The Art of SEO with Stephan Spencer

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Hey there, thanks for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Anne and in today's episode we're sitting down with Stefan Spencer, who wrote the Art of SEO. Stefan kicks off the episode by going into why SEO is still as important as ever, even with the rise of AI. While AI may shift how we search, he assures listeners that SEO remains the backbone of the Internet, so you should stay focused on your SEO goals, keep investing in strategies that work and adapt to the evolving world of search. You'll also hear him talk about the power of experimentation, why you shouldn't be afraid to test out different tactics on your site, and how tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you refine your strategy. Lastly, you'll learn about the importance of creating content that resonates with your audience. Google rewards authentic, helpful content, so the more personal and valuable your content is, the better it'll perform in search. Before we dive into this week's episode, I wanted to take a moment to let you know that our Cyber Monday sale is currently live and you can join Food blogger Pro for $100 off of your annual plan. Plus you'll receive a copy of our brand new SEO workbook that we just cooked up for you. This offer is only available if you enroll before Wednesday, December 4th at 11:59pm Eastern Time 10:59pm Central Time, so be sure to visit the link in our show notes or go to foodbloggerpro.com cyber Monday-2024 to take advantage of our Biggest sale of the year. And now, without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

Stefan, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

We. I was on the other side of the microphone not too long ago having a conversation for your Marketing Speak podcast. And one of the things we were talking about as we got into it was SEO. And I said this phrase that I say on this podcast occasionally. I said, it's really an. It's like an art and a science. And you're like, oh, have you read my book by chance? It's called the Art of SEO. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's so perfect. So you have been in the world of online business building SEO specifically for a really long time. Talk to me about that title, the Art of SEO. Why did you come up with that and does that still feel true today?

Yeah, well, I can't take credit for the title that preceded me actually. There was a series from O'Reilly, the Art of Project Management and so forth. So the Art of series was a top selling series for O'Reilly.

O'Reilly being kind of these technical books that cover all sorts of different topics.

Yes. I've been a fan of O'Reilly, the publisher and Tim O'Reilly the founder for. Since the 90s. Since the early 90s. I actually learned Perl how to program and build websites in 1994 and make them interactive using database calls and all that. Using perl from an O'Reilly book.

Love it.

1994. So I really loved and appreciated that publisher. I never would have dreamed that I would be an O'Reilly author. Three time O'Reilly author back when I.

First picked one up and like used it to learn how to build something.

Yeah, yeah. And so the Art of War is actually, I think the original inspiration for O'Reilly's Art of series. But are you familiar with the Art of War by Sun Tzu?

Yeah, the Art of War. And then the other one that we actually talk about a lot is the War of Art. Do you know Steven Pressfield?

I don't know him, but I've heard wonderful things about his book. Yeah, yeah. So the Art of War has this amazing quote that I love to share, and that is tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. And I believe that applies to SEO, not just to warfare and all of marketing, really. So if you think about all the tactical stuff that people are so focused on with regards to SEO, what the latest helpful content update musings are and the. The biggest winners and losers in the last core update and so forth. It's so tactical that you get lost in the weeds and that's where you get slaughtered on the battlefield to mix metaphors. And I really want people to zoom out and think bigger picture because one SEO isn't going away anytime soon because what's one of the most popular websites on the planet? Google. And what's the primary driver of Google traffic? Is it paid, is it AI overviews or is it organic? It's still organic and will be for quite some time. So these naysayers who say that SEO is dead and have said it over the years and now the reason supposedly is AI, they're off, they're way off the mark. So keep investing in SEO. Trust that everything is unfolding as it's meant to like divinely orchestrate it and just relax and make your site better for users and for SEO. And I've seen a lot over these decades I've been in the SEO game with, you know, I'm building SEO into websites from the 90s. I actually started doing SEO before Google existed and it's, you know, some of the tried and true best practices, foundational principles of creating a crawler friendly website that functions and works and has all the proper redirects when needed and the robots txt directives as needed and has, you know, quality content that's not too small and not overly keyword dense just for SEO purposes and, and has relevant keywords in the title tags and all that sort of stuff is foundational and has been since the 90s. Yeah, why would we veer away from that? Because, you know, a lot of users are on ChatGPT now. They're not getting the same level of quality of the response if they're trying to do a search query even with search GPT they're not it, it doesn't hold a candle to Google search. Now there are some naysayers who, who hate on Google and its algorithm because it seems to have gotten less relevant as years have gone on. But the fact of the matter is it is most people's go to source when they're searching for information on the Internet. So I think we just all need to double down on doing stuff that is future proofing our website from an SEO perspective and trust that we're not going to have the Apple cart upset anytime soon.

