Gert Mellak - Algorithms Be Damned - This SEO Method Will Always Work

Google was the first search engine really to focus on the user. Okay, I want to provide the best user experience possible. And this hasn't changed over time. They just got a lot smarter about this. Whenever you think you're smarter than Google, you're going to get the numbers presented a few months later, probably.

Whenever you're on the user site on a consistent basis, there's not much you can do wrong. It can be harder or easier to rank in certain niches and for certain keywords. But if you really try to defend as much as possible the best user experience possible, you're in the right place.

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy Matt Wolf and Joe Fish. Hey, what's up? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. I am 50% of hustle and Flowchart. My name is Matt Wolf. And welcome back to the show. Today I've got a real sort of tactical, dense, actionable episode for you. Today we're talking to gert malik of seoleverage.com and we actually got introduced to Gert because he was, or still is James Schramko's SEO pro. He's the guy that James trusts to do the SEO on his website. I believe James made the connection and said, you've got to talk to this guy. This guy knows his stuff. James knows that we've gotten a lot more tactical on the show, a lot more actionable with the types of stuff we're talking about on the show, and this episode is not going to disappoint. We talked to Gert about what's working now in SEO, and the strategies that he breaks down are really the strategies that worked five years ago. They're the strategies that will work in five years. It doesn't really matter what the algorithms do. If you follow what he says in this episode, you're always going to have pretty decent results with SEO. This is timeless advice on SEO. It's also a very actionable, very dense, very packed episode with things that you can go implement in your business. Right now in the world of SEO, you're going to be blown away by this episode. Get ready to take a lot of notes. If you're somewhere where you can't take notes, we're also taking notes on this. You can get the notes by joining our Facebook group. If you go to Flowchart Group.com, when you sign up to join that group, you will get an option to have the notes delivered to your inbox for free from this episode. Assuming you go sign up within two weeks. So we make the notes free for two weeks from the date this episode goes live. So go to flowchartgroup.com, join the Facebook group and you will be able to get access to these notes. Now, I also want to shout out our sponsor, this show is supported by ahrefs. That is A H R E F s dot com and there is no better episode to talk about Ahrefs on than this one with Gert. In fact, we on this episode itself, Gert talks about how every self respecting SEO uses ahrefs. There's pretty much nobody out there in the SEO world who has anything bad to say about Ahrefs. And if you do anything in the SEO world, then you use this tool. This is pretty much an industry standard for doing the keyword research and seeing what competitors are doing and finding out how difficult it is to rank for keywords and all of that kind of stuff. And we're gonna get real tactical on this episode and we're even gonna talk about some tactics that you can do using ahref. So Ahrefs will be interwoven throughout this episode, as will some other SEO tools as we break down a lot of these tactics and concepts around SEO. So you're really, really gonna dig this episode as well as Ahrefs. And you can go get a free trial. Nope, sorry. You can get a $7, seven day trial of Ahrefs over at Ahrefs. Com. That's a dollar a day for seven days. Give it a test run. You're gonna love it. You're gonna see some great results from your SEO. You're gonna find some low hanging fruit keywords that you can go after and you're going to start seeing a lot more traffic to your website. So highly, highly recommend ahrefs. It's the tool we use. Use it long before they're ever a sponsor. Go check it out. A hrefs.com now let's go dive even deeper on this SEO rabbit hole with Gert Malik.

All right, Geert, we're live. How are you doing?

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, great to be here. Doing well. How about you?

Doing awesome. Yeah, it's like these are our best days. We love podcasting. It's just our jam. So whenever we can collaborate and nerd out with someone similar to us, but an expert in another thing, that's our best days, man.

Our jam.

That's our jam. And especially shout out to Sramko. But James Schramko at Superfastbusiness he connected us. I know you, I think you are his SEO guy, right? His go to dude there.

Yeah, absolutely. We've been in his forum for probably five, six years and at some point get like into a closer collaboration. I was contributing to the forum from an SEO perspective to multiple threads and this is how this all started. So James was definitely instrumental in our growth, our focus on SEO. Many agencies out there focused on a lot of things initially and the more services you can offer, the better. Until we found our sweet spot in search, marketing and specifically SEO.

How did you get into SEO originally? What drove you down that path originally?

I started out with SEO probably almost 20 years ago. Getting older these days, noticing this already.

That changed a lot in 20 years.

It did change a lot and it was like some kind of love hate relationship in the initial stages because you get some things right, you get some things not ranking and stuff like that. So we focused on a lot of things over this period. But SEO kind of was the only thing that constantly went bigger and bigger for us. We more and more focused on SEO, got bigger and bigger clients got better and better results. So at some point we really dropped the rest. But originally I started out as a web designer, web programmer. I've been programming for.

Probably almost 20 years, 15, 20 years. And the thing was I built my website, built the sites and clients didn't really appreciate the work because they didn't see any results. So getting into getting them exposure, social media wasn't a big thing back then. It was really, the first step was really to get them Google exposure. So I started SEO essentially as an add on service. So I wanted to keep making websites but just also adding SEO as an additional service and make sure clients get results afterwards and can really appreciate the service we have. We had been providing. This is how it all started.

Yeah, that's. We could relate to the whole thing of having an agency and then having. We had a content marketing agency for a while and our big thing was how do we track the results of what we're doing to, you know, to a success or whatever the goal is with the client, leads or sales. And I think that's a pretty big part of what you do as well. Right. With your company and you kind of have a framework around all that.

Exactly. We do two things. Essentially we provide site audits, which might be talking about a little bit later, and then we have ongoing consulting services. And for the ongoing consulting services, it's really all about consistent execution of the right things. Let's put it this way. So at some point, I came up with a framework we call Erica, and it essentially makes sure that we tackle, ideally on a biweekly basis with clients on a call on specific points. We prepare those calls from a strategic point of view, make sure they know where they are, where the competition is, and then lay out the next action steps for the coming two weeks until we talk again, get an idea about where are things going, what's working, what's not working, what can we leverage, and things like those.

Yeah, I think when it comes to SEO, one of the. One of my biggest hurdles of really being effective with SEO is that I always. I never really want to go super deep down the SEO rabbit hole because I feel like next year SEO is going to be different than it is this year. Right. Like, you know, you had all that. There was that, that phase where every year there was like a new animal update. You had, you know, Penguin and Panda and all these various updates and these algorithms kept changing. And it felt like every time I finally felt like, okay, I get it now, things would change. So I'm curious, how do you sort of keep up with all of the sort of progress that happens in the search engines?

That's definitely a good point. And I think what we need to see, and this is like the constant that has been there over time is that Google has always been focusing on the user. So if we search for a content pattern and have been in this industry for 19 years, 19, 20 years, right now there is a content pattern. And Google got to the place where they are right now because they were on the only search engine initially. It focused on users rather than ads on their homepage. If you remember Yahoo, like AltaVista, all the other search engines which were like more directories and ad collections, and you had to kind of search for the search box in order to perform your search afterwards. Google was the first search engine really to focus on the user. Say, okay, I want to provide the best user experience possible. And this hasn't changed over time. They just got a lot smarter about this. So whenever you think you can trick Google's algorithm into doing something that whenever you think you're smarter than Google, you're going to get the numbers presented a few months later, probably, okay? So whenever you're on the user site on a consistent basis, there's not much you can do wrong. It can be harder or easier to rank in certain niches and for certain keywords. But if you really try to defend as much as possible the best user experience possible, you're in the right place. We obviously we have our R and D team in the agency. We run our own experiments. We try to prove and disprove what Google states officially. We obviously do all these things to make sure we are on the right track and we test the things we suggest to our clients. But it's also very much focusing on user experience as one of the constants in our work. And very often when we start with the project, obviously, as you stated initially, conversions and conversion or clicks on affiliate sites, affiliate links and stuff like that is important. And we do SEO as a reason for getting conversions from the organic channel. Once you make sure those conversions can happen and the experience from users coming to the site is correct and is optimized as much as possible, Google tends to give you a lot of credit for that and high rankings over time. What is important though, and this is where we come in with our framework, is the consistent execution. So what's right for users today is not what's right for users tomorrow. And if I think if you just quickly remember two years ago we had on most websites, not sure about yours, but like very big sliders on top, you had like full screen videos with an arrow that had a text, click here to read the content or stuff like that. So you can't even imagine this today. And I know exactly we have been ranking sites higher and giving them like a 40, 50% ranking boost just by removing those sliders just because it doesn't correspond to what users expect today. Being on their cell phone, they want to have the answer right away when they come to this page or at least a confirmation that they're on the right page because it's just so easy to go back to Google and click on another search result. So there's obviously like trends in design, trends in user experience, trends in how you present content two years ago or one year ago, probably even the longer the content the better. Probably two years you could outrank a 2000 words article with a 2500 words article. Today you're going to see that Sometimes it's a 200 words article from an authority site that's going to outrank everything. So you can go deeper, but it's not corresponding to what users want to see right now. So you need to keep up with the rhythm. And this is where we insist a lot with our clients in getting in touch every couple of weeks checking out what's working. Why has this dropped? Let's check out the top 10 again. What are we doing wrong? What are we not getting right now? Of what Google wants from us and especially after Google algorithm updates. This is interesting, but if you keep close to what Google changes over time, an algorithm update very often is a very positive thing. So people are very scared about algorithm updates. We are pretty excited because very often our clients get like a 10 figure, 15, 30% boost just because we saw the early signs of where Google might be going with their experiments and reach their tests.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I want to get into some of the tactics and the actionable stuff that people can implement. But I actually want to go back to something that you said just a minute ago. You mentioned that you do a lot of work in either proving or disproving the stuff that Google says officially. So I'm kind of curious, what things have you found that Google is that officially that you were able to disprove?

