Blab #25: The 3 Pillars of SEO

Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or marketing professional looking for straightforward non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Labs podcast. I'm your host, Tom Haslam. I'm the creative director here at Marketing Labs. Did you know that a staggering 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine? That's why it's crucial to get your SEO strategy. Right. In this episode, we'll be exploring the three essential pillars of SEO that will help put you in the best position, no pun intended, to grow your online presence. Joining me for today's pod is Tilly Hayes at SEO Executive. How are you doing til?

I'm good. Thanks. You, Tom?

Yeah, I'm very well. It's not as hot in here as it normally is, is it?

No, it's quite warm outside though.

I think it's going to get hot though. Sweaty, sweaty pod. And we also have a special guest with us today, Ryan Jones from SEO Testing. Are you doing Ryan?

Yeah. All good. Happy to be here.

Yeah. Thanks for joining us. SEO Testing is a SaaS tool dedicated to helping marketers bring in more organic traffic through SEO testing using Google Search console data to make analysing the results easier, making use of their API access. They also have a range of tools and reports available to help SEOs save time and show the value of their work. Ryan has been in SEO on the wider digital marketing industry for nearly a decade and is deeply passionate about marketing like all of us here. He's worked agency side, he's moved in house, and he is also worked as a freelancer when he is not working. Ryan's a big sports fan with a particular love for NFL and NBA. Nice. I like

American Sports.

Yeah. Any particular NFL team?

Yeah, I'm a 49 ERs fan, so as long as we don't talk about last year, it's all good.

Did they lose the Super Bowl? Sorry.

I'm not a massive American NFL fan personally, but if there was one team I'd support, it'd be Green Bay Packers.

That's okay.

Just because I like their logo.

It did make it worse last year that I watched the Super Bowl live with a Chiefs fan. Oh, did they win it then?

Yeah. Oh, how did that not go down? Well, I was miserable. Was you? Yeah, totally miserable. Oh no. Do you like football? I do, yeah. What a football fan. Are you a football, soccer? Don't call it soccer. I'm joking. I'm just going down the What football team would you support? Big Darby County fan. Dolby County? Yeah. Interesting. I'm a Chef United fan. Okay.

My family and not as forest fans,

Not as forests, so

I guess they're against you

Don't call 'em knots. Forest.

Forest,

Matt, I'd be fuming at you. I always call 'em knots Forest on purpose. Okay. Forest because Knots County.

Yeah.

But anyway, we're going to talk about SEO now, aren't we? So we're going to talk about the three pillars as what we refer to as the three pillars of SEO because it's the main element, I guess, of what form SEO as a whole. So we'll start with pillar one, which is technical, SEO. Now, my knowledge on technical SEO is not great. You are decent and I'm assuming, I'm hoping you are good.

Not as good as I once was, but still up there. Still up there,

Yeah, that's good. So I mean, can you explain for our listeners in its simplest form what technical SEO

Means? Yeah, so in its simplest form, technical SEO is any optimization work of a website's build or infrastructure that's going to help Google Crawl index and rank the content that's on the side. That's the one sort of way of breaking it down in a sentence

Form. So I guess from a site architecture perspective, are there any specific elements there like speed mobile, I guess it can be broken down to quite a few different bits, can't it really technical. SEO. Are there any common issues that are often overlooked, do you think?

It depends on the site really, but there are a few common ones that generally get missed in terms of things that are picked up in audits and stuff like that, which is anything to do with 3 0 1 redirects. That's a common pitfall for certain people. In terms of broken redirects or redirect chains that I think more common orphan pages as well. They're often commonly overlooked, but I think I would say those are the main two. And drawing back on my agency experience, I think those were the main two ones that were picked up during the audits that I did all those years ago.

You see those so commonly, don't you incite migrations and things like that, the amount of sites that you and Josh have worked on and the pages have been broken

And

Stuff, not from your side but from theirs or whatever. And I think also people often overlook optimization for mobile. It happens a lot with new sites where they'll just optimise it technically for a desktop and then you go into mobile and it's just completely wrong.