Yeah, that's great. So one of the things I love about that is, you know, I think sometimes for any creator they can get, let's say, well, early stages or people who have Been doing it for a long time. You can get into it and you can start to get surrounded by like, hey, what's the best, you know, host? And that's really good. You should be aware of that. It's like, what's the best way to structure a post? You should be be thinking about that. Or like, you know, what's the, you know, how can I be using Google search console? Those are all really great. But to your point, and maybe the analogy could be, you know, when you talk about the art of something, we often talk about the world of music, and you could have the most expensive guitar with the best strings, with the best amplifier, and you could be on the world's most beautiful stage. But if you're not, like a musician who's trained for 10 years in playing guitar, it's probably not going to sound good. And I feel like because we are in a world that's technical, it can sometimes feel like, hey, if we get all of these tactics right, then we're going to be successful with our craft. And I think both need to exist. But the thing that is most important more than tactics is the art of it. Like, are you creating, are you crafting a thing that people respond to? And then after you've played guitar for a decade and you get really good, you can think about the best strings, you can think about the most expensive guitar, you can think about the best amplifier. Like, those things are still very much so important, the tactics. But what really matters is the craft. But I think what's hard is the craft is ambiguous. And so for people who want to get better at the art side of SEO, what does that look like? How do you get good at the craft of content that Google wants to rank? Not because the tactics are right, but because the content is so good that they want to prioritize that in a search result?

Yeah. Yeah. Now this dovetails very nicely with what we were talking about being the, you know, tactics versus strategy. And that quote from the Art of War, one more quote I want to share with you that I think also frames this quite well. I learned this or heard this from Tony Robbins, and that is to be outcome focused, not activity focused.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah. So if you're outcome focused, you have the big picture in mind, where you're heading and whether these things will actually move the needle or not. You can tick the box off a whole bunch of best practice checklists for SEO and end up wasting a ton of time and not moving the needle hardly at all. So that just, just really an important way to frame this whole conversation. So you're talking about this ambiguous craft of SEO or what some people would actually call black art, right? You're just trying to reverse engineer this black box called the Google algorithm and that even Google engineers don't understand anymore because they've let AI take over and use machine learning to come up with its own criteria, what Google engineers refer to as signals. These are ranking factors and even Google engineers don't know what those ranking factors are. So the SEO community has a better handle on it than Google engineers because we like to try and reverse engineer, kind of poke and prod at that black box called Google and see what works and what doesn't work, and try and discern correlation and causation from each other. And so if you really want to focus on the biggest needle movers, the ones that are going to get you the outcome, you need to be willing to experiment and not just read what are on the SEO blogs. And even in the legit, highly rated books such as mine, the Art of SEO, you cannot just take that at face value and assume it's all exactly true. You have to test this stuff for yourself. Your mileage may vary, as they say, right? So if you look at this kind of like an experiment or set of experiments, then you can try something and see if it works and then revert back if you need to, or try another experiment. You know, let's just take something so basic as title tags. This is a really important element, has been since the beginning, probably the most important element from an on page factor standpoint. You know, stuff on the page, you change the title tag and you'll change your rankings almost certainly. So it could go the wrong direction or it could go the way that you want it. And if it goes the wrong direction, not the end of the world, you just course correct. You treat this as iterative experiments to see what works and what doesn't work. If you're afraid to change your site because you have that coveted ranking for whatever coveted keyword, now you've backed yourself into a corner and you can't make changes because you're afraid you're going to lose your rankings and operating out of fear is never a good thing. So just be willing to be experimental with this. Try things that are going to be really easy to back out of and that don't require a lot of technical acumen, like optimizing your title tags. And that's something that you can use like a WordPress plugin that allows you to mass edit These and not just do them one at a time inside of the WordPress page and post editor. That's not the smart way to do it. Sure. If you have hundreds or thousands of pages, that would take you a very long time.

So one of the things I imagine in that scenario is like, you know, you do have a post that's ranking well. And usually for us, we would say, hey, if we're going to experiment with something, we're going to take a piece of content that we have that's like kind of sort of doing well. You know, it's like it's getting a decent amount of traffic enough where we can experiment and track it. But it's maybe not like position one for the most, you know, high traffic keyword that we have. Like, we're not going to go to that post. We're going to go to one that's maybe like, hey, it's position four or five and we're going to tweak a few things and we're going to see or tweak one thing. Usually it's a better way to test and see what happens with that. An example, in our case, really easy example is like, hey, we're taking videos that are lower down on the page. We're moving those up so people see those right away. And we're just kind of thinking that we want to do that across the board because we're going to earn more from it. If a video player is up and it starts sooner, but we want to see what impact does that have. So we do, you know, batch of 5, batch of 10 kind of these mid tier posts and eventually scale up to the other ones once we feel comfortable with it. Do you have something that you're using to track that with? Are you using Google Search Console? Like how do you know if it changes or you're just like looking in a search result. What's the best way to know when you are experimenting to see the results of that?

Well, you can use expensive tools to do SEO tests and probably our listener or viewer is not, you know, spending that kind of money.

Sure.