Probably this is very, very internal information. I'm not sure what we can share, but it's something. Sometimes it's not as clear. Let's put it this way, sometimes it's not as clear as Google states it. Google themselves say, look, every search query is different. If I think five, eight years back we saw trends across different industries. And the legal industry might be different than health industry. Especially these days, finance industries are very tough industries that work very differently from everything else. But even within an industry, certain queries might trigger a completely different behavior. And Google, at the end of the day, this is a very smart but also a dumb machine learning algorithm. Right. So they are going to follow whatever is best for the search query, whatever signals they pick up. And then they obviously have their layers in their algorithms that might act in certain niches in a different way.

So maybe this is a little. And that's helpful. I know without giving away the secret, all this stuff, but what are some trends? So you just mentioned behavioral trends and actions signals that Google looks for. I know there's, you know, you said user experience being another one kind of behavioral like design. You know, I know comprehensive content has been talked about this year. I know Brian Dean talks about it. We've had some the podcast talk about as well. So that's kind of giving people what they're exactly what they're looking for. What trends stand out maybe in any of these categories that you could share with us?

I think one, one trend that has remained working very well is the content silos. So really structuring content, putting out quite a few content pieces from different angles, linking them together in an appropriate way where you have like one main pillar content that Kind of introduces the topic and then you can click on on internal links to get further information. Like having, I don't know, one article about Shopify and then you have like an article about shipping methods and payment methods and SEO and stuff like that. And then I think I just feel that Google is very likely to send people into a content cluster because it's a very safe bet. And this is my guess, this is not something they state, okay, but if you think from Google's perspective, Google wants to make this specific user happy, they might not know 100% for sure which article is the right one for them. But sending users into a content silo where they know, okay, this is a Shopify article, but if they lean more towards information around payment methods, they're going to find a link to this. If they lean more towards conversion optimization in E commerce, they're going to find a linked article for this. So content silo is definitely one of the main trends. We still recommend clients and we have been doing so for probably two or three years at least to structure their content. And especially a big thing is to create content really with an intent. So most affiliate marketers know you do your research, you try to target certain key phrases, you then try to rank for them. A lot of sites, especially in non affiliate markets, don't know that they create content they really think is just great for the audience and they might get great feedback so they even feel more confirmed that they are on the right track. Just don't know why they don't rank right. So they just don't figure out why is nobody coming to my awesome article My entire industry loves? Okay, so this is where we try to educate our clients, especially in the ongoing consulting where they say, okay, what is it, what you're going to write? Tell me the next 20 topics you would want to write. Let's see, we have like a very simple spreadsheet with a hierarchy where you say, okay, where does this go in the overall structure? And then two things happen. First of all, the client really needs to think about different angles and avoid duplications. We don't want multiple articles to talk essentially about the same thing or at least be aware of it and then act accordingly with canonical tags or active no indexation and stuff like that.

The second thing that happens is that once you put out this article and you guys are doing this very well on your blog, by the way, the internal linking is going to be automatic. If I know this article is going to be below this other pillar article and is going to be Very similar or related as a topic to these other articles below the same pillar article. The internal linking comes natural. When we do a site audit, very often we go in and actively try to put things into structure that have just been put there as a flat article series or at the most with tons of text. We then try to get rid of or categories we try to make a little bit narrower because a 50 pages category doesn't help anybody. But yeah, creating content with an intent, know where it goes, what topic it supports in the overall structure is definitely something that always works. Okay.

Yeah, I like that. Thank you.

Yeah, so go ahead.

The second thing I just wanted to mention when we talk about things that work right now and have been working for a while is really content structure. So it's very interesting to see that most people have tools like Ahrefs or Surfer. SEO is another really good tool to take the content and compare it to what's ranking on page one. But not necessarily these tools take into account the structure of the article. So we use inlinks for example, as a tool here as well where we can then see what's the expected structure of those articles, which topics are mentioned first, which topics are mentioned further down the page, what are the topics that come up in the middle of an article? And I think this is very powerful and we've seen this working very well where sites wouldn't rank and then we compared them really manually, not with machine learning, just really manually and say, okay, every article that's ranking above us is tackling the topic first. We have in the last part of the article. So rewriting articles restructuring can be a very powerful tactic as well because sometimes there is just, I call this usually a handbrake. So sometimes you see a page just gets stuck on page five. And if the other ones are really big brands, Wikipedia, HubSpot in the marketing space, for example, they're just going to be there. And it's not your battle to fight for the top five. But sometimes it's really just coming back to user experience where you say, okay, I'm not there because there's just too many people opening up my page, not finding immediately what they search for, going back to Google and clicking on another the result where they do find it. So if I still rank on page one, get a high impression count, I'm obviously one of the best articles out there and Google gives me the credits for it. If my internal structure though doesn't send the right signals to Google.

Saying that I deserve a better spot, I'm just going to sit there forever.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Have you ever used a tool called topic?

Is it usetopic.com usetopic.com yeah.

Yeah, I think we've had a look at it.

Yeah. So we brought those guys on the podcast, and that's something that we've experimented with. You can actually plug in a blog post and it'll tell you all the other stuff that's ranking on page one and compare your article against them. It seems like it does kind of what you're talking about. Make sure you're adding this content into your content if you want to get onto page one. But this brings me down another topic. What you were just saying is keyword research. How do we know what keywords are worth going after? Because I'll get into ahrefs, right? And I'll find a keyword that will get a lot of volume and I'll say, oh, this one looks really, really good. And Ahrefs might even say, this one's easy to rank for. And then I'll look at who's ranking for it already, and it will be, you know, the Wikipedias, the HubSpot, the Quick Sprouts, and some of these ones that are pretty solidified in that space. So how do you determine, okay, this is a keyword worth pursuing?

This is definitely a great point, and I really love ahrefs. Not necessarily the keyword difficulty they indicate, because I think sometimes this is misleading. What I really like is their Content Explorer, and this is a tool that I think is very underused by most Ahrefs subscribers, because this is really a tool that allows you to see, okay, what are other people? What are the topics other people rank for and actually get traffic with a normal amount of links pointing to their article. And these are then topic ideas I might also be able to rank for. So the key phrase here I usually state is pick your battles. So we really want to know that you might want to have a pillar article about Shopify, and that's fine. Just be aware that you're not going to rank for Shopify.

Okay.

You then might have an article about 10 Ideas for your Shopify shoe store. And this might be less competitive, but still very relevant conversions, might even be higher. And this is one you might be able to rank. So we really want to make sure we pick the right battles and part of the keyword research, then we call this a target research, what we do. So this is essentially taking out the online space, checking out not only the keywords, but also directly on sites like quora, Facebook, Twitter, etc. See how people really use these phrases and then pick all those phrases. And these are a phrase someone or a question someone asks. On Quora is probably a good title for a blog post.

That's a really good idea. I've never thought about it.

Very likely, Very likely. You're going to rank very easily for it. So questions you have on Ahrefs, when you do a keyword research, it nicely comes up with a section that's called Questions. We usually before Ahrefs, I think in the early years, we kind of search for what and why and which on the keyword list and came up with these things as well. Ahrefs comes up with a lot of questions, thankfully. But I would also go a little bit beyond it. And this is where we say, okay, keyword research is not just firing up a tool and, and getting the combinations they come up with. They do a good job. But we want to take it one step further or two steps further and really check out what are the titles on YouTube about this keyword. What are the Twitter tweets mentioning this keyword are like. So you can do a site colon twitter.com and then state a keyword, for example, and you get all kinds of tweets mentioning this keyword in a context, for example. So this is a very actionable tip, I think, for a few listeners as well, where it's like, I want to have an affiliate site about some software tool and let's see how people tweet about this software tool. And I don't have to go to Twitter and use their search, which very often doesn't bring up a lot of actionable advice. I can just really use Google. Google indexing. Twitter indexing the tweets is going to give me probably a much better example. And you can also do this with Quora or other sites. So very often Google gives a much better filter or access to those pages and the information they have on. And they also, if you think about it, Google has processed this information, so they're going to give you the more relevant one first, whereas the platform themselves, they might just do a usual keyword match with their search function. But not having this process.

