Transcript (software transcribed, not edited)

Hello, everyone. Ben Briggs here and welcome to the second episode of the better digital marketing podcast. Today. We’re going to talk about SEO. Everybody’s favorite organic search free clicks from Google free Google traffic. It just does not get any better than that. So what do we have to do?

And how much money do we have to spend to get all this free Google traffic, so. Basically when it comes to SEO, there’s really kind of three major categories things that you have to do if you want to rank for a keyword that’s going to bring in traffic now one important consideration is. Is the keyword that you’re thinking about?

Is it a branded query or is it a non-branded query? I’m going to skip over that just kind of assume that you guys know the difference between a branded and non-branded query at this point and I’ll make a video about that some other time, but for now the three major categories of things that you need to think about if you want to rank on Google.

You know on the first page is from some of those sweet sweet free Google clicks. Our content is your number one thing you got to think about the actual content that’s going to be on your website whether that’s images video text all that good stuff usually usually text and then links so getting other websites to link to your website as a there’s a number of different ways that you can go about that.

And then technical so these are kind of a nuts-and-bolts coating type things, you know communicating with robots, you know, making sure that your website accessible and all that good stuff. And so what we’ll do today is we’ll talk a little bit about each one of these categories the content the links and the technical SEO to try to kind of help give a broad overview.

Of what is involved with getting a website to rank on Google and to pull in that free Google traffic? So first of all content now this almost probably seem so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said, but if you want to rank for a keyword X you have to have content about keyword X if you want to rank for blue widgets you got to have content on your site.

About blue widgets. Now this content this is does need to live in some very specific parts of the website for one. If you put the keyword that you want to rank for in your title tag, then that’s going to send a signal to the search engines. But this page of your website is relevant for that keyword and that’s going to help you rank for that key.

You can also put your keyword in h tags. This is becoming less important, you know, and it’s getting more and more complicated the way that Google actually evaluates where what lives in your site how important that is, but. H tags bold text, you know, all that good stuff, you know having the keywords that you want to rank for on the page and then also having it in a format.

That’s actually human-readable. Google’s gotten better and better at detecting just Spam content, you know people who are just repeatedly writing the same keyword over and over and over on their page mean obviously that fell out of favor. Ten years ago and and has continued to get more and more difficult for people who want to do article spinning and these sorts of things to try to produce content that that’s basically the the question.

That you probably want to answer when you’re looking at the contents. You’ve created when you’re hoping to rank for you know, any given keyword is how much better is this piece of content that I just produced than the content that’s currently sitting there for that query. So so let’s say that you want to rank for Portland real estate, you know, you wanted to Europe your real estate agency in Oregon.

You want to get your website to show up on the first page when people are searching for Portland real estate. So the first question that you need to ask is what content is already there, you know, who’s already produced content? I mean you got your zillow’s you realtor.com is. All the different major aggregators and then you’ve also got your other local competitors who are all producing content because they want to show up on Google and get that traffic.

So when you look at the the content that’s already there the mistake that a lot of people make is they’ll say, okay. Well, I need to produce content. That’s at least almost as good or or that’s a little bit better. Then the content that’s already there. The content that I’m going to produce is going to be a little bit better than what’s already there.

And then that’s going to allow me to show right that. Is not a good approach it pretty much always fails your content the idea and Rand fishkin talks about this and presentation. He gets called 10x content. You’re you’re really your target. Your goal when you’re thinking about producing content in order to rank for you know, any particular keyword should be that my content is going to be 10 times better than the content is already there.

My content is going to be so much better than the content that’s already there. And if you look at a keyword and you look at the content that’s already there. And and you think about it for a minute you sit there and you go. Okay. Well, is it possible to produce its is this the best content that is possible to produce about this particular keyword.

Now if the content that’s already there if the answer that question is yes if the content that’s already there for that query is. Really really really good and you can’t as somebody who’s you know in the industry somebody who’s, you know selling these Services you can’t think of a way to make it all a lot better then.

