Google's new indexing approach, The sleazy world of Reddit marketing, and more

Check this out because we're talking about SEO right now. This is a tweet from Kevin Indeg. So he says Google's approach to indexing content has evolved significantly. Too many low quality pages can hurt you in Google than the core algorithm updates. Understanding this shift is important for anyone making strategic SEO decisions. Quantity is out, quality is in also for indexing. So in this chart over here, those that can't see it, this is from Ahrefs. So undisclosed domain crawled pages versus organic traffic. So in the black, it shows crawled pages. And then organic traffic, um, you can see in the blue, right? So basically what this is showing is in the black line, when the number of pages goes up a lot, when Google has to work more, the organic traffic seems to go down. And this is just one example over here, but, um, you know, we've seen that with our, our stuff in the past. We've seen that with client stuff as well. I don't know if you've seen this as well.

We have too.

Yep.

And we also noticed that if your site traffic is going down, in many cases, assuming it's a big site, a lot of it's because you have pages that are getting little to no traffic. Like I was just in a pitch the other day and it wasn't really a new client pitch, but it was a pitch to existing client to, no joke, delete 90+% of their pages.

Wow.

I was like, guys, we just need to delete them. And I know you want a 301 redirect or 404 and there's a lot of technical SEO stuff that you can do. Forget that part. The point I was trying to make is 90+% of your pages get no traffic from search engines in the last 6 months. And a lot of those pages have products that you no longer sell. So why would you just leave them up? Like, just let's get rid of pages. And sure, you want to combine and do all the right things for SEO, but they're just like, oh, we're losing rankings to the competitors. I'm like, yes, this is one of the big reasons. And the other big reason that we see is big sites have a lot of pages that are just stale and are like 4 or 5 years old and never have been updated when they need to be updated. And the last part is the key, need to be updated. There's some web pages like how to tie a tie, it doesn't really need to be updated. After you create an amazing page that's ranking well on how to tie a tie with some animations and GIFs or some videos, there's only so many ways to tie a tie and people don't care for someone to make up a new random way to tie a tie. It's just like, just stick with common sense when it comes to SEO.

And Google has said this in the leaks that came out a couple months ago, where if a page is getting zero visits or has zero links, then they're going to count it less. And if you're still waiting, you're wasting crawl budget on it. Think about it. If you're a search engine, if you run Google, for example, are you going to want to waste your time on these pages that are getting No clicks, no traffic, nothing. And you have all the clickstream data with Android, with Chrome, with everything. Of course, that should be a negative signal. Just think about that, right? It makes a lot of sense because they're focused on, you know, they're pleasing their shareholders at the end of the day, right? That's a big piece of it. And so you don't want to waste resources, AKA money like that. And so yes, I don't think enough people think about updating, consolidating, or deleting enough. That's been reinforced even more with this leak. And, you know, even with what Kevin just showed over here, it makes sense.

Yeah. And I don't know why people are so afraid to delete. Like they hold onto it. I'm like, but your traffic is going down. Would you rather it go up or would you rather it go down? Well, if I delete it, what happens? I'm like, no one visits the page or buys from it. Who cares?

Like, just be logical.

Take out the emotion. The data shows it's making you no money. So delete the damn page.

Yeah, people don't like losing things. That's what it is at the end of the day. It's just human psychology. I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post what Whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you there. Did you see this? You worked with Lars Lofgren before. You remember that guy? Yep.

I've worked with him a lot over the years.

He used to work for me.

Great guy.

So, Lars, he wrote a post over here on Reddit marketing. I don't know if you've seen it. I'm going to share my screen over here. So, here's what's interesting. So, the headline here is The Sleazy World of Reddit Marketing. Everything is fake. All I really need to do is point you, point your attention to this post over here. So this post over here, the original post is, what's the best standing desk, right? And you see a moderator over here, his name's Manunda, and you can choose either. So he's saying you can choose either UpGravity or FlexiSport. Both are amazing. And if you have a little higher budget, then go for MountUp. By the way, here's the Amazon list of best standing desks as recommended by other Redditors, right? What happens is people are paying these, these group moderators money to post these and Sticky, these posts. And I'm assuming they're driving to like these affiliate posts over here and then you can just buy from Amazon and there's like, they collect an affiliate commission.

Nice. Dude, Reddit's been ranking really well. But if you saw the latest Google algorithm update, a lot of sites that got dinged in the past few core updates, you know, have started to recover quite a bit.

