380: What Google is Expecting from Food Creators with Arsen Rabinovich

This podcast is sponsored by Clarity. That is C-L-A-R-I-T I.com and really, the name says it all. The purpose of Clarity is to have a clear and straightforward tool that allows you to have clarity. That's where the name comes from. Into areas of opportunity for improving content on your blog and managing those projects along the way. And what we found was for many bloggers, ourselves included, there either wasn't a great system at all to manage projects or find areas of opportunity, or it was like Google Sheets or Airtable, which those are really powerful tools and those are awesome tools. And if you're good at using Google Sheets or Airtable and connecting all of the different elements that you need, more power to you, I think that those tools are incredible. But what we wanted with Clarity was to ease the burden of some of the more technical considerations that go into hooking all of that information up. And so with Clarity, what we're doing is we're bringing what we consider to be some of the most important information for publishers and bloggers into the same place. So Clarity brings in WordPress metadata, so how long your post is, what the links are, external, internal links, alt text within images or images that are maybe broken. We bring all of that information in. We bring in information from Google Analytics. So you connect your Google Analytics account, your Google Search Console account, all of that information comes into one central spot. And from there you can use Clarity to find opportunities. So maybe you want to improve the number of links that are coming to a certain post. Just this morning, I looked for Pinch of Yum, and we have some new posts that we're actually not linking to. So I made a note and I was like, oh, my gosh, we need to link to these new posts that we've published within other posts. And I wouldn't have been able to on my own. Just kind of think of that or check on that if not for that being surfaced with. So you can find those opportunities, but then you can also create a project around those to then make sure that you can check back and say, great, here's what I need to do. You can create tasks within that project and you can work through that to make sure that you improve that piece of content or that area of opportunity over time. And this is the key piece with it is you can take notes along the way. So you can look back three months, six months a year from now and say, hey, that was an improvement that I made. Did that have an impact? Great. If it did, what are some other ways that I can do that in other places on my blog to continue to optimize and improve. And what we found is, especially for people who have been blogging for a certain number of years, a huge part of what you need to do is not only think about new content, but continually maintaining and, and and optimizing your existing content. So it's been fun to see Clarity grow as we've talked about it and shared it with other publishers over the last year or so. And just last month we had 60 bloggers sign up to start using Clarity. If you want to check it out, the best way to do that is to go to clarity.com food. So that's C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food and podcast listeners can receive 50% off of your first month if you go to that URL. And again, it's C-L-A-N-I-T-I.Com food. Thanks to clarity for sponsoring this podcast. Raise your hand if you are interested in search engine optimization.

Yes, My guess is most of us.

In some capacity are interested in SEO. And that's why podcasts like these are always really exciting to share because we know that a lot of people are interested in optimizing their content for search engines. And that's really the focus of Arsene Rabinovitch's company, which is Top Hat Rank. They focus on search engine optimization. He's going to be talking about the idea of Top Hat Rank, where the name came from and we're going to be talking about really the background and origin and also like current state of.

Google, like why is Google act the way that it does?

How does an algorithm work? Why is it important for us as creators to understand the algorithm? Should we create content with the Google algorithm in mind? Should we just focus on users? We're going to be talking about all of those different things today and Arsene is going to explain kind of like how to think strategically about your content from a search engine optimization standpoint. So if you're interested in joining in the conversation behind the conversation, then you need to check out the Food Blogger Pro podcast group. You can get there by going to foodbloggerpro.com Facebook and that will bring you to a page where you can join this group of fellow Food Blogger Pro podcast listeners. You can kind of seed questions that we might ask in the interview. You can interact with the guests sometimes after they come on. It's just a chance for us to add a little bit of context around the podcast so it's not just me, it's not just the guest, but really.

It'S this community of creators who are.

Building things and publishing things online. And we want to give you the opportunity to join into the conversation insofar.

As it makes sense to do so.

So again, that's foodblockerpro.com Facebook, be sure to check that out and you can join the conversation there, there. But for now, we're going to jump into all things SEO with Arson from Top Hat Rank. Arson, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, thank you for having me.

Excited to be talking to you about all things SEO. So you do you kind of eat, breathe and sleep SEO. It's the world that you live in. And a lot of times you're working with food publishers. Not exclusively, but it's a niche that you've gotten into. Tell us a little bit about Top Hat Rank and how that came about, your history with it.

Right, so we are a, we're going to be 12 years old this year. We're a 12 year old digital marketing agency. We're known for SEO. We're a full service enterprise SEO team. We're an award winning SEO team. Up until, I want to say, mid 2018, end of 2018, that's all we were focusing on. Working with big brands, doing really, really big, giant migrations and everything. And Casey and I speak at the same conferences, a lot of the same conferences. We travel around the world and we speak a lot of the same conferences at one point.

And that's Casey Marquis for those who are Casey Marquis.