So yeah, I would just recommend using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics. And if you have at least one third party tool for SEO, perhaps it's Ahrefs or Ahrefs as they call it, or Semrush or Moz. Yeah, probably the industry is more focused on Ahrefs as the, the top one. But regardless of whether those are all really robust tool sets and they allow you to do keyword research and link research and competitive intelligence, all sorts of great stuff. So you can track rankings and improvements or decreases in link authority. And Ahrefs is referred to as Dr. Domain rating. And yeah, just, you know, you are is URL rating. That's on a page level basis. And then Dr. Is domain wide. And you track those metrics, you track the rankings and overall for the whole site. These are some metrics that I think are useful not just for your own site, but for any site that you're trying to do a partnership with or even get a link from. You want to look at their organic traffic numbers and of course, their doctor score, the domain rating, and the number of keywords that they're ranking for. So if a high doctor site is willing to do a deal with you and do some co marketing, link build with you, or send you some link equity, and they have great doctor but they have very little organic traffic according to Ahrefs, and. And very few keywords that they're actually ranking for in the top 10. That would be a big red flag. To avoid that partnership. That site probably is artificially propped up with a doctor score in order to sell links. Sure.

Interesting. Yeah. It's a world that we've never gotten into, but I know some people are really strategic about how do we partner with a brand. Maybe you do a joint venture. I think about it even in the world of podcasts, like you're on a podcast and somebody will link back. All of that collectively is really so important. One other tool that I want to mention before we get too far away from it, we've used a tool called SEO testing, which actually just brings in Google search console data. And then what it does is you're able to say like, hey, at this point we made this change and it kind of does the calculations for you. So it's still the same data. It's not new data, but it just is helping you understand any changes that potentially happened because of the update that you made. It's hard to know for sure. But one more thing, I want to go back to that. I think it's worth pointing out, number one, Tony Robbins. You had mentioned Tony. He has this great quote on your site. He says, I know Stefan, this man is a genius. The top guy in the SEO business, which is such a great quote to have from such a nice.

I even have the audio.

Yeah. To verify.

Hit the play button and then hear his raspy voice.

That's so great. So you had talked about this idea of outcome over. What was the other word? Outcome.

Outcome focused. Instead of Activity focused.

Activity focused. And I was.

And by the way, just to call back on something that you had mentioned really briefly there, you said seotesting.com there's another platform that you should know about if you do have the budget to do legit SEO testing. Search Pilot searchpilot.com and the founder or co founder of that is Will Critchlow, who you may have heard his name before in the SEO community. He's the former CEO of Distilled, or maybe he's still the CEO there as well. It's a big agency and he hosts the Search Love conference for many years. So he's a fixture in the SEO community and he's heading up this testing platform which at one point was called Distilled odn. So definitely worth checking out. It's not inexpensive though. So if you don't have budget for Ahrefs or Semrush, you almost certainly don't have it for this testing platform.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's all, even when I look at the pricing, it's all custom quote. So like, you need to, you need to reach out in order to get numbers from them.

Yeah. So American Express black card to apply.

Yeah, exactly. Totally. So this idea of outcome, I was thinking about it as it relates to the work that Lindsay and I do. So, you know, context for us. Lindsay and I started Pinch of yum, you know, 14 years ago. Primarily, you know, 99.9% of the content on Pinch of Yum is created by Lindsay. She's the creator, she's the recipe developer. She, you know, publishes content to it. And one of the interesting things I've been reflecting on, even in this conversation is one of the ways that we work together is, you know, Lindsay is very much so what I would consider to be outcome focused. And you can let me know if this kind of taps into what you're talking about. Where she's thinking about, how do people come to this piece of content? Are they going to make this content? Is the recipe going to be successful? Is it clear? Is it easy to understand? Does it flow well? And she's thinking about, like, how do we change and adjust and improve things to get a better outcome from the content? I'm spending 0.5% of my time thinking about that. I'm thinking about, hey, how do we make the site a little bit faster? How do we work with our team to improve core web vitals? How do we make sure that we have those foundational structured data elements included? My belief is like, that's Kind of the easy part. Like, because there's generally a playbook, you can follow that playbook around best practices. It's technical. It's kind of like there's a right and wrong answer with the tactics, but the outcome is more of where the art comes from. It's like, how do you create a piece of content that people are successful with and get people to that content via social media or email or whatever it might be? Is that a little bit of what you're getting at?