I think from coming back to the migration process, I think because we're as an agency very akin to SEO, we do take that into account when we're redesigning the website quite a lot where other creative agencies, and I'm not knocking other creative agencies, they might not look into that side of things. So commonly you'll find that, let's say a client wants to redesign, they'll be like, oh, I want to remove all these pages. I want to really simplify it down and we've changed, which is fine, but the consideration to all the 4 0 4 errors that you're going to get past, or should we say post-launch, you've got to consider how you're going to redirect them. Is it other pages that you're removing, ranking for keywords that you don't want to miss out on? Little things like that.

It's common for I think businesses that are sort of in those early stages as well, especially with the rises of Wix and stuff like that for sites. Maybe they first built their site on Wix and I've got nothing against Wix. I think they've made tremendous improvements in their SEO standing as well, but I think when they take those first sites and then potentially start working with an agency or a consultant to move on to something like WordPress or a bigger CMS, I think that's when sometimes issues can arrive as it's all been done by themselves firsthand, and then they've kind of got to go through and pick up these different issues that have powered on top of each other over the years.

Yeah, I think sometimes as well, clients create pages and unknowingly some of those pages rank for specific keywords and they might not even know that without looking at it before they've changed the website. And I think that's quite a common one. It's quite interesting because they might not have, let's hope they will have paid a professional copywriter with some SAO knowledge to write the content in the first place, but sometimes without even knowing they've got pages that rank quite well and then when they come round it's like, oh, we've lost all our rankings. They've not considered that process

Or writing content that ends up duplicating with other content that's already ranking. Yeah. Do you see that quite a lot? I've seen that quite a few times. Yeah. Especially back in my agency days, we had certain clients that would come on and start writing their own content, which is all well and good. I encourage that because no one's going to be as much of an expert in your industry as you are and that kind of thing, but without having a detailed view of what's on the site already, what's already ranking, they'll think of problems that their customers have, start writing solution pages for that, and then all of a sudden you're creating duplicate content issues and Google doesn't know which one to rank.

Yeah, I saw one actually earlier me and Josh were looking at, and they've got location pages and it's set up as a templated page and there's 10 different location pages that all use the same content, and the only words that change on there is the location. And that's a big problem, isn't it? It's got to have unique content,

Really. Yeah. Nick and I are working on a site currently where it's kind of ended up a bit of a rabbit war and it just boilerplated content everywhere where the intent's the same users are confused, Google's confused, and it's just a bit of a mess. So

We've digressed a little bit there. I wanted to ask you your sort of take on what you do at SEO testing, how you help your clients and what SEO testing does?

Yeah, so SEO testing at its core is a testing tool and it kind of draws back to when we think of what SEO is, we've kind of been doing SEO testing since SEO became a thing in the sense that we'd see something that was wrong, whether it was a page that wasn't ranking or not ranking where you wanted it to rank, making changes to that page and then monitoring something else to see whether that's been s sort of improvement or a decline. And you could be monitoring rankings, traffic, a combination of everything. So what SEO testing does is it allows site owners, whether it's agencies managing on behalf of clients, clients doing it themselves, that kind of thing. They can change something on their site, whether it's anything to do with tech SEO content and what other stuff that we'll come onto in a bit. And just having that data in front of them that tells them whether what they've done has yielded a positive return. And then we've kind of built out other elements of the tool as well, which is more reporting based, which is especially useful for an agency side, but it helps communicate the work of what SEO Hass done and it kind of allows SEOs to show their value and say, we've done this

And

It's yielded this.

Yeah, had this impact.

You can point on a page by page basis and say, well, this page has gone up 10% and this page is ranking for this many more queries and that kind of

Thing. So that's quite cool. Just to get a bit of a better understanding of SEO testing, what's your role there?

So my role is marketing manager. So I oversee every marketing activity that we do to get more clients for us and more people buying our tool on a monthly basis. So that'll encompass everything from SEO to doing podcasts like this and talks at Brian SEO and other industry events and essentially any marketing channel that we choose to do, I kind of oversee that.

Cool. And what would you say is your ideal client then? Is it an agency or is it a business looking to do it themselves?