Right, right.

Right in the space. Know it.

Right.

As a SEO agency called Media Wise. It's been on the podcast a lot. Food blogger, pro expert. So.

Right.

For anybody who's newer to the scene.

He'S the, he's a resident guest now.

Yeah.

With you guys. Yeah. So Casey, Casey reached out and he's like, look, I have a wait list. I need someone who's going to be able to knock out these technical audits for, for recipe bloggers. Because they, I think that time it was like March 2018, and it was one of the Google updates that just rolled out and just hammered away at site sites, especially sites that had a lot of content that was like competing, diluting focus or competing with each other. Right. So we started doing these audits and my team loved it. My team loved working with recipe bloggers. Looking at recipes all day is much better than looking at like appliance parts or our larger, larger brands that we deal with. Because you forget like all of those.

People are thinking about SEO and, and the appliance part company is trying to figure out how do I rank for, you know, when somebody searches for whatever Widget, right. Happens 10 times a day as opposed to like, you know, a thousand times a day if you're looking for a certain recipe. So it's a little bit different.

Right. So, you know, but it's a very, very tough vertical to be in. It's a very, very tough niche, right? Because in case he compares this, and I totally agree with him, that this is as difficult as optimizing legal sites, lawyers, right. Competition, just how perfect things need to be on the page. Right? Like Google is definitely not forgiving with, with, with recipe publishers right now. So we just got into the space and over time we developed products, we built. We started with just the technical audit, then we built a forensic audit specifically for recipe bloggers. Recipe bloggers that were affected by a lot of the updates and they didn't know how to resolve. We started doing forensic audits and then we launched Top Head Content and Top Hat Social with Ashley, who's my partner in those two agencies. She's my co founder and then she's also the VP of Ops at tophat Rank and she's also the host of our SEO for Bloggers webinar that we do once a month, Shameless Plug.

And she's been on the podcast as well. So for those who, right, have listened for a long time, they can listen to that episode. Otherwise, be sure to search Ashley. Top Hat. I think she was talking about kind of some of the content things. So. Top Hat content, right.

So she's like the content guru, right? And she. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Yeah, no, that's great. And she, she has experience in that, in that world, but is also managing some of those other areas. So it was a great interview with her. So you have Top Hat Rank, Top Hat social, Top Hat content. Where does the top Hat come from? What is that? Just out of curiosity?

It was just one, you know, it started, started back with Arson Rabinovich, Internet Marketing. And that wasn't like, that wasn't a good brand. So, you know, there was like white hat SEO, Black hat SEO, and we just went with Top Hat because, you know, the. We, we, the whole business, the whole agency is structured around providing really good customer service. And that was like one of our biggest things. We lowered the barrier to entry. We were one of the first agencies to offer services, enterprise contract, limiting the barrier of entry. The way we're set up is specifically designed to integrate with brands so that we are part of their team. Flawless, like, seamless integration, all of that. So that was like top hat, like, almost like a white glove service for.

And hat related to the different kind of classifications of SEO. For those who aren't familiar with the idea of white hat, black hat, can you explain what that means in the word SEO?

Right, so white hat SEO is essentially when you do everything by the book, everything is organic, you're molding your content. Like, stuff that we always preach. Like, this is white hat SEO. Like, follow the rules, be patient, be consistent, understand what Google wants from you, what search engines want and apply.

Right, yep. And when you say the rules, those would be Google's rules.

Well, yeah, the guidelines. Right.

Like the best practices.

Right, right, right, right. And then there's black hat SEO, which are a bunch of tactics that are designed to manipulate the algorithm, which is getting a little bit harder to do these years. But back in the day, it was a very easy thing to do. But, yeah, it's basically using PBNs, private blog networks, to build a bunch of links out of nowhere to show an influx of authority. It's spinning content. So basically grabbing content from somebody else and spinning paragraphs, spinning words, using different types of words that are synonyms. And then just, it spins the content to make it somewhat unique.

And then post.

And we used to do all kinds of.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Connect voice to text, grab a report from npr, send it through Google Translate a bunch of times so that it, like, scrambles the words, translate into a bunch of languages, bring it back to English, and then publish it. Right, yeah. So like, that stuff doesn't work anymore, but that's what black hat SEO is.

Yeah.

The idea being that instead of, like, playing by the rules that Google outlines or the guidelines, you're instead saying, like, are there ways that I can trick or. Or manipulate the algorithm in service of ranking faster? Like, it's kind of like everything that humans try and do. Like, how do we get the desired outcome without as much work? Right. And sometimes it ends up being just as much work. But black hat really being this idea of, like, manipulating the algorithm. So when we talk about the algorithm, what is that? Like, does that live in some hollowed place in Google's servers and nobody knows, like a Indiana Jones style, like somebody's going to break in and grab the algorithm?