Well, so you'd basically go to Google and do the kind of like quora.com colon and then your search query. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yeah, the command is called sitequora.com for example, put a space in there and write either within quotes. You can write a phrase or a question or the keyword. Then Google essentially is going to give you from quora.com what they think is most relevant for this keyword. When you go through those pages, we are just making notes. We were just making notes and then collect our keyword research and try to refine it more and more until we end up with a huge list of keywords. So the keyword researches we do usually are probably a few thousand keywords. They can be more or less relevant, can be more actionable, less actionable. But then the next step is, is really going into a tool like Content Explorer from Ahrefs. You plug in a keyword where you think this is really relevant and try to apply the filters they have there. And they have filters for traffic. So find me all the pages about Shopify shoe stores that get at least X amount of traffic and get at least don't have a domain rating above 35 because I've got 30, I don't think I can compete with domain ratings of 50. And I want to give credit to my diggity here. I think this is a tactic I've seen on one of his videos. So I want to also mention this at this point. So I think Content Explorer is definitely the way to go when you want to really make sure you're going to tackle the right topics.

Yeah, so it's like Quora and doing that search on there. You're kind of just idea mining from what it sounds like. And then you're now going to go over to Ahrefs Content Explorer and then start to really kind of put the pieces together. What's already ranking the competition?

Yeah, when it comes to this filter stuff, what sort of like minimum search volume are you looking for? Because a lot of times I'll find long tails. They'll be like, oh, I could write a lot about that, but it gets 10 searches a month.

Yeah, we probably, probably depends a little bit on the niche. We're just working on an architecture site. Search volume isn't too high there, but it's extremely relevant and conversion is going to be high enough to justify it. We probably want to start with 500 in traffic as a metric, then slowly go down. You might not find anything and you need to adjust your metrics until you find something suitable. Okay, but we need to go a little bit away from only focusing on search volume. At least it's my experience because first of all the tools are not precise. So the search volume the tools are going to give Pick Ahrefs, Sembrush, Moz.com and a few others. And you're going to get a broad range of search volume and then add Google Keyword Planner and you're going to freak out. So we really want to see search volume in context and say, okay, this is not an absolute metric. This is giving me a trend. And probably that keyword has a much higher search volume than the other one. At the same time, we know that high search volume usually correlates with low conversion rate. So we want to also see what do we really want. This is a site that wants to attract leads that are going to make an investment in an architect and the entire project of a million dollars. I don't need a very high volume there just to make this happen. If I'm the best architect presenting all the bits and pieces they wanted to know about this project, I will get 10, 20% conversion rate.

Maybe I want to go back and connect what we're talking about here with what you talked about a trend like content silos with the Shopify example, for instance. So if you did that, most of us are not going to rank for Shopify in that content, I guess the main content piece, but all those internally linked links from that big piece of content siloed to an internal page of some sort. Maybe it's deep diving into conversion rate optimization for Shopify sites or any of these keywords. Sounds like that's kind of how you connect the pieces. There is. You might start with a broad thing that's just going to connect to a lot of these articles that you write based on what you learn in this process. Would that be right?

Exactly. Exactly. So you just want to frame the expectations. Right. So I've got clients that say, okay, my topic is Shopify services.

So I'm going to say, okay, we needed an article about Shopify just to make sure that all the other articles we are going to write about Shopify are connected to something. Something bigger than an individual question we are answering. Right. Framing the expectations in this case means that look, this is the pillar article. You're not going to rank on the first few pages of Google within the first year or two at least. And maybe you make it to page two at some point because page one is shopify.com and all the subdomains and domain plugin providers probably. But you still want to have this article because then Google can identify the entire silo and understand the context. So if I have a lot of smaller articles connected to a bigger one, Google can figure out what the context is. And then when you start building links to the pillar article, the internal link choose the page rank is going to flow through the entire structure and this is what makes it so powerful.

That makes sense. And plus you will ideally rank for all those small or maybe long tail keywords that could bring you more focused prospects or visitors that could convert and your higher conversion rate hopefully happens because of that. It's like 8020 thinking almost in that sense.

Exactly. And the pillar article also has a usability or user experience function. So if I come to a very specific article about how to configure payment methods on Shopify, for example, or configure PayPal on Shopify, this article might have internal links to the main Shopify article. So I can click on it, I can get more information about Shopify, I can see what else does this site give out in terms of information about Shopify, and then also get to the shipping methods or some one click upsell plugin or whatever. So this also has a user experience function. It's not all Everything is not about ranking. This is what I also tell clients. They think everything they put out on the site is there to attract traffic from Google and it's just not the case. So one thing we do actively after every single audit is suggest a huge amount of URLs to sites to really no index or repurpose or make sure they really know what this should be doing. So what we essentially do is we crawl the entire site, check the search performance in Google Search Console, check the search performance in Google Analytics, make sure we know what did this URL do for the search performance in a space of six months, and then you're going to figure out that many, many URLs are not useful at all from a search perspective. You might be using them on social media. You might even attract comments to those articles. It's just not ranking material as I call. Okay, so then you're much better off either repurposing those, grouping them up, or sometimes really no indexing or deleting them all together.

Yeah, that makes sense. And in fact, the next question I was going to ask was I wanted to kind of dive into like what your audit process is. So it kind of sounds like that's at least a piece of it. So what are you looking for to decide what content to remove? Like what are the factors you're looking at in analytics or wherever you're looking to go? Okay, this one probably shouldn't be something that. So the old wisdom that I heard was when you have content that's really not getting any traffic, you should probably just delete those posts. But it sounds like what you're saying is you can just no index them and it's kind of the same result. Is that sort of true?

It really depends a little bit. Like in SEO, it depends like a common phrase. We want to make sure we know why it's not performing before deleting or no indexing a page. I would want to know did this perform in the past? And this is a very good, a very good tactic that still works. And I think this is also worth checking this out. Many articles have been doing very well or did very well two years ago or five years ago. We just had a project where we found an article that did very well in 2012. So many sites these days have been around for a while. They have been migrating From Joomla. To WordPress to I don't know where. They always got all the content and put it on the new site. They migrate again, they get all the content. We don't want to lose it. We have been investing so much time into this and we bring it to the new site. What happens is that in 2012 you could rank with a very short article without any illustration. No bold letters, no sub headlines, just the article. Because There were just 10 other decent articles that were out there and you could rank this Today, this article is ranking on page six. So what we did like it was last week on the project was we went back to this article. The topic back then and still today is spot on. So that's exactly what the target audience wants. Just nobody in all these years was thinking that it's worth the time to get back to those topics and rewrite those. So if you have a site that has been around for a while, you can track which articles really lost traction over time. And sometimes rewriting those articles. Use tools like ahrefs, Context, Explorer, Surfer, SEO in links. You write an optimized piece of content around the same topic, leave it on the same URL, and the rankings are going to come back nine out of ten cases at least.

Do you go in and change the date on that or anything too? Or do you just. What's that?

Do you change the date?

Oh, do you go back and change the date and make it like a new piece of content on the blog? Or do you just kind of leave it where it is and just update the content?

No, you would probably. I think WordPress automatically puts the date up as well as like the last modification date. I think that happens automatically. You want to double check it. So you don't want to leave it with the same date and different content. And there is like a common pitfall. I see people focus too much on the date. Google is smart enough to figure out if you really change the article.

That's true.

I have not seen this working. I've heard it once but never seen it working just by setting the date forward. We did even a test in the R and D here and we could not prove this. This is one thing I can definitely mention. We could not prove this to be working. What does work, and we have done this in R and D and on client project is that content that's spot on and still is like addressing a bleeding neck of your target audience. You rewrite this content, you bring it back. If it did well in the past, it's going to do well again. Once you bring it into 2020, 2021 with the standards of today, with a nice structure, with illustration, maybe an infographic, add a video, give it the content people expect today, structure it well and it's going to come back. You have the same URL. Google is getting the signal that you care for your content and you make sure the content stays updated over time. And this is also a sign that's going to speak for your entire website. And this is where I said very often it's better to noindex a lot of pages, noindexing rather than deleting sometimes because people might have them in some smartaq software or.

