably gonna be in a low risk activity. And, you know, you said there's these three buckets, which is basically there's the, the technical SEO, there's the content, SEO, and then there's the link building and we've kind of talked about the link building. But how about the, you know, the content side? Everyone kind of says, I put up content and sometimes the content is done really well, sometimes it isn't, sometimes it syncs with keywords that are important for you. But then there's also the technical side of the site. I think people understand content, meaning they can write content, but a lot of businesses probably don't know the technical side of things like making a clean site and all that. What are some of the things that have been evolving in the last couple of years on the site development side? Like, are there certain types of sites like, I don't know, there's now a lot of sites like WordPress and Wix and and all these other kinds of Site Builder sites; I don't know how are they doing as far as SEO is going or is it still better to build a site from scratch and and really meticulously go through all the HTML code and and make sure it's perfect? Does it seem to matter a lot? What, What are your thoughts on that?

Tom Demers 15:00
My experience is that again, right it, it depends on the implementation. So you can rank a site, you know, that's totally, you know, sort of homegrown and hand coded. Tons of WordPress sites drive tons of traffic. Even some of the platforms like Wix have gotten more SEO friendly than they were a few years ago. So it really just depends on the implementation, a lot of the best practices, some of the things that I think have been increasingly emphasized in the last couple years, PageSpeed and page performance are certainly important. So Google will give us more insight into some of the PageSpeed metrics that are important to them. The core web vitals reports that you can see a Google Search Console PageSpeed Insights is a pretty good resource, usually, just to get a sense of here are some of the things that are, you know, potentially slowing your website down and in general, building a faster site is going to be better for your users for conversion and for SEO. So you know that that's all, you know, valuable. I think that's something that's been dialed up within the last few years. On the technical side, I think another thing, that's another couple things that have been dialed up. So one would be Google's looking at your content as a portfolio of content. And this is they've talked about this some with some of their what they call the helpful content updates. They always have fun euphemisms for their, their updates. But you know, one of the things they're looking at is, is your content, what Google would consider thin, meaning there's not a lot of content on the page, or not particularly helpful or useful. And really specifically targeting search results rather than being useful for users, which kind of means low quality. And what percentage of the content on your site falls into that bucket, right. So again, if you have a lot of stuff, that's indexable and some of it might not be stuff that you're trying to gain Google with, it's just, it looks like it's low quality to Google. And it's getting into the index. And when people, one of the things that Google looks at is what we would call like pogo sticking, meaning somebody searches for something, your listing shows up, they go to your site, and then the person has a bad experience kind of immediately, maybe the page loads really slow, maybe it doesn't fit with the search result, bounces back to the search result and picks something else, right. That's the kind of pogo sticking. So that's an indication to Google because Google has the data of the users interaction with their search listing, right. So that's an indication to Google Oh, this is a bad result, we're gonna stop showing this result. And if you have enough of that, with your listings that are showing up in search results, Google is gonna say, Okay, this domain is not that great. So again, that might not be like a burn your domain to zero, but it's going to be like, Oh, we're going to suppress them a little bit, we're not going to show them for as particularly for search terms related to this sort of basket of keywords that they're getting bad engagement for. And that piece to being sort of what we've called, like a topical authority is another thing that I think has been dialed up. And that overlaps with, that's partly content. Are you writing lots of content around the same topic going really deep with multiple articles covering what Google sees as a lot of the related topics, and also interlinking those strategically, right? So you're creating a basket of content around, you know, Plumbing Repair tips, or even like, specific, you know, you know, issues with your, you know, specific things that can go wrong with your toilet, and you know, how to, and tips around that, but also interlinking, those, making sure that, you know, you think about, you know, one of the concepts that we think about in in in terms of topic clusters, right, so like a hub page, and what we've called spoke pages, and does that hub page link down to those spoke pages, right? So does your, you know, Plumbing Repair tips page, link off to each of the individual sort of tactics that you're talking about, or problems that you're addressing, and then do those interlinked strategically to, and that doesn't necessarily mean that every page has a link of like 500 internal links to everything within a cluster, it actually means like coming, taking the time to contextually link those within the body copy of the content that you're creating, and linking them to the the posts that are relevant. So one way to think about it that we frequently do is almost like, you have your parent page at the top of your cluster, it links down to each of the individual child pages and then a lot of times the child page is almost linked together like a chain. So there's, you know, links, you know, from one to the other. And particularly the topics within there that are the most relevant. So that's something that I think has really been dialed up. You used to even I would say kind of pre pandemic and the kind of the 2020 and before range, you would really be able to just kind of churn out a lot of posts that were within a niche so maybe like the plumbing niche or the pet niche, but they weren't super tightly related to each other and they would all rank whereas now it's a lot more difficult to do that. Google is looking more for that topical authority. Like, are you writing deeply about this one topic? So you know, for, to take pets as an example, not just like, you know, write like, one post on nail clippers for cats, one post on food for birds one post on, you know, the best, you know, brush for BerneDoodles. It's like, Have you been writing, have you written 20, 50, 100 posts about BerneDoodles? Right? That kind of thing. I have a BerneDoodle.So,

Dave Erickson 20:25
And so even though backlinks are ones that are relating to your sites, there's, there seems to be the second kind of link category, which is internal links, where you write if you write a post about toilets, and then you write a post about best lever mechanisms for toilets, and then you have a link from one article going to the other and vice versa and then you write a third article about the best toilet seat, and you link that to your other two. So you're, you're kind of building this network of internal links, which is different than the backlinks, correct?

Tom Demers 21:00
Correct. Yeah, exactly. So that's, and the, and the, again, the external links are links on different sites. And like I said, we want whatever the best combination of authoritative sites, so sites that are, you know, popular and have lots of links and relevant links. So a document that's about plumbing as opposed to, you know, getting a link from a site that's all about pets to our plumbing site. But also we and then the next layer to that too, particularly with internal links, which obviously is anchor text that you can control is the anchor text are the linking texts that you use from document to document. So for instance, if we're linking to our post about the best brushes for Berne, BerneDoodles, we don't want to use the same linking text every time that we link back to that page. Because that kind of indicates to Google that we're sort of over optimized, we want to use different variations if we can, but pretty tightly, so not necessarily like click here, or, you know, here's the post, right as the linking text, but also not just BerneDoodle brushes, it would be like, you know, the best brushes for BerneDoodle, your BerneDoodles, you know, the, our review of the best BerneDoodle brush, right? That could all be interlinked, right?