Maybe you should think about marketing and other ways because if your content is not a lot better than what’s already there. It’s going to be very very difficult to convince people to link to it or promote it let alone to just have that happen organic and what we’ll talk about kind of organic links link Outreach stuff like that a little bit but.

In any case your content needs to be high quality human readable and needs to be actually useful to the customer. You can’t just write the keywords and have some unique content. That’s basically exactly the same as everything that’s already there for that keyword. Your content needs to be a lot better.

And if you’re not willing to do that, if you’re not willing to invest the time and money into creating content, that’s much better than the content is already there for you know, the keyword that you want to rank for then just don’t do it by the pay-per-click ads, you know figure out your marketing on Facebook go to a business networking group to do whatever else it is that you do to generate business and and.

And just realize that if it’s not worth the investment in the content to produce content, that’s way better than what’s already there for that keyword that you want to rank for then you don’t you’re not going to be successful. You’re just not going to to rank for that query unless you’re willing to produce the content that’s required.

Be there. now. What makes content better than what’s already there, you know could be a visual presentation, you know, if there’s contents already. They’re very very text heavy but it’s well-written, but it’s very text Heavy, you know, maybe you could find a way to kind of Translate. That content in a way that’s more visual his visual Persuasions much stronger than then written persuasion.

So convincing customers that your contents useful one way would be to translate, you know content the similar to what’s already ranking for a keyword X into a way. That’s more. You know adding video just having a video on your page is going to make whatever page that is of your website seem more valuable.

It’s a Google Google knows that people like video. You know, it will Engage The users Google just wants when Google is thinking about the the organic results in what to show in the organic results. Google’s not thinking about getting you as a business owner a good result in terms of having produced that content.

The only thing that Google cares about is that the user who did the search. Finds the the content to be really really relevant really useful that way the the customer will be satisfied. The customer will like Google trust Google use Google tell the people to use Google and that’s good for the long-term Health in Google and Google is known that for a really long time and they’ve been executing against that objective and finding a lot of different ways to evaluate content at scale.

And two in order to achieve that so so that’s one of the ways that you can translate translate the existing content into a video translated into a more visual form. And that’s one of the tactics that you could use to make the content that you’re going to produce better than the content that’s already there.

So links links are super super important if you want to rank if it’s at all competitive now, if you’re the only person on the planet who wants to sell, you know, maybe you’re selling I don’t know penguin top hats right? You got these awesome penguin top hats and you’re the only one selling them.

Well, pretty much. All you have to do is, you know, put the content on your site, you know, right up with the product. They’re, you know, write a halfway decent description. You’re going to show up you’re going to be the only one selling, you know penguin top hats. So you won’t even really need them any links any all like funeral for people who’ve ever searched for penguin top.

Ansel find yet. Everything’s great. Everything’s all all hunky-dory. Now if you do have competitors and you pretty pretty much all do then you’re going to need links now links. The reason why links are important this is really the fundamental Innovation at Google that Google made, you know way back way back in the day.

The reason why Google is a better search engine the back. Is because of the way that Google evaluates the the link profile and assigns domain Authority and uses these signals that are Beyond just the the first party signal the first the direct signals from your website, which is the content of your website and also the technical we’ll get to that in a bit but the the way that the internet relates to your site, so.

For instance, if you’re a plumber and your good plumber and your local area, then they’re going to be other websites in your area that are going to be linking to you. Maybe it’s the local Chamber of Commerce. Maybe you sponsored a little league team and they’ve they put a bills Plumbing Banner on the Little League website link back to you, right?

All of those kinds of factors those can be you know good ways to build links and it used to be that any link that was paid for in anyway. So like the sponsored the local Little League team technically, they were supposed to put Rel equals. Nofollow on that link. Now a nofollow link as opposed to a do follow link is is supposed to be an invoice for a long time.

A message to Google that said hey Google don’t count this as as passing Authority. This isn’t an editorially given link. This is this is a link that was paid for. Social media all of your Facebook’s and linkedin’s and Twitter’s and redis and all that. No follow the links by default pretty much all the links that you’re getting from.