All the social media software that's just recycling old content. So very often it's a safer bet to no index because they might be using it or linking to it somewhere. But sometimes it's really deleting it or redirecting it directly or canonicalizing it. If you say, okay, this is not working, why is this not working? Because we've got another article on the exact same topic from two years later. So maybe just let's redirect or canonicalize it to the other article to make sure Google doesn't even consider this to be a duplicate. Because one thing is really important, and we see this all the time whenever Google. Whenever you allow Google to pick one URL on your site and not make it exactly clear what this should be aiming to rank for. You're not going to rank well. So give Google two articles about Shopify, shipping methods, configuration. They're going either they ignore one and pick the other one anyway because one of them is so bad it completely ignore it. What's happening more often is that in different markets, different URLs are going to rank. So Google essentially every Time someone performs a page A search and one of your pages seems to be relevant, they're going to pick one of the URLs, and it's always another one. And we have cases where we see whenever they pick URL, A is ranking on page one. Whenever they pick URL B, it's ranking on page five. So there's a huge difference based on what Google decides to rank, because One of the URLs is really optimized. But when Google happens to check out the other one or try to rank the other one, it's just not that optimized. It can't compete. But Google is still going to add it to their ranking algorithm as if it was a normal page. So this is where internal linking comes in, where content structure comes in, where sometimes can allocation comes in, or where sometimes, okay, is this page, the other one really necessary, or can we just redirect it? So Google gets it crystal clear that the other one, the good one they rank on page one, should be the 1 ranking.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I bring it up is sort of selfishly, we've got this podcast here. We've got, you know, we're approaching 400 episodes of the podcast. Some of them were recorded years and years and years ago. Right.

So congratulations.

Thank you.

Thank you. But, you know, we've got some episodes now that they get pretty much no traffic anymore, right? The ones from four or five years ago, those episodes don't get traffic, but some of those guests might still be pointing at those. Like when somebody asks them a question, they might still point them to that episode to go listen to it. So I never really wanted to go and delete old episodes because I still want that guest to have that spotlight on our website. So I've always kind of struggled with, should I go back and delete some of that stuff or should, you know, just leave it and let it go? But it sounds like from what you just said, probably the best way to do it is go, no, index it. So it doesn't affect the rankings of newer stuff. But anybody pointing to it can still point to it.

I would probably ask, on every episode, is this targeting something very specific? Is there a keyword or a topic you would match with this specific podcast episode? And if this is the interview with, with the founder from Topic, for example, this is actually targeting topic and searches for this topic tool or text optimization or SEO optimization specifically. So you could go back and essentially update the article that's below the podcast episode and make sure this is brought to what's ranking today and then see if it starts ranking again. If you are not able to bring this back, bring this to to today's standards or get it ranking again. Noindex obviously is an option. It's going to be there. People are going to be able to refer this if they just Listening Every podcast episode is an asset that's going to be around. So people might want to check this out or the tools mentioned. They might want to click on links, especially on affiliate sites. They might click on an affiliate link you have in there, et cetera. So you definitely want to keep those. But the question ultimately is is this going to be the best possible answer for someone executing a specific search query? And this is where very often podcasts are just not the best answer. So the podcast we're recording right now, even if you write the best article below, it is not going to be ranking material for someone searching for SEO. It might be interesting for someone searching for SEO and the Erika framework once this gets traction in the industry. Right now it's not ranking material. So it's up to you to decide what do I want? Do I really want Google to waste their crawl budget their processing time on this article to make sure it ranks for specific queries, or do I not expect organic traffic search traffic to this episode anyway? Then I can question the point of having it indexable in the first place and just having it is right from the start as a no indexed page. Use it on social media, use it wherever I want as a referral link, internal linking, etc. But if I don't expect search traffic to a page, we really have to question does it have to be indexable or not?

Yeah, it does make a lot of sense. I know you said you took a look at our pages and we're doing decently well from the sound of it.

I knew no one place we need to improve. Which you'll probably call us on if I don't call it myself. And that's page load time, but that's a whole other story.

Yeah, well, what are some obvious things and elements? Because you mentioned things like bolding specific things on the page. There's probably title text, there's infographics, quote cards, things like that. Are there obvious elements that we should all be aware of that we should be putting in our content? Anyone listening? That's just kind of basic that. Okay, I just want to do just enough to kind of get moving in the right direction.

Yeah, it's definitely a great Point, I think. And I've just had a great conversation with Greg Miralis from Studio One Design, who is essentially my mentor. Whenever I have a design question, I'm going to ask Greg first.

He designed not this shirt, but a different shirt. He's a buddy of ours.

Okay. I didn't know that what he said on a podcast. We are also starting our podcast and I just had the chance to interview him. What we talked about was that the impression you get from a site is going to be a sum of all kinds of details I'm going to perceive when I come to this site. So very often we think it's all about the content we put out there. But really people might not even consume our content. They just leave the page because they don't like it, because it doesn't look professional enough.

It loads too slowly. For example, there's a lot of things before they actually start reading the headline that are going to decide whether they give us a shot or not. And it's just so easy to switch back to Google, click on another result. Just because I don't like how this looks like because there is a pop up, there's a huge cookie banner that's really annoying me. I don't want to have to find a button to click this away or the button is too small, I can't even click it. Let's go back, find another page. It's really not the case anymore that you're the only result out there. There's always an alternative. So you definitely want to pay a lot of attention to user experience and design a lot more than actually gets the credit. So most people are going to just pull up a template from some themes site out there and.

Get the site going and then only focus on content. And they think the content is going to be everything. The might be realizing that they need to invest into professional copywriting rather than having something put together on Fiverr or something like this. It definitely pays off to have content writing. We have Google having the BERT algorithm. Some people might have heard about it. Google is really better and better understanding what content means and what content is used for and what it means in its context, what every word means in its context. So we want to be aware of the content quality that's necessary, but we also need to know that content is not going to be read before. My site doesn't make a good impression in the first place. And this is where sometimes it's a little bit hard for us after an audit or we have within our audits we take a Look at the user experience. We open up the site from a mobile phone, we give people some suggestions. Sometimes they have a very big header on top and you really have to scroll down to see anything. Sometimes they have everything hidden in the sandwich menu menu on top and they don't have it on the page. People on mobile phones really like to scroll down. If you don't repeat the things you have in the menu on the homepage, you're probably missing out on a lot of users that are going to bounce off your page because they don't want to click on this menu. So sometimes we just expect people to act on a mobile phone, for example, like they do on the desktop, where on the desktop you would focus on the menu and immediately see what you want on the mobile phone, not so much. So on the mobile phone you might want to scroll down. And a good best practice we have found, is to highlight the main menu items you have on desktop on the homepage in a very easily clickable fashion where you have access to the main categories, to the main services you're offering, etc. When I scroll down, I scroll across all these services can easily press them in order to figure out what a site is doing or what a business is offering. This is definitely something worth considering here, right?

That's a good point.

So speaking of mobile, what are your thoughts on the accelerated mobile pages? The AMP thing that Google has. A few years ago somebody told me install this plugin, it'll make your site all AMP ready. I installed that. So our site has the AMP plugin on it. But now from some other people that I've talked to, it wasn't the greatest decision. And like our site doesn't look very great on the sort of accelerated mobile page that Google created for us. So I know my thoughts on it. But I'm curious what I think it was a mistake to install it and I'm sort of regretting it. And I don't know actually how to undo that mistake because some of that stuff's ranking. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that.

So maidy, I was never fond of AMP really right from its start because it adds a lot of complexity and we're working with mostly small teams, small businesses, we're not working with huge media sites where I definitely think it makes sense on a normal site content site. I think it's overkill. You can make a site reasonably fast with image optimization, optimizing a theme, getting someone program an extremely fast theme by combining all the JavaScript files and CSS files and caching whatever you can investing in and services like Cloudflare, CDN and whatever you want in order to make the site faster. The argument of getting the site load fast for me is not enough to consider AMP for a site because it adds a lot of complexity to a normal standard project. So my suggestion to clients was always to I pointed them to some WordPress site like Geo, WP or whoever can then take a look at their.

At their site and see what can we really make faster here. There's probably a lot to do before we jump on amp. And AMP is going to be a big project from multiple angles. It's going to be a web developer project. It's going to be a project for SEOs. It's going to be a challenge for the user experience because you have certain limitations on AMP that you don't have on a regular site. So my suggestion to my client base is usually to stay away from emp.

Yeah. Now if a site already has.

Is there any going back from it?

Yeah, you need to figure out what.

Make sure all the redirections are correct when you go back. Make sure see what traffic really comes to the EMP pages in the first place. Is Google really using them? Are the ranking much better to just make an informed decision if you want to switch back.

I think 5G is reasonably close to us in order to not having to bother today anymore about AMP at all. A few years back it was an option definitely if you thought site speed was there was nothing you could squeeze out of your page anymore to make it faster and every competitor was much faster than your side. AMP was an option, but it was always a big project to take on. Obviously there were then plugins you could install and have a quick solution, but still the devil lies in the details. Check the markup that's there. Is Google really figuring this out correctly? Are you producing duplications just because the plugin doesn't create essentially the code you want? So my point of view, I do recognize I don't have like huge online newspaper magazines or something like that as clients. So I'm not probably not the expert on amp. My personal suggestion was for my client base to stay away from it.

I'm kind of thinking that the last bit, and this is probably the bit that we jumped into, it's the same.

Last bit that I have.

Well, we'll see. Site audit.

Let's do two last bits.

Okay, good. Well, I know we mentioned it numerous times throughout here and we might have poked at it already, but the site Audit and the Erica method. Not sure if that would be the same topic here, but is there. I don't know exactly where to start on the SEO site audit side, but it seems like, okay, we're all sitting on websites and content and we might have some traffic coming to it. What do we do with it? So where do you start there and what would you suggest folks to maybe the fundamentals?