Yeah, so we've got a few personas that we actively target. Agencies are a big client of ours. We like working with agencies and that kind of thing. In terms of our ideal client, it kind of depends on what the tool's going to be. Because the tool's got so many different uses, we might find that an agency has a massive amount of success of adding all of their client sites into SEO testing and tracking everything that's been changed and then using that for a reporting or we have site owners themselves and business owners themselves that are just starting to look at SEO and they're reading these blog posts and saying, oh, okay, actually I can do this, but how do I know when I do this that traffic's gone up and that kind of thing. Because all well and good looking at analytics and search console as tools themselves, but it's hard to judge whether it's work that you've done or whether it's anything like algorithmically that's

Happened. And obviously we always market SEO, don't we? It's a long-term thing. It's very much long game. How intricate does the testing tool go? Can you go weekly, monthly, or is it an amalgamation of a few bits?

Yeah, so we report on, because we've got access to GSCs API or dashboard, we can show clicks by day, week, month, and then when it comes to testing, you can test over any time period that you want really. So we've had clients that have tested a change made and then compared a month the previous year

To

This current month this year. So like July, 2023 compared to July, that's just gone. We've got clients that will run tests for 2, 4, 6, 8 weeks, that kind of thing. A lot of that depends on the traffic levels. The site gets to be able to have more statistically significant results. If you've got lower traffic, you want to run that test for a longer period of time to make sure the page gets enough traffic to actually, so we can then report and say that, okay, this is a statistically significant result, this is down to what you've done and it's not anything that Google's changed or that kind of thing. Yeah.

You mentioned blog posts and things. Is that the resources that you would give to people maybe new to SEO to use alongside the tool?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So one of the tasks that I've worked on actively since, so I joined in April, 2023. One of my biggest tasks, which is still ongoing, is building out a massive content library of areas where asset testing will touch.

So whether that's sort of general SEO advice or we can dive into schema and that kind of thing. Or we've got a big content hub on a lot of GSC based topics. So our goal is if someone has an issue with GSC or they've seen an error code in the page index in report or something that they can then Google that we are there, we'll then tell them what's happened, tell 'em how to fix it, and then just at the end we'll tell them that actually you might be able to make your use of GSEA bit more efficient by using SEO testing, but we'll only put that bit at the end. We really actively try and solve the problem that people are having first, and one of our core values is to give our knowledge away for free, basically.

Yeah,

I think that's quite important in business, to be fair. You've got to build a trust there, haven't you first. Yeah, absolutely. And the blog essentially is there to either answer a specific question or help try and help solve a problem. We've done quite a few shorts and podcasts about actually not massively negative to sell, but directly selling on a blog where you see people plugging every single product that they've got or service that they're doing. I think it's good if you do it subtly, but sometimes people just don't get that kind of message where you're just trying to help educate them.

Yeah, we try and stay away from throwing CTAs in like every paragraph you see, some people do. But yeah, if it makes sense for us, we'll throw something in about SEO testing there. If we talk about exporting data, then we might put a little thing in that says, if you've got this amount of track, it could take a few hours to do this specific task, but we have a tool that allows you to do it within 10 minutes. But that's kind of as far as we go that our main goal with the blog is always to solve the problems first and foremost, and then if they choose to have a trial of SEO testing after, then that's great, but as long as we're solving the problem, we're happy.

No, that's good. Nice. I want to talk about site speed and mobile optimization a little bit because it's quite a big topic, talking topic for our clients in terms of helping educate them. So how would you say that site speed and optimization can impact search rankings? Are there anything there from SEO testing perspective where you can regularly check those things?

Yeah, maybe not necessarily from a testing perspective. You can obviously make changes to your site if things have been picked up by Google Page, speed insights and that kind of thing, and then you make changes for that or you've picked up something in, because I know with Screaming Frog, you can connect Google Lighthouse, API to that and get some good site speed insights. So from a purely testing point of view, you can obviously make changes with the goal of improving site speed or becoming more mobile optimised and then track to see whether that's improving traffic or rankings and that kind of thing. But yeah, from an overall perspective, they're both really important with user experience and that kind of thing. So with mobile optimization, Google's moved now to purely using the mobile site or the mobile version of sites for indexing. So having a site that's usable on mobile is absolutely crucial. And then site speed with it being a direct ranking factor as well. We don't necessarily know how much Google weights and the likelihood is that they'll weight it differently for different topics and that kind of thing and different businesses. But overall, we know it's a ranking factor because Google has said that it's a ranking factor and then combining both when you have a mobile optimised site that's really fast and easy to use, that's going to help from a user experience point of view as well, which is the main thing.

