How Smart Businesses Build Authority Online: SEO Insights from Yoast’s Carolyn Shelby

If you think of your website as a cake, SEO is the sugar in your cake. You can have a cake that does not contain sugar. That cake is going to taste like sawdust and no one's going to want to eat it, much less pay for it. So SEO needs to be the sugar that is baked into your cake and it's also part of the frosting. If we look at the things that have changed, we already know that AI, even if you don't see it in Google search, AI is running parts of the, of the Google indexing process where they used to have to make dictionaries and complex instructions. The Internet is kind of going into its Mad Men era where we're going back to pre Internet days where marketing was very loosey goosey and there wasn't the machine precision, attribution and analytics that we've enjoyed for the past 20 years.

Good day and welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. My name is Bob Govro. I am your host for this show today and you know, truthfully, every day when you come and join me here, excited today to have a guest in the marketing space, but specifically in the SEO space. So search engine optimization, you guys are going to really enjoy her. She's going to get a little technical in some of the areas, but we're, what is gonna happen is you're gonna identify that there's so much information that we don't know and maybe there's some tools which she'll share as well that might be able to help us do this. Because we don't know everything. We definitely don't know everything about SEO or at least the majority of us. So how can we just take a few steps further? This episode is going to be called. Actually, before I get into the episode, I just wanna remind you that this, the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast is a place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepr success, from mindset and leadership to profits and revenue. And this one for sure, shifting perspective on mindset, but also focused on revenue and lead generation and how we're optimizing all of the hard work that we do related to content creation. Right. Like it's. If we're working hard to make sure that we're putting out valuable insights and content for people as entrepreneurs, we want to make sure it gets the most eyeballs possible. And that's ultimately what we're going to chat about today. So this episode's going to be called SEO that Scales Carolyn Shelby on Driving Traffic and Building Long Term Visibility. Carolyn Shelby is the principal SEO at Yoast. Check out Yoast, by the way as well. We're going to drop some resources in here for them as well. But she has over 25 years of experience in web technology and search optimization. She's been shaping SEO strategies since the early days of the Internet, which we're definitely going to talk about. She's worked with large scale media companies, international organizations, e commerce brands to build visibility at scale. She's currently supporting product development and technology advancement, which is why a larger organization like Yoast is going to be cutting edge, you know, when it comes to their, their industry. I just want to quickly introduce you so. So Carolyn is the principal and principal SEO at Yoast, where she leads SEO strategy and supports the development of tools that help millions of of business owners optimize their websites for search. Over 25 years in experience in web technology and search optimization, she brings in a deep technical background rooted in the early days of Internet. Carolyn has led enterprise SEO efforts for major media organizations, managing complex site structures and driving visibility at scale. Her Specialties include technical SEO, international SEO and optimizing large scale WordPress environments. She's an experienced speaker and consultant and regularly shares insights on the evolving search landscape, AI driven optimization and content strategy. Her expertise bridges foundational web engineering and modern performance driven SEO. Guys, this is going to be very insightful for you. Even just understanding how some of these ranking systems actually work, how they pull some of the insights so that we do get our information in front of everybody, but also maybe just to learn, hey, these are things that we don't know and we need to find someone who can be responsible for them on our behalf. Anyway, without further ado, I'm excited to welcome Carolyn Shelby, principal SEO at Yoast, technical SEO strategist and industry veteran to the show. Carolyn, so great to have you with us today. All right, everybody. So as you know, I feel very privileged in my role as a CEO in my organization, but also to be able to host this podcast and, and get the opportunity to connect with extremely talented people. And I'm really excited to welcome Carolyn Shelby to the podcast today. Just briefly, Carolyn is the principal SEO at Yoast, as I sort of mentioned before, and is really focused on some of the technology advancement and product development internally and externally within our organization. So fascinating to always work with people who are at the cutting edge of developing new things. And so Carolyn, I would love, first off, welcome to the show. And second, I would love to hear maybe a little bit about how you got started and how you got into this major seat in your Organization.