No, nobody knows. Nobody knows. It's.

It's.

It's grown beyond just like one person knowing what the algorithm is. Right. And we don't even know if what we know is what's actually happening, there's machine learning components to it. There's just so much happening and just like different queries are treated differently. There's just all kinds of stuff. So there's not one way to say, this is the algorithm. This is what it does. It's very nuanced, it's very complex. It's constantly evolving. You can actually see the evolution. We were just looking through. I was looking through some of our older webinars, and I'm looking at some of the recommendations that we were providing back in 2019 versus what we're providing now, just to see the evolution of, like, how far we've gone. Right.

Because the algorithm has changed or best practices have changed, and therefore how you need to approach your content has changed. Do you have an example of one of those changes?

Yeah. Right. So, like, we're noticing a much better understanding. And you hear me talk about this a lot, and it's just like super important for everyone to understand Google's understanding of intent behind the query. Right. And down the line, as Google becomes much better at understanding what people are actually searching for, the reason why they're searching for this, we're going to see results shift. And then when you layer in personalization and everything else that Google collects around you. So good example is we see this constantly shifting, would be a query for like, let's say potato soup, right? My, my. My favorite thing to talk about now, potato soup at one point will show results or has shown results that are local. Like, do you want to order this?

Right.

It's not all recipe sites, right? I've seen shifts in how Google understands queries. I just did an example. I showed an example at the TasteMaker Virtual TasteMaker Conference that we just had. I did a talk and they showed an example, and I think it was for orange chicken sauce. There was only three results on page one that were specific to the sauce recipes. Everything else was recipes for orange chicken. Right? And that probably happened as a byproduct of filtering from the user signals, engagement signals that Google collects people who are visiting pages and then bouncing back to search results. If thousands of people perform that action, they click the number one. Within two seconds, they're back to search and they're clicking a number two. Google starts shuffling those results over time because it's getting an understanding that this is not the right result for this query. So that combined with Google's understanding of the syntax, the actual pattern of characters in that query that Google will derive intent from, combined with the user data. Now the results are shifting. And every time there's a Google update, what's happening is the result page itself is shifting because Google is saying this is better results. And as a byproduct of that, bloggers who used to be there are now either moved down on the page or are just completely gone. Because Google's like, this is not a recipe query anymore. This is a commercial intent.

Yeah. Example being like, I think of tacos as a good example. If you search tacos, there's. There's probably an equal chance that you're looking to buy tacos from a restaurant as there is that you're looking to get a taco recipe. And my guess is Google gets better at knowing what your intent is by all the different things around that maybe it's location, maybe it's if you were just some. At. At some place and then your location has shifted. Like, right, all of those. If you've never searched for recipes before, but you have searched for taco restaurants before, like, right. All of those things factor into it. So when you say an algorith update are there, what does that frequency look like? Like, is it kind of like my computer, where there's small updates along the.

Way and then every once in a.

While a really big update.

What's the frequency?

And how do you know when updates happen?

We, we don't. We're at the mercy of Google telling us, hey, there's going to be an update or we did an update. There's systems like Semrush sensor, there's a weather report from Moz which tells you how turbulent the results are. Right. Like what, what, what, what fluctuations we're seeing. And sometimes we'll notice a lot of shifts and a lot of moves within search results and Google won't come out and say, oh, we had a, we released an update frequency also, we don't know. It's been quiet. June, July of last year, we had like eight updates in two months. Or like I'm exaggerating, but probably like six updates in two months. And then the last few months other than the May update and the update that we just saw now. Well, the helpful content update, something's happening there. But they just rolled out another update a few weeks back or a week back. And before that it was pretty quiet. So we went from May up until now with almost no updates, where all of the entire summer of last year of 21 was nothing but updates.

Yeah.

So it's very unpredictable.

So you said the helpful content update. Would it be interested to hear your thoughts on that a little bit. And then also, is it like search engine optimization professionals who are naming those or is that Google who's coming out and naming those? I also think of Medic as an example. Like, right, so within the Google algorithm.

Who'S kind of naming those and how.

Do you know what those are actually about?

Right. So Google, Google, when they decide to be kind to us and let us know what the update is about, we take that information, but we always take it with a grain of salt because it's Google and they have PR teams that tell them what to say and what not to say.

Sure.

We always look at the data, we look at what's happening in real life to see like, oh, you know, because they made this whole big deal about the helpful content update and like, they reached out to a lot of these prominent SEOs who have voices in the community and they're like, okay, we're going to roll this out. We want to provide some education. Everybody made a big stink about it. And then when it rolled out, it was like, oh, okay, not much. Right?

Not much in terms of changes or not.