Social media have a nofollow on them now for years and years and years. SEO is all of us. We you know, we had a heavy bias towards do follow links because do follow links could pass pagerank and then that would help us rank better. So we were always. Chasing after those do follow links and in a lot of cases like, you know directories that you might be in for instance.

My business is in clutch dotco. We ran up City a couple other ones. The free profile that you get from those guys comes with a nofollow link, but but if you you know upgrade to a premium membership and you can get a new phone link, right and that’s that’s very common across all kinds of Industries.

The the do follow link is one thing that. That people are kind of holding up as you know. Hey, here’s some some extra benefit that we can give you, you know, if you become a premium member what have you so but that’s recently changed the the nofollow versus do follow Google now and I’ve been saying this for years that there’s no way that the Google algorithm can be so much better.

Then the being of the yahoos, you know, the Google organic results are so much better for a reason and the reason is that Google is taking into account more signals and doing a better job of evaluating those signals to rank content. And and this is what links are all about the the links that you’re getting from, you know high-quality sources and any organically gotten links are even more valuable.

But any links that you’re getting from from third-party sources, including social media Google’s evaluating that and taking that into account when it’s ranking websites. So so so if you have better content, then the other guy and you got more links than obviously going to rank better. There’s a lot of different ways to get links.

We just kind of touched on a little bit directories, you know, you can have directories that are relevant to a specific business Wide Web directories, you know back in the day we had dmoz, you know best the web’s still out there, but probably not worth the price anymore. There’s a lot of web directories, you know that used to be they used to be a big part of it big part of the link building strategy.

It’s definitely decrease a lot in value, you know over the last 10 years, but there’s there’s still some value in some directories, especially if it’s a directory where. You’re actually going to get some traffic from and a way that you can tell if you’re likely to get traffic from a directory is search a keyword that you want to rank for and if that directory already ranks for it, then you’re doing.

It’s called like Barnacle SEO, right? So you’re putting your business on the van directory. So at least you can soak up some portion of the traffic that that directories already generate and then if that directory also links back to your site, that’s a signal to Google. Hey, this site is relevant for this keyword that will help you rank a little bit better.

Now there’s many lot reach, you know, you can send a hundred emails a day. You can email, you know to have a series where you’re requesting a link three times. You can do this manual Outreach to try to get different websites to. It’s a link to you. I mean that’s a valid tactic. It can produce some links.

You know, it’s something that you want to do. They’re fairly efficient ways to do it. It’s not not a tactic that I use. But manual Outreach is an option. You know, you’ve got your guest posting and your press releases where you’re producing a piece of usually just text content and you are putting that out on a press release directory, you know, maybe you get an anchor text link where you can actually have your keyword that you want to rank for as the text of the link that links back to your site.

That’s a that’s going to be a little bit better. Then I’ll link that just says click here or announcement or whatever other anchor text. There might be if you can get a keyword Rich anchor text link those still have some value in 2019. They used to be the Holy Grail back in the day, you know eight nine years ago and anchor text links were kind of the the bee’s knees.

They’re pretty awesome. If you want to rank for something to get a couple anchor text links and you’re good to go, but. But that’s changed a bit, you know and you do want to be careful with keyword Rich anchor text links if all of your links are keyword, Rich anchor text links than Google algorithm can see that as being a little bit unnatural or a little bit.

Manipulated and it’s possible that you’ll even get a penalty if you build too many of those especially if it’s the exact same keyword every time so mixing up your anchor text links a little bit. Make sure you’re getting some natural stuff in there where you do have some click here’s or just some some you are out my URL.com, you know, you don’t want all of your links to be keyword.

Rich anchor text links but some of your links definitely should be you know, especially if you’re targeting any sort of a competitive keyword now the same that I’m going to make is going to be a little bit controversial about links and it has been for years, but maybe it’s becoming less controversial as we have and I’ll link to this in the video description.