Okay, well first, thank you for having me. Second, it's a long and winding story. So I guess I will kind of start out at the beginning when, when I got into Internet stuff, the web did not exist as we know it today. Like not even as we knew it 10 years ago. So I, I, I joined a startup, I was co founder of an Internet service provider which is, I don't know if you remember dial up and like AOL back in the day, but that's what we did. And actually we started before you could dial into the Internet and get out to the public Internet. So when CompuServe and AOL were still walled gardens and you would dial into those, it was bulletin board systems were real popular. We started out providing uucp, which was a way to do email and Usenet news, those kinds of things. We ran it off of an Amiga that was underneath somebody's dorm bed. So it was a long, long time ago when we started doing web stuff we had to write our own web server because Apache didn't exist yet. That's how long ago this was. So I started learning how to make web pages for our clients and for ourselves, you know, because somebody had to make a web page, right. I started learning how to do that as these, as it was evolving and eventually, you know, we went from directories to search engines and things started getting ranked and I'm just naturally an incredibly competitive person, so there's a ranking, I must be at the top of it. And that was really kind of how I started learning how to do what I later came to know was SEO had a successful exit, sold that company. I was able to retain several of the websites that I developed from that and I kept running those. So that was a nice way to keep my skills going. I ended up moving up to going and taking an in house role as a webmaster at a medical society because that was about the time the bubble burst the first time and everybody was losing their jobs. But medical societies and everybody needs doctors and doctors all need their societies. So that seemed like a pretty safe place to ride out the turbulence. I was there for five, six years. Eventually I ended up continuing with the SEO. I moved on to take a role as director of SEO at Tribune Publishing which runs all the newspapers in all the newspapers in the country, but they run a lot of them. So like LA Times, Chicago Tribune, we had the New York Daily News before I left. And that was seven and a half, eight years of my life there. So that was, that was a lot of SEO and that was a lot of traffic and a lot of really high pressure, instantaneous time to work on, you know, hone my craft. After that, I went to Disney and I was on permanent loan to espn. And I was pretty much the only SEO at ESPN for a couple of years, which was kind of weird considering what a big company it is. But that was another situation, just like at Tribune, where I was split 50, 50 between editorial and technology, which is, I would say, a unique set of skills that you don't often find in SEOs who tend to be either purely technical or purely marketing. And I think that that's really helped me grow my entrepreneurial experience, my business running experience, and then the individual business clients that I've helped along the way. All of that, I've done the whole, really, the whole every, every job you could have at a business. I pretty much had it right down to vacuuming the floors and cleaning the windows and taking the trash out. So I think that's all been very, very helpful with this new role that I have. Well, new, it's two years old at Yoast, because I'm in this great position where the product that I work on is designed to help small business owners, and I know what they're going through, and I can put myself very easily in their position because I understand, not only do I understand the technology of what's driving it, but I have a pretty good idea what they don't know, what they care about, what they don't care about, what they're capable of fixing on their own, what they're willing to fix on their own, what they should really be outsourcing, and where they likely don't have the big company, big tech department experience and therefore need guidance to help them run their very small company like a slightly larger company. But anyway, it's been. It's been a wild journey. It's been a long journey. Just so excited about all the people that I can. I can help now and hopefully help their companies grow and help them succeed as, you know, entrepreneurs and small business owners. Because that's really what. What our plugin is for is helping everybody do SEO.

Well, absolutely. And let's maybe. And thank you. What a wonderful story, too. I feel like I'm still taking the garbage out and vacuuming the floors every now and again. So, you know, that never really goes away in that entrepreneurial space.

No, it doesn't. And I have such memories. Oh, my gosh. Just. I know we don't have a lot of time, but I want to tell you a quick Story I was vacuuming the floors one night and some of my friends from college, because I was still of that age came over and they were, they were trying to help me. And one of them said, oh, here, I'll vacuum for you. And plug the vacuum cleaner into the ups. And it was the UPS that was connected to the servers. And all of a sudden the UPS made this the patient is dead heart monitor tone. And everyone in the room's like, I saw your soul leave your body. They took everything down in one because they turned the vacuum cleaner on. So, you know, it's just those kinds of crazy experiences that I think people who've always worked and who've always been just employees at big businesses just don't have that. They can't. They cannot fully appreciate the panic of being responsible for running all the technology, but also responsible for vacuuming the floors.

Exactly. And the heart failure of knowing that everything is down, which means nobody can do anything.

And everyone will start calling right now. And I can't fix that and answer all the phones at the same time.

Like, yeah, oh, man, I'm having flashbacks myself.

I know, right?

So let's, let's take a little bit of a step back just thinking to. Of our listeners, and truthfully, for me too, I know enough to be dangerous. But can you walk us through what SEO actually is?