Dave Erickson 22:11
As brushes that make your BerneDoodle happy.

Tom Demers 22:15
Exactly, yeah. And a good way to think about that is to look at the basket of terms that you're trying to rank that particular page for. And using, you know, you might have like 20 different, you know, pretty specific variations that you're looking at, either third party keyword, tools, or in Google Search Console to see what that page has ranked for in the past. And using those as anchor text to kind of link to that page thinking about that strategically, too, can be really powerful. And when you have control over external links, like if you're getting a guest post, or, you know, maybe you have like, a partner site that's linking to you, you want to use a similar tactic, right? So you want to vary the anchor text, but have it be, you know, sort of relevant and specific to the page that you're linking to.

Botond Seres 22:56.
I mean, some of these principles are quite easy to apply, right? Titles, headers, both text and images, meta descriptions, nicely named anchor links, of course. But in your opinion, what, what is the thing that is most underutilized in commercial sites?

Tom Demers 23:14
I think that varies a lot from niche to niche, because the most important thing for different niches is going to be different. Right? So I think, broadly speaking, I think there was the topic cluster and internal linking might be one of the most underutilized. A lot of sites don't really link internally, don't think about information architecture broadly too, so not just internal links, but where content lives within the site. So the difference between I mean, they're related concepts. But when I talk about information architecture, it's more if you think about if you were a robot coming to your site, how many clicks would it get, would it take you to get from the homepage, to any important page on your site that you want to have rank well, so an older blog posts, for instance, so a lot of sites, when you know, we audit a lot of sites, a lot of sites, you, you, it would be like 20, clicks deep, which is, you know, again, pretty wild, for sites that don't have that much content for a page that they really want to have rank that's keyword rich, that they took a lot of time to create content for. But it's not, it's just buried very deep in the site. So thinking about that, too. And what you want to think about is, generally speaking, most sites, the homepage will be the most linked to the site. In some instances, you might have, you know, link baits or specific, you know, assets, maybe you do like a, you know, a yearly report or a real linkable asset that does really well, that will rival the homepage, depending on the site, but you want all of the content that you want to have rank be as close to those pages meaning as few clicks away or as flat of an architecture as you can. So I would say that concepts, internal linking and thinking about this clustering and really going deep within clusters is one of the things that's still the most underutilized. I think a lot of sites think about link building, not all sites do it. And again, I think it actually has variable ROI. Depending on your site, if you're a site that's targeting really low competition terms, you probably don't need a ton of external links, right? It doesn't, it might not, it might make more sense to invest in content and you know, some cleaning up technical issues and things like that. But if you're, you know, a B2B SaaS company where only a handful of terms are really going to drive ROI for you, and they're in a really competitive market, then link building might have a great ROI for you. And that might be the most underutilized, right.

Botond Seres 25:29
So all this talk about the internal links, has got me thinking about crawlers or robots. Do they understand single page applications?

Tom Demers 25:37
Can you give me an example of what you mean by single page application?

Botond Seres 25:39
Oh, like if the page loads up and all the quantity just sold out using JavaScript.

Tom Demers 25:44
So you can build sites that, you know, use a lot of JavaScript and have them be search friendly. But generally speaking, if the site is built without an eye towards search optimization, and making sure that Google can crawl it, you'll often find that Google's not going to be able to find a lot of the content, or crawl the site, right. So thinking about the navigation elements, being wrapped in JavaScript can often be problematic. One of the what a great tools for this to use, is within search console, you can inspect URLs, right, and you can basically kind of see, and so you put an inspect URL at the top of search console, then you can click test the live URL, and you can kind of see the URL the way that Google sees it, right. So you can get in and you can get an idea of what, is Google actually able to crawl and you know, sort of ingest, it also shows you some of the JavaScript errors that Google is experiencing, right? Which again, are a lot of times going to be different than what the, you know, somebody's just seeing in the browser. So that's a good, you know, sort of quick test, when you roll something out, if you know, particularly if you're finding that stuff, one of the things that we find a lot is when people design their blog homepage, they want you know, a really clean, nice looking blog homepage. But it won't be crawlable, right. So things like if you have a load more button, a lot of times Google, like or an infinite scroll, a lot of times Google's not going to scroll, they're not going to load more. And another good kind of trick for, for identifying that is you, you can do what's called a site search operator, where you can look, you can look within Search Console, at your index pages. So you would look, you know, within Search Console to see which pages are indexed, that's a few clicks deep. But you can quickly see this just by going to google.com, hitting site, colon and your website. And then like slash blog if all your blog posts live off the, you know, blog subfolder. And then you'll see all of those URLs that are, that Google's indexing. So if you look at that, and you're not seeing some of your recent posts, or you know, some of your blog posts, generally, that could be a red flag, and one of the things you can do is again, right, take a blog post, go to that inspect URL and Search Console and if you scroll down, Google actually shows you how they discovered the URL. So again, another red flag is if they're not discovering the URL through your site, like through your blog homepage, but they only found it,say, through your XML sitemap. That's potentially a red flag, right? That they're not crawling some of the content on your blog page. And we see that a lot. You know, again, we're just with, with sites that will use, like, different designs. So you know, still having like paginated results, you can and you can have both experiences. You can have a load more button for your user, if you find that that's a better experience for them. I think generally, if you do any heat map testing, you'll find that the vast majority of users do not scroll down to the bottom of your blog results listing. So it's actually probably more for SEO than anything, but you can have the load more button and then paginated results beneath that. So that there's a you know, again, crawlable, HTML version of those results. And another tip, I would say for those that we often find is a recommendation that we'll make for people is just to show more results for those two, again, right? Like you can have the you know, stuff that you want to highlight above the fold, but showing so Google will typically crawl it varies a little bit depending on how authoritative the site is, but they'll typically crawl around 100 links on a page. So if you're only showing like five blog results, and then you're going to pagination, right, it's again, right you think about clicks, right? It's click, click, click, click, click right to get deep into the archives, so showing more results and showing more of those paginated links. So instead of just showing like, you know, okay, here's page two, here's page three, like one link per paginate result showing here, you can go to one to 10, or you can just go to the last page. Using that as a pagination tactic is another way just from an information architecture standpoint to, to flatten the site. We've had that, especially for sites that have a lot of older blog content. That does pretty well, that can have a pretty significant impact on search traffic, just that you kind of bubble those pages up.