I’ll link to the the announcement that Google made. It’s just seemed unreasonable to me for a very long time that Google would ignore. How many people on Facebook or LinkedIn the website X how many people on Twitter LinkedIn and Facebook X. You know how many people on Twitter are linking to this website.

It seems a little bit silly to me to imagine that that Google would completely ignore that. Given Google’s history being pretty Progressive as far as finding new ways to rank websites finding new ways to identify links. It seemed pretty silly to me to say. Well those links are nofollow. So there’s no way that Google is using Twitter to figure out which websites are.

Just didn’t make any sense. And now, you know a couple days ago about a couple maybe a week and a half ago. We had to Google announced that the Rel equals. No Falls just a Hint. It is one of the signals that they use when evaluating the quality of links. So basically admitted that there could be some cases where a nofollow link would actually pass pagerank.

So that means those social media links. All of a sudden are potentially Counting. When it comes to ranking for a particular keyword now, this is mostly conjecture on my part, but I would say that if you’ve got a Twitter post and it has the keyword that you want to rank for and then I’ll link to your website all within that same Twitter post the the Google robot the Google system.

The algorithm machine learning has gotten sophisticated enough to be able to understand that. Keyword in the Twitter post followed by link to your website or particular page means that your site is relevant for those words that were in that post. So, I mean this this does kind of open up the door a little bit to manipulation and honestly the desire by the social media platforms of Facebook’s and the Twitter’s to avoid.

Having a massive amount of spam which they get a massive amount of spam anyway, but but if Google admitted, hey, you know, if you get links to your website from a Twitter post and includes the keyword, then that’s going to help your website rank better. The results of that would be people trying to manipulate.

It would be people making sock puppet accounts on Twitter so they can link back to their own websites and. There’s some of that stuff there’s something some that has been going on anyway, because there are people like me out there who assumed that these kinds of Twitter links would be valuable in terms of providing some ranking benefit and you know went ahead and execute against that strategy even though Google has been telling us that these links definitely don’t count.

But so. So my so the takeaway from this whole thing as far as the rally was no following the social media links is that it’s a good idea to be doing some stuff on social media if you want to. Rank better in SEO. You want to get people talking about your website on on Twitter on LinkedIn on Facebook, you know, depending on what’s relevant for you, you know, maybe if you’re a restaurant that Yelp is probably relevant you want people talking about your business.

They’re posting links to it post links to your menu. And just like your Yelp profile is going to be a nofollow link, but there’s no question that if you have 748 reviews for your restaurant on Yelp, and then you’ve got a link with all this user-generated content that’s going to be that’s a factor that Google’s using to rank websites is there’s no question that some of that is going on.

So I guess the moral of the story is don’t devalue a link necessarily just because it’s a nofollow. It’s good to also get new follows. No question, you know kind of the the more old school stuff, especially if you can get you know, just local Partners businesses business owners your friends with link linking to each other.

I mean, that’s still a good idea there used to be a big thing about a reciprocal link penalty because. For a long time there was a bunch of manipulation going on where people would just set up pages on their site where everybody could just link to everybody else and it all became a bunch of robots doing a bunch of linking back and forth to each other.

And so for a period of time there was a situation where reciprocal links can potentially get you in a bunch of trouble realistically in more modern times last couple years. The worst thing a reciprocal link is going to do for you is just not get counted as a benefit. It’s not very likely that you’re going to get a significant ranking penalty for.

Having a reciprocal link where you link somebody and they link back to you. And if you do actually have a real-life relationship with with this business if you’re bored with your business is related, if you’re a supplier if you’re a vendor. If you if you have some kind of reason why you should be linking back and forth to each other you might as well link to link back and forth to each other, you know, if you’ve both got good websites and you’re both going to benefit the pad in the link and it can also be a Content idea can be you know, hey, we’re going to talk about our relationship with this Fender and then we’re going to provide a link to that vendor site.