Okay, so search engine optimization is the people think that it is solely about doing stuff to your website so that you can rank number one on Google. It is really. The theory behind it is. Is a little bit more, I guess I don't want to say abstract. It's. It's different than that. SEO is not a thing you do to your website. It's. It's really a practice that you sort of bake into everything. If we're going to run with the baking analogy. If you think of your website as a cake, SEO is the sugar in your cake. You can have a cake that does not contain sugar. That cake is going to taste like sawdust, and no one's going to want to eat it, much less pay for it. So SEO needs to be the sugar that is baked into your cake. And it's also part of the frosting, it's also part of the decorations. There's a lot you can do with it, and there's a lot of places it can go. But it really is necessary to make the. Everything that you're doing palatable. And who you're making it palatable to specifically are the machines. So there's an art form to making it tasty for the machines, but still keeping it tasty for the people. SEO is packaging and making your message understandable to the machines in a way that the machines then know it's relevant to your users and can serve it up to your users. So it's, it's a packaging process, I guess, flavor.

I like the cake analogy. I'm going to guess that that's not your first time using it.

No, no. Actually I started using that probably 15 years ago and I've seen the slide that I made like on other people's decks. I'm like, that's mine, that's mine. From my talk.

Yeah, somebody trying to explain what SEO is, they're stealing your cake analogy. I get. Makes it seem to make more sense. So ultimately, right, we're, we're trying to make sure that our users are being provided information based on what their perceived desires are, right. From the machines who are in control of sending out those messages. And what we're trying to do is make sure that the machines get the right messaging to know that when we have the right information for an end user, that we're not missing that intermediary because we don't have our connection. Right.

So when I first started, I was dealing with a lot of marketing people and at the newspaper journalists who were classically trained, and by classically, I mean before the Internet. And they, they had a tendency to, like, journalists will say, will say a person's name once and then they'll only refer to them by either their last name or a pronoun further on in the story because they don't want to be redundant or feel like they're saying the same thing over and over again. And marketing people, when they make marketing materials, which is really all they thought the website was, was a brochure. It's an online brochure. That's all it is. Right. They would not say the name of the company because you already know the name of the company. You can see that little picture up at the top. Well, you know, but the search engines work differently or they wouldn't see the name of the product because there's a picture of the product on the page. Well, especially back then, the engines couldn't really read what was in. And by read, I mean comprehend what they were seeing in the picture because they see pictures like the matrix, it's just bits, right. And it doesn't actually form pretty pictures. So they needed to advance to the point where they could understand those things. And back then they couldn't. So it was A thing of I need to train you to do your job, but do your job just a little bit differently because I need you to understand that each of these pages exists in the vacuum of space. And if you don't, in text, say in text that is visible to people and to the robots, say what the product is, what the company is, clearly state the value proposition and whatever other details you want them to know, they're going to miss those details and then they won't be able to accurately associate your content with the right things. And when people go search, it won't come up. So there's very. There's little things that you can do to just adjust your workflow to make it more clear and less ambiguous to the search engines. Exactly what your message is.

Love that. Very well articulated. And I think everybody who's listening right now is fall. They're going, okay, I see exactly how that that works. So then the question is, how the hell do we do it? But I'm going to get there in a minute. So the evolution. So you talk about, you know, almost like pre Internet, post Internet, but now it's like pre AI, post AI. What's the evolution been in your space over the last five years? What does that look like?

So everything's gotten really kind of crazy. I would say in the last 24 months has been just a. People will say it's a storm. I would say it's more of a cataclysm. And the difference being a cataclysm is reforming the earth behind it. So everything is changing and we see a. Like just today I saw an estimate that ChatGPT was going to overtake Bing in 31 months. 31 months is not a long time. That's not even three years. That's. That's like less time than we were locked down for Covid. That's a ridiculously short span of time. So if we look at the things that have changed, we already know that AI, even if you don't see it in Google search, AI is running parts of the Google indexing process where they used to have to make dictionaries and complex instructions for the machines to help them identify which country or you know which location your website should belong to. Like identify if it's Spanish and what kind of Spanish. So is it. Does it really. Is it more relevant to Mexico? Is it more relevant to Spain? There's all of those things that it used to have to do. They let the AI do it now, and the AI is so much smarter and faster that it's just easier for them to let the AI do it. The problem with that is we don't always understand how the AI is making decisions, which is kind of scary, not going to lie. So that's happening. Then we have the AI overviews and the AI mode where people aren't going. Used to be I ask a question like, why do I have this weird bump on my chin? Whatever. I don't actually.