Botond Seres 29:56
So those 100 clicks, don't get recertify paginates, for example,

Tom Demers 30:02
They do get reset when you go to a new page. Yeah. When you paginate, yes, exactly. So each page would have, you know, kind of 100 links or so that Google would crawl. Again, that's just a rough estimate.

Dave Erickson 30:11
If you had 100 blog posts, you could do 10 pages of 10 each, but it might be better to do five pages of 20 each.

Tom Demers 30:19
Exactly. Right? Because again, right, and, you know, link to each of those from that homepage. Now, everything is just a couple clicks away from the homepage, right? Because if the homepage links to the blog, you know, instead of being you know, maybe again, right, like 10, or 15 pages deep by the time you get deep into the archives, yeah.

Dave Erickson 30:35
And it could be that you have topics of blogs, so you can have all the blogs on one topic as, as a page and have that as a link page. And if there's 20 of those blogs, that's great. You can get to them through the menu and on the homepage, right? Also 100%?

Tom Demers 30:53
Yeah, yeah, using Categories is a great idea. And then thinking about to strategically, you know, another mistake that I see a lot of sites make is having categories where it's like, you know, again, right, like, my, my plumbing site, I have like a plumbing category, and like a boat, Tom's plumbing, you know, company, and then like, you know, maybe I do a little bit of stuff with, like HVAC, and then an HVAC category. And then if I write 100 posts, you know, 94 of them are about plumbing. So those are all in the plumbing category, right? You want to actually think about, you know, categories that will, where the posts will flow somewhat evenly into those categories, right? It's not gonna be perfect, but so instead of just having a plumbing category, I'd have like, you know, separate categories for each of the different plumbing topics, right?

Dave Erickson 31:39
Plumbing for showers, plumbing for toilet plumbing for…

Tom Demers 31:42
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, another again, another kind of thing to think about from an information architecture standpoint, is where you expose links to those categories or topic clusters, right. So if I have, you know, again, right, like, you know, six or eight of those different categories, I can have links to those from like, the right now, there's my blog or below blog posts, right? On each individual post, I can have links to those categories, from like breadcrumbs on an individual post back up to the category that it's in, I can have links to those from the blog home and I can even have links to those from the footer, right. So within the footer of my site, instead of just having like, you know, my general, like, sort of about pages and Privacy Policy, and some of the standard things you think about, I could have, you know, the categories or, like, you know, our most popular topics, or even individual blog posts that I really want to push link equity to, right. So all those things are good things to keep in mind. And, you know, pushing link equity with popular posts and relevant posts. Again, I think those are all underutilized tactics. Yeah.

Dave Erickson 32:42
Yeah, I see that on, on, on landing pages now, where they're talking about, like a B2B, they'll also have the section where it's three blog posts, with each one with a topic that's very relevant to what they're talking about above. And that way, they link directly to those posts from the homepage. And those tend to be the posts they want to promote.

Tom Demers 33:07
Exactly, yeah. And I think, you know, for B2B, again, one of the ways to think about these topic clusters, it's obviously a lot harder now than it was 10 years ago. You had a sales page, right, which was either like, you know, plumbing services in, you know, Boston or whatever and you would say, Okay, I want to rank this page. So I'm just gonna fire a bunch of external links at this, right? And this is going to rank for whatever I want, right? Or maybe a better example is like, you know, you have a software product, let's say that is, you know, data loss prevention software, right. And you wanted your data loss prevention software page to rank for data loss prevention, right? You used to be able to just kind of fire links at that page, and it would start to rank. Now, Google's much more specific to the query intent. So it's not going to rank your data loss prevention software page for data loss prevention, because it knows that users really want an informational result for that. So they want, like, a glossary page for that, right? But one of the things that you can do is, those pages can still rank for data loss prevention software and a powerful way to do that is not just to build links into that page, because again, it can be hard to get, like a quality editorial link into that page that actually makes sense. You're probably having to do some more Fiverr or, you know, guest post type stuff, what you can do is actually build external links to your informational pages, right? So you might have, like a data loss prevention glossary page, or even like a state of data loss prevention or something right, report, you get links to that page, and then that page is linking back to the data loss prevention software page, and they're part of the same cluster, right? So a lot of those pages within that cluster are ranking to the software page where it makes sense, and pushing link equity over to that page. And that's a way to get, you know, more transactional pages that you want to have rank rank without having to kind of crowbar links into that page or building links to those other pages that are then pushing that link equity and, you know, sort of relevance over to that page too.

Dave Erickson 34:58
You know, obviously There's B2B and B2C, they probably take some very different tactics. Let's say that you are building a t-shirt site to sell t-shirts online. As a business person who's trying to establish that business, you know, a lot of people are, it's easier to think about the product they're going to make and produce, right? And then to do all the marketing or to set up the website is, is less of a familiar thing per se. But say, I'm a small business person, and he wants to do that. What are some of the things that he should start focusing on to launch his business, besides just getting a site up and getting the e-commerce working and a product sold? What would kind of be like the first next step after getting it up and running that he should focus on to start tailoring the SEO strategy so that he can start receiving traffic?