Wait, there's a lot to unpack here. So let's say, for example, that you're trying to get in people's heads to understand what they're motivated by and what problem they're trying to solve. Because I learned, I learned this acronym. The acronym is upside, but UPSYD unaware, Problem aware, solution aware, your solution aware, and then decision. So you think of people who are at various stages of the buyer journey. They will have a certain level of sophistication and knowledge about the solution and how to go about implementing it. So let's say that somebody is on a recipe and they want to, I don't know, improve on it and maybe utilize it in a restaurant. I'm just being hypothetical here. That's a very different outcome than somebody who is a busy mom that only has time for maybe 15 minutes in the kitchen because she's got a lot of demands on her time with her kids. So if somebody has a, a set of constraints and you have addressed those constraints in a, in a meaningful way, then you know that's gonna, that's gonna provide the user with a lot of value, that'll make it more link worthy and thus you'll get more links to that content. Because they'll appreciate that even if you're not asking for links, they'll just spontaneously link to it. And it will almost certainly be picked up as kind of next level content by the latest AI algorithms inside of Google. And so you'll be rewarded in multiple ways. Now, let me give you kind of a similar sort of scenario, but one that I'm actually in the process of implementing with perhaps no direct SEO benefit, but I don't care. I'm willing to almost bet the farm on this. And that is to take my personal development podcast, so you have Marketing Speak, my marketing show, which you are on. And then my real passion is actually a personal development podcast all about spirituality and mindset and biohacking and wellness and all that. So that's called Get Yourself Optimized. And we just recently relaunched that site as of a week ago. Beautiful new design designed by Studio One Design. I love those guys out of Australia. And so this new site is going to have. Our vision is for it to have every single episode have an online course based on the podcast. So based on that particular episode, we will use Claude Chat, GPT, ElevenLabs, InVideo IE all in combination to create a three module video based online course that will have things like reflection questions and multiple choice quizzes and worksheets and checklists, even perhaps. And all of that is done through AI with some, you know, just QA before and a lot of disclaimers. Sure. Because AI has hallucinations still. Anyway, so that's the vision is for every single episode. So we're in the process of ironing out all the kinks and we have some of our kind of early adopter guests saying, yes, I want to be part of this pilot. And. And they're actually letting us use their voice. An AI generated version of the voice using 11 labs that you cannot tell is not them. It's so cool. So they'll be narrating their own course.

Yeah.

What's that?

We've experimented with 11 labs. Just myself, like out of curiosity and it's like, oh, wow, this is amazing.

It is, it is. So imagine a faceless video. So it doesn't have the face of. I don't like using an AI avatar of somebody I know. Hey, Jen is spookily good at this. Hey Jen dot com. But I, that feels too, I don't know, uncanny valley to me. And out of integrity or just kind of icky. So I'm not going there. But having the AI narration be the guest's voice, I feel that that's, with their permission, going to be something that's cool and allowed, you know, it's not going to be weird. So imagine you as a, as a guest. Actually you were on the other show, but imagine being a guest on this show and you get an email out of the blue saying, hey, we created an online course. Here's the video scripts, here's the outline of the course, here are the quiz questions and everything. Can you perhaps have a quick look at it and tell us if you like it and kind of give us your blessing to move forward with implementing this? No charge to you. We just want to make our podcast website more of a learning destination and more active learning than just passive listening. And I guarantee you some folks are going to say, that is amazing. I want, I want to work with you. Can I hire your agency? Yeah, right and you know, maybe some will say no, that feels too, I don't know, weird or whatever for me. But you know, then there'll be others who are just kind of in the middle of the road. But the, the idea of this isn't an SEO play because we're not actually going to put the transcripts of those video scripts onto the, the, the website, onto the, on, onto the page. What we're doing is we're adding to the show notes page that has the transcript for the episode.

Yep.

And then there'll be a player with, you know, the, the picker for each module and to access the quizzes and that. And, and that's going to be a huge value add. So that somebody. Back to your point about going after the outcome. You know that Wayne Gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going to be.

Yep.

So we're skating to where the puck is going to be. I don't think anybody at this point, any podcaster has done this on mass. I don't think this exists yet. We'll be the pioneer in this area of taking a podcast episode and turning it into an online course, like a full blown multi hour online course based on the podcast episode and doing it across a whole swath of, of these episodes. I have 470 some episodes already. So that's, that's a way to create something that's really remarkable. And I'm using that, that term very deliberately because I love Seth Godin's definition of remarkable. And that's simply this worthy of remark. If you create worthy of remark.

Yeah.

You are really going to stand out. You're going to be that purple cow that he talks about in his book. And that makes you link worthy. That makes you buzzworthy, that, that makes it something that, that would interest an AI algorithm that's trying to discern who are the top movers and shakers in a particular space. So on the other end of the spectrum, you have folks who are just trying to stay up with the kind of old school SEO tactics.

Tactics.

And that's not gonna really future proof your business because you've got folks like me that are in your space that are thinking completely outside of the box and that are gonna leap multiple levels above you in this video game.