We're not seeing, we're not. There's certain, certain ones that are being hit, but it's definitely not at the scale that we were prepared to see it. And. Right. Like, we were ready for like just blogs to be taken down. Right. Because it's a site wide. Right. So there's, there's different types of updates. So like there's that core update, core algorithm update. That's the update that, that's the, that's the algorithm that's consistently running. That's the update that, that's the algorithm that's always in the background. It's running, it's, it's doing its thing and there's an update to it. Right. So like Google does better, you know, like natural language processing now. So they're going to update the algorithm and then they will say this will impact 5% of queries. Right? And then there's these types of updates, like the helpful content update, where they're like, okay, this is going to run. It's going to collect from what we understand the first seed set of data. Right? And then based on that data, it's going to learn and then continue to run and run. Right. And then there's different types of updates targeting different things. So there's updates targeting review sites, there's updates targeting E commerce sites. It's based on what Google is seeing, its results and what it needs to adjust. Right.

And so an example would be if you are in the world of like health or fitness and you are blogging about medicines or alternative medicines, Google might look at that bunch of content that's generally in the, like, health or wellness or medical world and make an update to that content. And would they do the same thing in the food space? Like, would the food space be a bucket of content that they would make updates around?

So it depends on, it depends on what's happening. Does Google need to fix something or does we'll have a better understanding of what recipe blogs are doing and it's going to create this update. As an example, like, Google's John Mueller came out and said, oh, you should not add a. And this is just logic. Right. You should not add a recipe card to a roundup post because it's not a recipe. You're marking up something that's not there.

Right.

And that's something that you shouldn't be doing.

And can you explain real quick who John is?

John Mueller is like the brain in the mouth of Google when it comes to communicating to us, to SEOs and to the community in general. So he's like Webmaster Trends.

He's kind of the mouthpiece for Google on things like that.

They have a few. But he's the one who's like, on Twitter answering questions from webmasters. He's a really nice guy. Very smart guy.

Yeah. And previously was Matt Cutts. Is that right?

Matt Cutts. Well, yeah, Matt Cutts before him. Right, right, right.

Okay. And so he was saying, hey, speaking on behalf of Google, don't put a recipe card in a roundup because it's a roundup. It's not a specific recipe. Is that the idea?

Right, right, right. And then when we actually look at it in practice, when we're looking at page one, they're like, there's a recipe card on the first ranking result. Right.

We would, we would not do it if it. You didn't work, but it's working. And so there's a little bit of.

That's the point. We come in and we're like, okay, well, hang on. We've seen this happen before. Google used to say, don't stuff your. Don't over optimize your headings, don't over optimize your headings, don't over optimize these things. And then an update comes out and they're like, oh, you haven't been listening. Here it is.

Right?

You got hit. So not saying that this will happen. I'm giving this as an Example, I don't know Google's ever going to or even cares to do this. But let's say Google says, hey, we're really getting tired of this. It's confusing us because schema takes the implicit portions of the content on the page of the document, makes it explicit for us, and it helps us understand what the document is about. So, like, recipe card, it's schema telling Google this is a recipe post.

Yeah.

So when Google comes and visits your site and picks up this roundup and sees a recipe card, Google's like, this is a recipe post. But then what actually looks at the content on the page, it uses its processing powers to understand that this is indeed not a recipe post. Right?

Yeah.

So at one point, Google's gonna be like, we're, you know. And again, I don't know if this is gonna happen, but Google might be like, okay, we're spending way too much time figuring this stuff out. Let's just make this a part of the algorithm and then filter out anybody from this result where the schema doesn't match the content on the page.

And. And it.

I've used.

So I've used kind of the analogy of schema as a yard sign. And it's kind of like Google's walking by your house and you have a yard sign saying, what's happening?

Right.

And if you have a garage sale and you put a garage sale sign out, Google's going to walk by and be like, great, garage sale.

Right.

In this case, it's kind of like you actually have a lemonade stand and.

You put, you put a lemonade stand.

Sign out, and you're putting a garage sale sign out, even though it's just a lemonade stand. So it's like conflicting information. It's conflicting yard signs to Google.

Right.

And initially in this, I'm building this analogy on the fly. Initially, it gets you more people like lemonade stand and garage sale.

But when they come in, they're like.

Wait, this is like, this isn't what you marketed it as. This isn't what Google displayed it as. And Google wants to display things that are most helpful and aligned with somebody's search query. So in that case, do you have a recommendation? I know it's really specific example, but do you have a recommendation like, do.

The do do just do roundup?

Or like, do include recipe. It's.

Why are you doing this? Like, what are you getting out of that schema? So some of the bloggers that I consult and coach, they're like, oh, well, we want you know, the, the star rating and the aggregate rating and the result. But there's other ways of getting that in there without applying an entire recipe card. Right?

Yeah.