Tom Demers 35:59
Sure. So I think probably the first step is to think about keyword targeting, and the types of terms that they would want to rank for that would make sense for their business and that would be a fit for the relative authority of the site. So one of the things that, you know, you need to keep in mind, especially as you're starting a new site, is that there's a whole universe of terms that you're not going to be able to rank for out of the gate, right? So again, as you build, as you think about the sort of keywords that you want to target, and the topic clusters that you want to target, you want to have potentially a mix of things that are very low competition, and things that are a little bit more ambitious, that you might rank for down the line and you start to build out that cluster sort of with that in mind. So some of the ways that you can think about to, you know, identify some of these terms that you want to target, you would use traditional keyword research tools, you know, brainstorming, just topic ideation, thinking about some of the terms that you might want to rank for checking those against some of the third party keyword tools, which will give you you know, rough volume estimates to see, like, Okay, does it look like people are searching for these, and then also looking at competitor sites, right, and building out your keyword strategy, okay, these are the different types of terms that I would want to rank for. So that's kind of piece one. And then the second piece would be thinking about the types of pages that we'll be able to rank for those terms. So again, you think about it from a, you know, a t shirt, a t-shirt company, you know, there are going to be some transactional terms, like, you know, if they're doing different, you know, types of prints of, you know, like niche t-shirts, like, you know, if they're, they're creating metal t-shirts, right, right, heavy metal t-shirts, or a specific band name, t-shirts, things like that, those will be more transactional, but they'll probably be very competitive, right? So they'll want to potentially find like a combination of long tail terms that are, you know, really specific, like, you know, you know, black heavy metal t-shirts, you know, that XYZ, right, like really specific phrases that they will be able to rank for out of the gate, but also maybe have, like, you know, some of those heavy metal t-shirt, you know, sort of category pages. And then also think about, you know, again, within that realm of different topics, are there tangential terms that are more informational that they can create informational blog content against and use a similar strategy.What we talked about with the B2B SaaS, where it's like, it's an informational topic, maybe related a little bit more broadly to heavy metal style, right? You know, right, like, you know, heavy metal in general, even, what are some of those types of topics that are related to these terms, and one of the things to use, too, is some of Google's own tools, right, and some of Google's own data. So some, you know, sort of classic things that tend to work well are looking at the things that Google suggests related to a term. So you go to google.com, you type in heavy metal t-shirts and hit space. And you'll see some of their search suggestions, right? So Google's creating those suggestions for a searcher based on things that other people have searched for related to that core term. So that's a good way to think about it; you can look at the search result itself, and see some of the things that they're layering in. So there's generally a lot of people also asking sections in search results now, where those are related questions. And if you click on one of them and kind of open it and close it, you'll start to see more of those, right? And there's tools that automate this too. So search response, that's searchresponse.io is a good tool for this. It sends back a lot of them, either will show you people also ask the thing. What's cool about that tool is they'll show you the people also ask questions and how many search results that, that search response is aware of that, that particular question has shown up in. So if that's showing up across lots of different questions, that's a good indicator and some of those are. The other thing that's nice about that is you can sometimes unearth things that are a little bit less competitive, because not when so most of your competitors are going to go to a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner, type in and heavy metal t-shirts and see all those results, right? So when you go to target some of those, you're going to be competing with all your competitors, right? Whereas not everybody's going to search response to see these. And some of those won't show search results in won't. So show search volume in Ahrefs or SEMrush, but we'll actually have search volume, right, so that's another good trick and hitting a lot of those, right, you start to get a topic cluster. And you know that those are things that Google finds to be related, because they're showing those in the same core search result, right. So that's a good way to find some of those related topics, interlink those, and again, some of those more informational terms will be things that will be easier for you to build external links for too. So there's a good, good way to think about it.

Botond Seres 40:43
Speaking of keywords, I mean, when everything is a function, and that is one of the most challenging things about working with new clients is figuring out what it is that they really want. And the significant parts are for this keyword research naturally a service that we went quite in depth on and I was afraid to do it a couple times over the past years. But I haven't ever discovered a reliable way to find all the new tangential keywords that may be relevant. How would you, I mean, we already talked about typing into Google. Right. I mean, that's, that's free research right there. But if I need something more brainstorming, like, is there a tool readily available for that?

Tom Demers 41:36
Yeah, in terms of like, top level, like, you know, just some of the universal? Yeah, so I would say a few things. I mean, one thing that we always do as part of a client engagement is just to get feedback from the client as part of, like a kickoff questionnaire. And sort of, you know, and, you know, what do you view as potential terms that people might be typing in? Right? And what are some, you know, some other things that you can do there, too I think, is really to dive deep. So a couple other questions that will ask clients that I think are good ways to find different, again, general topic areas are, you know, who are your direct competitors? A lot of times a client's direct competitors may actually not be the best source of keyword data, just because they might not be doing any SEO, right? Or they might be doing it poorly. So you don't always necessarily just want to, like blanket copy the site that's getting the most traffic, because we've had instances where a client will have a competitor and we'll look at a lot of their terms and we'll say, Okay, this client, this is the competitor who's getting the most search traffic; potentially, you'd want to emulate them, we'll bring back some of the terms that they're ranking for. And the client will be like, those are totally irrelevant. We don't want to rank for any of that stuff, right? And maybe the clients rate in the sense that like that, that site might be ranking for a lot of super broad stuff, that's not bringing them any business. Right. So competitors are a decent starting point. But you also want to think about popular publications within the niche. Right? So and that, again, if you don't know those, you know, personally, you can go to your client, or are trying to, you know, talk to people who have a high level of expertise or, you know, potentially like service teams, or salespeople who are talking to a lot of people, what are the publications that those people are reading that your prospects are reading? What are they using for top level categories? Right? So if you go to, like, you know, a site that's, you know, a niche publication, really specific to what your client does, what are the categories that they're using, when you kind of just look at their top level navigation, Right? What are the posts that get the most traffic for them and get the most links. Another one that we use that I think is a good again, a good hack for just like top level stuff, is what are popular conferences, right? And looking at. So conferences obviously don't have any kind of intent about search traffic necessarily, right. But they are sort of the conference organizers have their pulse on the niche, right? And they're thinking about high level topic areas, and things that are trending. And sometimes those could be areas that might not have the most search volume right now, but will in a few months. So you know, an example is like ChatGPT, if you look in third party keyword research tools, like Ahrefs or SEMrush, it shows very little search volume for a lot of ChatGPT related terms, but you obviously know that there's a ton of people searching for that stuff, right? If you're in the, in the niche, obviously right now, right? And those tools will catch up. And in a couple months, it'll start to show that right? But so conference organizers can be kind of like that for a specific niche, they might be sort of on the forefront of what those specific, you know, niches find interesting. So looking at, you know, the tracks that they're, you know, running and the specific talks, and also like, anything that you can do to kind of get a gauge of like, okay, like, what's the, you know, sort of keynote who seems to be getting like, you know, the prominent position within these, you know, conferences and what are they talking about? What's their area of expertise that can be another, you know, sort of proxy for what's like a good high level topic area, and then you can start to dive deep using some of the tools that we talked about once you have a sense of that high level type pick area. Another one that's actually pretty good is to think about, like, the way that books about a topic are structured, right? So again, right, if you're sort of, if you're, you know, addressing a specific area, within a niche, you might get, like, you might look for, like a book on that topic, if you're marketing to more, like, you know, novice people within an industry, but you might look for like, you know, dummies, books, right, or like one on one on a topic and just look at how the chapters are structured, that'll give you like, top level, you know, topic areas, right? Because again, that person has probably taken a pretty thorough, comprehensive look, if you look at a few different books, and tried to think about how to organize all of the information related to that topic area. So that could be another, you know, or courses on the topic too, right? Like, what are the different, you know, sort of modules that somebody has within a course? Those can all be good ways to sort of get a good high level idea of different topic areas.