Thanks for clearing that.

Yeah. All of a sudden I'm like, do I? No. You would go to Google, you would ask your question and it would give you a page full of links and you'd start scanning like no, it's definitely not that. No, it might be that. And then you'd have to go look at several of them to kind of figure out. And basically you're doing your own research. Right. So now the AIs are effectively doing that research for you and they're trying to answer your question without forcing you to click on, forcing you, without offering you those links to, to follow what this is doing. It's using your content, but it's not, it's not causing the user to go access your, your, your page. So you're not getting those clicks. And if you look, I'm sure most people have done this. If you haven't, you really should. So go to your Google Search Console. If you don't have a Google Search Console account, I take away number one, go set one up. And what it's going to do, it's going to show you the impressions, which is how many times your site appears in like Google results and the clicks and where it used to be relatively the same or at least parallel, now they're calling it the alligator. So it looks like this, your impressions are going up because it's citing you and it's dropping little links to you. But people don't need to click because they're getting the answer from reading it on the page. This decrease in clicks is causing a lot of panic in the industry. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts that we're seeing is business models are going to change and the key performance indicators that we're tracking are going to change. And attribution models I think are also going to have to change. I feel like, and this is something I've been saying in my talks recently is that the Internet is kind of going into its madman era where we're going back to pre Internet days where marketing was very loosey goosey and there wasn't the, the machine precision attribution and analytics that we've enjoyed for the past 20 years. It was very much, you know, go watch Mad Men. If you haven't watched it, there's like, oh, yeah, it's great. We were mentioned in time. They can, they can tell you where you were mentioned, but you have no idea how many eyeballs that reached. You have no idea what people are actually saying about your product. You don't know how many times that was looked at. There's going to be a lot of vagueness introduced into the system and we haven't figured out yet how to compensate for that. So tracking clicks isn't going to be an indication of success. Tracking impressions may be an indication of success. I think what people are going to start paying attention to more than anything else, and they should, is, is revenue. You know, this is all going to come down to our. Am I making more money? Even if you can't directly attribute it to your, your Internet performance, you're going to have to trust that if I'm doing well on. If we're getting a lot of impressions, we know that people are coming through from like the alums or from Google. We know traffic hasn't stopped. Therefore this increase in revenue could be attributed to our Internet performance. There's, there's none of this. Well, yeah, but it's probably this thing we did or this little league team we sponsored or whatever. That's not going to be a good enough reason to stop investing in and stop paying attention to your SEO and, and your other Internet marketing.

Yeah. So we're going to have. So where we used to have some nice visual dashboards of tracking everything and it was measurable and scalable. We're going to maybe lose some of that for a little bit of time until some smart people can figure out how we regenerate analytics on this.

Well, and to be fair, we. I remember a long time ago, before Google bought Universal Urchin, it was Urchin. That's why it's called ua. Before Google bought Urchin, Google would give you the IP address of the people that were coming to your site. And they would also give you the. They would give you the exact keywords that they, that they searched for and clicked on to get to your site, the keyword data. And that was fantastic information you could target so precisely. I would sit and watch the live. The live stream, basically livestream of all the IP addresses that were hitting my website and I could figure out who they were. I could like my friend, I know who that is and why are you on my website and that was exciting. But then they took it away and they took away the keyword data, so we never got that back, really. And now I think it's going to be, I don't know, that we're going to get the level of attribution and the level of accuracy back that we once had, that it might just be gone forever. I wish I could tell you that it won't be, but I don't know.

Yeah, and I think that's just the evolution of these platforms and everything like that. I think it's expected that it's going to continue to evolve and they're going to try and make more money and get more investment out of everybody as well. And the vagueness probably helps us go, we can't stop this. We just don't know what's working. So that we just have to invest in everything. Right. So thinking of all this and the evolution of this space, what are some, maybe key foundational components of SEO that you think will never change, that people need to focus on?