They’re going to do the same thing for us and and everybody benefits from that kind of a link. You want to touch on a little bit paid linking buying links private backlink networks that PB ends. A lot of people are real excited about. All the link by and stuff. I mean there’s no question that it does work, you know sometimes until you get burned like there’s no question that the people on the, you know, really bleeding edge of figuring out you know, how can I cheat?

How can I buy links how can I buy expired domains that have link profiles and then use them to give links to my own websites or my friends websites. I mean that stuff goes on it gets you burned all the time though. So to me the cost of having to rebuild the get a new domain rebuild the content change the content because can be exactly the same if I.

Take the exact content from my website that Google just nuked and then I move it to a new domain. That’s not going to trick Google anymore. Gurus a little more sophisticated than that and and Google is desperately. They’re always desperately trying to Nuke everybody who is doing you know, these really bad.

Well in Google’s opinion bad tactics of trying to use purchased links to try to build Authority for their site build links for their site so they can rank better the the kind of argument from Google. Is that this type of behavior generally moves websites to the top that don’t have the best content that don’t have the best user experience.

You know, it’s just it’s purely commercial manipulation because people are trying to move their product up to the front of the line. And that doesn’t create the best experience for Google users. So all the way back in the back Cuts days and Google still has a giant web spam team that is going out there and trying to Nuke these websites trying to defeat these tactics trying to make it very very difficult to gamey algorithm with private back link networks bought links all that kind of stuff.

It’s going to make it very likely that if you engage in these kinds of tactics that you’re going to get burned so I don’t do it. I’d like you can do it if you want, but you should if you’re going to do it, you know, you better be real excited about building new websites all the time because from time to time you’re going to get nuked.

So you’re and you’re going to have to completely start over. So that’s kind of like ostomy there is there’s benefit you can get more ranking results in a shorter period of time if you engage in some of these tactics unless you engage in the stuff that’s already completely new to but the the guys these are all Bad actors right these guys in the link buying in the.

The private back link networks. These guys are basically Bad actors, you know, they’re basically trying to cheat the system and and Google doesn’t like them but there’s no reason why some if somebody’s willing to cheat. So he’s willing to manipulate someone’s willing to do these sorts of things.

You know, why would they stop selling? The service once Google has removed all the benefit from it. They can still pretend like there’s benefits still tell you there’s benefits to still sell you the service just because they’re selling the service doesn’t mean it even works. So you need to be really really sophisticated in the way you evaluate what you buy, you know, if you’re going to engage in this type of tactics to get links in my opinion.

It’s not worth it. Manual outreaches. Okay, you can do you know guest posting is you know, it’s not as good as it used to be. It’s been devalued significantly press releases can work if they’re legit if you’re actually announcing something if you do have to spend some money. You know, you have to get on the distribution.

You have to get a halfway decent distribution. And then you also you have to be strategic when you’re doing the press releases, but those sorts of things can work and then building up an actual social media presence, but. I would say the overarching thing, you know in 2019 when you’re thinking about building lengths you should be thinking about building links that are actually going to have benefit from the traffic that they’re bringing in.

Google’s gotten pretty good at evaluating whether you’re building a link just for the links sake and then devaluing that when you do whereas if you’re building the link because this is actually a place where it makes sense for people to have a link to your website. And people are going to click that link and come to your website, which you are telling Google about if you have Google analytics on your site and pretty much everybody does so these are the kinds of these are kinds of more sophisticated decisions that I believe.

Google is making. When it comes to links and so when you’re thinking about building links, you need to think about, you know, these sorts of issues and really try to build those high quality links that are actually going to also deliver value to your site because you’re going to spend the time and effort to build to build a link.

It would be nice to actually just get some traffic through that link and that’s. Not as easy as just spamming out a million links or buying into a private backlink network, but the upside is long-term and it is not going to get you burned. You know, you’re not if you build links in this way. You’re going to have a whole lot.

It doesn’t make it impossible that you’re going to you know have a problem. You can get a manual action or an algorithmic penalty. I mean these sorts of things happen and sometimes there by mistake, but you’ll have a lot lower probability of having those types of problems. So that’s links. I think I think around about links long enough.