So that's just like. But then, you know, you get the image, the feature, so that they're using it as a, as a convenience. Right. But when other bloggers look at that first page result, they're like, there's a recipe card. Everybody on page one has a recipe card. I'm going to do it. Now keep in mind, and Casey and I have been beating this like into people's heads, schema is not a ranking factor at all. Google will not look at schema and say, will not look at your page and say you don't have schema markup. I'm not going to rank you on page one. Right. Because Google understands that not everyone can apply schema to their site. So we're not going to single it out. We're going to level the playing field. Now, yes, there are contributing factors that improve like click through rates and give Google better understanding of the website and what's in there and all of that. But those are not direct ranking factors. Right. There's also the benefits of getting like rich results into rich, rich, rich elements into the search results. So like your, your thumbnail, the star ratings and everything else. But you can accomplish that with other, with schema markup specifically for that. That's not embedded into the recipe card because the recipe card will show the, it as a recipe card schema on that page.

That makes sense. So in a case though, like let's say recipe card produces a result in the carousel. Like I'm thinking of mobile where it would show recipes. You wouldn't be able to get a result in a, in a carousel unless you had schema, right?

Yes, correct.

Yeah. So in those cases like that it would be, it would not a ranking factor in the sense that like it's algorithmically ranking, but it does help you get those things like into the rich result, into a carousel. Carousel being a rich result, Right. That being not a ranking factor is what you're saying, but it is, it does impact the number of people that would maybe click on something or interact.

Well, again, we can't necessarily say that, that you got in there because of the schema because everybody who has schema doesn't make it in there. Right?

Yeah.

You got in there because of other signals as well. Trust, popularity. Right. Like a whole bunch of other signals that like we don't know about.

Right.

We assume we know schema just Facilitates that schema helps bring that image into that. You know, we always say 1200. Bye bye. That image, that star rating schema helps. It's not necessarily a direct ranking factor.

Sure. So tell me if this is a fair analogy. Let's say you list your house on Zillow and somebody searches like houses for houses in Minneapolis. Zillow. I don't know how Zillow works, but just thinking of it as another algorithm. It's going to display all of the houses in the results for that specific search based on things that are equal within the content that's shown, like how many square feet and like you know what the description of it. But you want to be really strategic in adding those additional elements, like really good photos. And like if you don't include photos in a Zillow listing, not many people are going to click on it.

Exactly.

Go through, interact with it. It still might, you still might still show up.

It still be a hot home if enough secondary signal. Speaking of that, so like we recently sold one our previous house and they needed attention on that house. So we, so I played around with Zillow, Zillow or Redfin, one of those and just sent a bunch of like random traffic to that page, like a lot of it. And within a day we got the hot home, the hot home, little label on top and started surfacing up. But yeah, like perfect, perfect analogy. You can get your listing to be at the top of the search results, but if it doesn't have pictures, it's probably not going to have a really good click through rate. You're probably not going to get a lot of eyeballs on that listing. Right?

Yeah.

So yeah, one hand washes the other kind of a thing.

Yep, that makes sense.

Right?

So what should, what is the role.

Of a publisher as it relates to understanding the Google algorithm? Like how much should we as creators track with it, be aware of updates and almost like create content in service of the algorithm?

Right. So I love this question. You shouldn't be doing anything. You should be doing zero things. You should be writing for the user. You should be accommodating your user first. Now with that, it's always important to be aware of what's happening around results in Google when it pertains to like your industry or your query and stuff like that. So I'm not saying that you should be like, oh my God, there's an update coming and be like as involved as we are, like tracking sites, tracking results, basic understanding of what Google is expecting from you is already presented to you on page one of Google and I preach this, I've been preaching this for many years. Look at page one of Google. Yes, there are caveats to this. There's absolutely caveats to this because you can have an overwhelming signal like too many backlinks can push a site to be number one, but the content can be complete crap. Right. You can have a large brand site like the Food Network or allrecipes ranking and that's because they've built up enough either expertise, authority and trust. And Google's like, I don't have a better result from somebody else. I have trust in this site. Regardless of how well that content is written and structured. I'm going to rank it. Right. Like WebMD showing up for everything that's medical, even though it could be like a paragraph on the page. Right?

Sure.

So understanding, understanding what's happening on page one and looking at it from a perspective of I'm not going to blindly copy what's there. I'm going to analyze it, I'm going to look at how content is being structured on the top ranking blogs. I'm going to take a look at what's being covered, how it's organized, how are they prioritizing intent. Right. And we've done these, we do this with our bloggers. When you start adjusting to come close to what everyone on page one is doing in common, you don't have to copy them, be inspired by them. If everyone on page one for a recipe that's somewhat complex has a paragraph at the top explaining what this dish is to cut down on confusion, I guarantee you Google wants that on your page. So if you don't have it, you should probably add that if everyone on page one or not everyone, if majority of top ranking blogs on page one are answering questions, satisfying the secondary intent, alternative ingredients, how to serve, how to store, so on and so forth. Right. You should have that also. Right. You should not think of it from a perspective of I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing and expect for this to survive every single update. You have to be fluid and you have to look at page one and see like, hey, has the results shifted? What is Google expecting to see from us? Right.