So, interestingly, if we're looking ahead to the way the LLMs are surfacing content, especially when people are using the LLMs, sort of like a search engine, it's useful to remember that the SEO that we were doing even 10 years ago, where we assumed that they couldn't read the images and we assumed that they couldn't see anything that wasn't on the page, this is now applicable again because we know that the LLM bots, when they come in to get content, first of all, they're not crawling, they're kind of like Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible, dropping in on a line, grabbing what they need and coming back up and leaving. Right. They retrieve the page, but unlike Google, they're not reading all, reading and scanning all of the source code, they're parsing it and stripping out the HTML. They strip out the header, they strip out the sidebar, they strip out the footer, they strip out the navigation. All you're left with is the article body. And within that article body, they are not executing anything that a human would have to touch, nor are they executing any JavaScript. So anything you have hidden behind a toggle, if it's not visible on initial load, they're not going to see it. Anything that you have behind a tab, if it's not visible on initial load, they will not see it. They're not going to see the alt text, necessarily, because I don't know, we don't know conclusively what they're using to render and then parse these pages if they're using something. There was a, there was a text only Browser called links 100 years ago and that was effectively what the search engines were using a long time ago. And it could see the alt text. I don't know that that's what they're doing now. I do know that captions are visible on first load. So if you do the alt text for accessibility and then you repeat it in a caption, you have a much higher likelihood of having that information conveyed to the thing that is, that is the machine that is trying to read your site. Right. So understanding that and retooling the way you write your on page copy to be as informative as possible and is visible every. Everything that's important needs to be visible on first load. Without human intervention, you don't take anything for granted. We don't assume that they know the name of the company. We don't assume they know the part number. We don't assume that they know the name of the product. We don't assume that they know the color or anything like that. We have to say all those things in words to make sure that that information gets conveyed where it needs to be conveyed. I think that's the biggest. Like the prime directive of SEO right now is we need to make sure that everything is human readable and machine readable on initial load period. And that's for all of your pages. Then we can get into know keyword targeting and internal linking and content strategy. But that's, I mean that could be. If you have 12 hours. I'm happy to talk to you about that.

I was going to say this has made it very clear that I don't know very much about any of this. Although like topic surface level, I'm with you and it's all making a lot of sense to me and I'm like, oh man. That's why we need to work with smart people who can execute on some of these things. So thinking of the opposite side, what are some mistakes that you see small business owners and entrepreneurs making when it comes to their approach to SEO, aside from not doing anything? Because I think that's probably, you know, even just in what you just said, what you just said, doing nothing is not the right solution. But other than that, what is it that they're maybe doing that they should stop doing?

I think a tendency, people have a tendency to want to play with and use all the gadgets and all the bells and whistles. And I used to, back when blogging was the big thing, I Used to tell people not to over bling their blog. So you don't need every flashing red light, every blinking text, you don't need all of that stuff. You need the text on the page. So hiding FAQs in toggles was a really big thing up until very recently. Yes, Google can still see it. That is 100% true. But we don't know who else is coming through that can't. And that's where the problem lies. So if you just spent a lot of time retooling everything to hide all of your FAQs in toggles, I implore you, please untoggle those things. There's a belief that users don't want to scroll, and there's a belief that users want the entire page to fit on a single screen. Now, if you're on a desktop, like I have a 42 inch gigantic monitor, that's a big screen, I watch TV on it, but that's one thing. But you can look at your analytics and you can see where the majority of your users and the converted users are coming from. And if they're all on a phone, you need to design your page to be the best it could be on the phone, not on the desktop, because that's not where your users are making their purchases. And you can see that in your analytics. There's ways that you can drill down and understand your users. So I guess what that's a long way of saying is figure out who your user is and how they're buying and then make that experience the best it can be. And also don't hide anything. Hide anything in Toggles or in fancy JavaScript menus should absolutely not be in JavaScript because nobody can crawl that. And it's Google can crawl it eventually. Google has like a two pass system. They'll come through and they'll grab everything in plain text that they can get and they'll start processing that. Anything that needs to be further processed, like JavaScript is going to be delayed. And based on the size of your site and how often you update, that could be 10 minutes, that could be three weeks, we don't know. So if it's important and you need everybody to know about it, it needs to be in easy to crawl, easy to process, preferably plain text content on your website.

And so when you're doing these things right, is having more information on a website more beneficial? Like is it a volume game? To a certain extent as well. Like assuming that each if there were two comparable sites, both optimized in the best way for for SEO, one has more articles and information and videos and trainings versus one that's more of just a one short landing page to get someone to buy. Or, you know, comparing those two together. Is the one with more information going to be ranking better, showing up more frequently, or is it really just, you know, the very specifics of what you're trying to reach people with?