No, absolutely. I think, I dunno how many sites we see till where the site just isn't mobile optimised

Still. Yeah, well, they've just got the content right at the top all the way down

To

The fold, and it's just like you need to show some products on the screen at least, rather than just a massive block of content.

And often you'll find little things when you're not necessarily looking for it. I mean, we went for a migration recently. We changed, we had a custom built site which wasn't best for it made publishing content a longer difficult task for us, which one of my main roles is to publish content. So naturally having a website that's hard to publish content was not good for us. So we went through this massive migration. We've migrated to WordPress now, and we found that during the migration that our embedded YouTube videos hadn't been copied over. So we went through and fixed that, and then we worked out that on the ones that had actually been copied over, they weren't fully mobile optimised. So we can then go through and say, okay, we can

Fix that.

Yeah,

You find lots of things like that. I think some stuff you do just naturally Ms. Little bits and bobs like that, but I guess other agencies unlike us, might not pick up on stuff like that, so Cool. Just to wrap up technical SEO then, before we move on to pillar two, what's your favourite simple technical SEO test that you guys offer?

It's not necessarily a specific technical SEO test, but one of my favourite ones is, especially for newer sites or sites that may be custom bill or things like that, is implementing schema. And obviously with the help of chat GPT now, you don't necessarily have to know how to write in JavaScript to be able to, I mean, I'm not that technical, I dunno. JavaScript, I can code HTML very, very slightly thanks to an apprenticeship back in 2017, but my JavaScript knowledge isn't all there at all.

No.

But yeah, one of my favourite tests is for if you've got a big hub of blog posts that doesn't have schema in built, then you can either do it yourself obviously through JavaScript or implement if you were using WordPress, I'm pretty sure Yost have schema implementation within that,

But

Implementing Schema and then seeing what that does for you, it just helps Google so much in terms of understanding what your content is, who it's for, who's written it, which is a big part as well when we come into the next pillar. But yeah, that's one of my favourite ones.

Nice. Cool. So moving swiftly on to pillar number two then, which is content. I'm going to start off, I'm going to ask you this one til, what would you say the role of content is as a broader SEO strategy?

Yeah, so I think it can be really valuable to build brand awareness. Also try and reach a wider audience, especially if you're providing informative content, it can help you gain more customers as well, especially if you're on a lot of social channels or paying quite a lot for your initial marketing spend. It can also increase and drive organic traffic as well. But then you want to make sure that the pages that people are coming to are actually informative, so they're not just going to go elsewhere afterwards.

I guess with content, you're expanding your keyword net really, aren't you? It's a good way of looking at it, I think. But what would you say on it, Ryan?

Yeah, so I think my overall opinion is content, and maybe I'm being a bit biassed because a big part of my role is content, but I've seen what content's done for our growth. I've seen what it's done for clients, I've seen what it's done for every business that really chooses to invest in it. But my overall opinion is that content fuels SEO, if you don't have, it's all well and good having a good technically optimised website and things like that, but if you don't have good content, then it's hard to do anything else because content is what's going to drive people to your site before we talk about anything else like that. But that's what's going to draw people in. That's what's going to create a good user experience on the site, even when you're not talking about SEO, but that's what's going to help you drive sales and that kind of thing. But yeah, I think content is absolutely crucial

And bring them back as well if they like what they see or what they've read or I guess as a wider content side of things, they like your messaging, they like how you come across your tone and so on.

Little

Things like that. It all makes a huge difference in terms of how customers perceive your brand and like you said, till about building your awareness

And

Essentially you most clients want more traffic, don't they? And essentially want more business, but you've got to build it up slowly and you've got to have the right clusters and things like that. Does SEO testing help with content clusters and things like that or

We have tests that allow you to test whether content clusters are right for particular keywords and stuff. So we have, it's called a URL switch test. So a big one is if you are investing and keyword insights have a good tool for content clustering and things like that, but you might have a big library on a topic like keyword cannibalization and stuff. I'm drawing from any site as an example that we've tested ourselves. We had, I think it was four blog posts all targeting different pieces of the overall keyword cannibalization topic, and we just wanted to test whether if we merged them all into one big guide to target all of the keywords in the cluster,

Whether that would work. So obviously we throw on redirected all those URLs to the now main UR L, and that yielded a nice increase for us because we were just able to have that segmented guide that was going through topic by topic and whether we can talk about whether it made us sound more authoritative, I dunno. But yeah, from a purely SEO point of view, that test was useful for us because we've then been able to modify our content strategy going forward saying that rather than having these little thousand word guides on different tiny topics, let's pick the topic and write the best guide we can. That covers everything.