Dave Erickson 45:59
So if you're, you know, if you were making a site that was focused on, say, headphones, and headsets for, you know, the audio industry, and you went to a trade show, like CES, Consumer Electronics Show, and you looked at their, you know, they have a lot of seminars, and you find a bunch of seminars on the newest microphone technology for headsets, you would know that that's a topic that that's kind of relevant and coming in, or you pick up a dummy book, How To Build A headset, and you see all the structure of topics for it, you could use that as kind of kind of a guide to structuring your content,

Tom Demers 46:44
Exactly. Where if you see like an enthusiast site, right, that you know, your prospects are interested in or, and it could be a message board, it could be kind of like a subreddit, looking for topics on subreddits. Again, those might not be a proxy for things that people are searching for, but they give you kind of a jumping off point, you can start to dive in there. And the other thing to do too, as you, as you start to sort of drill a little deeper is, again, right like so your competitors, in the competitors, that your client or you know, you as a business, think are your business competitors might not always be the same as your search competitors. So a way to think about it is when you find a really good term, and, you know, you and or the client are like, Oh, that's a great term, look at the sites that are ranking within that search result, particularly the sites that have a similar level of authority, yours, right, like have similar, you know, sort of domain authority metrics, external linking metrics, when you look at them in Ahrefs, or SEMrush and dive deeper into those sites, right, because if they're ranking for that term, they're probably ranking for other related terms that, again, are relevant for you, and are things that you can potentially compete on, if they're, if they're a comparable, you know, level of domain authority you, so that's another good thing to do as you drill down.

Dave Erickson 47:54
So if you're kind of planning out a site or building a site, for your business, the key words, and that, you know, there are probably, you can easily come up with five or six keywords that are very relevant to your business. How deep should someone really go into how many keywords I mean, if you pick five, and they're very relevant, and you focus on those five? Are you leaving a lot on the table versus having 15 keywords, which five are core and another five are kind of related and the last five are yes, they can apply to your business or or what you're selling, but they're there because you have, they have some minor connection? Does it matter how many? Is it better to focus on a few? Or is it better to have everything?

Tom Demers 48:44
So I would say now, it's better to focus on a few and what I would typically advise is say, So say you have your mapping out a few months of content and you're saying hey, we're gonna create 60 pieces of content in the next few months. I would pick three or four core sort of topic areas and go really deep within each of those areas, as opposed to just doing you know, 60 different topics or, you know, 30 different topics with your, you know, 20 to 30 different topics with two or three posts in each topic, which is actually the opposite of what I would have recommended say like five years ago, because again, you could have gone a lot thinner and sort of use more of a portfolio theory and seeing what stuck and then gone deeper there. But now I think actually, you're not going to get traction with those if you're just doing a lot of one off stuff. So I would go deeper. So again, right like you would pick your sort of few core topic areas and say okay, this is you know, the stuff that's absolutely the most relevant and go really deep within that topic area and go for a mix of again, right, things that have are showing some search volume, some of those related search suggestions that might not even show any search volume. But you know, again, right like you can see from the people also ask for the search suggestions that there is some you know, some have sensitive information that there's likely to be some search volume there. And you know that they're related to that core kind of topic cluster that you're creating. And I wouldn't necessarily run with a topic cluster, unless you're willing to do at least like 10 to 20 pieces of content around that topic cluster, that, that tends to be an end again, it sometimes it depends on the, the competitiveness of the, of the niche too, right. So if you're in a really competitive niche, you might need more like 50 or 100 posts around that topic to really compete, because a lot of other sites are doing that and operating at that level. And then again, there's obviously other variables, like how competitive is it? How authoritative are the sites that you're, you're competing with all that stuff? But yeah, that, I think 10 to 20 would be a good guideline in terms of how deep you want to go within a topic cluster as a minimum.

Botond Seres 50:42
There was a brief moment in time when I don't know if you remember this, but, like word clouds or search term clouds were very popular, like every site had them. And it was just a bunch of words, it was just thrown on the page. But the term didn't seem to go anywhere. So…

Tom Demers 51:08
No, no, yeah, I think I mean, there was there's a lot of wild stuff, if you look back at what used to work, right, There used to be I mean, early on, Google had to outlaw stuff like putting white, you know, putting, like, white text on a white background. Right, because it was, you know, in some of these search engines were so easy to fool that it was like you would have, like your, you know, it would be like, oh, you know, Susie's dog site, and then the text would be like casinos, right. And it would rank for casino related stuff, right, or, like you said you know, you could just have a word cloud and, you know, mention a bunch of random stuff and that would be stuff that you would rank for, but certainly a lot more sophisticated now. And they just keep, you know, sort of raising the bar in terms of the level of depth and, you know, different moving pieces that you have to and I think, you know, one of the things that they've again, they've really dialed up and gotten a lot better out within the last couple years is just that query intense. You know, even as recently as a couple of years ago, I think Google was pretty bad at things like so, you know, within the affiliate space, particularly, a lot of sites got hit, where they would be ranking on very broad terms like dog food, right? Where if somebody's searching dog food, Google's now kind of determined, the intent is probably that they want to purchase some dog food. Whereas if they are searching for, best dog food, they might want more of a review article. But a couple years ago, it was a lot easier to get your review article to rank for just dog food, right? So Google's continually dialing up that and some of the things that you'll see now, too, is they'll actually show more variety in some search results. So you know, the example of data loss prevention, right? Whereas a couple years ago, it might have been all glossary pages. Now they might show, Okay, we're gonna have a couple glossary pages. But actually, it's a better user experience, if we don't have 10, because the glossary, the people looking for a glossary style overview, will pick the first couple. And then we want to have, actually, like best practices, articles, and, you know, X number of tips article, right? So it makes it even more difficult to optimize for those search results, right? Because you have to kind of balance like, Okay, what type of content? Can I rank in this SERP? What, What's the thing that I'm going to be best at? What other variables do these sites that are ranking have, that my may or may not have, like those glossary style results, if those are just off the charts authoritative, I'm probably not going to get those spots. So maybe I'd be better off creating, like more of a tips article, or a best practice article. So you know, a sort of final level, as you're thinking about the content you want to create, is actually to look at the search result. That's actually again, a kind of an underrated step that I think a lot of people don't take is like really delving into like, Okay, I'm going to create a piece of content that I'm going to try to rank for data loss prevention, in some related terms, I need to actually look at the search results that I'm targeting, see the types of things that are ranking there and take that into account. As I'm creating my, my article to...