Yeah, definitely a great question. We usually.

Try to get people started with an audit. We sometimes start with consulting, but it makes the most sense to start with an audit. And the reason I'm saying is our audits are extremely thorough. We've seen some audits from other agencies. Not trying to.

Sound arrogant. I know we have a solid product. I know we go into a reasonable level of detail that's still digestible from the client side. Our audience come out with an action step spreadsheet which has priorities where we say, look, this has big impact. This is something you could do, but it has not such a big impact. Focus on this. This is like the task list you should be following afterwards, even if you don't want to go through the 80 pages of our audits. And we usually structure them like in four different phases where you say, okay, phase one is really what's happening on your site. Who are your competitors? Where is your site in a benchmark again, when we benchmark it against your competitors visibility. We use Systrix for this, which is one of the industry standard tools in order to judge on the organic visibility of the site and really raise awareness of the situation. Because we see many site owners are so focused on their own site or one competitor site that they forget about the overall picture. And the overall picture might be that they have a huge user experience issue on their site which nobody of their competitors has. The overall picture might be that they have an extremely low click through rate. We had a company from Melbourne, I think, doubling traffic just by optimizing for higher click through rates within a month or two. So we really want to figure out what is the handbrake here on this site. What is it that we should start with? We audited last week a site that had such a strong cloud flare protection on their site after an attack that nobody in Europe, Asia or Africa could access the site without a capture.

Google could access it because Google has a white listing on cloudflare. But essentially probably a third of the users trying to access the site had to leave because nobody wanted to always go through a capture if they clicked on a link. Right? So we try to find like the high impact things. And then in our audits we have like we go through a scheme we have developed over time and we're always refining. And then in each section we have an analysis part. So there are 30, 40 analysis sections probably across our audit, where we say, look, this is what's happening, this is what's good and this is what needs work. Literally this is green and red. And we try to make it as clear as possible. It's good that you have a decent click through rate. What needs work is that there are 50 URLs that don't even have a meta description.

So we have this phase one where we really take out what's happening, what's the current search performance, what's the benchmark.

When we take your site, compare it with competitors. And then phase two for us is all about content. We have a keyword, research, obviously we check market research as well, check other platforms, use ahrefs for this. We do a content audit, which is probably the most actionable item, where we check the search performance of every single URL over a period of usually six months. If we have enough data on the site to make sure we really know. What does the site depend upon? Because many sites, many even established brands, depend on a handful of URLs and if those go down, they don't have any traffic left. We have a very established site as a client. They depended on three URLs in order to get their organic leads. So get those URLs down a few rankings and they don't end up with any leads. Our focus or our recommendation was to scale the content production process to make sure that we get more URLs bringing in leads. So we don't depend on three. And especially those three were like from a few years back, extremely long articles, which, it's like a ticking bomb. You can't take them off, you can't change them too much because you might lose your leads. At the same time, you can't leave them like this while the entire rest of the industry is going towards shorter, more specific articles with action steps. So it's like a catch 22 in these cases. So in every audit you really want to make sure you know what's happening. Phase two is also where we try to teach our clients what a content structure can look like, what a content silo can look like. We don't map it out for the entire page, but we give them an idea with like 20, 30 URLs, how we would structure it, what would it mean to build this content silo and give them like a tool if you want. And moving forward on how to go about content creation, making sure that we create the content with an intent, we already know where it goes and we know what the internal linking is going to look like. So phase two is content. Phase three is the third document which focuses on technical SEO where we take internal linking canonicalization, a lot of other things on a normal basic technical audit just to really make sure we get the basics right. And then on phase four, we do a full link audit. We use link research tools here as one of the market leading tools. Perform a full link audit, make sure we know what the backlinks are like that point to this page. Because negative SEO is a thing. Even Google had to admit it at some point. That sometimes happens. Unfortunately. Google is very smart these days, thankfully that they figure out a lot of things. So if you send 5000 Viagra anchor text links to not going to bring it down anymore, thankfully. But we have seen spammers getting really creative. So we had have seen a project, for example, those trying to rank in Melbourne and spammers attacked it with anchor text for Ottawa. So Google kind of gets confused. The anchor text is still relevant, still in the same industry. They're just trying to get Google off their relevance for Melbourne.

Yeah, as a location.

And they suddenly started to rank for Canada and have no service provided there. So spammers get smarter. So you want to be aware of the links that are pointing to your site on an ongoing basis. And this really brings me to the Erica framework, which is like the logical step for many of our audit clients that say, okay, we now have this audit. We have an action step list. We can work on this list with our team. We sometimes offer help with the implementation of these action steps if they want depends on the client. But then they say, okay, now I don't want this to happen anymore. I don't want to have literally 1500 tags on my page anymore that create 1500 useless URLs.

How can we guarantee on an ongoing basis that this doesn't happen again? And this is where we have developed this framework where okay, let's get on a call every couple of weeks. This call is going to take 30, 40 minutes. We're going to walk you through the framework and the framework is called Erica. So where E stands for evolution, we check out what's the evolution of your site, what are the tasks that you have been performing recently? What are they doing? Is this starting to rank? Is this starting to get traction? What are your competitors doing? What's working for them? Is there any spike in their traffic estimation or in their rankings? Is there anything we can learn from them to make sure we are all on the same page? Because very often site owners don't really have an idea what's happening on their site. They might be focusing on the next article and might sometimes search for this article. Obviously they find it because they search for the title of this article and they think everything is all right. They have no idea what they could leverage from their competitors experience. So sometimes you see a competitor going down if they are not on top of their SEO game. Very often this is a huge opportunity where you see competitors article going down because they didn't touch it for 6, 8, 12 months. If you know why this is going down or what it is that Google doesn't like about this article, this is a huge opportunity. You can build up something very similar, bring it to today's standards and outrank essentially your competitor in the same same moment. So evolution, it's very competitive. Research on an ongoing basis is extremely important. The R from Erica stands for research in general. So we do a lot of research. So while most of our clients work on their content on their own, we also have a like a done for you package. But most of most ERIC agreements are focused on strategy and consulting. So we do a lot of research. We research keywords, we research phrases, prepare content briefs for clients. So before they create a piece of content, we already give them an idea about what this content should look like, what's the length, what's the vocabulary, what's the topic, the structure, et cetera. This needs to be expected. So when they create a content, they already have like a piece of content that's eligible for page one right from the start, not that you put out the content, see it doesn't rank, then have to redo it a few weeks later. Again we want to use put them or set them up for a win right from the start. And then research is also competitive research. Research is some testing. We give some tips for conversion. We just doubled the conversion rate on one of the organic URLs on the site just by suggesting using Hotjar. Getting into this, getting an idea how far people scroll and they just say okay, the call to action is just too far below, so let's put it up there. The sidebar isn't working because people access the site from a mobile device mostly and they don't see the sidebar. So there's a lot of things that come into this where we just tell our suggestions and clients need to then decide if they take us seriously or not. Sometimes it definitely makes sense to take other non SEO suggestions seriously as well. Then we have I stands for interlinking, as we call it. So this is just saying internal links and external links. We want to know what are the internal links. Because internal links ultimately tell Google what page. What's the importance of a page? Imagine you have an article where not even you link to this article in any significant way. So this is something that very often happens in blog categories that are huge and full with articles, because this is just a general topic. If the only link that points to an article is a link on page 15 of a category and you don't use this article internally as a reference, in any case, why should Google give it importance? It just doesn't make sense. Whereas if you have those pillar articles you link to all the time and make sure that you link, for example, in your case you're linking to all the SEO speakers on your podcast, which is interesting, right? So it just makes sense from a user's perspective, but also from Google, it makes sense that whenever you talk about SEO, you talk about Stefan Spencer, you talk about Brian Dean, for example, Gerd Mellock. @ some point, maybe, if you want to edit something, probably so you can, it just makes sense. So when Google discovers those pages, they can then say, okay, they always reference these guys on these URLs, so obviously we can connect the dots and say, okay, SEO plus these URLs has some sort of connection. This is what it's all about. We've got Google with neural networks that try to make sense. They try to make connections. Let's make it easier for them to make those. A page that's buried on page 15 of a category doesn't have any connections with anything. Just having it in the right category doesn't do.

Anything. That's the orphan pages.

Right? Orphan page would be. If it wouldn't have any link pointing to it, page 15 would still have a link. So it wouldn't be an orphan per se, but you're on the right track. It's just a completely abandoned page floating around on your site like a dead crocodile Nile, and you don't have any reference to it. And then it's just clear for Google that if not even you care about this article, why should they care about it? And very often when clients ask us why doesn't this article rank? We just check out how many links internally point to this article. And more often than not we find one or two. Whereas every article points to the privacy policy.