Yeah. What would you say why content is an essential pillar till,

As I mentioned before, I think trust is a massive one. I think knowing your audience first and foremost kind of feeds into how you create that content as well. So you want to be able to answer specific queries that they might have and obviously that can help increase conversions and people are likely to come back to you as well. I would definitely agree with what you said, Ryan about it feeding into SEO and technical SEO can't really exist on its own. If you've got no content on the site at all, it's not going to answer those user queries. Or if you've got outdated content, again, Google won't like that and users won't either. But also if you've got bad content, whether it's keyword stuffed or anything like that, that's not going to do any favours either. So it's got to be right and well optimised.

I've had many arguments on Twitter as to whether content or technical is more important, and my overall opinion is that you need to obviously have both. But I do say content from a maybe biassed point of view, but I do say content is evers are slightly more important. I know people have the argument of, oh, if you can't see it then they can't rank it and they can't index it, that kind of thing.

Don think, sorry, go on.

Which is why I say that it's crucial to have both obviously, but

I think if we had Matt on this pod, hi Matt, if you're listening, he would 100% probably say what you've just said. If you can't index it, then Google can't crawl it and then it's not going to get found in the first place. But I think the whole point of this pod is that there are three crucial pillars to SEO as a whole. It's not really one standalone topic is at SEO. There's lots of little bits and bobs that control that journey as it were. And these are our three really content technical and links. So I think that's been quite useful from a content perspective. What would you say makes high quality SEO friendly content though? Because obviously you've got to educate people like what you say, but it's got to be optimised as well in my opinion.

Yeah, absolutely. In terms of what makes, or at least from my side content, SEO focused is having it first and foremost centred on the right topic and you'll be able to understand what that topic is when you do your keyword research and that kind of thing. But having the content that's topic focused, making it relevant, showing your authority, and this is a big one, when people have guest writers come in and things like that when they really start investing in content, making sure you've got the right expert, writing about the right things, saying write a lot in that one sentence, but it is all true, making it readable, well structured. So having only one H will look like the really basic things. Having only one H one on the page, you don't want H falls to be taken, a place of H twos and all that kind of thing. So making sure you head into right, making sure everything's nice and internally linked. And I had a conversation with someone recently about whether you should just internally link within the same topic or whether you can branch out to other areas at the site, and I always say that it's always best to internally link to anything that's relevant.

So if you are writing a guide, for instance, on schema markup and then you talk about site speed, it's always handed to link to your guide on site speeded if you have one.

Absolutely.

Or an external guide and that kind of thing because external links help drive authority as well because it shows that the content's well researched.

Yeah, absolutely. I think just to touch on it as well is obviously Google having to understand the authority of the page as well. So one thing that we really sort of ran home with our clients when it comes down to a blog template page is that it's good to show who wrote the blog, maybe a picture to help build a bit of trust, a link to the author page, maybe a little small bio, just so that they can understand that it's not just a bot that's written the content when it was published or when it was updated. Just little bits and bobs like that, like you say, helps not just people, but also Google understand the content as well. I know obviously there's a few with ours that we sometimes attribute specific blogs, like you say to the right person. So if I write one on colours, there's lows that I've written on colours to be fair. All the creative ones I'm best placed to write them, so it's good to link to me and SEO, you tills or Nick or Matt or anyone in the team could write about SEO to fair apart from me, I don't like it that much.

I'd rather talk about colours. I think those bios and stuff like you've just talked about become more important when you start venturing into your money or life as well. I think that's crucial to mention. So if you're right now about anything medical, you've got to make sure it's being peer reviewed by someone who's actually qualified to it and that kind of thing. Or if you're talking about investing, then having, even if they don't write it, at least making sure it's been peer reviewed by someone who knows how to invest in that kind of thing or has the right qualifications if it's something medical and that kind of thing. Anything that's going to affect, obviously your money or your life needs to be absolutely on point and can't. That's one that you can't necessarily just send to your content team.