One of the questions that I have related to that and this would tie into, you know, because I think the spectrum in the world of SEO would be like creator heavy with SEO sprinkled in and then SEO heavy with creative sprinkled in.

Right.

And I think for the person who's.

Creative heavy like creator first, like the Idea of looking at competitors or the other ranking pages, like folding that content into yours could maybe seem a little bit soul sucking for, for the people who are SEO heavy, it's like great, like, let's build this out. Yeah.

Right.

But what about, what about for those creators? Is there hope for them? And for me, I also think of.

Like, what if just the really good thing from a content perspective just doesn't exist yet? Like somebody hasn't talked about it or covered it.

Right.

So could you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah, look, it's, it's, it's about changing like the fundamental approach to what you're doing. Right. And the bloggers that I coach, so I have a coaching product where it's a handful of people, I don't have much time for it. But it's bloggers who are just starting out and we go over and we change their approach to what they do function being I'm going to create a new piece of content from the point of ideation or I'm going to go back in and update older content. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

And then the process so that you're not stuck in this like it's overwhelming information, amount of information that you can collect from all of these tools. Right. There's a lot of noise. So what we do is we teach and we say always start your journey by understanding. First of all, if it's possible, look at page one. Mixed result. Like we talked. Right. Like tacos. Right. It can be like where to buy tacos, history of tacos, some tacos. Like three blog posts about tacos. You're most, most likely not going to hit page one because there's only room for three and those are already reserved for the bigger players. Right. Be aware. So always start the, we talk about, always start the journey by, by looking at what's happening on page one. Understanding what's. You don't have to do data analysis, you don't have to collect it, but you can click and scroll.

Yeah.

And get a feel. Like I have, like my post is super short. Everybody on page one is a thousand plus words. It's a Ukrainian borscht recipe. I should probably expand on it.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. You don't have to be an SEO. It's common sense. It's changing your approach. It's looking at page one, understanding what everybody, again, what everybody's doing in common. Am I coming close to what Google wants there? And then actually being realistic, can I actually rank here? Right. A lot of times. So I want to take a minute to Talk about that. A lot of times bloggers will say this is an impossible keyword for me. Right. Like I will not rank there. But then we look at page one and we actually pull up the data for the ranking pages. Then we see that there are in certain positions on page one. Typically top two spots are reserved for like more authoritative sites. Whatever that authority is, whatever you guys internally want to apply a measurement DA, PA, whatever it is. Right.

Can you talk about what those are for the Right.

So domain Domain authority is a score that is calculated based on multiple factors. Some of them include the amount of backlinks and referring domains and the quality of those domains, which help people understand what is the opportunity for the site to rank. Essentially was created by Moz to help with backlink building so that we can see, oh, this site has DA30. I want to reach out to that site and get a backlink.

It's kind of like to use an analogy in the restaurant world, like the Michelin star rating. Like it's another company that's created this rating. In this case it's Mozzarella, which is a company that focuses on SEO related information and the is. So it's not necessarily like a Google piece of information, but it is helpful to understand, generally speaking with the restaurant, like how good is this restaurant with a website, like, how authoritative. How many backlinks does that site have? How long has it been around? Is that a fair analogy?

Right. But it can be easily manipulated. Right. So I can artificially inflate somebody's domain authority. That doesn't mean that the site is going to rank. There's other factors to look at. Right. But so whatever that authority is, and Google doesn't look at it. Google in no, in any of its patents, does Google reference domain authority or anything like that. Right. So like Google does not care about that. Google does talk about relevancy and everything else, but Google does not talk about a domain authority. Google has its own way. It's called PageRank. It's not about the webpage. It's because Larry Page wrote that algorithm.

Super confusing.

Right? Right.

So Page happened to have the last name Paige.

Right? Right. Larry Page. Right. So and that's 0 to 10. Right. And we don't know what they stop telling us what it is. We don't know what the calculation is. There's no way. It's an arbitrary number. Domain authorities arbitrary. But usually you'll see higher DA sites take position 1 and 2 or you'll see sites that are like the bigger, bigger sites. But when you Actually look at the authoritativeness, whatever that is. I'm quoting with my fingers of the ranking sites, you will. In most of the queries right now, you'll see a handful of pages midway on page one who don't have much authority for the actual ranking page, not the domain. Right? Yes, domain signal does impact a page's ability to rank, but it still shows you that content is still the biggest ranking factor. And I have, I have screenshots from my coaching clients where when they follow the instructions and really understand this is what the topic is, this is the intent behind this query. This is what the user wants. If I structure the content to accommodate the user's primary intent, secondary intent, and I cover the topic in its entirety, while not overwhelming, turning it into like a 3,000 word article, right? You will rank, you will hit. Not again from not a lot of variables.