So sometimes it's just logically, if you put yourself into Google shoes and say, okay, I'm Google now, I want to know what are the main articles on this site? How would I figure it out? Either I have a link from the homepage which is a really good indicator, or I have this reference from all kinds of pages across the entire entire site. It's another good indicator. And then if I compare a page that has a lot of internal links with another page that doesn't have any and displayed somewhere on the category, it's just a very clear distinction I'm going to make as a search.

Engine. Right? Yeah. Okay, so then you have what, the C and the A.

Right? This is the C and the A. C stands for content. Obviously content is still king. Not only having the content, but also having the right structure, having it connected to the rest of the site and having the content well researched. So the best tool people have and nobody uses is Google themselves. So if you want to rank for something, Google it first. Hardly anybody does.

This. That's a very good.

Point. All kinds of tools, right? If you want Google to rank your page, check out what Google wants to rank. You don't need a tool for this. You can get this for free.

Check out the top 10 top 20 pages. I did this manually before Surfer SEO inlinks and tools like those. I made my notes manually, even handwritten, where I checked out the top 10 pages and said, okay, what's common in all pages that rank? Well, because it just made sense. If you want to rank in Google, you need to ask Google what they want to rank. And the best way to ask them is to perform the search with the keyword you want to rank. For today, you have got interesting tools. Surfer SEO is a very good entry level tool. End Links is a very good advanced tool. If you want to dive a little bit deeper and you have a very good idea what this content should look like even before you write it, or if you have an article where you think the topic was spot on and we want to bring this back into today's standards, check out, use those tools, apply them to this article, compare it with what's ranking right now, and you're going to get a very clear picture of what should be happening. And sometimes we get like blind when it comes to our industry. We had an Internet service provider, they didn't talk about Internet connection on their article, which is something everybody else did for some reason. It was just so obvious. They're not going to talk about Internet connection. This was one of the main topics. We added this and the rankings started to go up just because Google tries to connect the dots. But there is a few dots, There are a few dots they can't connect with this article. Okay. So they really want to go in. We saw this I think still three years ago and this really surprised me because Google used to already know what synonyms are. We saw this in I'm from Austria in German. We had a site there that didn't use one of the synonyms that exist for entry, entrance, door. It was putting this synonym on the page and Google immediately ranked this on page.

One.

Wow. For years they didn't rank on page one just because they didn't have one of the synonyms there. So sometimes it's really those quote unquote stupid things. We are missing that thankfully today tools are going to give us because they're just going to compare our vocabulary with the top ranking vocabulary and they're going to say, look, look at a few mentions of this synonym or at this text or everybody else is talking about such and such. Try to add this as well. And it puts you in a very good position because many people out there, many competitors out there are still not using this to its full extent. And this compared with Google stating that they're going to become more and more towards AI, towards artificial intelligence when it comes to the searches, more and more personalized searches. You really need artificial intelligence when fighting against artificial.

Intelligence. There's no way to keep up.

With Google's, there's no way against it. But I think, but this is really paired with the human element and this is what we try to state in our framework. We need this communication, we need this communication to first discover opportunities. We need this communication in order to make sense of what the AI engine is giving us. Because sometimes it's really the client's judgment and say, okay, in my industry this specific keyword, even if others mention it, doesn't make sense. That's a decision. We can't make this decision as an SEO about technical architecture. Right. It's just not going to happen that easily. This is the content side of things. And then a stands for action steps is the Erika framework. Every call ends with action steps for the client and action steps for us. Our action steps are mostly research based client action steps might be whatever needs to be done on the site based on our judgment of what is going to have a high impact. So there's probably 200 things you could do and everything would be good for SEO. But it might only be three things that are really going to make a difference in the next month or two. Everything else might make a difference and bring you from page nine to page eight and you're not going to notice any difference in your bottom.

Line. Yeah, it's back to the vital few that make the big differences for.

You. Exactly.

Exactly. That was.

Awesome. Yeah, no, that was amazing. So I do have one last question and maybe we can make it sort of a quick one. What's your best piece of advice for getting an external backlink? Because I know that when it comes to SEO, that's a difficult part for a lot of people is getting those backlinks from other.

Websites.

I think there's not a single good advice you need to really run different strategies. Okay, ideal scenario, your content, you just put out something that's so good that everybody wants to link to it. And it's really a mere question of promoting it and making sure that people in your industry know about it and everybody is going to be happy to link to it.

We have had an eviction lawyer as a client at some point, tell me what they're going to put out there in order to make it so great that everybody wants to link to it. It's just not happening in many cases. And this is why link purchases. Link selling is still a theme. Nobody talks about it. Google doesn't like it. It's still a theme. You can pay them for the link or pay them for the time it takes them in order compensation for their time to put this article together or whatever you want to call it. It's in the industry, still a theme. So ideally, if you can think of something creative in order to put it out there, make sure people know about it. Just because you publish it on their blog, it's not going to make it known. Consider other options. Consider running Facebook ads to this. So to make it known and get a few thousand people check this piece of content out, you might might get some natural links and it might even go viral there. Make sure you contact bloggers directly. Every agency that does link building has a huge network of contacts right away. Especially in key industries like could be marketing, business, tourism. We've all been working in those industries and already have an established content network. It's really hard to do link building on an ongoing basis in house. I believe just because you don't have this network, you don't have the tools, you don't know that you need to follow up sometimes five times in order to Get a link or get an answer, especially around summertime. Make sure you leverage an external trusted partner for these cases and then come up with what is the best approach for your industry. There are clear industries like very often finance, casino poker. We don't engage in those industries, but I know that purchasing links is the only way they work. Try to get into competitive tourism space and you are not going to only have to pay high prices for links, but you're also going to get attacked all the time with negative links. So every industry has their thing, to put it that way. If you can bring something up that attracts links naturally. I had a tool once that did nothing else but open up A list of URLs in individual tabs and this attracted links naturally, because it was great. Then there wasn't a plugin, a Chrome plugin that did this, just copied, pasted the URL, just had nothing. I didn't even have ads. I just wrote this as a, as a side hustle at some point. But it attracted links because it was just a tool and people recommended this on forums and it would attract links. If you're in the copywriting space, there are copywriting methods you can write about. You can maybe build a small tool, make this known in marketing spaces. Maybe if you have a paid tool you can give like discount code to the audience of different blogs in exchange for some exposure. There's definitely a lot of things. And then there are other tactics that still work, like broken link building, for example. Broken, broken link building is something that does work. Depends on the industry again, but reaching out to someone telling, look, you've got a broken link on your site, check out this article, it might be a good substitute. And that's it very often already gives you sometimes even very high authority sites, authority, links. I got a link once this way. I think it was on a trade show website that had a very high authority and just happened to have a link to a guide. And this wasn't available anymore. It was a competitor of my client. We just reached out. Look, we have an updated guide. This is from 2000, I think it was 18. Maybe this could be a good replacement. Just so you know, this link is down and that's enough, right? And this is just really helping people. They thank you for it. They give you a high authority link. You couldn't even purchase this link if you.

Wanted. What's the. I know we have the extension, Chrome extension, but there is an extension where it can basically tell you if there's a broken link on.

That. I think it's literally called Broken.

Link. Is that all it is? It's.

Perfect. I think it was a broken link checker or something like this. I remember that one. And then there is. There's even a service out there that's. Was it broken link checker.org or something like this. There was even a paid service that only was focusing on this particular method. I'm very much against only focusing on one method and try to. We always try to keep link profiles as natural as possible, not only to not raise like a red flag right now if you only attract guest postings, for example, it's just too easy for Google to spot. We always need some social signals as a pillow for those articles because it's just a natural thing to happen today that you attract social feedback before you attract links. Just something that usually happens if you spend a lot of money on Facebook ads. It's not necessary, it's just already happening in any case.

But sites wanting to start out with guest posting to get to a high domain rating as soon as possible are going to get into trouble very soon. It's just too easy to.

Spot.

Wow, there's a lot here. And this is good.

Gert. Yeah, this has been like a master.

Class. Well, it's been a totally different perspective too because we've chatted with some SEO folks, like some really amazing folks, and I feel like you have a whole different perspective and you just probably shined a light on a whole bunch of different things we haven't ever chatted about. So very helpful is that Erica Framework. Is that a publicly available book or document that people can.

Get? We've ended up publishing a book that's called the Erica Framework. It's available on Amazon, but it's also freely available on our site on seoleverage.com people can download. This can get an idea about our perspective of SEO. I think in general, what differentiates us from other SEO folks and we're really in touch with them and follow them on what they put out there. Everybody learns from everything. Everybody. We really embrace the fact that SEO is a long term game and this is something that probably cost us a few sales and a few clients because we're really upfront of this. I don't want anybody to jump on the SEO train with us if they're not prepared to stick with us for quite a while. Quite a while meaning eight months upwards because it doesn't make sense. The way we view SEO. We are very conservative. I'm not who should be deciding on risking a client's domain with some very quick PBN link methods that could bring our clients in trouble. I couldn't justify it. We have clients that have been building up their projects over years and they make a living on them. They have to support their families with their project. How could I provide them? We could get fast, we could go faster, right? We could purchase a lot of PBN links. I just had a client tell me like completely happily they purchased 20 links for I don't know how little money, all PBN links. They even got a nice ranking out of this. This is fine. And I congratulated them. I wouldn't do it. I would start disavowing those links as soon as possible or get rid of those. As an agency I couldn't justify these methods. So our approach is really long term focused. It's a long game. We have had clients for 16 years straight renewing month after month their agreement with us just because we always had this focus. So we try to every month earn the next month. We don't have anybody on a long term commitment after month one. They can cancel if they don't feel we provide enough value.