Let’s talk about technical SEO. So technical search engine optimization should really be kind of called technical website optimization. One major element is mobile friendliness. So does your website work well on mobile and you know some some of the people who’ve been on the internet had businesses on the internet for a really long time.

You know, they’ll say Amen my customers use desktop. Yeah, you know that like some of them still do I use desktop? But you know, I’m not a not just an average customer. I’m a little more tech savvy than that and I spent a lot more time in front of machine. I have multiple desktop computers in my house.

So mobile most people. Most consumers especially if you’re busy if your B2B, you know, you can probably still kind of focus on desktop and get away with that for the most part. But even in B2B a lot of your customers are on a mobile device and you know, making sure that your website is accessible.

Attractive easy to use loads fast, even if it’s going through no 3G or 4G, you know, maybe a slow Wi-Fi connection on somebody’s phone getting the website to load fast into work. Well on mobile is critically important and. You’re basically the entire index Google’s move the entire search index to mobile-first, so if you have a great desktop experience and your website super fast on desktop, but your mobile experience doesn’t have those same attributes your it’s not as fast.

It doesn’t. It’s not as easy to use on mobile. You’re getting a penalty for that. You’re getting a penalty for that right now in October twenty. Nineteen. You are you’re being hurt by the fact that your website doesn’t work as well on mobile. So that’s the number one thing. That is the number one thing.

It’s a bigger attribute than all this other stuff. We’re going to talk about is speed and mobile friendliness when it comes to technical SEO. That’s the most important thing speed mobile friendliness now, I’m going to put the title and meta tags in the technical bucket. They’re not that Technical and there’s an argument for it.

There’s an argument for title and meta tags being placed on the content side. But basically your title tag is is the usually what’s going to show up as a Blue Link on the search result page and when you show up. On the search engine results page the serp. Your title tag is generally going to be the Blue Link that people are going to click on, you know, if you want page X to rank for a keyword X then you want if you want page X drink or keyword why then you want keyword why to be included within the first 65 characters of your time attack?

The the first 65 characters are really what Google reads it may or may not be ignoring title tags that are a little bit longer than that. At this point there’s a little bit of dispute between different people about you know, exactly how long the title tag can be. My kind of standard operating procedure is to take those first 65 characters.

Use those as the the most view those is the most important. Part of the title tag and put the keywords that I want to rank for in that part of the title tag those first 65 characters and then if I want to put stuff like my brand name or if I just want to put extra words there that’s fine. It’s not going to have a big negative impact, but but it’s also not going to probably have you know much if anything of a positive impact as far as meta tags meta keywords is completely dead.

It’s been dead for a long time. Put a fork in it. There’s no reason to write a keyword meta keywords tag, really? Maybe there’s some old crappy surgeons still pay attention, but the The Meta keywords tag, don’t worry about it. Don’t use it. Most of the other meta tags, you know are used for things that aren’t related to improving your organic search engine.

The one meditech that does kind of matter is the meta description. The The Meta description can be used as the black text that appears below your Blue Link of your title tag on the search engine results page. So the meta description is not accounted for it doesn’t is not a ranking signal it will not help your website show up better for any particular query but.

It is the black text that will appear with your link. He can be Google can also auto-generate this now that’s this is about the last 18 months to 2 years. Google has. Updated to where it can instead of your meta description. It can use content from your site to create its own description. So that might happen particularly if your meta description isn’t very good.

Google will do this, you know for any particular page, so. When you’re when you’re crafting The Meta description what you’re really trying to do is I think about it a lot like I think about pay-per-click ad copy The Meta description, you know should give users an idea about what the page is about and a reason why they should come check it out.

So the meta description is that part of your website that. I’m just trying to get people to click on and you just try and people trying to get people to get a basic understanding of what the page is about what they’re going to get if they click and give them a good reason to click. So so that’s your your meta description tag.