Yeah. So I love that idea. And the reason is because so much of what search is is you have these platforms. We'll talk about Google and it's a platform trying to figure out how do you get the thing to people that is most helpful. And there's all of these different ways that they're doing that. You know, links being an indicator that we often talk about, but links are really just a reflection of something that happens in normal life, which is people remarking on a thing. It's remarkable. And to go back to the music example, like you, 50 years ago, you would have a musician who was remarkable, right? And so you have Jimi Hendrix. It's like, he is remarkable. And people talk about it, they share about it. It's like links, but it's like a analog version of that. And so when the web comes around, how do you know what is worth showing to people? Well, you look at what people are remarking on, what people are commenting on. Now, obviously, there's hundreds of other variables, thousands of other variables that go into it. But what it's getting at is the core of what we are trying to do. In the world of content, whether it be with SEO or Instagram or Pinterest, you are trying to create something that is remarkable, worthy of remark, and you are doing it in a digital space. And then the question is, like, from there, how are you going to choose to create a business out of it if that is your goal? Like, if your goal is to produce revenue, you create remarkable content. And then you say, do we want to do affiliate? Do we want to do ads? Do we want to work with brands? Do we want to sell our own product? But it all starts with having something that is remarkable. And things are remarkable for different ways for different reasons. It could be because it's super helpful. It could be because it's super funny. It could be because, you know, it's super inspiring. Like, these are all of the different reasons why something might become remarkable. And so for people in the recipe world, one of the things that I think people get into it and feel attention with is like, hey, I created a recipe. I covered all of the things that I should from a tactic standpoint, and it's still not working. Why is that? Well, is it remarkable? And that's the question that you have to sit with. So that's. I love that as an outcome of this discussion is just really a reflection around, like, how can you create content that's worthy of remark? What a great takeaway. Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by member kitchens. Imagine your kitchen. It's more than just a place to cook. It's where your creativity comes to life. It's where you nourish your family, your friends and yourself with food and conversation. Now imagine sharing that kitchen with the world. Imagine inviting people in to experience your unique flavors, your personal touch, your passion for food. At member kitchens, they believe that every food creator has a special kitchen to share and their job is to help you swing the doors wide open. Their white label meal planning platform is your virtual kitchen. It's fully equipped with everything you need to showcase your recipes and brand, build a loyal community and earn a sustainable income. As one customer said, recurring revenue is life changing. Your kitchen will integrate with tools you already use like Zapier and WordPress, and it's fully configurable, putting you in complete control of your brand and your business, all in an easy to use interface backed up with stellar one on one support. So if you're ready to share your kitchen with the world, set up your own member kitchen. Visit memberkitchens.com today to learn more and start your free trial. And use the code Food blogger Pro for 50% off your first two months of any plan.

And speaking of remarking people remarking about your content, in SEO parlance, there's the term unlinked mention. So somebody's talking about your brand and like pinch of yum and they're not linking to you, which happens a lot.

Yep.

Right. And I know it ticks people off if they pay for a PR firm and they get this, all this press and very little of it actually links to your website. That's very frustrating. But it's still going to count. Maybe not as much, certainly not as much. But it'll still count because these sophisticated AI algorithms are picking up those unlinked mentions and have been probably for years. So it's not, it's not all is lost. But yeah, you got, you got to put the user first and the outcome first and then all the tactical stuff comes as maybe an afterthought or comes along as, you know, for, for, along for the ride.

Yeah.

And I just want to give a case example. I don't have a food blog myself, but I'm going to use somebody's blog that I've mentioned you to you before about her, her site. She's just blown up. She used to work for me. She was my va, my virtual assistant over a decade ago. And her name is Carolyn Ketchum. She has been blogging about keto and providing free recipes and now recipe books, multiple, multiple bestselling, I think six of them. Keto baking books that have been really going gangbusters. But she gets over 2 million page views a month, 2 to 3 million page views a Month and she's been at this for 12 years. I have a great case study episode about this on my Marketing Speak podcast. And yeah, so she was not an expert on SEO. Even though she worked for me. She did not learn all the SEO ins and outs. This was not a tactical play about applying all the, you know, cheat Google cheat sheet stuff, you know.

Yeah.

It was really about being of value and trusting that this is going to lead somewhere. And she makes so much money.

Yeah.

Super successful at this.

It's, it's amazing when you find something that you are passionate about that you were good at and, and that there's a need in the marketplace for it. And I think of that in the world of Keto, like not. My guess is she understands it really well. She's lived that story. She can help people who are going through it. It's probably noteworthy because of those things or remarkable you could say. And it's in a world where there's a lot of people who are interested in eating in that way. And so you all of those things together can kind of create this collective wave. Plus I'm sure she's smart about tactics layering on top of it to make sure you know she's or is partnering with somebody who does like implementing kind of those best case scenarios. So it's really cool to hear. We'll link to her as well to add to her kind of.

Her site is all day I dream about food.

Cool.

Which is a brilliant name based on the Adidas brand.

Yeah.

Dream about sports.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, I don't want to, you know, poo poo tactical stuff. I don't want to say like let me give you an example specific to you actually to Pinch of Yum. It's really basic, simple thing that you could implement. So you have under your recipe categories vegan. Okay. Now you don't rank for vegan recipes that that page is highly optimized. It looks like for vegan recipes it's the beginning of the title tag. It's in the H1 headline and you know there's top rated vegan recipes as a sub headline. Vegan dinner recipes, vegan instant pot recipes, easy vegan recipes, etc. Here's where the tactics come in that really will get this page and, and the pages that you're going to create from this discussion if you so choose.