No,

That's one that you need to make sure that got an expert. If you are the expert in the case, then you need to at least cast your eye over it. And that needs to be written on the site as well that this piece was peer reviewed by this person. Here's a link to their profile that shows all their qualifications and why they're the expert in the topic.

It all comes back to that trust element as well. Obviously it's been expertly written by someone who fully understands it and it's going to help the customer or the reader have trust in it that it's going to do them well.

Yeah,

Absolutely. So content specific tests for SEO testing then, what have you got on that side of things? Yeah,

There's a lot of tests that we can have that to do with content. So we have single page SEO tests, which would be useful, especially as you're an agency, you've probably done a lot of content refreshes over the course of with different clients. So a single page test is useful for that because you can put in the date that the content update went live, you can put in a description and say, we changed this and this, monitor it over a certain period of time, and then you'll be able to see that, okay, content refreshes over time, we'll generate X. And it helps with forecasting as well. We've got pages and pages of content refresh tests that we've done just on the SEO testing site, and we can say that over the course of 30 tests that we've run, we have an average traffic increase of 30% I think it is, and that helps then getting buy-in for future stuff and obviously keeping that task going into the future. And then if we're talking about, I mean maybe less technical, but more if you're just changing the sort of structure of a blog post where you might have just written one long guide

And you might be changing, I suppose a good example to say is if you're moving to more of hub and spoke content and that kind of thing,

Then

You might change a page template and build hub pages for all of your main topics, and then you can use a group test for that to see whether these hub pages actually improve or whether it was better to just have a big blog post that then links out to all your different spoke topics and that kind of thing. Quite interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of different tests for content. I think a lot of our clients use SEO testing for content-based tests.

So just finishing up on content then, what do you think till about how you create content that resonates with your audience?

Yeah, I think it goes without saying that you need to understand target audience first and foremost. So whether the product that you're offering matches a certain demographic, for example, so let's say you've got a younger audience, you want to decide how you want to market to that younger audience. So things like TikTok or Instagram maybe that might not be as applicable to an older demographic, for example. And then once you've put out that content, you can ask for feedback and things like that can really feed into your strategy going forward.

Nice.

I know you also do a lot with content on socials to target different demographics, don't you?

Yeah, well, that's more paid advertising side of things, but the content does fall in, the creative content falls into it in terms of you've got to understand what the messaging is, marketing as a whole, what is the

Message,

Who's your target audience and how are you going to get it to them?

Tone as well is important, isn't it?

Absolutely. Yeah. So I think it's all encompassed in a digital marketing sphere or if you want to call it that, but I think like we said, all these elements that come into SEO, the first two technical and content is quite important. Yeah, absolutely. So moving on to pillar number three, then we're going to talk about links. I've labelled it link building, but you can link build internally and externally. I guess a big focus here is that all of that is important. So like you mentioned earlier about the relevancy of a specific keyword that could link to another blog post or a page, but also the importance of backlinks and how they help Google understand the relevancy of a website and what it talks about. So what would you say are the most effective link building strategies?

It can be a difficult question to answer because link building in my experience has got harder and harder as time's gone on. I remember when I first started, which was back in 2015, it was kind of easy. All you had to do was write a good piece of content and then email people, and then generally they would say, oh yeah, okay, yeah, we can we'll link out that. No problem. And even if you're reaching out to the right people now, they'll come back and they'll just say, now I'm not interested, or they'll want thousands of dollars and things like that.

I guess it all comes down to how authoritative their domain is as well.

Yeah, it comes down to that. It also comes down to factors. Is the content that you are outreaching, is it actually worth a link? And I think that's where, I think it was Brian Dean, his skyscraper link building technique went absolutely massive a few years ago because everyone realised that, oh yeah, okay, everyone, all they're doing is writing better content, better content, and then that's going to be successful. In terms of what's actually successful today, it starts with the second pillar in terms of obviously making sure you are writing content or even if it's video content that you're linking out. Again, if you have a videos page or something like that, making sure that that content is actually linkable in terms of making sure it's well written and all the stuff that we've just talked about. I think there needs to be a focus, especially nowadays on digital pr, which is why you've seen the rise of agencies offering digital PR services or digital specific agencies come into the fold now because that's shown to work at the minute. And another strategy that I really like is creating your own studies and data-driven content and that kind of thing. So if we were using us, for example, we'd maybe conduct a survey of a thousand marketers on different topics, and then we can put nice graphs in the content and say, well, 60% of marketers agree with this and 40% of marketers have trouble with this specific thing

And that kind of thing. And that's really useful for them reaching out to these industry specific websites and stuff and say, well, we have data on this that we can show you now. And that's first party data as well, which is always crucial.