So there's a lot of factors that go into that, and I would have to give the standard SEO responsive. It depends. Yeah, of course, I would say that having more content is better if you are not generating garbage content or content that's going to cannibalize other content. So it's easier to rank a single page because it's got one URL and you can drive all of the inbound links and accumulate authority in that bucket. So imagine each URL is a bucket, right? What you don't want is the same topic spread across a lot of buckets unless each of those pages is uniquely valuable. You don't need 50 pages on how to feed your kitten. You need one page on how to feed your kitten and maybe one page on how to bathe your kitten without getting shredded, and one page on how to keep your kitten from eating chocolate, things like that. But you don't need, you don't need 50 articles on the exact same topic because that's going to spread out all of your link equity into a lot of little buckets. You might have 50 and 50 links, but 50 links in 50 buckets is not as good as 50 links in one bucket. So there's that. There is also. There is value in having a lot of content because the LLMs, we believe, are using this thing called reciprocal rank fusion as a means of calculating who they're going to who and what they're going to select to use as a citation. And basically it's doing. You've heard of the fan out that. That. Yep. Okay, so if for every query the machine is figuring out like five more related queries that you're probably going to want to know about, right? Then it runs six of those. So the original and then the additional five all at the same time, it pulls the top. Let's see, it pulls the top 50 articles for each of those. Because I was at a talk recently and the guy from Anthropic said that they can easily run 300. They can scan through 300 results like that, and it's no sweat for them. So I'm using 300 as my thing. So we've got six topics that works out to be 50 results for each. And they're going through and they're looking for not just who ranked number one for the primary query and then maybe find some supplementals they're ranking, they're giving everything a score. So if you're number one for one query, but you don't show up for any of the other five that they ran, you've got your score. If you've got rankings for the same page for all of those. Right. Each of those six queries that we ran and you don't even have to be in the top 10, but you're consistently there. Let's say you're consistently there in the top 20. Each of those scores they add together and there's a multiplier which will make even though you're not number one for the primary, you've got enough spread across the breadth of the content or the topic that your score is going to ultimately be higher than the guy who was number one for one query.

Interesting.

So there's like math.

Yeah, I was picking up on that.

Yeah, there's a lot of math going on there.

Things were happening there.

But what that tells me is that it's better to have a lot of content than to have a single page. It's also, you know, just common sense. It's harder to make a single page serve every possible need than it is to have dedicated pages for, dedicated for, for specific needs. You can't, like, like we were talking about before, you can't be, you know, jack of all trades. Jack of all trades. Master of none is kind of the opposite here. You can't have a, a single page. Make everyone happy is basically what it comes down to. You can't serve all masters. God, I don't know. I'm mixing up my metaphors.

That's all right. You had me at the cake earlier on.

I'm very food motivated.

So thinking of the entrepreneurs that are listening to this, watching this, how do they build content that will consistently drive traffic? I know we're talking about having more is better than, maybe not because of the, the exponential reach of information and supportive ranking, but if you were having a clean slate and you said, okay, you obviously need content to put out there in order to get eyeballs looking at you, what would your best strategy be for someone in creating that content?

Ask yourself, if I were my customer, what questions would I have? And then answer those questions and make sure that you're answering them in a useful way. So where you're not going to have much success is if you're just regurgitating something someone else has already said. You don't phrase it in a very generic kind of way, which means you can't go to content mills to have this written. You need to make it reasonably targeted to your product or your specific user, your user's needs, your user's location. Put yourself in the shoes of your user and just sit down and brainstorm. Make a list or make a Persona first. So I'm Jim Bob and I live here and I'm using this product and I'm, you know, 43 years old and I have two kids and an ex wife and these are all the ways that I would be using the product. These are probably the things that I would have problems with. These are the questions I would ask, these would be my concerns. And it's not just about price. It's gonna be about quality. Quality. And it's going to be about how do I wire this into the wall, how do I wire this into the wall without an electrician? You know, there's going to be, there's going to be lots of different questions that are unique to your product that only you can answer. That is the way to make sure that you're the one cited. If you're the, if you're the only one who's qualified to answer that question, then make sure that you've got that content out there. Because what's going to happen is if you've got things like, like a knowledge base or support, you know, support if you've got any of that, not everybody does. But if you gate things off so that only customers that you know about can get to information like how to fix something or how to any, anything like that, if you don't provide those answers, these search engines are going to go to where they can get that information. If it can't be from you directly, they'll take it wherever they can get it. And if wherever they can get it is Reddit, that's what you're stuck with. So I would answer the user's questions, anticipate what they are, talk to your first line service people, because they'll know. Eight people came in yesterday and asked where the price tag was. They're clearly looking for it, generate things that way and then answer those questions and make sure that that content is available to the search engines. Because if you don't make that content available, they will take it wherever they can get it. And if that's a competitor or that's, you know, God forbid, Reddit, please. Reddit people don't hate me. Please be. But, but you don't, you don't want to leave that to chance. Just make sure that you're answering the questions and that you're being as helpful as possible. And, and don't, you know, copy other people's work or just repeat things because you think that I need to say these words to get this traffic. Because that's not the way it works anymore. You actually have to be useful. You have to provide value.