Yeah, right.

But you will give yourself at least a fighting chance of hitting that. And because you structured your content.

Go ahead, go ahead, finish that thought.

Because you've structured the content to the user, to what the user wants. I tell everyone to look at search Best bikes for kids, the number one result. I'm not even going to tell you who it is. The number one result has been there for years, has not moved because I've been showing it as an example. Has not moved from page one being number one on page one. The three and a half plus years that I've been showing this as an example to bloggers, right? And that post covers the topic in its entirety. Best bikes for kids. I want you to actually search for it. I want you to click on that first result and I want you to scroll through it. I'm here to find out which bike is the best bike for my kid and it's giving me that right at the top. Everything else, best bikes for short kids, for tall kids, for aggressive riders, for slow riders, for kids with bad balance is all below. They're accommodating my primary intent. Secondary intent is below the fold. Now, even in Google, if you look at page one, you search Best bikes for kids, the top of the page is going to be informational content because Google's satisfying that primary intent. I'm here to learn. And then below the fold, if you scroll down Best bikes for kids, you start seeing local results, target rei, places where you can buy the bike. Google is accommodating my primary intent at the top, secondary at the top, at the bottom, reverse that, remove the best from the query and just search for bikes for kids. Now, Google interprets That as commercial intent I want to buy a bike, not learn. So you'll see that the results have shifted. Same results, almost the same sites are ranking for both. But the way Google organized that page is now different. It's prioritizing commercial intent pages towards the top and informational intent pages towards the bottom. Because my query is primarily commercial or I want to make a purchase.

And it's amazing how one small change like that can reshuffle essentially the entire order of things based on Google's assumption around intent. Like best being a qualifier, that is an indicator around the intent which is research. So they surface informational content. You remove that and the assumption is that there's a purchasing decision just looking to buy a buy a bike and not compare or analyze necessarily. So what is that? How do you apply that same conceptual information in the world of recipe content? Like what so impact does that have?

Take a look, take a look at the results for if you search for chicken dinner recipes, plural, right. Majority of page one is going to be round the posts, categories or slideshows pages that help a user determine what he or she is going to make. Right. What they are going to make. Google has understood that when somebody searches for chicken dinner recipes plural, I'm looking for I'm not sure which recipe I want to make and I want to make a decision. So Google is accommodating that query and that intent by showing me results that are all majority are roundups or categories. Right. Where I can click in and then see a list of different recipes that are chicken and our dinner and I can click on them and decide which one I want to make. Right now if I put in oven baked chicken recipe, Google understands that I am searching for a specific recipe. So if you wrote a recipe post and Google is not surfacing single recipe posts for that result, good luck, you're not going to be on page one.

Yeah, right.

Another example baked potato soup recipe. So I talk about focusing around the query, right. Google is. It takes things very literally right now, right. Where baked potato soup recipe used to rank on page one for potato soup recipes. It's now on page two. Nowhere on page one do we see any variation away from just a baked potato. You can have creamy and old fashioned but you're not going to have like bacon potato or sweet potato because that was. That's not what the user is searching for.

Yeah, right. So it's getting hyper specific and matching those long tail keywords.

Salmon. I was just working on somebody the other day on somebody's audit salmon like it was like oven baked salmon with. With. With garlic and lime. Right. And it's ranking for oven baked salmon with garlic and lime. It's number one. But like, there's like negative two people searching for that monthly, right?

Yeah, that long. Long.

So when we look at page one, we're like, well, this, this is still an oven baked salmon recipe. Just because it has, you know, garlic and lime or whatever. Right. Doesn't mean that it's not. Right. So let's take focus away from that lime and garlic and optimize it towards, or refocus it towards oven baked salmon recipe. Right. So yeah, definitely. And that's what I say. Start with page one. Even just the titles on page one are going to tell you, like, oh, I probably won't be able to rank here because my recipe requires this component.

Sure. Yep. It's. That's great. And I think the point that you made about content being a primary driver is a good one because I think sometimes we can get overwhelmed. Even I know for like any new endeavor that we're starting, I can get overwhelmed by like, shoot, I haven't been doing this for 10 years and therefore I'm not going to be able to ever make any progress.

Not true.

But. But what I hear you saying is through the combination of. And this is maybe a good note to end on. Would be interested in your thoughts on this if this feels accurate. Through the combination of good content written for people first and foremost.

And not that you don't want to.

Take in best practices around SEO. Definitely do that. But best practices around SEO are usually best practices around good content for people.

Right? Right, Right.