Dave Erickson 54:03
The tactic or strategy that has the most ROI at this point, seems to be that of content generation, putting out a flow of consistent content on your site, and that content, having a structure and an organization and a relationship to each other. That seems to be the most I guess, cost effective way that, say, a small business could start adding value and getting traffic, organic traffic to their site. Um, so that challenge, in some ways, things like ChatGPT, and some of these AI tools can produce a bunch of content. I think that I've experimented with it and we actually had a guest on our last podcast who talked a lot about it. That content can come across is low saturation. It is there, very glossy, doesn't say a lot, it may have some keywords, and it may have a rough outline but most AI generated content, even if you're really good at the quarry, right, you still need to edit it to get it to relate and fit into the context of what your site and business is all about. I think a lot of people, though, are not very educated on it so they just type in something to ChatGPT and then take whatever the output is, just throw it on their site as a blog article and that, that, that may actually have negative results in search versus another. But that is a question. I'm sure Google is thinking a lot about this. And I'm sure that in the next couple of months, you're gonna start seeing a whole bunch of this AI generated content that wasn't curated by a person or a company who actually knows what they're doing. And it's just basically, verbal garbage, right? Yeah, it's already there. How do you think that's gonna impact the industry or search and Google?

Tom Demers 56:07
Yeah, so I think it's, it's obviously a very hot topic and SEOs are kind of famous for trying to get as much leverage out of any new technology as we can. Right. So I think, and, you know, like Botond said, you know, this isn't, this isn't like a super new concept in the sense that, you know, so again, I've been doing this for, you know, over 10 years, one of the things that people used to do was used what were called content spinners. Right. So that was like a very pedestrian version of this sort of AI generated content where you would like, you know, put in sort of paragraph templates, and vary them by, you know, the times that they show up, and you would have, like, you know, 10, different, you know, potential sentences, and you would use wildcard variables. And so it would be like, we have the greatest insert product here, you can get it in different colors, like insert that colors that you can get it here, right, and you would just like, mash it up. Right? So that was pretty, those were pretty dumb, right, compared to the new AI software and were pretty easy to detect, but like anything else, it worked until it didn't, right. And some people probably made a ton of money off of that approach. Yeah, so you know, one time. But so, you know, the AI, you know, to your point, right, I think that and even more recently, like, you know, even before chat up, people were using Jasper, you know, AI and some of these other tools to generate some of this AI content. And, like, one thing I would say to people is to keep in mind, especially if you're a small business owner, that there's different rules for different sites, right, like everything in life, right. So somebody likes, so CNET, there was, you know, publication or publicity around a couple of these things, right? So CNET, and Sports Illustrated, right, they both kind of had these incidents where they've been using AI content. And already, there were people kind of caught them generating AI content with just wildly factually incorrect information. And in the case of the Sports Illustrated content, it was on I think Men's Health, one of the, you know, publications that Sports Illustrated owns, and it was like, you know, sort of like how to increase testosterone type content that was just wrong, right. And doctors were like, this is, you know, kind of misinformation and potentially dangerous, right? So but those articles for CNET, you know, somebody did some analysis around it look like they're already ranking, right? But the fact that sea, that rolls out articles that are low quality, and AI doesn't mean that you can't write the same articles that will rank well on CNET might get your site into trouble with Google, right? Because Google is looking at, again, a variety of factors where Google is trusting everything that sea that rolls out. And by default, they're kind of not trusting anything that you roll out, right. So I would keep that in mind. Just because you see somebody or like a case study where somebody says, like, Oh, I generated 10,000 AI articles in two weeks, and this is where my traffic went; you're not seeing the month three to five of that site, right? And that site might have other characteristics that are different than yours so that's worth keeping in mind. And I think it's just like anything else, right? So you're gonna have levels to it, there's going to be people who figure out how to, you know, people are already coming up with tools that layer on prompts to the chat, ChatGPT API, that say, okay, take the output, and also format it this way, right? And do like, you know, and then layer on these additional prompts. And some of those tools will be more useful than just getting the output directly from, you know, the sort of GPT for Power ChatGPT of interface or whatever. But for a lot of those, you'll still have to QA everything right? And I think the couple things to keep in mind with ChatGPT are you know, one, there's and I think this is you know, one of the you know, sort of most important things for your brand and just like you know, ethically and morally, ChatGPT is often confident but wrong. So it gives very right sounding feeling answers that are just wrong, right? And if you've played with it a lot, then you know that this is the case. So you have to really carefully QA it, and make sure and not sometimes it'll be wrong, or it'll just kind of be directionally wrong, it'll give you sort of a way to do something that's not really the most efficient way. So you do have to have somebody with some level of expertise if you want the content to be accurate, reviewing the content in QA. The other thing to keep in mind about ChatGPT is it's not an SEO tool. Right? So again, that's why some of these like, you know, interfaces that are layered on top of it could be really useful, because they can layer on some SEO best practices or SEO data. But when you ask ChatGPT to give you an outline for an article. It's not really leveraging SEO best practices, it's not, you know, another thing to keep in mind with ChatGPT is all the information is based on a set of training data that's from late 2021. So it's not going to have any, you know, up to date, you know, sort of statistical information, or you know, and it's not using, like a search API, I did an article for search engine lands. And one of the things I did was, you know, you can look at the prompts that I use in the output that I got. I said to ChatGPT, like, you know, give me some long tail keywords, and it gave me long tail keywords on a specific topic. Then I said to the ChatGPT, how did you get these keywords, and it worked through and it said, I got these keywords by doing a, b and c and it was like, I went to the ahrefs API. And then I got keyword data there. And then I looked at the search results. And just knowing how ChatGPT works, I said, I said to charge up to it was like a person. Hey, ChatGPT, that's not possible. Like, I know that you can't do that. Is that really true? And it was like, Oh, I'm sorry, for the confusion, I actually didn't do any of that. That's a process that one couldn't do. Right? So it literally lied to me. So again, when you're, you know, you have to be really careful with this, and sort of understand how the tool works, and QA the output, because, you know, if I, if I didn't know any better, I would have been like, Oh, awesome, it's using all these SEO best practices, there's gonna be a great SEO article, when in reality, and when I actually, you know, again, QA, the list and looked at it, they didn't have any search volume, there was no search volume for any of those long tail terms. And, you know, if I had just gone and created a bunch of content against that, you know, those ideas, I might have spent, you know, 1000s of dollars or tons of hours, right, like, you know, optimizing against the wrong thing. So, you know, that's all it's, it's a very powerful tool, it's going to be really interesting for, I think, automating a lot of processes. But, you know, there's still it's still very flawed, and you got to kind of understand how it works. And you know, what checks to put in and all that stuff? Yeah.