And so video versus text as well. And maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but it sounds like if you're doing video, you want the text copy there as well. Because they need to see those words.

Yes. Especially if it's not Google. So the other, the other engines don't necessarily, like I know from Anthropic, they definitely are not looking at video and they're not looking at the pictures, they're just looking at the text on the page. Google obviously can, it has much more insight into the video because I mean YouTube is in their family, so they've got that access. But it is probable that they're looking at the transcripts and the transcripts are generated by like whatever their transcript generation thing is, which is probably Gemini. I would do a couple of things. I would run through, I would make sure I have a transcript. If you, if you have no other way of getting a transcript, get your video, upload it into YouTube. Even if you don't publish it anywhere, if you upload it into YouTube and keep it private, it'll still generate a transcript for you and then you can copy and paste that transcript and put it where you need it. But I would have, I would have that text on the page, easy for them to get to. Some of these plugins like for WordPress, I know where it's offering to give you the caption or the I'm sorry, the transcript. It will put it in a toggle or it will put it in a way that's just kind of embedded on the page and not really fully visible on first load, which will be useless as we now know. So even if it's ugly, you need to find a way to get that transcript onto the page. You could very easily take the transcript and feed it into like chatgpt and say chatgpt. This is a transcript from my how to video. Can you write a blog post to accompany this video and then give it the transcript and it will write a non transcripty post for you based entirely on what you just fed it? So I would and I don't even know that that would count. Well, I do know that does not count as AI generated content because it's stuff that you said it's not. Write me an article about ponies and then just taking whatever it barfs up because that's obviously garbage.

I feel like you had more to.

Say there, but gotta self censor sometimes.

So tell me about Yoast and how Yoast works with business owners and how you know, you and your team, your fairly large team, you know, if we're thinking of small business, fairly large team of people support entrepreneurs, how would that work?

So we have plugins, we have plugin for Shopify which is obviously all business owners, they're all e commerce shops. And then we have our regular WordPress plugin which is, you know, for general WordPress use. But we do have a WooCommerce e commerce add on that's available and it comes as part of the premium product that we offer and it is designed to help with your e commerce site. It does things like it has specific schema for products. It walks you through making sure that your product feed is set up and the product feeds are a thing that like pipe into Google. So if you have a Google business page, you can add product products to that. WooCommerce will connect directly to your Google business page and like any changes you make on your site will just kind of feed up to Google. But that's how you get those product carousels at the top of the Google results where like if you look for sneakers, red sneakers, women's size nine, it will pop up all these pictures of red sneakers that are supposedly available in size 9. And if you want your stuff to be in there, you need to have that product feed so set up. So it's got, it's got the extra stuff that correlates directly to making sure that you're maximizing the visibility for your e commerce site. The other things that the general plugin does, it helps with your. Your helps you organize and populate your business. Business related schema which would be the organization data. Make sure that you have defaults set up for the business name, the, the little teaser pictures, your open graph data, all of the things that you might otherwise need five or six different plugins to handle. And you'd have to know that you need them to handle it. It kind of just takes care of everything for you in that sense. And it does a lot of the underlying basic technical SEO things that you have to do anyway like generate your sitemap and keeps that updated Helps with the robots. TXT management. A new thing that we're doing now is we're also building for you an LLMs txt, which is. I don't know if you've heard about this. So there's. It's not a standard yet, but it's a proposed standard and it's like a, it's like a curated. I won't say a shopping list, but it's like a store, a store directory almost. If you walk into Ikea and you know you need light bulbs, you don't just walk around, you know, staring at things, looking for the light bulbs, because you'll be there 100 years and you'll never find. Find them. You look at the store directory and say, where do I find the light bulbs? Oh, here's the light bulbs. And then you go to it. So the LLMs TXT is a list that you write and you control for the LLMs, specifically telling them where all the good stuff on your site is. I would liken it to like a treasure map. And you're, you're handing them the treasure map saying, the gold is over here, I'm going to take you right to it. You don't even have to wander around and look you, Here you go. So we're doing that for you too. Trying to think what else we do. There's a lot. I think I'd be here a while if I, if I went through all of that.