So plus doing kind of like lay of the landscape research, like taking a look at what the search results are, maybe if you want to jump into an SEO tool, you can do that. But just getting a general idea of what search results look like, how extensive are pieces of content, and then using that to like softly inform how you're going to produce a piece of content while being strategic about your focus. You don't want to get too specific, but you also don't want to get too general. Finding that sweet spot, you'll be able to get traction. Does that feel fair?

Right. Right. Absolutely. And the point should be that, and I still see this happen, a lot of recipe bloggers are still following those best practice rules. We got it like green lighting Yoast. We have to include our primary keyword in all of the headings. Right. But then when you sit down and you read through that content, like if you actually like have somebody read that to you?

It feels really fast. Yeah.

It doesn't sound conversational. It doesn't sound proper. Then Google understands this. Right.

Whereas five, 10 years ago, maybe wouldn't have now does.

Right. In 2019. November of 2019 is when Casey, like we raised the biggest flag. Like, hey, Google is policing this. Which now is a little bit different because when we look at results now, page one does sometimes have majority of the bloggers that are, that are stuffing keywords. Not saying that you should do the same thing, but you know, it's still possible. Google is not like as strict. You should definitely not do it. But you will see it in search results. Absolutely. Definitely right for humans. So look, at the end of the day, it's understanding what Google is expecting to see because Google probably has a better understanding of what the user wants to see. Right. Google has literally done the thinking for you. It's showing you what it's expecting to see on page one. Not copy.

Interesting point.

Right?

Yeah.

Its algorithm has decided. Right.

Yeah.

Then really understanding what everybody else, what, what everyone's doing in common that you are not. Not saying copy them, but really understand what are the components, what are the titles, how long is the post, how is intent prioritized? Right. And you will have outliers. You will have some that are just like, I look at some of these results, like, how is this person even here? Like, why are they here? There's literally like, like no headings on the page. Right. It's like comments. The first H1 is comments. Right?

Yeah.

But they're there for some, for, for whatever reason. Right. Don't take that into your evaluation. That's not you. That's, that's, that's an anomaly. Right. Or if you're, if you're, if you have a Pad Thai recipe and you see that everyone. The first three results are like authentic Thai recipe blogs. That's all they write about. We will most likely not outrank them because that's their primary topical focus is Thai food. Google has mapped their entity to Thai food recipe. They will always be there regardless of what your domain authority is. Just really, really understand. Look at the result and get to know it. You don't have to have tools you don't have. There's, there's definitely tools that you should have. But like, you can learn a lot from page one.

Yeah, that's great. It reminds me of, you know, a lot of times I come back to. Just because it's helpful for me comparing to other industries completely unrelated and in the world of music. Like, one of the things that you do in order to better understand a craft is like learn songs and listen to songs. If you want to get better at a language, you spend time speaking the that language with other people. If you want to get better at search optimization, spend time looking at search results and like seeing what Google's surfacing. It's. I've never really thought of that before, but it's like you're studying to try and understand better how the search algorithm works. And like, even for myself, I'm like, oh my gosh, I should do that more. Like, it's, it's a great takeaway and letting that inform your content creation process. So arson, we could make this a two hour episode, but I think probably what would be better is we'll have you on another time to continue these conversations. That'd be valuable for people, but for.

Those who would want to follow along.

With what you're up to, work with you potentially.

What's the best way to connect with.

You and the team at tophatrank?

Right, so tophatrank.com, we have a whole section says bloggers just go in there. Our webinar, it's free. We don't charge anything for it. We do it once a month. We have all the resources on our, on our website. It's tophettering.com SEO for bloggers. One word. Definitely go there. Register for the webinar. We're on YouTube. Once a month we do an episode around a specific topic. Yesterday we did an episode on how to prepare for the holiday season, how to like best optimize and prepare your content for the holiday season. The episode before, we had a brilliant LinkedIn, not a LinkedIn Pinterest consultant. So we covered different topics. Definitely lots of information there. We've been doing this for two years. We have a great crew in the big community. Tophatrank.com is the site and then Instagram, also tophatrank, Twitter, tophatrank. Everywhere it's tophatrank.

That's great, Arsene. So much fun to talk to you. We'll have to do it again soon.

Pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me.

Hey there, Alexa here. And thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We really appreciate you being here. If you really like this episode, we would so appreciate you leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps the show get in front of new listeners and it just makes us really happy. We read each and every one and it's just so great to hear from you. What you're liking and what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. Episodes. So all you have to do is go and find the Food Blogger Pro podcast on your Apple Podcast app, scroll down to the ratings and reviews section, and then you can rate the show. And then leave a written review if you want to be even more awesome. And while you're there, we would really appreciate if you subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. But maybe you talk about one of your favorite interviews on the show, or maybe you just talk about the show as a whole. But regardless of what you talk about in your review, we appreciate it so, so much. So thanks again for tuning in today. We'll see you next time. And until then, make it a great week.