Yeah. Great.

Will will really sing to the search engines for the keywords that you're trying to target. So what's I think a, a missed opportunity for you is those categories of like subcategories of vegan recipes, such as top rated and vegan dinner recipes and vegan instant pot recipes, easy vegan recipes. You're not ranking for those. So you're not only not on page one for vegan dinner recipes, not just vegan recipes, but vegan dinner recipes. You're not on the first 100 results. You're not on the first 10 pages for vegan dinner recipes. How do you do that? You create a page all about vegan dinner recipes. All you have right now is, is a section on your main category page of vegan that's like vegan dinner recipes and then a sentence and then you have some featured vegan recipes that are dinner recipes in you know, like a carousel that. It's not a rotating carousel. I hate it when those auto rotate. But yeah, yeah, it's a carousel. So all the stuff that's hidden by that carousel, anything that's hidden is going to get discounted by Google. If it's hidden in a tab or within a hamburger menu or a. You have to hit the plus sign or whatever it is down arrow to display the thing. Know that Google is not going to give it full credit because it's not visible by default to the user. So you only have what, four or five ish recipes featured fully visible and the rest are. You have to use the slider carousel thing to see those next ones and what there may be 20, 30. I don't know, I didn't keep going. But there's a bunch. What if you made a separate page just for vegan dinner recipes?

Yep.

That would sing to the search engines for the phrase vegan dinner recipes instead of just being almost like an afterthought as a little section on your main vegan category page. Same thing with easy vegan recipes and so forth. And then that gives you also the opportunity to blow out the page because you're not just going to have this little stub of that carousel and.

A.

Part of a page. You want to fill that up with lots of valuable stuff relating to that topic, whether it's easy vegan recipes or vegan dinner recipes. And you're going to maybe provide some context around why dinner is the most important meal of the day for vegans or whatever. Right. So it's kind of like we had Bed, Bath and Beyond as a client for a while. And you know, they, they had one, one thing they, they did right on their site is they had these, these tips and, and little factoids and things. So you'd go into a section Such as bedding. And then you'd go from bedding into a subcategory like sheets and. And then there's Egyptian cotton sheets and all this. And you look at Egyptian cotton sheets, now you're in a sub subcategory and it gives you all this detail about why Egyptian cotton, what's the big deal about Egyptian cotton? And explanations about things like thread count and why that matters and what are good thread counts. What, you know, how do I be a savvy shopper for sheets and, and not just get, you know, just bottom of the line stuff. So you could do the same thing with you with pinch of yum. And, and vegans are passionate. You know the old adit, like the, the, the running joke about how do you, how do you tell if it's. If the person is a vegan?

Yeah, you don't have to. They'll tell you.

Yeah, they'll just tell you. Yeah.

Same with like CrossFit. How do you know if somebody does CrossFit? You don't have to know. They'll tell you.

Yeah, exactly. That's awesome. I'm vegetarian, by the way.

Yeah. So you can make that joke.

Yeah, totally. So you see how simple tactical stuff can help you to show up for keywords that you may have thought you just gave up on years ago, but you didn't have separate pages dedicated to those topics. And also when you have these topics and you only talk about the that particular phrase that looks very surface level. It looks thin content. That's a term that Google has come up with. Thin content doesn't just mean it's a small word count. 300 word article is obviously thin content. Word article that just keeps talking about the same thing over and over again related to the main keyword. So this is an example I give fairly often. So I'll give it here. Even though it has nothing to do with food. And that is if you were talking about lawnmowers and this whole page is about lawnmowers and it's thousands of words. But you don't talk about lawn care or yards or grass or clippings or horsepower or weed whacker or gardening or any of that. That looks pretty weird. It looks shallow. And that's thin content of a different sort. So you want to create something that's really high value and has what some SEOs refer to as LSI keywords Latent semantic Index. And you don't need to know what that is. It's probably not even used anymore, if it ever was by Google. But the concept is important. You don't. Those related keywords like grass and yards and lawn care and all that on a page all about lawnmowers. You hit, you, you missed the mark and you probably hit the, the potential spam button inside of Google.

So it's important to have a fully comprehensive piece of content that covers all of those different elements. Which makes sense.

I'd say if, if you go to, you know, sit in that other chair imagining yourself as the visitor. Sure. And they have expectations that you're going to cover that stuff, then it would be a mess. It would absolutely be a mess. So if it's a how to, you know, one example I like to share is coffee. Chronicler.com has this ultimate guide to the AeroPress. I don't drink coffee. I could care less about it. But they go to such extreme depth on that how to piece about everything about cleaning it to the slurry and all that, to recipes, to infographics, just so, so, so much dilution, et cetera. It's all there in one place. Now if it was called the ultimate guide to the AeroPress and it only provided recipes for the AeroPress, I'd be like, yeah, that's a disappointment.

Yeah.

So you have to kind of get inside the visitor's head and see what their expectations are based on why they're coming to your page. And if you hit that mark, then you're probably well on track.