Yeah. Are you guys recovering?

I don't know. I haven't checked, but I know our traffic is up the last few months.

Yeah, I would say the last couple of weeks we've been going up consistently. I'm actually trying to pull up Search Console to see if it's been moving up and to the right, but it's like pretty significant pushes with impressions.

And this is important for everyone listening. If you just heard, I myself, as you can tell, don't really look at my analytics on a daily basis or my traffic stats or even weekly basis or monthly. And Eric does look, but he's not looking daily or that frequently either. Because in a business, yes, you need to do things like marketing and drive traffic through SEO or paid advertising. But the more important number is the numbers that actually move your revenue. So in my case, I look at things like PR from places like Adweek or Ad Age or Campaign, or how many RFPs we're getting and where they're coming from. Because a lot of these things or awards combined, they're driving a lot more qualified leads than just writing a blog post on here's how to rank higher on Google. And when I look at the leads we get right now from companies being like, hey, we need help in 26 countries for SEO. Here are the countries where we need headcount in. Do you guys have these resources? And those accounts are paying millions of dollars. We're getting them now. Well, when I had 5, 6 million visitors a month from Google, I wasn't getting literally any of those leads a month. You need to optimize your marketing for revenue, not for vanity metrics like how many people recognize me or my name.

Yeah. You know what I learned from Peter Thiel is that he always focused on any direct report. He just focused on the one KPI, like what's that one thing, right? And one thing we do at Single Grain is anybody that reports to me directly, you're required to write a running one-on-one document. So we don't have to meet every week now for one-on-ones, but it has the main KPI front and center. So it might be revenue, it might be leads or whatever, right? And it shows red, yellow, green, which is like a traffic light. Green is good. Yellow is slowing, not on track. Red is really not on track. And you can see it every week, right?

Yeah.

And then people write about their problems, how they plan on solving problems. What happens is at the very end of it, you're required to kind of list like your top 3 priorities for next week. And all I do all the time now is I'm just like, hey, how do these 3 priorities relate with your top KPI? And it keeps like, I find that I have to keep doing that, right? But it gets them locked in over and over and over. And I'm finding people are continuing to appreciate that because it's very easy for people to become unfocused in the company and work on what they think is important when the reality is, you know, you should plan out for the next 3 years and just have people focus on like the big picture. Yeah.

Yeah, and when you have someone focus on too many different things, they don't optimize for it. And a lot of times they think they're doing well because they did well in a few other things that don't really move the business or the marketing versus just having them focus on the most important thing and just say, your job is to grow this number. And if you grow this number, you did a good job. If you didn't, you did a bad job. And if your number isn't growing, we need to dissect why and what you're working on and what we can do to shift it and try different things to see if we can actually make that number go up.

Yeah. Yep. And you gotta be quick. I mean, yesterday we were talking to a friend, I'm not gonna name names here, but he was just saying how he had this operations person and she came in with all these ideas. You know, she worked for someone that was like, you know, a prominent investor. And, you know, but he's like, I've been thinking about moving her over to California to get her to work in person. And I'm like, okay, why? It's like, because she's not getting work done. I'm like, well then why would you move her over to California? Like, it's not a remote thing. It's a her thing, right? But to kind of wrap a bow around this, it's whenever you have that gut feeling about somebody, you got to make a move, right? I think, you know, Neil's really good at moving on from people fairly quickly. I was really slow initially. I've gotten a lot better with it. But my point of saying all this is like we talked about recruiting a little earlier. But what will slow your company down is if you don't move on quickly from people. If you don't have a culture of high expectations, that's going to cause a lot of drag on your company, especially if you're just like. 10 people, whatever, one person's 10% of your company. So it's on you to move things quickly if you're a leader.

But have high expectations, not after they're hired, have high expectations starting when you're interviewing. And if you have high expectations and they know it, you're more likely to get the right people versus hiring and then trying to just push people and push people. You want the right person who will push themselves and do whatever it takes to make the organization succeed, assuming they're following the laws and ethics Of course.

The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best Offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there, and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. And Neil, you have a topic here. Is it worth building an in-house agency? Because we're talking about people right now.