Now when it comes to page speed there’s a bunch of stuff that you get into and one really went there a couple tools that I use pretty much all the time when I’m thinking about pagespeed. One of them is Google pagespeed insights. Just Google Google pagespeed insights. You’ll go to a little tool you can put your website in there.

You can put your competitors website in there. You can put whatever website in there. You want the Amazon in there to see how good the big boys are. And you put your website in there and it gives you a bunch of information about the the speed of your site how fast it is, you know, it’ll tell you how your servers look performing.

It’ll tell you, you know, what do you have opportunity to improve the formatting of your image and prove the compression of your images is your JavaScript making your website take a long time to load. Is there anything that you can do to optimize? Press that so the the page speed insights and then also pingdom is a pretty good one.

It’ll give you give you a lot of the same information but also a little bit of a different look at some of the information so you can look at that Google pagespeed insights report. And if you understand what it’s talking about, you know how to do that stuff, you know, it’ll give you a bunch of suggestions.

It’ll show you, you know areas of red that are bad. You know that are slow that are hurting your performance. You can address those if you don’t understand it then you can hire Developers. Who does understand it and they can Implement that stuff for you? There’s only you can only go so far, you know, generally if your if your page is you’re getting a score that’s as good or better than the page speed score of the competitors who are already showing up for the queries that you want to show up for, you know, you want to be at least as good you got to be as good if you’re a lot slower.

Then the competing sites if your page is a lot slower, even if your contents better, you’re still not going to be able to beat them for ranking and they get those top spots on the search engine results page. So when you’re looking at a big part of your technical SEO is your page speed you can use that pagespeed insights report on to optimize your content and you can also use the pingdom can help another thing.

It’s a smaller Factor just because it. It’s not. As it doesn’t have as big of an impact. He really can’t have as big of an impact as optimizing the content that actually shows up on your page optimizing the way that your content is presented and the compression of your content your job script and all that good stuff.

But your server response time, you know 1/8 once you’ve done all this other stuff and once you’ve got, you know a halfway decent score. Then you can look at you know, how fast is my server, you know, what’s my server response time? And then really the only way to impact that is to if it’s if it’s slow, you know it if you’ve got a slow server response time for shown in the red contact your web host and say hey, is there some kind of web hosting platform some kind of web hosting plan that I can get on?

That’ll reduce this with you guys, you know, and you can also look shop around for other web hosts. I mean some web hosts are faster than others. It depends on the infrastructure in the cloud delivery Cloud delivery Cloud delivery Network is for your images in particular but a lot of a poster kind of putting all the content in the cloud now.

That can kind of reduce the latency of the amount of distance that the data has to travel to get between the the server that you’re hosting it on and the actual customer or wherever Google’s page speed test is happening. So looking at your web hosting is kind of a the last step or the first day if you’ve building a brand new website and yeah get it hosted with with a good hosts going to have a fast server response time, but you’ve already got a website up.

I like to look at a lot of these other technical factors first and then say Hey kid if I change web house if I got a different web hosting plan, would that speed up my server response time? Allow me to get. Just a little bit better page speed score. So that’s about it. I mean, obviously we could dive deeper on any of these specific context if you if you’ve got questions about anything that that we put about in this video.

Hit me up on Twitter. I’m at the samurai Dr. On Twitter or you can get in touch with me through my website www.samael.org. We. I hope this has been useful is kind of an overview of kind of at least my perspective on SEO I think is a pretty good one. I think if you followed the recommendations here, you could end up with a very competitive website in terms of generating organic search traffic here at the end.

I want to mention that I’m over all bearish about SEO have been for a very long time. I did SEO for a living full-time. Way back in the day and it’s seven eight nine years ago. I really focused on SEO. I did SEO for a living for a couple years. But I got out of that as a full-time gig. I really focused more on paid search and that with the first transitioned over to paid search and paid social as the focus for ones because look at the search results page.