Botond Seres 1:02:34
Yeah, by the way, allegedly, the latest version of ChatGPT actually does that.

Tom Demers 1:02:40
Well, so, it legit does it? I don't think so. I've played with ChatGPT before, and I actually ran some of the same prompts. Right? And you know, the places that it falls down, I find so, ChatGPT4 is much better at handling more complex tasks, but it still messes them up a lot. So I'll give you a specific example. This was with ChatGPT with excuse me, GPT4, which is the underlying technology for ChatGPT. So if you're like a paid user, you can select a drop down and use, you know, 3.5 or 4. So this was using for this is not on the old tool, I said to ChatGPT, like, for a set of URLs generate title tags for me, right that I would use for search and limit the character count to 65, which is something that it's not good at, it doesn't really understand character counts, and give me three columns, a column for the URL, a column for the title tag, and a column for character count, right? So you would think that's like a fairly straightforward task that, you know, the ChatGPT will be able to do. So it did some of it, right? So it gives me the URL back and a column, it gives me a title tag, some of, a lot of them were actually fairly short and within the character count. But then in the third column, it would give me either character counts that were incorrect, right? Or instead of a character count, it just gave me the, the domain of the, of the URL, it wasn't a character count, it was just like, you know, text, right. So again, the more complex you get, whereas if I had just given the URL in the title tag, it probably would have spit it back out correctly, right. So the more complicated the task, the more sort of prompts that you need to use, you know, the more sort of rot for error you're gonna get as the output, and the more you really need to QA it. But again, one of the things that I think ChatGPT is really cool for is as a starting point for stuff like that. So you know, an example we talked about keyword research. I showed this prompt too, you can say to ChatGPT like, hey, what would the you know, outline for a book on, you know, you know, plumbing for Dummies look like, it will actually give you a pretty good starting point. You don't want to take that and just build your website around that necessarily, but it gives you, like, a pretty good outline of like, okay, these are actually pretty good top line ideas. And similarly for title tags. It's like, oh, that's not a bad idea for a title tag. But if I'm looking at Search Console data, third party keyword pool data, I'm going to create a much better title tag, right? So it can give you, like a starting point for a structure for that. But depending on and, again, if I, if I have like a ton of pages that are somewhat low value, and I need to create, like, meta descriptions for those, it can be a cool tool for that, right, it can be very useful for that. And I might just want to run with those meta descriptions, you know, versus the time it would take me, especially if you're like a small business owner or something to actually generate, you know, title tags or meta descriptions for all those pages, but you want to be aware of it.

Dave Erickson 1:05:29
That's how I think of ChatGPT. It's useful as, as a tool, we use it basically to write some content. And the way we use it is, I asked for a basic outline. I would like to, you know, applications for an infrared camera in the security industry. And it would give me a fairly structured outline, maybe 300 words, and I'm looking to write an article for, you know, 1200 words. I would, you know, at least I have the structure, I don't have to think about the structure, I can then think about, how do I fill in the various points, do the research, find articles that are relevant to it and link that in? And instead of that process taking four hours, it takes two and a half hours.Right?

Tom Demers 1:06:13
Yep. Yeah. And the way I think of it, too, is almost like, you can think of it like a very junior assistant. Right? And it's, it's similar in the sense that right, it's like, like, like, you have to create a good SOW for you know, somebody, a good statement of work for somebody, when you're giving them a new task, you kind of have to do that in your prompts, right? You want to think about, How do I structure this prompt in a way that ChatGPT will understand it and give me the right output? How do I, I only want to delegate tasks that it's going to be good at, just like an employee, right? You don't want to give them something that's going to be impossible for them. And I want to QA, right, particularly if I've seen that it doesn't do this task particularly well. Right. Yeah. So yeah, and but but if you give it the right task with the right input, and the right sort of QA on the back end, it can save you a lot of time for sure. Yeah. And outlines, I think is a good use of that, again, you know, another thing you can do with, like content outlines is, you can sort of feed it some of the items that you want to have included in the outline too, right. So you can say, give me an outline for this topic. And right, maybe I grabbed some of those ”people also ask” terms, or some of those suggested, you know, related search terms, like give me an outline for this topic and make sure to include these, you know, five terms, as you know, subtopics within the outline, or headers within the outline, right. And then again, right, like, you just kind of have a jumpstart on that. And it'll fill in other stuff that's not as search specific, but you have a blend of all the stuff that you want to make sure you have for your on page SEO. But also you cover the topic really thoroughly, which, you know, is good for SEO as well.

Dave Erickson 1:07:39
For the future of SEO, what do you think are gonna be the things that are going to most affect SEO in the next, you know, three or four years?