That's great. One quick question, just out of curiosity. You know, we talk about those category pages. What you're saying makes sense. You know, if you go to Pinch of Yam and you look at vegan, it's like it's a kind of roll up of all the different vegan recipes on Pinch of Yum. But to your point, like we could have a subcategory under vegan that would be like dinner recipes. Would you imagine that the hierarchy of that being pinch of yum.com recipes/vegan/ dinner. Like that's how the.

You could do it that way. But I wouldn't be worried about getting the URL structure exactly right to the page. Yeah, it doesn't really matter. It's not a major signal. Right. So we don't want to get lost in the weeds of supposed best practices that don't move the needle. That's that activity focus again instead of being outcome focused. That's not a needle mover. So if you had vegan dinner recipes with dashes between each word.HTML or php or something, or slash. Sure. That's that's search engine optimal. But if it's a big project for you to do it that way and you prefer to have it as slash category slash vegan, or slash recipe slash vegan dinner, great, that's fine too. That's not going to be a big difference maker if you have one versus the other or even if it had a number, you know, for your category ID or something instead. It's, it's, yeah, keywords in the URL are nice to have, but it's not, it's not major. And so if you think about, like, how can I best use, utilize my time here? The very best use of your time is to create something really remarkable. So if no one else is, I don't know, making an interactive dinner picker game or something and you are, that could be worthy of remark. That could maybe get you on, I don't know, podcasts or maybe even on TV appearances if it's particularly remarkable. And especially if you time it so that it's timely for those appearances. You know, so if you, if you're like, I have done some TV segments about being a foster kid, for example, and I timed it so that I did those TV appearances during National Foster Care Month, the month of May. So it's like, hey, it's National Foster Care Month. And we have next up, Stefan Spencer, who is a successful entrepreneur and author and a former foster kid, talking about three big lies that people believe about foster care and foster kids coming up next. Right. So that is timely and relevant. And so if you have a timely hook, you have an emotional hook, like, hey, people care about foster kids and the foster care system. They want to hear about it. If you have that equivalent with what you're creating, that's amazing. If you don't, if you hit all the technical kind of tactical stuff, but you missed the emotional hook or the timeliness of it. Yeah. Then you're probably not going to get the results you're after.

Yeah, that's great. I love that. One last thing that I'm curious to hear your reflections on, because I think a lot of people are in this head space right now. It sounds like you're not super concerned about AI in the role of search optimization traffic going away. I think a lot of people listening to the podcast are like nervous about that and nervous about, hey, what happens if everybody uses ChatGPT? Which obviously that would be a huge shift there. But Even, like, as AI overviews rolls out, what if that becomes 50% of search results have AI overviews? I know it's something we think about that we're concerned about. But it sounds like there's not a huge level of concern for you from a search perspective. Is that true?

It is not a concern for me. So maybe in the future we will have this dystopic world, but I believe in creating my own reality or co creating it with God and believing in the most benevolent outcome coming to pass. So I don't think we're going to be slaves to our AI overlords and somewhere in the middle there is AI usurping every opportunity for us to get free organic traffic and that. I don't think that's common either.

Yeah, and if it does, then people are going to stop letting these models train on their data and then the outcome becomes worse. And so there isn't that in between.

Yeah, yeah. So if you think about like how, how would I best utilize Chat, GPT or Claude or Llama or whatever, I'm, I'm going to ask a question and what then that's the an, like that's it, I'm done. No, I'm going to have a conversation. That's why it's called chat, you know, so if I'm chatting with, if I'm conversing with an AI, ultimately it's going to get to the point where I don't want to have that chat myself. I want my personal agent to have to be my representative and have that chat with whatever the large language model is so that personal agent I can entrust with things like my personal private health data, medical records, tax returns, financial records, all that sort of stuff and say, hey, keep this stuff locked up tight. But you know more about me than even my, my spouse does. Go and ask questions about this, that and the other thing of these LLMs and get, you know, collect, collate and, and aggregate and, and curate and all those things and come back to me with, with the final answer. That's coming. Certainly that's coming. But there's still going to be opportunities and, and needs for us to kind of get into the weeds. We're not going to just make the biggest purchase decision of our life without doing our own due diligence. We're just going to, you know, trust the personal agent who had a conversation with chat, GPT and, and now we're going to bet everything on red. No, we're going to get involved if it's an important decision. And so if you think about what's likely to come to pass in the, in the near term, it's going to be more use of LLMs, large language models for discovery and research and competitive intelligence and brainstorming and strategizing and things like that. It's a great conversation starter, great conversation partner, but it's not the same thing as, let's say I'm, I'm, I'm searching for new, I don't know, new webcam. And I want the best webcam because I shoot a lot of video. It's probably like a CEN or one of these other sites that's done a lot of testing because there's this al, this, this algorithm or, or I, I, let's just call it a metric for now. That's an acronym from Google. It's called eat. Now almost certainly Google has very effectively trained its machine learning algorithms on eat. EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Now show me an AI that has ever had experience with cooking a vegan dinner or basket weaving or scuba diving or representing itself in court. Never any of those. So it won't ever have that experience until it's like fully autonomous and you.