I mean, if you look at the search results page from from seven years ago eight years ago nine years ago. Look at the Google search results page the amount of real estate that showed up above the fold. That was non-paid. That was there was organic that was that sweet sweet free traffic. It was a whole lot bigger than it is now because if you think about it seventy eighty percent of the traffic for depending on what Market thing on what specific query I mean maybe as low as 60 but still most of the traffic’s mobile most the traffic’s been mobile for a couple years and there’s basically no.

Organic SEO real estate available on a mobile device above the fold. Above the fold you’re going to have ads or you can have Google products Google shopping Google my business the the actual 10 Blue Links doesn’t show up on a mobile device until you scroll quite a bit down. So the share of the Click Share the amount of traffic that goes to the.

Google organic listings is going down and down and down and that trend is going to continue. I expect it to continue. I’d be shocked if Google decides, you know, actually we don’t want paid clicks. We don’t want to generate Revenue where a publicly traded company and we’ve decided that we’re going to give traffic away for free.

I don’t think that that’s possible so I would bet that the trend of. Even if your number one, even if your number three, you know in the Google organic, you’re going to get less traffic next year than you did this year. And that’s going to continue. So so overall I do advocate for doing some basic SEO stuff.

You want to show up for instance for your brand number one, if you’re not showing up number one for your brand if your website doesn’t load fast if it’s not usable on mobile. It’s less about for me. It’s less about actually attracting non-branded Google traffic and getting the revenue that results from that and it’s more about just having a decent website.

Make sure that my customers aren’t frustrated at least being as good as my competitors. So if you want to do just a basic checklist to make sure that your website’s functional that it’s easy to use that you. Aren’t you know frustrating your customers definitely advocate for that? You should absolutely do that.

Even if you’re a pretty small business, but when it comes to investing a ton of money in manual link Outreach bunch of time and money and manual link Outreach doing a no creating a content for 700 keywords that are all pretty much exactly the same, you know the name. Maybe it’s different long tail keywords used to be we would produce content for a five-word search and then because we were the only page that had those five words.

We would rank be pretty easy to rank for a long tail keyword with just a simple piece of content couple links pointing to it that that’s more or less gone away because the the algorithm has gotten away from. Exactly matching the the text to the search and more towards kind of trying to understand the overall intent semantically relating different words.

So that creates pages with a lot of authority pages that have been determined to be high quality can rank for a larger set of keywords that are related. Whereas back in the day of very narrowly targeted page. Maybe would be able to dominate. A long-term a long tail keyword. So so overall, you know the opportunity to generate revenue from non-branded organic search is getting it’s gotten a lot smaller already and it’s going to coat to continue to go down.

In the the amount of profit that’s available there. That’s not to say there’s no profit to be had there. And if you’re already doing if you’re doing a lot of the work that you already have to do just because you want to generate. Traffic and revenue from particular maybe a non branded paid search.

Maybe you’re putting together a really good content page. You’re making sure it’s conversion rate optimized, you know, you’re making sure that it’s easy to use and it loads fast. You’re doing all this stuff. Anyway, just to generate revenue from from non-branded pay-per-click then, you know building a couple links doing just a little bit of fundamental SEO stuff to try to.

To try to rank a little bit better and get some of that free traffic that can definitely be worthwhile. But again, I don’t you know recommend looking at SEO as I wouldn’t build a business around SEO because it’s going to continue to go down in terms of the bang for the buck that you get with the time and money that you investment so.

I hope that that was useful again. Hit me up on Twitter. If you’ve got questions, there’s a piece of content you want to. You want to see expand it on if there’s something something that you heard about in this video that you want to know more about hit me up on Twitter at the samurai Dr. You can also hit me up on my website.

If you need digital marketing Services particularly, if you want pay-per-click management paid social conversion rate optimization, post-click optimization lead nurturing those kinds of things. Hit me up, you know schedule a call and we can see if you’d be a good fit as a client. And if you’d like to be a guest on this podcast, let me know.

I’m definitely open doing interviews and discussion type formats on digital marketing related issues. So thanks everybody for listening to me rant about digital marketing and I hope that this is going to help you do your digital marketing better?