But they definitely need to be decided that they want to be there for the long term. And this requires the consistent approach. And this is where our framework is based upon where we say okay, we are doing this. We are going to require resources on our client's side or them to hire my team, almost 20 people right now and growing to execute on our suggestions. We can do it both ways but we need them to commit on the long term to an ongoing growth. We're going to make sure they know they are on the right track. But this is a long game again. The long game means that we are going to build up another content. We are going to make sure this content is structured. We are going to make sure the internal link juice flow is correct and we are going to make sure we always know where we are based on on the competition leverage, what's working for them and more stuff we have been talking.

About. So they can go find out more about the book and your services and all that. Was it SEO.

Leverage? Seoleverage.com exactly. So everything is there, product services and ideally if they would just want to drop me a line, this is my email address is there and we can just have a chat. My chats are no pitch chats. Everybody should really be decide if they want this kind of SEO method in their marketing mix and then I'm happy to.

Help. Thanks for being so open man. This is very valuable in anyone doing SEO or even if you stuck with all the details and you're here with us right now, definitely go contact Gert and SEO pays off. It's our number one traffic source and definitely a long term game. So, yeah, don't do any of the hyperlinks and all that. Not worth.

It. All right, thank you.

Gert. Have a great day.

Man. Man, thank you so much for having.

Me. Wiki, wiki.

Wiki. I don't know, we're just doing that transition.

Thing.

Wikipedia. Wikipedia. We need to outrank Wikipedia. Good thinking.

Luck. Yeah, I guess it depends on the keyword. Maybe. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of keywords I will outrank Wikipedia on, but there's a lot that I.

Won'T. Good point. Very good point. Yeah. Don't let it deter.

You. Yeah, no, that, that episode was one where, like, I was sort of in my nerd out mode. I was just kind of like, ooh, this is tactical and in the weeds and fun. Let's dive in.

Here. It's.

Good. It was very good, I would say. You know, I said this after we stopped recording, but as far as SEO episodes go, like, I'd say that was as actionable and as good as any of the SEO episodes, and it sort of revalidated a lot of stuff that we already knew, but it also, he added a lot more information. And I have some, like, pretty killer ideas of stuff that I want to implement on our website.

Now. Yeah, no, and I think there's something here for everyone. I mean, if you made it this far, you made it through because, I mean, that was a masterclass in SEO and we went deep into the weeds on a lot of things. So some folks are probably glossed over when it starts talking about a lot of.

That. You mean accelerated mobile pages aren't relevant to everybody.

Listening? Conical, blah, blah. All these like, oh, that, that.

One'S actually a pretty big deal. The.

Conical. I mean, it's all big. But I'm just saying that people that are not open or have. Have never, I guess, explored SEO or the terminology. I could. I just want to make sure, like, it's.

Okay. Yeah. The canonical thing for anybody who doesn't maybe know what that means is if you've written like two pieces of content on the, you know, he sort of explained it, but I'll kind of re. Explain it. If you've written two pieces of content on the same topic, you can use something like Yoast SEO and tell Google essentially, hey, if you're only gonna Rank one of these articles, rank this.

One.

Right. And you can go into. Yo, let's say you've. There's Article 1 and Article 2. And you want Google to rank Article 2 because it's the newer one. You can go into Article 1, and inside of Yoast SEO, there's a canonical link you can plug in. Okay. The URL to Article 2. And now Google, when somebody searches for that specific term, they're more likely to rank Article 2 than Article 1. Because you're pointing it out. You're telling Google, hey, if you're going to rank one of these, rank this.

One. Yeah. And actually it's probably a good mention to say Yoast, SEO is a good tool to. To do a lot of what he was saying, like, with the metadata. I mean, there's just a lot of stuff that I'm just thinking of that a lot of the folks listening, probably not deep into the SEO weeds. They're probably just maybe some people. But it's good to. Yeah, Yoast SEO will probably simplify a lot of what he was saying and give you the options where you can like, oh, okay, I remember now. He mentioned Gert mentioned this thing. Oh, metadata. Oh, and it. Yoast actually gives you the step by step instructions too. So I think I mentioned it. Yoast SEO for WordPress websites would be a good thing to use.

Here. Yeah. And it will handle a lot of that canonical stuff that we were talking.

About. What.

Ideas? So here's what I want to do, and I think this is especially relevant for people who are doing podcasting. What I think we should be doing is we should go and create pages for broader topics. So, like, we should have a page on our site that's just like the title of it is Search Engine Optimization. Right. And we put some written content on it around, like, here's some of our biggest takeaways around search engine optimization. But then that post also links off to every podcast episode we've done about search engine optimization. So creating these sort of silo pages for these broad topics that link off to all of the podcasts on those topics. So none of the podcasts are ever really like orphaned podcasts. They're always being linked to from this sort of pillar page. And then when we have a new podcast episode about SEO, let's say we bring on, you know, Brian Dean again to talk about SEO. Well, on that Show Notes page, I'll link to the SEO sort of silo page and say, hey, if you want to go deeper into SEO, here's our page that Curates all of our episodes around SEO. They click on that. There's sort of our takeaways on SEO, plus the links to all the other SEO episodes. So it sort of creates this sort of link tree. And then you do it with other topics, too. You have one on, you know, here's all of our things where we deep dive on affiliate marketing strategies. Here's a page where we deep dive on how to write and publish your first book. Because we've done a lot of content around that stuff, you know, and you start making these sort of big, almost like table of contents pages for specific topics. And then you link off to all the episodes and content around.

Those. I like that. And that could live on the, you know, maybe put those as in the menu or at least on the homepage or something like, boom. Here are the core pillars of content that you'll.

Find. But it also gives us, like, a place to reference for people who come to us about things. Right. Like, who was it the other day? Or somebody in our Facebook group over@flowchart.

Group.Com. you can get the notes, by the.

Way. Yeah, it is. But somebody in our Facebook group the other day asked for, like, well, you know, I'm starting to go down this rabbit hole of SEO. What content should I consume? I think it was actually Kennedy who said this, this, but he was asking about SEO and, like, what. Where he should go. And if we had a page like what we're talking about, we can be like, look, here's where we rounded up, like, all of our stuff around.

SEO. I think it's smart. And we do this for the members area already with the, with the search thing, for the notes. But at the same time, yeah, publicly this would be a great way to help with SEO, but also user experience, I'm sure that would help with SEO as well. Because Google's looking at that. They're going to see how things are flowing around because, yeah, it fits into his content silo thing that he's, you know, that Gert talked about. And he's done a lot of testing and shows how, yeah, the spiders, the Google search spiders are going to kind of flow through all these pieces if you connect them up. I think it's a good idea, Matt. I think we do.

That. Yeah. And it wouldn't be too hard to do. I mean, what you do is you start by like, creating a search engine optimization page. And you start by just like linking off to all of the podcasts about it. And then over time, you just start filling in more content. On the.

Page. So what would be on that page? Would it just be like, okay, here's our philosophy, here's what search Eng. Se or, you know, search engine optimization is for us. You know, how we use. Maybe there's like a case study or some kind of information, but at the end of the day. Yeah, it's going to be. Its job is to link.

Everything. Yeah, I mean, I think the way I would probably do it is on the sort of top of page, like you said, we'd kind of like do a little introduction to SEO. And then below that it would be, you know, here's episodes and articles around SEO that we've got on this site. And then maybe so like with the Gert Malick one, right, we'd have a link to his show notes page. And then below it I might put like, here are my top three takeaways from that episode. So it'd actually have like some actionable advice around SEO, but it would also link to where they can get that full episode. And then I'd have like Brian Dean below it and it would say, you know, the title of that episode. And then here are my three biggest takeaways from that specific episode. Link over to that. Where you can listen to the whole thing and you just kind of.

Taken from the notes or.

Something. Exactly. We've already, we're already creating the notes anyway. So we. It pulled them from the notes and we just, we link over to the episode. Here's our big takeaways right below it. Here's the next episode. Here's our big takeaways below it. So somebody can actually scroll that article and get a whole bunch of like really good takeaways around SEO. But if they want to get deeper into the weeds on any specific sort of takeaway, they can go listen to the full.

Episode. It also helps us put in some tools and next other things that people might want to.

Explore.

Yeah. Ie, affiliate links in some.