Absolutely.

And then you can move into thought leadership and things like that, which is successful at the minute. So doing things like podcast interviews or hosting and attending events and that kind of thing. And speaking at Brighton, SEO, that's using me as an example, but they'll always link out to where you are speaking from or what company you represent when you're doing your talk and that kind of thing.

Yeah, no, I think it's a topic that not a lot of our clients understand fully, which is why they come to us because we help with all three pillars sort of thing. As part of an SEO strategy. What would you say tills on the link side of things?

I was just going to mention as well, some other ways in which you can build links, particularly over the past couple of years, that people are starting to do things like influencer marketing. So if someone's got a big platform, they might reach out to a particular influencer who's maybe in your industry, and if they're sharing your content, other people who follow them be more likely to share it as well. Also, competitions and giveaways as well. There's always a catch isn't there as part of the competition or share this and it helps to grow your audience that way. And it can potentially also be linking back to your site as well

Mentioned digital pr. I agree with you on that in terms of how big that's becoming now. Building audiences through people is quite important as well. I think now the rise of personal branding and things like that, like you said, thought leadership, but in terms of like you said, getting high quality back links from really good sources. It can be hard, it can be a big slog, but you've got to have a strategy in place for it at the heart of everything. What would you say, obviously I'm sure you've probably had lots of experience of low quality backlinks and people buying spammy links from really terrible websites just because they think it's the right thing to do. What would you say is a big impact on that from an SEO perspective?

Yeah, I think from that perspective, you can talk about the two different types of penalties that you could potentially get from that in terms of algorithmic penalties or manual actions as well. And I have actually dealt with a site previously that's had some manual action put on it

Really.

And the fix for that really was to, obviously you had to go through and disavow all of the bad links,

But

Because a lot of businesses actually lost from that, the fix that had to be put in place was we had to create almost like a mirrored site, but under a totally new business name and everything

Really,

And essentially rebuild a site from scratch to replace that lost business. So yeah, manual actions and algorithmic penalties can be brutal, but I think

Especially if you're into the thousands of disavows, absolutely millions, it depends on the size of the site, but that can be quite a lengthy process in itself.

Yeah, I think actually the biggest risk nowadays, I think it is kind of rare now to see these types of big manual actions for, even if you're building hundreds of spammy links over a period of a few years, I think it is rare that you're going to see any sort of manual action from that nowadays, but your kind of biggest risk is the fact that Google is just going to ignore them. Google's smart enough now to understand what links are good and what links are bad, and when it identifies a bad link, and I dunno whether this has been confirmed by John Mueller and the search liaison, but I think Google is smart enough now to just ignore them. And in that instance, your biggest risk is the wasted time and budget that's gone into all of the outreach and all of that. That time that you've spent building those spammy links, even if it wasn't a lot of time, it might be a lot of money if you bought a lot of spammy links and that kind

Of thing. Absolutely.

And to have Google just ignore 'em and treat them as if they weren't there.

Yeah, I bet that could have been a, well, I bet that was a tricky process. Yeah. What's dealing with the manual actions, have you ever had to do anything with that til?

No, I think it used to be more the case that you had to do a disavow audit, didn't it? But Ryan just said it's become smarter now. You don't have to keep doing that.

Yeah. I think the use for the disavow file has become almost nil. I see a lot of stuff on LinkedIn now about how you should do a backlink audit and then you should disavow all of it's just a waste of time.

Yeah. I used to do it a little bit at my last job, or got told to do it a little bit in my last job. Yeah,

We did a link audit quite recently for a client, didn't we? And understanding to help them understand which are good, which are bad, and what sort of process they need to take to improve it longer

Term. And link audits can be useful because they can help you identify cases where you might have a back link from a particular site and you might see that it's linking at, it's linking to a page on your site that's not necessarily the best fit. And in that case, you can 3 0 1 redirect that link if it's not a useful link on your site if it's not generating business and traffic and that kind of thing. I've seen examples of that before where people have had old guides that have been linked to, but the guides kind of obsolete now. So an easy option is just to either update that guide or link it to someone or something else.