Tom Demers 1:07:49
That's a great question. So AI is definitely one of them. And this sort of flood of AI content, and thinking about how to, like we talked about, right, like both leverage and differentiate yourself, right? I think increasingly, Google is going to look to or, you know, another search engine if it wins, is going to look to find signals that indicate not only that you have content on a particular topic, but that you have a deep level of expertise, right. And that's something that they talk about a lot. And I think sometimes when you are interpreting things that Google says, in the press, it's almost like they're sort of trying to speak into existence, what they want to have happen. So when they talk about Eat or EAT now, right, and they say, Oh, we have this, like, super ingrained in the algorithm, that what they really mean is like, we're trying to get to this as much as we can. And we're making some progress and we have different things that are a proxy for it. But actually, we're not as good at it as we want to be. So we're trying to scare people into, you know, like doing it anyway. But that doesn't mean that they're trying to get there, right? So thinking about, like, layering expertise on top of AI content, what are the areas that you can leverage, these sorts of AI tools to create content at scale, but still having a level of QA at a level of expertise that differentiates you? I think that's going to be a big component, continually. I think like, how you can demonstrate that you have a deep level of expertise with a lot of different content, a lot of different types of content. And I think increasingly, that'll probably be different types of media. So as Google looks at, you know, are you an authority, not just, Do you have a lot of different types of blog posts on a topic, but do you have blog content and video content? Are you going really deep on this topic? Do you have some sort of bio, that is an indication that you have expertise on this topic? I think all those things will be important. And I think performance is, you know, your page performance. And, you know, making sure that you have, you know, fast loading pages across a lot of different devices is going to be important too. Because, you know, again, obviously, like, well a lot, I think a lot of niches that have historically people have searched on desktop, we'll see more and more mobile traffic, more and more traffic across different types of devices. I think in the next five years, right, you never even know, you never know, there might be a different form factor that people are browsing more on. So making sure that you have really fast loading, high performance, you know, content and applications for things.

Dave Erickson 1:10:28
It's kind of why, like, Jam Stack is getting popular because it creates loading pages. And, and yeah, obviously, YouTube, you know, you mentioned YouTube has its, is its own search engine. And I assume that you work a lot in trying to get YouTube content, because people are looking more and more at video and reading less. And although Google is based, really on text, they're trying to incorporate video, I think video is important, right?

Tom Demers 1:10:58
Yeah, for sure. And you know, AI is another area that's going to, I think, impact video and make it easier for people to create video. And you're already seeing some of that again, right, like some of these sort of tools that will end like, you know, the most pedestrian version is they just sort of take your blog posts, put stock photos on a video, and turn your text into, you know, transcription that's read by somebody. But you know, we'll have probably more advanced versions of that image creation, right, with things like DALL·E and, and things, I think that'll increasingly and again, you'll have to kind of level up the user experience on your pages in terms of like, the expectation will be that your images will be really high quality, right, and that you'll have like cool prompts that you're coming up with, and, you know, AI generated images, the sort of table stakes for the images that you can create will be higher, having video on blog posts, again, right, like might eventually be table stakes, it'll be hard to rank if you don't have some sort of video element. Right? And again, and also like, you know, social networks, too. I think, another thing that I think you know, will probably likely be a thing that we see with, with SEO more broadly, is just a little bit of diversification in terms of the way that people are getting answers to questions. So a lot of people have talked about, you know, ChatGPT replacing Google. I think, if that happens, that's way way out, and probably isn't likely, if you use ChatGPT a lot, you know, that like, if you if you replaced Google with chat GPT for a week, you would not want to, you know, you'd be dying to go back to Google at the end of the week. But I think there are going to be niche applications. So you know, and that you've already seen, like, there have been some of these studies that like, you know, and I know, this is true for my kids, you know, kids under 15, use Tik Tok as a search engine more than Google. Right. And, and I don't think that'll be true for everything. But query dependent will definitely be true, right? And there's definitely stuff where, like, you know, we'll be talking about something and I'll go to Google and my kids will go to Tik Tok to find, like the answer to something, right? So, you know, thinking about what types of queries are going to be searched for the most on what types of platforms and then optimizing for those and being in those places for your brand is going to be important, too, I think, yeah.

Dave Erickson 1:12:56
Well, I know you have a company. And do you want to talk a minute about what your company does or specializes in?

Tom Demers 1:13:05
Yeah, absolutely. So for Measure SEM, we offer consulting services, both a combination of SEO and PPC. So we do what you would think of as more you know, sort of traditional SEO, blocking and tackling things like technical site audits, crawling your site, topic ideation and keyword research. We also do ongoing content creation and promotion. So those are SEO specific assets. So some of the things that we talked about, like creating like, you know, linkable assets that you would do outreach for or glossary style content that would target specific terms, we do a lot of that work for clients. Then we do, you know, sort of more traditional PPC campaign management across primarily AdWords, you know, Bing, LinkedIn or Facebook, and just managing page search spend, for clients as well. And we work with, you know, a variety of different businesses and different niches tend to be a lot of, like medium sized businesses. We work with, like a lot of B2B SaaS, or, you know, B2C e-commerce type companies.

Dave Erickson 1:14:06
And how do people get a hold of you?

Tom Demers 1:14:08
So best, quickest way is probably Tom@measuredsem.com via email, a very quick email or so again, that says showing my age. Email is usually the best platform for me. But you can also just go to our website, fill out a form measure@sem.com
Dave Erickson 1:14:24

Yeah. Great. Great. All right. Well, Tom, thank you very much. It was an excellent conversation about SEO, I learned a lot myself. And for our listeners, next month, we'll have another interesting podcast on the ScreamingBox technology and business rundown podcast.

Tom Demers 1:14:45
Awesome. Thanks, guys.

Dave Erickson 1:14:47
All righty, thank you.

Dave Erickson (outro)
Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology and business in the first week of every month. Please help us by Subscribing liking In following us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on, we hope you enjoyed this podcast and please let us know any subjects or topics you'd like us to discuss in our next podcast by leaving a message for us in the comment sections or sending us a Twitter DM. Till next month, please stay happy and healthy.

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#chatgpt #seo #keywords #searchresults #datalossprevention #nichewords #SearchEngineOptimization @tom demers @dave erickson @botond seres @screamingbox @measured sem