Yeah, well, and, and I think too, right. Like, it's more so to like, for someone like me. Right. So I conceptually, I understand at a high level the importance of SEO and optimization, but it really, my guess is it someone who's working with the plugin needs to be responsive and to be able to understand the information that it's, it's asking for and, and anything like that. So really it's like for my marketing team. Right. And for, for agencies that you work with. Is that, would that be fair?

I would say it's very helpful for marketing teams. There are, there are technical things that it does that are helpful as well. And for people that don't have, like, they're good at marketing, but they're not maybe as good at the technical things. It'll handle those technical things for you, which is, which is very nice. So there's, you know that there's a marketing reason to have X, Y or Z, but you don't know how to technically implement it. I think that's kind of the sweet spot where it's helpful is that it advises you that you need this for marketing purposes, but then it technically implements it on your behalf so that you don't have to get your hands dirty or go in and actually start hacking your theme, which is something that a lot of people, you know, are really, either they're afraid to do it or they, they do it and they break their theme. So it tries to help you, spare you from doing that. And then we also have, we've got a knowledge base and we've got articles on our website where we try to directly give general advice. It's not necessarily related to our specific plugin, but it's related to business and understanding SEO concepts and understanding business needs and how to apply those SEO concepts to your business needs. So we've got, you know, a monthly webinar where we talk about news, we've got training sessions. We, we just have people that know business and can help you with those, those questions that you might otherwise have to call in a consultant to do or hire a dev team to do. We can usually kind of walk you through it or at least point you in the right direction so that you can save some money and be a little self service. I know people that have particularly small businesses are hesitant to bring in external consultants because they can be expensive and you don't always know if they're doing anything for you. And it feels a lot safer and more comfortable to try to do it yourself. Plus there's that satisfaction that, yeah, I did this myself and look, it was successful and now I'm proud of myself.

Yeah. And to your point, talking about the entrepreneurial journey too, a lot of times we find that we need to learn something first before we can figure out, figure out who the right person is to be responsible for it.

You need to know how to identify BS before you start hiring people.

Absolutely. So it sounds like this is a really great place for entrepreneurs to start to learn about SEO first and foremost with your resources, but also to maybe get some fixes and then understand how it works a little bit so that we can bring in the right people to be responsible for it going forward.

We really do try to make it understandable for everyone. I know it can feel a little beginnerish if you've got a lot of experience with it. But we're, we're trying to help people that really are starting from square one and help them understand these more advanced topics so that they're not taken in by people that are selling snake oil and that they're also having success. Because when, when your business continues, you know, we. We enjoy that success too.

Absolutely. Carolyn, this has been such a pleasure. You're certainly a wealth of knowledge and it's been very informative. I've learned a lot. I've got a lot of things to think about. If someone were to want to work with you or your team, what's the best way for them to find you?

You can go to Yoast. So it's like toast with a y dot com. We're all over everywhere. So I'm pretty sure any social platform you check, you'll find us. We're on X, we're on Facebook, we even have a subreddit. So we're all over the place. That would be. Yeah, I would say that's the best place to get it. But go to the website, go to yoast.com. the free version of the plugin is as build free. So if you want to get started and just kind of dip your toes in the water, that's a great way to get started. And like I said, you can download that if you're using WordPress from yoast.com or from the WordPress repository, or if you're on Shopify, we've got a plugin that's in the little Shopify extension store there.

Amazing. Well, thank you once again for joining me today. For everybody who's been watching, I'm sure you've taken away at least 10 things that we need to be thinking about considering in our own business and even maybe just a shift in perspective and the importance, importance of SEO as part of our overall marketing plan. But for everybody watching, thank you for joining us today. I'm your host, Bob Govreau. It's been a pleasure. We're here to empower you with the right information to make informed decisions so that you can change the world as we feel like entrepreneurs do. If there's anything in here that you found is extremely beneficial and you think it would help someone, please share this out. We're here to help everyone just continue to move forward. Secondly, if there's any questions or comments, make sure you leave those in there. And for sure, make sure you hit follow so that you can get access to next week's episode as it comes out. So once again, it was a pleasure, Carolyn, to have you in here. And for everybody else, I look forward to seeing you again next week.