Cases. So on that page you have like our recommended SEO tools and you've got Ahrefs and you've got that topic and you've got, you know, and we list all the tools that people. And so now we got, now we. And we can make one of those silo pages for every topic that we kind of go into. And now like when we go on, when, when somebody pops up on our group about like, hey, I'm, I want to go into affiliate marketing. Like, what's my first step to become an affiliate marketer? Your first step is go look at our affiliate marketing page. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean it just makes like perfect sense. It's a great user experience. I love it. And it's probably going to make us more money.

Real time brainstorming.

Y'.

All. You're listening. Real time brainstorming, real time. All right. So.

Part of that actually was one of the things I started and Gert talked about. It was raising content basically from the dead. I mean, I love it because like in not going to go through the whole process but you know, it's, it's basically just optimizing it for now standards and then probably doing more of what you just said there with linking and putting in a content silo somehow if we can. And then he basically, he's like, you can raise that thing up quickly. And we've seen that with, you know, we mentioned use or topic, but get it at use topic. And you know, Nick and Rio who are on the show, that's kind of what that tool does in a way as well. It's just going to use AI in their algorithm to tell you, hey, you should probably bolster the article by just adding this paragraph in or this.

Topic.

Yeah. And boom, now it's raised from the.

Dead.

Exactly. I mean a lot of what Gert was talking about, it seemed like, like he didn't say it in specific words, but essentially it's the, the, the comprehensive.

Content.

Yeah. You know, is, is. It's what it sounded like what you said the trends are. Even though it was interesting, they said the trends of content right now.

Are really shorter, more.

Compressing. The content compressing still probably very comprehensive in. Exactly. But.

It'S. Here's the thing, I think you could still compress content and still have pillar.

Posts.

Sure. Right. Like you look at something like Brian, what Brian Dean does on his website, you know, SEO, there's been 900 page books written on SEO. Right. Like there's been big old monster fat bibles that you can buy on.

SEO.

Right. And you look at Brian Dean's blog post and yes, it might be a 5,000 word article, but that's still a massive compression from a 900 page book for.

Sure. I mean, yeah. So it's, that's a good, that's a good way perspective, I guess. Yeah. You don't need it. I mean, books are cool. Not down in the books, but. Yeah. You don't have to write a book to actually rank.

Well. Well, yeah.

Yeah.

Comprehensive. But I mean what you just said is, is, was pretty much my other big takeaway is kind of go back through, audit your content, find the stuff that's not getting like any traffic and, and then figure out what to do with it. There's multiple things you can do with it. Number one, you can go and combine it with another article that maybe is ranking a little bit better and just merge two articles together. Right. You can go and update it. You can like run it through a tool like topic, figure out what other stuff you can add to it to make it rank better and update that article. Or if you just don't see any value in that article, maybe it's an article that doesn't attract your ideal audience. So even if it is driving traffic, it's not bringing the ideal traffic in. Well, that stuff, you can either just delete it or you can make it no index, which means anybody who's still linking to it can still link to it. It's just not going to rank.

Anymore. Cool. What was the. There was one thing. So the no index. And I think there's one thing I wasn't following. Um, you obviously, he's saying basically don't index it if it's not going to rank well. And all that is that just because Google penalizes you when there's more pages you have that essentially aren't.

Rankable. You know, I, you know, obviously I'm not the biggest SEO expert, but my understanding of it is like, you know, there's, there's link juice, like quote unquote link juice floating around on your website. And you know, if there's link juice pointing to some of these older articles that aren't ranking and then you stop telling it to rank these articles. The link juice, I'm doing air quotes here. But the link juice can flow to other content is kind of the thing. Think of traffic like you're pouring a bottle of water down. You're pouring a bottle of link juice into this, like this like anthill where there's like all these little paths trickling everywhere and you pour it down and you have all the juice trickling into all of these little trails that the ants created. Well, if you close up one of the trails, that means there's more of this link juice pouring into the other trails. Does that make sense? Is that a good.

Analogy? Perfect.

Just imagining you have an anthill with this like jug of link juice.

That'S like, I see it as bright green for some reason. Radioactive, like radioactive bright green link juice that we're pouring down an.

Anthill. I mean, but the visual is spot freaking on. I mean like that's an example of a infant infographic. You can plug into an old piece of content about SEO that sucks, but now you just raised it from the dead using one of the elements that he said is helpful, like graphics. What? What do you.

Got? He just reminded me of one other thing that he said, but he said it very quickly and like, it wasn't something he put much focus on, but about getting backlinks. One of the best ways to get backlinks is to create some sort of like little tool or widget that a lot of people would want to link to. So his example was he made a tool that like, would open up a whole bunch of links across a bunch of tabs, like with one click, right? It was a real simple Chrome plugin or whatever. And he put that on his website and a lot of people thought that was a cool tool and it gave a lot of people something to link to. You look at what Neil Patel did. I think he did this on quicksprout, but he had like a website SEO analyzer tool. So if you went to quicksprout.com, the front page was enter your URL. We'll analyze the SEO on this website, right? That gave something that gave a lot of people something to link to on his website. It gave a lot of people, like anybody who's writing articles on SEO, they're like, hey, if you want to do a quick analysis on your site, here's a free resource where you just plug in your URL and it'll do a real quick audit for you. So like, this concept of creating like really simple tools is a really, really, really great way to get a crap ton of people linking over to your site and build your domain authority. Maybe it won't build the individual article authority, but it will build your domain authority. And your domain authority trickles down to individual pieces of.

Content. Would it be accurate to say that a higher domain authority equals a bigger jug of link.

Juice? Yes, that's a good analogy. There's more link.

Juice. So you get more link juice to pour down this ant hole. Sorry, I don't know. I don't know. I'm asking like, does that give you the ability to. It would, right? So like Google essentially sees, okay, cool, you have a higher.

Authority. I almost feel like it's not more link juice. Better call it more potent link.

Juice.

Okay. It's like, yeah, so like the link juice that you're pouring, it's not like, it's not like there's like new holes that opened up. So there's more places for the link juice. To go. It's just the link juice that you're dumping in there. It used to be, you know, what do they. What do they call it? Like, it used to be 21 proof, and now it's 50.

Proof. Yeah, I'm just worried about the.

Ants. Yeah, fuck the.

Ants.

All right, well, on that note, we're gonna wrap this puppy.

Up. We're murdering fictional ants in this.

One. Hey, sulfur s. With this fictional liquid.

I hope someone has the wild hair to sketch what this looks like in their minds based off of this crazy analogy we.

Promote. Oh, sure. We will get an email with this.

Sketch. If you are an artist, this is a call for all artists. We will put this in the post if we think it's good enough.

And then we're gonna get all the SEO people going. What is this bullshit? These guys don't know what they're talking.

About. Blame it on Gert.

All right, thanks for hanging with.

Us. His website was. Well, before we do that, his website was SEO Leverage. You can grab his book of Erica Method. That's where you can find out if you want to, you know, get information about hiring his team to do.

An audit or the consultant considering getting an audit from him as well. Because, I mean. I mean, shoot. He said it's adp, just something audit. And, I mean, just think of what. Immediately we just think of, like, what's the roi? And that could be very quick. Could be the sale of one product. You know, it just depends on what you got.

So. Or as Gary would say, what's the ROI of your.

Mom? That's right. He.

Would.

Yes. But get the notes, because this is a lot of good, actionable, tactical stuff where the notes should break it down in a real good flow for you. Flowchart Group.com is where we're telling you to go to get the notes. Now you can join the Facebook group, become part of the community. And when you join the group, we will also email you the latest notes to the latest episodes. And you can grab the notes from this one. If you do it within two.

Weeks, do it quickly@flowchart group.com and then we have our sponsor over at Easy Webinar. And you can get a sweet deal that they hook. They're hooking you up, up. And basically, you can get a fat discount from the subscription. They do everything. Webinars, you've heard us talk about it. It's pretty obvious. They make webinars easy. And it's. They. They kind of. They.

Basically. It's not shitty. Webinar.com. it's.

Easywebinar.Com. i'm sure Kasey appreciates that. Yes, it's easywebinar.com so go to easywebinar.com hustle. That is easywebinar.com hustleen. Make sure you get the discount. Something like 20 to 25% off, depending on what you.

Choose. Yeah, I promise we're not drunk right.

Now. We're not. I'm sleep deprived. Yeah, that is.

The. Joe's sleep deprived, and I get amped up after real tactical episodes. So I'm just amped up and Joe's sleep.

Deprived. That's the thing is, like, I'm actually amped up. I was pumped up on that episode. I'm just like, right afterwards, I was like, my brain is so swollen right now. I just can't move for a.

Minute. Well, on that note, let's wrap up because we got another interview in 15.

Minutes. I gotta go do some wind sprints or something.

Bye, y'. All. Thank you. Share it with someone that needs SEO.

Love.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Before taking the time to listen, we want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics, tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening. Go get it.