Yeah, that's an interesting one.

Would that be the case for older blogs in general? Say if you've got a link that's pointing to a blog from 2021, for example?

Yeah. Yeah, it can be. Yeah, I've seen, I've certainly seen use cases of that where people have had, I suppose a common example is trends posts like top X trends to watch in 2019 that has generated hundreds of links over time and people have then rewritten the guide in and said, top X trends for 2024, and then they've redirected the 2019 post to the New Year's post. And immediately then, I don't think all of the link equity is passed over with a redirect. But I certainly think some of it, some of it is,

Yeah, I think Matt would probably explain about the equity pass between links a lot better than I could, but we've talked about it a lot in terms of how it's passed, especially from a backlink perspective, from an external authoritative source to your website to a relevant page, you've got to get it to the most relevant page, like you say, because how the authority is passed through the link and helps Google understand it. But how can businesses better understand the process to try and get good quality links from author sources? Because we couldn't go directly to Apple and say, can I have a link to this? But it's trying to get the fairly meaty ones. Are there any tips you can give on that and getting decent links?

Yeah, I mean, using SCR testing as an example, and I think one of my biggest things is trying to build personal relationships. And I think because I believe relevancy trumps necessarily authority, I think

It's

All really good having a big link from Apple and stuff. And I'm sure that if we had a link from Apple for the SEO tested site, we'd probably be quite thrilled. But I think I'd rather have a link from a HS for example, because that's a massively authoritative website, but it's also really relevant to what we do.

Absolutely.

And I think when you're trying to build those kind of links, I think personal relationships have a massive impact. Some of the best links that I've been able to build have come from me meeting someone at a conference or recording a podcast with someone and then keeping that conversation going over time. A good example is we've got a couple of links from Wix who are now a massively authoritative SEO resource, and all that stemmed from me having a personal relationship with George, their content editor, and then him coming to me and saying, we actually have this blog post in the pipeline and we think you're a good expert. Would you be able to write a post on it? And me saying, oh, yeah, absolutely.

Oh, that's interesting. I think that we need to look more into guest posting for ourselves. We do it a lot for clients in terms of who they can consider a good guest post or who they can outreach to and things like that in terms of processes for us. But yeah, it's quite interesting to understand how other people and yourselves at SEO testing approach that. So wrapping up on the link side of things then, pillar three, what kind of tests have you guys got at SEO testing for links, whether that's external or internal?

Yeah, so again, linking back to the single page test or the group test and things like that. But in terms of two specific tests, you can either choose to build some relevant internal links to a piece of content that, whether it's like a new piece of content that you've written or a piece of content that's kind of stagnated over time, one that's been on the blog for a few years or something like that. And one of my favourite tests is to take that piece of content as is build some links from other relevant blog posts that you've got on your site about it, and you can use tools and do that, or you can use your own intuition and that kind of thing. And then seeing what impact that has. And in the same vein, there's no reason that you can't test on external backlinks as well, is you can take a page that let's say was published in sort of May of this year and has had no, apart from the kind of backlinks that you get organically, especially if you're kind of like a bigger company, you're always going to have posts that get backlinks just organically.

But then, or if you say, I'm going to actively outreach this particular blog post, I'm going to build 15 links myself, whether you do it through an agency or something like that, or actually do the outreach yourself, I'm going to build 15 links and then you can test to see the impact of that. So you can say that over this period of time, we were slowly, slowly increasing the number of back links to this page, and then we can see that it's yielded this impact.

Interesting. Nice. Some pretty useful tools there to be fair. Enjoyed that guys. You enjoy it till,

Yeah,

Enjoy it, Ryan.

Yeah.

Great fun. Nice. So that's all we're going to have time for today, but thank you you two for coming on. Thanks to Ryan and Tilley for sharing their expertise on the three pillars of SEO. Remember, a strong online presence starts with a solid technical foundation, high quality content, and effective link building strategies. It's all encompassed into one SEO journey. Tune in next time for more insights and advice on digital marketing and creative topics. Don't forget to subscribe to marketing, grab and followers on social media for the latest updates. Until next time, enjoy.