Know, dystopian future a few years down the line.

Yeah, but in the, in the near term it's not going to have the experience. And why was E added to the eat? Because it started as expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness eat. And then Google years later said, hey, you know what, there's an actual another E that we need to add to this experience.

Why?

Because of AI. So if you're mass generating a bunch of content that can't, it can't possibly have that experience of these topics and yet you're generating the content as if it does, you will be outed. The algorithm at Google will be very sophisticated at catching this sort of stuff. You know, so much better than using an AI detector such as GPT0 or something. You know, it's like these are good, but they're not great. Certainly Google is great at it. They're just not letting on that they're great at detecting this stuff. So you want to again, just relax and, and take a breath and know that what you're doing when you're creating great content, that's remarkable and that it's really helpful and, and that you really understand the motivations and the situation, the problems that your visitor is facing, then you're dialed in to really set yourself up for success. And even if things change with algorithms and maybe even a new search engine out competes Google at some point, I don't see that coming anytime soon. I'm not Concerned that search GPT is going to take out Google. I don't, I don't see it. I just don't. Now where LLM does come in handy is empowering you to do better SEO and more SEO. If you didn't have the time, the budget, and now you can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude, etc. To create things like, I don't know, improve, improve your XML site maps and, and write a first draft copy of some intro copy for each of your subcategory pages. Because you never did that before. You know, like that's, that's low hanging fruit. You can definitely utilize ChatGPT and, and Claude are my favorites for helping you with some, some AI assisted SEO tasks. Now you can't just trust that it's all correct because it may hallucinate on you. And those are just bold faced lies, essentially. Yeah, hallucinations. But you know, you, you do the QA and the fact checking and all that, make sure that everything is copacetic before you, you launch it. But you can really multiply your potential impact by using AI as kind of.

Assistant or companion to what you're doing, not as the replacement.

Right. As a facilitator. I love this quote. I think it's from Mike Koenigs or maybe he got it from somewhere else. You won't be replaced by an AI, you'll be replaced by somebody who's using AI.

Yeah, totally. That's so great.

And another related quote, this one's from Peter Diamandis. They're going to be two kinds of businesses at the end of this decade. Businesses that are. One is businesses that are using AI at their core and that includes even the local plumber and everything. And two businesses that are out of business.

Yeah, yeah. Because of the businesses that use AI. So it's like it's this reminder to us that as creators, as business owners, figure out how to use it because you need to be competitive, you need to be smart, you need to be efficient, but also to kind of preserve that humanity in what you're doing. And that being such a great balance. And I know you have this interesting balance that you strike with your podcast. So as we close out, my guess is people would be interested in following along with what you're doing and you have both the get yourself optimized as well as marketing speak podcast. So talk a little bit about those and then shout out for where people can find you and then we'll wrap up.

Okay, awesome. So get yourself optimized. Do. Sounds like an SEO podcast, but that's personal development, spirituality, biohacking and all that. So you can go to getyourselfoptimized.com for that one. And Marketing Speak is all things marketing, not just SEO. So things related to paid search and paid social and analytics and e commerce, conversion optimization, all that. So that's marketingspeak.com and it's all, you know, all the transcripts, all the, there's, there's checklists of, of takeaways, you know, actionable, actionable takeaways. There's a lot of great material there on, on those two sites. And then StefanSpencer.com is my personal site that has a ton of like SEO myths and best practices and, and training videos, all sorts of great research material and of course the, the book the art of SEO that I co authored, published by O'Reilly fourth edition. Don't get the third edition. That's like eight years old and a thousand pages instead of 770 pages.

Nice. We'll link to it in the show notes. Stefan, thanks so much for coming on. Really fun to talk to you.

Yep, likewise. Thank you.

Hey there Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team here. We hope you enjoy this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Since we're kicking off a new month, we wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this December. Later this week we'll be publishing a coaching call with Erica from the Food Blog. It's a Flavorful Life. In this coaching call, Bjork and Erica discuss how to hire, help and outsource work, how to get started on Google search console, strategies for dividing your time, the best conferences for food creators, and how to build a community of fellow food bloggers. Next up is our live Q and A with the one and only Bjork Ostrom. For our last live Q and A of the year, we thought it would be fun to host an AMA or an Ask Bjork anything. We're excited to answer all of your blogging and business related questions from how to get started to monetization to all things strategy. We're rounding out the month with a brand new course all about the Feast theme and plugin. Whether you're looking to make the switch over to Feast or you're looking for a refresher, we've got you covered in this upcoming course. It's going to be a great month and we really hope you can join us for some of these new pieces of content. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and would like to join us. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com membership to learn more about our membership and how you can join us on Food Blogger Pro. We'd love to have you, and we'll see you back here next week for another podcast episode. Make it a great week.