Yeah, so I've been seeing this more and more. A lot of big corporations are starting to build in-house agencies. What I mean by that is it's not that they're trying to do all marketing in-house. Every organization that I've seen that's building in-house agencies also uses external agencies for support. But there's a lot of basic stuff, especially if you're like in a unique or technical industry, you just need people. And if you have many different products as a larger organization, it's usually revenue isn't created from one product line, it's from many. Having an internal agency can speed things up. Each product can have their own marketing team, but having an internal agency where some of the services are centralized, like video creation, right? For like the social channels or like having a studio and people help running it and supporting it, it actually makes things more efficient. And we found that when companies have internal agencies that help facilitate working between them agencies, A lot of times they're seeing actual way better results because they have dual resources, internal and external. And, you know, it's just easy to get a lot more done that way versus only outsourcing. Because when you only outsource, it's just sometimes people don't know the company as well. And when you try to do it all in-house, sometimes you don't have specific experts that can just do one thing extremely well. And that's all they focus on, such as Reddit or Pinterest or, you know, You know, CRO or whatever it may be.

Yeah, the in-house agency is interesting because it's kind of like a hybrid. First, they understand your companies really well and they're working on multiple things. They can also hold your agencies accountable because they actually know what's going on as well. So it's a nice in-between because when you have the specialists that are managing agencies, sometimes things get lost in translation. So yeah, and like, by the way, like Steve here from Brady.com, he built like an in-house team just focused on content, right? And he's like, yeah, I didn't know that with my SaaS company I was going to build another agency, but he built another agency inside his company. So yeah. Yeah.

All right. Even you and I, we have our own agencies that work on external people's stuff, but we also have our own internal teams, which are mini agencies that just work on our stuff.

That's true. Actually, yeah, that's a really good point. Specifically like our internal marketing, that's an example. That's like a completely separate team. Did you see the thing with the Financial Times on how they intentionally slowed down their website speed?

No.

Okay. Check this out. So Financial Times, obviously it's a prominent financial newsletter. I don't know if you pay for it, Neil, but so in the highlight over here, so this is from Chris Long. I like Chris Long's post. So it says, one of the all-time great case studies on site performance. To prove that site speed impacted revenue, the Financial Times intentionally slowed down their website. So in the blue block over here, it says, the delay was achieved by inserting a blocking CSS call within each HTML page. The CSS referenced a file that was configured to artificially respond in 1, 2, and 3 seconds depending on the test variant. And so I'm not going to get into technicalities here, but basically it showed that when you delay by 3 seconds, you get 7.5% less session depth, right? That means the amount of pages people are visiting in one session. Delaying by 5 seconds, 11% less session depth. When you have millions and millions of visitors, this matters for you, especially when you sell ads on your website. So there is like a markedly noticeable slowdown, I should say, when it comes to your revenue decreasing. Do you see this over here? I'll make this bigger.

Yep.

I'll let you read it.

5, 3, 2, 1 seconds conversion rate percentage difference from the control. So what is the— oh, from the control. They've all dropped significantly. It went down all the way up to— I can't see the exact percentage, but it looks like somewhere around 10, 11%.

Correct.

And that's for a 5-second load. 3 seconds is converting lower, 2 seconds is— 1 second is also converting lower.

Right. And so I think there's a case or there's a conclusion of— okay, the conclusion, okay. They concluded that over the short term, a slower site would lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands. Long-term, the impact would be in millions, right? And this isn't necessarily new, I would say, because Amazon did a case study saying, hey, like they would lose hundreds of millions, right? Or—

No, billions, billions. It was billions.

So if you do have the volume, it makes sense for you to run these tests. I mean, I don't even think you need to run this. Just make sure your site's fast, right? Like it's obvious, like if you have a slower site, yeah, you're going to annoy people and they're going to leave. So I don't even think you need to run this test, but—

You don't need to run a test, but just make it as fast as possible. And there is diminishing returns. Like if someone types in your URL and it instantly loads up, trying to make it load like a millisecond faster isn't going to do much for you.

Yeah.

But if your site, if someone puts in a URL and it takes 3 seconds for your site to load, that's slow. People ideally want sites loading in a second or, you know, feel like a second. It doesn't always have to all fully load, but if they can start seeing your page and seeing the content and I get the rest may load as they scroll, That could be a good enough experience.

That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and visit marketingschool.io/agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. So we're changing it to application only now. And if you're qualified, we'll give you a call. And yeah, we will go from there. We will see you guys tomorrow.